“A well-researched, often intelligent survey of Hollywood cinema during and after Roosevelt’s presidency.”

Nigel Andrews | Financial Times

“Smedley, a British film historian, devotes A Divided World to an examination of Hollywood before, during, and immediately after World War II. According to Smedley’s overview, the American film colony warmly embraced FDR’s liberal idealism of the 1930s. But in the 1940s, when the New Deal came increasingly under attack from Republicans, Hollywood did not rally a liberal defense and instead responded with a cinema of alienation and anxiety. Yet within this community of mostly American-born directors, Smedley notes, there emerged a brilliant trio of émigrés—Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang—who did not subscribe to the governing Hollywood approach. All three had worked in Berlin before the rise of the Third Reich. And all three made Hollywood films that were not only skillfully crafted but also profoundly different from the usual studio productions, “articulating criticisms of American society left unsaid by their contemporaries.”

 

Stefan Kanfer | Wall Street Journal