Iconic City Thrillers: Encoding Geopolitics Through Cinema
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2021
Summary
Abstract
Following Casablanca, throughout the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood produced a wave of thrillers that sought to capitalise on the reputation of foreign cities through exciting tales of romance and intrigue. Converting cities into marketable icons, those thrillers codified the outside world at a time when the United States was expanding its geopolitical reach. This chapter discusses how this process of cinematic iconization both elevated specific cities to myth and limited their meanings by dissociating them from political processes that did not fit the narratives of filmmakers or of the external agents pressuring them in the context of World War II and the early Cold War. It proposes a critical, attentive reading that can make the films’ omissions revealing in themselves.
Keywords: American Global Power, Cold War, Film, International Intrigue, Lisbon, Second World War
Introduction
When Warner Brothers prepared reviews and publicity pieces for their thriller The Conspirators (1944) for exhibitors to slip into local newspapers, they stressed the centrality of the city where the film's action took place. As a result, papers across the US published variations of the following paragraph: ‘The Portuguese capital of Lisbon, transformed into a cauldron of romance and intrigue by a world at war, where spies and counter-spies, Nazis and anti-Nazis, soldiers of fortune and cringing refugees from the abattoir that was occupied Europe, rub elbows, is the stage for this absorbing mystery-romance.’ With these lines, the studio inscribed the film in the emerging wave of US-produced romantic thrillers revolving around a sharply defined setting (usually a city, sometimes a larger region) placed at the crossroads of world affairs. Unlike The Conspirators, their titles often conveyed the setting-centric motif: Casablanca (1942), Tangier (1946), Calcutta (1947), Singapore (1947), Hong Kong (1952), Macao (1952), Lisbon (1956), Istanbul (1957). While many films summon – and expand on– their setting's reputation, between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s there was a distinct trend of what we shall call Iconic City thrillers, characterized by the way they bombarded audiences with reminders of each city's transcendental significance through tropes related to film noir, such as chiaroscuro visuals, intricate plots, hardboiled dialogue, and existential malaise.
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- Information
- The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons , pp. 111 - 128Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021