For 100 years, Hollywood has provided both the majority and the most popular of films shown on British screens. For many Britons, Hollywood films are not foreign films. Whether seen in the cinema, on television or the internet, they are regarded as normal screen fare and a part of everyday life. Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain is the first book to take a wide ranging view of this phenomenon, exploring the tastes and preferences of British audiences from the silent era to the present. Mark Glancy investigates the British reception of Hollywood films, ranging from The Public Enemy through film history to The Patriot and Grease. Drawing on rich original sources, his carefully researched and lively book explores Hollywood's capacity to appeal to British audiences, as well as its ability to alienate, enrage and amuse them.

Investigates Hollywood's ability to appeal to British filmgoers, as well as its ability to alienate, enrage and amuse them across films ranging from The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1922) to The Patriot (2000).

How did Great Britain, which entered the twentieth century as a dominant empire, reinvent itself in reaction to its fears and fantasies about the United States? Investigating the anxieties caused by the invasion of American culture-from jazz to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films-during the first half of the twentieth century, Genevieve Abravanel theorizes the rise of the American Entertainment Empire as a new style of imperialism that threatened Britain's own. In the early twentieth century, the United States excited a range of utopian and dystopian energies in Britain. Authors who might ordinarily seem to have little in common-H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf-began to imagine Britain's future through America. Abravanel explores how these novelists fashioned transatlantic fictions as a response to the encroaching presence of Uncle Sam. She then turns her attention to the arrival of jazz after World War I, showing how a range of writers, from Elizabeth Bowen to W.H. Auden, deployed the new music as a metaphor for the modernization of England. The global phenomenon of Hollywood film proved even more menacing than the jazz craze, prompting nostalgia for English folk culture and a lament for Britain's literary heritage. Abravanel then refracts British debates about America through the writing of two key cultural critics: F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot. In so doing, she demonstrates the interdependencies of some of the most cherished categories of literary study-language, nation, and artistic value-by situating the high-low debates within a transatlantic framework.

The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture. The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange. In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.

I will be discussing the impact of American pop culture on framing a renovated British social identity in terms of gender roles in the 1980s. Mainly focusing on how American Hollywood movies and rock music ignited a cultural trend in Britain. The American lifestyle contrasted heavily with the traditional British lifestyle, especially when it came to gender roles, American gender roles were more modern than the rigid British ones. Feminists of the women liberation movement in Britain took inspiration from the sexually liberated, independent, American women portrayed in movies and music to seek political, intellectual, and cultural change in the current British social atmosphere. This paper aims to first detect how American pop culture in forms of music and movies was feminist and challenged the gender role norms. Then, I identify how the American pop culture flourished in Britain due to the increased trade during that time period, and how it was favored by the majority of the British population. Then I analyze how elements from them were integrated into the British mainstream society, especially in redefining the traditional rigid gender roles in which the moral, social, and legal climate perceived women as subordinates to men. This leads to numerous women organizations in Britain being formed in the 1980s that promote a wide agenda of increasing women's opportunities in the workplace, sexual liberation, redefining family roles, civil rights, and putting an end to the objectification of women. Finally, I explain how the United States' influence on British pop culture leads to women not seeking to revolutionize with protests or sit-ins, instead, by asserting their “soft power” through literature, fashion, and finally voicing their opinions to change societal perceptions.

When Hollywood Loved Britain examines the Hollywood "British" film--American feature films that were set in Britain, based on British history or literature and included the work of British producers, directors, writers and actors. "British" films include many of the most popular and memorable films of the 1930s and 1940s, yet they have received little individual attention from film historians and even less attention as a body of films. While the book is centered on wartime "British" films, it also investigates wider issues: the influence of censorship and propaganda agencies during Hollywood’s studio era, studio finances, the isolationist campaign in the United States between 1939 and 1941, and American perceptions of Britain at war.

Drawing on new archival research into Hollywood production history and detailed analysis of individual films, Hollywood and the Invention of England examines the surprising affinity for the English past in Hollywood cinema. Stubbs asks why Hollywood filmmakers have so frequently drawn on images and narratives depicting English history, and why films of this type have resonated with audiences in America. Beginning with an overview of the cultural interaction between American film and English historical culture, the book proceeds to chart the major filmmaking cycles which characterise Hollywood's engagement with the English past from the 1930s to the present, assessing the value of English-themed films in the American film industry while also placing them in a broader historical context.