A new book by Johnathan Stubbs shows how American filmmakers viewed England through the lens of contemporary history

By Brian McFarlane
August 11 2019 - 12:00am
A still from the 1962 film Lawrence Of Arabia with Peter O'Toole. Picture: Supplied
A still from the 1962 film Lawrence Of Arabia with Peter O'Toole. Picture: Supplied

Think of Greer Garson bravely dealing with a Nazi escapee in her "English" kitchen, or the little boats headed off for the evacuation of Dunkirk, in MGM's Mrs Miniver (1942). Or all those classy Oscar-winning American adaptations of English literary works - Cavalcade(1932) and Rebecca (1940), for example - or how American finance ensured the brief efflorescence of England's Swinging Sixties films. Hollywood always needed British markets, and that influenced how Britain, and England especially, was depicted in films "projecting the English past", as Jonathan Stubbs puts it the subtitle of his book Hollywood and the Invention of England: Projecting the English Past in American Cinema, 1930-2017 (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing).

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