Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 65

Jacques Tourneur’s Films

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1944 (Telotte; Siegel). The main setting of the film — a subterranean bunker in
the catacombs of an old monastery — presents an ideal opportunity for an evoca
tive use of lighting. However, despite Gaudio’s skills, there is little or no sense of
profundity underlying the brief uses of noirish lighting in the film. Unfortunately,
with the exception of one scene when the captured Nazi threatens Nina (Tamara
Toumanova), Gaudio and Tourneur fail to invest the mise en scene with any real
atmosphere.
Overall Days o f Glory is of interest only as a historical document — a
“curiosity” as Peck as called it (Peck 2) — revealing only in its reflection of contem
porary attitudes towards the Soviet Union. Within months of its release, the film
was obsolete, a victim of the rapidly evolving political situation of 1944-5, and of
poor box office returns. The change in American society’s attitude to the war and
towards Europe forms the basis for Tourneur’s superior Berlin Express. Here, pro
paganda has been replaced by a liberal message, a trend increasingly seen in a num
ber of films released by studios like RXO in the post-war years. Berlin Express
represents a more successful fusion of politics with drama and style.
In the aftermath of the war, there was a scramble to flood Germany with
American films. This was seen not only as a commercial venture, but also as an
ideological venture: to re-educate and “deprogram” the German people (Guback
245-275). In some sense these films were as much a form of control as the estab
lishment of military and political control by the Allies at the end of the war. How
ever, many of the fil ms didn’t reach Germany until 1948, by which time the Ger
mans were in no mood to listen to Allied speeches. The poverty and deprivation
that enveloped Germany after the war led to a greater feeling of cynicism, not only
in Germany, but also among American directors working abroad.
There are a number of films dealing with post-war Berlin and Frankfurt
that either undercut their dominant message of optimism at the re-establishment of
democracy, or attempt to portray the effects that Nazism and defeat has had on
German society. In films like Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948, US, Para
mount) there is a deep vein of cynicism regarding the effect of the Allied victory
on German society. One can see this cynicism as characteristic of Billy Wilder
and yet it is surprising that A Foreign Affair, a film whose portrayal of the Ameri
can army is deeply unflattering, could be produced in Hollywood at all. Instead of
setting the Americans up as heroes. Wilder presents them as either stuffy and hu
morless, or as opportunistic con men. There is no sense that the Americans are
bringing the light of democracy and goodness to the starved Germans; instead
they are encouraging the black market and prostitution. Nowhere in the film does
Wilder attempt to argue the moral superiority of the Americans.
Roberto Rossellini’s Allemagne Anno Zero/Germany Year Zero (1947,
France/Italy, UGC/DEFA) is also critical of the effects of the harsh war repara-