“It’s a complex fate, being an American,” Henry James once wrote to a friend. “And one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.”
While James seems to have fought unsuccessfully – he spent the last three decades of his life on this side of the Atlantic, having travelled through the continent extensively as a young man, and set some of his best work in Europe – those currently in power in the White House seem impervious to the hold our continent has long held for Americans.All that history, all that art and cuisine, all those ancestors. All those languages and peoples, all those customs and ideologies, all that photogenic old stuff.
Hollywood seemed to understand this fascination. Europe is the place Americans fall for Audrey Hepburn (see Gregory Peck, William Holden, Cary Grant). It’s where Gene Kelly dances in An American in Paris (1951) and Julia Roberts eats in Eat Pray Love (2010), and Meg Ryan samples too much cheese in French Kiss (1995).
It’s where Liv Tyler loses her virginity in Stealing Beauty (1996), Diane Lane recaptures her youth in Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) and Elio and Oliver fall in love in Call Me By Your Name (2017). As Indiana Jones says in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “Ah…Venice.”
Yet the love affair seems to have soured for a certain kind of American. The Trump administration seems to despise the EU and all things related. Contempt drips from public speeches and private text messages, where the vice-president JD Vance rants about “bailing out Europe again” and the defense secretary Peter Hegseth wholeheartedly agrees: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”
The most recent expressions have come in the form of tariffs laced with vitriol and in the promotion of a Ukraine “peace deal” with Vladimir Putin that would leave him emboldened to eye more expansion into a continent that now has to pay more to contain him.
But antipathy isn’t necessarily new for the country of “Freedom Fries” (the George W Bush-inspired renaming of French fries when the French showed scant enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Yes, this did happen). The MAGA Europhobes might just have been watching a different set of movies. Because for every American film glorying in European sunsets and sophistication, there seem to be two that show Europeans as suspect or stupid.
Perhaps it started with the military rationale that our cousins across the Pond of America (or the Atlantic Ocean if you prefer its current name) might have been inspired by. After all, for two world wars Europe has provided both allies and enemies. For every plucky Richard Burton, there’s a Christoph Waltz.
Films about the second world war used to be big international affairs. Think The Great Escape (1963), or The Longest Day (1962), full of allies working together. But the most celebrated second world war film in recent memory is Saving Private Ryan (1998), in which Europeans appeared merely as villains or snivelling civilians to be rescued.
During the cold war, Europe was a proxy battlefield, where Orson Welles’s Harry Lime could emerge from the shadows, spies defected in Torn Curtain (1966) or microfilm could be chased across the continent. This was the Europe Billy Wilder would lampoon in One Two Three (1961), with James Cagney as a Coca-Cola executive bringing his own brand of brash, fast-talking Americanism to West Germany as he tries to keep the boss’s daughter from making her own Soviet Pact with an attractive young East German communist.
The film itself was a victim of the cold war. During filming, the Berlin Wall was built and forced the production to move to Munich and also meant that audiences in divided Germany and the US were no longer ready to see the light side of the situation. The film tanked and Cagney wouldn’t make another movie until Ragtime in 1981.
The cold war was just too scary and real, what with Berlin airlifts and the Cuban missile crisis, which followed a year later. Crime caper comedies sublimate the same mistrust and double-crossing in the safer shenanigans of gold bullion robberies in After the Fox (1966) and The Italian Job (1969) or jewel thieves in To Catch a Thief (1955) and The Pink Panther (1963).
Many of these played off national stereotypes, the self-important Inspector Clouseau, the pretentious Italian film director (both played by Peter Sellers), the cheeky London chappie and mysterious and debonair criminals. Not to mention it was all so glamorous with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, Capucine and Claudia Cardinale. Cat burglars work in Cortina d’Ampezzo and Monte Carlo much better than they do in Detroit.
Post-cold war, it became safe for Americans to enter clandestine warfare and take over from James Bond in the nitty-gritty. The Mission Impossible and Jason Bourne franchises each spent much of their time running across the rooftops and through the cobbled streets of European cities, crossing the continent on trains and speeding the wrong way down Parisian boulevards. John Frankenheimer perhaps made the best non-cold war cold war movie with his 1998 action film Ronin, starring Robert De Niro and Jean Reno, rightly celebrated for its car chases through Nice and Paris.
Steven Soderbergh revived the glamour of the European caper with Ocean’s Twelve (2004), starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Vincent Cassel is a master thief to rival Clooney’s Danny Ocean and Catherine Zeta-Jones is an Interpol cop on Ocean’s trail. Another attempt at a Charade-like caper was the Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp movie The Tourist (2010). The film fizzled rather than sizzled and anyone with even a passing knowledge of Venice might have been surprised to note that the airport seemed to be located within spitting distance of St Mark’s Square.
All of these crime films have tropes that come back again and again. The local police are incompetent (the Clouseau effect), or corrupt. Organised crime is never far away. The American protagonists find themselves baffled and in need of some local help who will often develop into a romantic interest/get murdered/both. There’s a latent paranoia that is the dramatic exaggeration of the tourist not wanting to be misdirected, or overcharged.
This paranoia reaches its panicked peak in the kidnap films that come back again and again. Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988) throws Harrison Ford’s confused surgeon into the Parisian underworld as he searches for his wife, who has mysteriously disappeared from their hotel room. The film is one of Polanski’s best and anticipates the Liam Neeson Taken trilogy (2008-14). Neeson, who has apparently gone to the Sean Connery school of accent mimicry, is an American ex-CIA with “a certain set of skills,” whose daughter is kidnapped in Paris by the Albanian mafia.
The use of an Eastern European mafia as go-to baddies also reveals another trope that many Hollywood films fall into when portraying Europeans: they make good villains. Whether it’s a European criminal mastermind – think of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988) – or Taken’s sex traffickers, Europeans are a group you can hate on and kill without accusations of racism.
Fill in another ethnic group and re-imagine the sex slave backstory and Neeson offing the villains with the same bone-crunching violence and you’ll see what I mean. Even in outer space, the evil Empire in the Star Wars series is mostly voiced by a series of European character actors, from Peter Cushing to Domnhall Gleeson.
The “hive of scum and villainy” version of Europe further increases the paranoid exaggeration of the kidnapping films. The American right wing are currently obsessed with viewing parts of Europe as no-go zones of crime and degeneracy. After all, Europe was where Gregory Peck and his wife adopted the demon baby Damien in The Omen (1976) and Donald Sutherland came a Venetian cropper in Don’t Look Now (1973).
More recently, Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) sees a trio of horny young American backpackers lured by sexy Europeans into torture dungeons where they are prey to sadists, one of whom has already demonstrated his weirdness by eating salad with his fingers. This detail is a great example of how an American encounter with difference (eew!) can turn into full-blown fear and loathing.
Even Sweden can be frightening. In Midsommar (2019), a pastoral Swedish community becomes a source of folk terror for a traumatised American young woman, Dani (Florence Pugh), when she tags along with her boyfriend and his friends on a field trip. It is bringing out the old in the old country and although the film was marketed as a horror film, it’s as much a satire on the students who are competing to write their research papers on a community which is conniving in their destruction.
Ironically, it’s Dani, who isn’t studying the community, who in the end “finds herself” and a sense of community which she wasn’t getting from her feckless partner and his selfish bros.
In Midsommar, Dani goes European, and in Hostel one of the torturers is an American. Europe is dangerous because it changes Americans as well. Americans beware Americans! We can call it “the Harry Lime Effect.”
In The Third Man (1949), Orson Welles’s black marketeer has gone native, out-corrupting the black marketeers in the midst of postwar Vienna, endangering the naive honesty of Joseph Cotten. His villainy – with that remarkable zither theme from Anton Karas accompanying him – dominated the picture despite his relatively brief appearance. It proved such a popular creation that Welles played him in The Adventures of Harry Lime on the radio through 1955-6.
The best example of the American gone rogue is Patricia Highsmith’s delicious creation Tom Ripley who has been played in films variously by Dennis Hopper, Matt Damon and John Malkovich, and now by Andrew Scott in the recent Netflix TV series. Ripley is an American Psycho abroad, a smooth sociopath who cuts a murderous path through the expat community as he blends in with the Europeans, exploiting institutional inefficiency and fooling a preening local policeman.
Hannibal Lecter, upon escaping in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), heads to Florence in Hannibal (2001), where he seems to have no difficulty finding a high-profile job (or disembowelling a preening local policeman).
But there is hope. Some film-makers are still fully paid up Europhiles. Can anyone watch Richard Linklater’s masterful trilogy of Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013) without falling in love with Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke and the continent?
Each film follows a rambling conversation as the actors play the same characters in an ongoing romance. They first meet in Vienna as basically kids, before reuniting in Paris as adults, old enough to have hit some disappointments. Finally, in Greece, they are a married couple enjoying a summer stroll.
Or what about Wes Anderson, whose The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou (2004), Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and The French Dispatch (2021) each demonstrate a profound love of all things European? The eccentricity, the music, the cities and landscapes are portrayed with his trademark meticulous detail. It perhaps comes as no surprise that Anderson has owned an apartment in Paris since 2005 and when asked to choose his Sight and Sound top 10 list in 2022 exclusively named 10 French films.
Perhaps, before trade and culture wars wreck everything, it is time for American film-makers to reassess the continent that brought them the Lumiere Brothers, nouvelle vague and neo-realism. The complex fate of being an American would be made easier if they were to understand the complex fate of being a European as well.
John Bleasdale is a writer, film journalist and novelist based in Italy
