American filmmakers on foreign culture

It would be hard for anyone not intimately familiar with foreign cultures to spot where American films aren't getting it right.

That's funny about Lester because Richard Donner was critical of how he showed American rural towns in Superman.
He said that was a comedy caricature which is true.

You even had a kid in suspenders. "Don't hurt my daddy!"


I was going to say what about Italian filmmakers of Westerns?
I think the average Italian view of the old West was that it was a time of barbarians and gangsters.
Which is fine--that's what you expect--different strokes for different folks.

A Hammer Dracula movie set in Transylvania sure can find the tiny element of Queen's English speakers in the villages there and make it the dominant one.

Three of the examples you've singled out are interesting to me (I can't really comment on The Brothers Karamazov, as I've never been able to make it through that film, finding it a crashing bore). Both The Shop Around the Corner and To Be Or Not To Be were products of screenwriting and direction by German-born Ernst Lubitsch, who'd been working in the American film industry since the mid-'20s, and perhaps unsurprisingly, many of his films for U.S. studios were Euro-centric.

That's an especially interesting one. I've told this story before on this board and the old site: first time I saw Zhivago was at an afternoon matinee at which I happened to be seated next to an elderly Russian woman who'd lived through the period and events depicted. If you recall, the intermission comes in the midst of the "cattle car" sequence as the train travels through the Urals. When the lights came up, she was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief and told me, "That's just how it was." When the film was over, she praised it for so effectively capturing the feelings and atmospheres of the places and times (in spite of the primarily Spanish and Finnish locations). Of course, director David Lean and other major creative personnel - screenwriter, production designer, cinematographer and so forth - along with the majority of the cast were English, and the producer Italian, so I couldn't guess to what extent, if any, American sensibilities may have crept into the finished product. 

All in all, American-made films depicting foreign cultures, either contemporary or historic, placed themselves under two self-imposed disadvantages, particularly during the "classic era," when mostly American actors, speaking English, played all manner of nationalities. Take the two Lubitsch examples: are there any more quintessentially-American players than James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan and Frank Morgan, or Carole Lombard, Jack Benny and Robert Stack?

The second disadvantage was that, in spite of lucrative foreign markets, they were made for U.S. audiences, and to appeal to their sensibilities. And no doubt, their preconceived notions and stereotypes as well. Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer had a little fun with those two items in 1972's Frenzy. In an exchange between a doctor and a lawyer in a London pub, one of them says, "Foreigners somehow expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs and littered with ripped whores, don't you think?"

When you come down to it, film makers of the classic period were often just as fast and loose with American culture, as often as not depicting idealized versions of contemporary eras and mythologized versions of historical ones. 

An area of special interest to me, that of the process of film making itself, provides a perhaps revealing illustration of what those film makers intended to sell: it's probably safe to say that about 95% of American "movies about movies" went out of their way to portray fictionalized versions of those very processes. When it's that obvious concerning things about which they know better, you gotta figure the inaccuracies are deliberate. Writer/director Richard Rush had some intentional fun of his own about those inaccuracies in The Stunt Man, in which the entire narrative is wrapped within the theme of reality vs. illusion, and then engages the illusions about which we've been informed to depict film making as it was never practiced anywhere, by anyone, at any time. It's an exquisitely sly endeavor, rather like a stage illusionist explaining to the audience beforehand how he'll accomplish his trick, and then fooling them with it anyway.