"We are not a nation," Herman Melville said of this country of immigrants, "so much as a world." That judgment is ringingly appropriate to an art industry that since its inception has dominated the world market and consciousness. A wistful tramp wreaks havoc in a Manhattan pawnshop, and Asians fall in love with Charlie Chaplin. Judy Garland sings about a rainbow, and Europeans know it is only a dream away from Kansas. A California child opens the eyes of his extraterrestrial friend to a toy store's worth of American brand names, and E.T. strikes a responsive chord on every continent. For most of this century the world's fantasies have been formed and reflected by the American cinema.
In the spirit of assimilation, Hollywood has thrived by embracing those immigrants who would enrich it. Today one need look no further than the awards shows, or the bottom line, to spot the crucial contributions of foreign-born filmmakers to the Hollywood movie. On Oscar night this spring, Czech-born Milos Forman (see box) walked away with a best-director statuette for his work on the laurel-laden Amadeus. This year's first surprise hit, Witness, was directed by Australian Peter Weir; this summer's runaway "Gook" buster, Rambo: First Blood Part II, was helmed by the Greek immigrant George Pan Cosmatos. Indeed, when America wants to cauterize its own psychology or psychopathy onscreen these days -- in Birdy or The Falcon and the Snowman, in The Killing Fields or Alamo Bay -- chances are it will call on a foreign director to perform the surgery.
It has ever been thus, for American cinema is truly an immigrant art form, made by immigrants for immigrants. From the beginning, each group of outsiders -- the ones behind the scenes and the ones gazing at the screen -- fed each other's good fortune. The audience made the filmmakers rich and famous; in return, movie people taught moviegoers, in the U.S. and all over the world, how to be Americans. When Film Maestro Federico Fellini was in New York City last month to receive tribute from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, he recalled the spell American movies cast over his provincial Italian boyhood in the 1920s: "I saw that there existed another way of life, a land of wide open spaces and fantastic cities that were a cross between Babylon and Mars. It was especially wonderful to know there was a country where people were free, rich and dancing on the roofs of skyscrapers, and where even a tramp could become President."
For the tens of millions of immigrants washed onto America's shores between 1880 and 1920, the infant movie industry provided more than fantastic diversion; it was a passport to the American dream. In the back rooms of penny arcades as dark and crowded as steerage on a ship chugging toward Ellis Island, they saw magic, moving shadows that served as a crash course in their adoptive country's history, behavior, values, ideals and follies. A maiden defends her honor; Jack Johnson defends a heavyweight title; firemen career through city streets toward a blazing house; bandits rob a train, and the sheriff fires his six-shooter right at the audience. True love conquers all prejudices in a land with a built-in happy ending. In the universal language of images, the movies told over and over the All-American story of assimilation and triumph -- the alchemy of the melting pot.