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Other artisans found their reward in discovering, and helping to build, an artistic League of Nations in their new land. Casablanca, the best-loved film of the 1940s, could have served as a travel poster for this international spirit. The director, Michael Curtiz, was from Budapest; the art director, Carl Jules Weyl, from Germany; the composer, Max Steiner, from Vienna. And of the top 20 names on the cast list, only three belonged to native Americans (Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson and Joy Page); the rest represented the tattered flags of Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Britain, Canada, Italy, the Soviet Union and Sweden. For Hollywood, it was the blossoming of a beautiful friendship.
With war's end, and the onslaught of insularity in the '50s, many of the diaspora scattered again, finding refuge back home in European co-productions. Hollywood was retreating into familiar genres: into the memorial expanses of westerns like High Noon (directed by the Austrian Fred Zinnemann) or the paranoid apocalypse of science-fiction films like The War of the Worlds (produced by the Hungarian George Pal) or grandiose melodramas like Written on the Wind (directed by the Dane Douglas Sirk) or effervescent comedies like Some Like It Hot and The Apartment (both directed and co-written by the Austrian Billy Wilder) or the sleek thrillers of London-born Alfred Hitchcock. Audrey Hepburn, from Belgium, was crowned princess of the box office; Cary Grant, from Bristol, was still the monarch of masculinity. Everyone was so assimilated that you couldn't spot the immigrants without a security check. American films, once an obsession, were now an agreeable habit, as the rest of the world began attending to its own dreams and nightmares.
To shake things up, it took another wave of immigrants: the influx of sophisticated foreign films in the late '50s and early '60s. Soon every young Hollywood hotshot wanted to make movies just like Fellini's, or Bergman's, or Francois Truffaut's. A picture's subject could be uniquely American, but its style would be self-consciously "artistic" (read European). Two Hollywood hits of 1967 strikingly assimilated these international trends: Bonnie and Clyde, originally offered to Truffaut to direct, and The Graduate, in which Berlin-born Director Mike Nichols ransacked the mannerisms of a dozen art- house auteurs to tell a story as American as plastics.
With the triumph of the international style -- episodic and oblique, offering no easy meanings or solutions -- came the latest surge of immigrant directors and cinematographers. Some, like Forman, Soviet Filmmaker Slava Tsukerman (Liquid Sky) and the Cuban-bred camera magician Nestor Almendros, were sidestepping new tyrannies. Some, like Louis Malle (Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, Alamo Bay), sought a larger canvas on which to test their palettes. Many others were Australians and Englishmen attracted by the grand contradictions of a country with which they shared a language and part of a heritage. America was, of course, where the action was. Also the power and the glory.