Magic Shadows From a Melting Pot for New Americans, the Movies Offered the Ticket for Assimilation

By RICHARD CORLISS

"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.

It is not precisely a coincidence that the U.S. emerged as a world power just as its movies began girding the globe. Pushing parables of fulfillment in brash editorial rhythms, these new "moving pictures" were missionaries of American energy, traveling salesmen for life in the New World. And the sales pitch worked. How many millions, dazzled by this vision, determined right then to pack their bags and book passage for the U.S.? How many millions more stayed put, but discovered and appropriated the American style? See us and be like us. And just about everybody did. The American century began with the American cinema.

There is a stimulating irony here: America was inventing itself onscreen, but many of the fabricators were foreign born. For both producer and consumer, this was education in the dark. Though many film entrepreneurs of the first generation were native born, they were soon replaced by a bazaar of movie merchants who had arrived in the U.S. barely before the masses they hoped to enlighten. The roll call of Jewish-immigrant moguls has since become its own Hollywood legend: Adolph Zukor, the Hungarian who had worked as janitor in a Manhattan fur store (president of Paramount Pictures); Carl Laemmle, the bookkeeper from Germany (founder, Universal Pictures); Samuel Goldwyn, the glove salesman from Warsaw (founder, Goldwyn Studios); Louis B. Mayer, the scrap-metal dealer from Minsk (vice president and general manager, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer). By the 1930s Mayer was earning $1.25 million a year and was presiding over the all-American family of Andy Hardy.

Like most of the other immigrant moguls, Mayer achieved the American dream without becoming a homogenized American. By parading their unregenerate Yiddish accents and their careful malapropisms, the studio bosses were implying that their success came from street smarts acquired on the Lower East Side and further back, in the shtetls of Eastern Europe; it took a ragman to become a Hollywood rajah. "They had grown up," wrote Film Historian Carlos Clarens, "in a trade where samples could be smelled, fingered and felt; they recognized craft when they saw it, and they respected it; rather than hoodwink the customer, they aimed to please." The moguls did not see themselves as artists, or the movies as art. Their job was to keep the assembly line rolling, in a factory called Hollywood.

Within its first decade, the movie industry had recapitulated America's century-long trek westward. In 1900, before the picturemakers arrived, Los Angeles was a sleepy city of 102,000 -- the population of Memphis or Omaha. But the immigrants could get drunk on the possibilities of all that air, desert, sea; ambition had elbow room there. And soon after settling in the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood, the industry discovered the last element it needed to achieve dominance among the popular arts: movie stars. Two of them, by turning stereotypes of Everyman and Pretty Girl into archetypes, would become the most recognizable people in the world, and among the wealthiest. The fairy tale needs one more twist: both Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford were immigrants.

"Not since the days of the Forty-Niners," wrote Novelist Upton Sinclair in 1933, "had there been such a way for the little fellow to get rich as in this new business." The little fellow Sinclair mentioned could have been Chaplin. Born in a London slum, the comic arrived in the U.S. in 1910. Three years later he signed his first movie contract, at $150 a week; four years after that, he was to make $1 million a year and become, for a time, the planet's most recognizable and cherished figure. Chaplin deserved no less; his poignant one-reel comedies taught the world how to love movies. Pickford, with her ringlets and coquettish ways, was hardly less popular, and no less resourceful. In 1909 the little girl from Toronto cadged an audition with Film Pioneer D.W. Griffith; by 1916 she could tell the bosses at Paramount Pictures, "No, I really cannot afford to work for only $10,000 a week" (which is precisely the fee she settled for). This sudden affluence did not short-circuit the masses' identification with the movie stars. It merely confirmed the public's image of them as extraordinary ordinary people. They were "us" on the big screen, with every wish of fame, charm, romance, wit and avarice fulfilled. They were their own movies.

As the industry's mantle spread around the world, new immigrant stars filled important character niches. The Latin lover: Rudolph Valentino (Italy); the noble warlord: Sessue Hayakawa (Japan); the tragic heroine: Pola Negri (Poland); the vamp goddess: Greta Garbo (Sweden). Nor was the flood stanched with the arrival of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Hollywood saw the Babel of exotic accents as one more earnest of its cosmopolitan reach. And so Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer brought their suavity from France; Marlene Dietrich (Germany), Hedy Lamarr (Austria) and Ingrid Bergman (Sweden) helped Garbo flesh out the fantasy of the European woman. From south of the border Carmen Miranda brought her fruity headdresses, Gilbert Roland his purring machismo. Half of England, it seemed, played cricket every Sunday in Griffith Park. And with bitter thanks to Adolf Hitler, Hollywood welcomed hundreds of refugees from the Third Reich. As performers, writers, directors or technicians, they would animate and dominate Hollywood for its next 30 years.

The pioneer immigrant directors -- Maurice Tourneur from France, the Germans Ernst Lubitsch and F.W. Murnau -- imported civilized modes of fantasy, comedy and folklore. But the new exiles had darker stories to tell, and through them Hollywood found its caustic maturity. Here were artists with an outsider's perspective and, suddenly, an insider's clout; they could celebrate the temple of American success while keeping an eye on the cracks in its facade. The industry, or at least that part of it that handed out awards, was grateful: eleven of the first 20 Oscars for best direction went to immigrants, from Frank Lloyd (Cavalcade) and Frank Capra (It Happened One Night) to William Wyler (The Best Years of Our Lives) and Elia Kazan (Gentleman's Agreement).

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.

These artists -- some immigrants, some visitors -- contribute new chapters to the saga that began in the penny arcades. It is a story of gangsters and heiresses, in penthouses or on the prairie, filtered through the first industrial art form, the dream machine. The dream is America; the machine is the movies. With the help of its immigrant artists and entrepreneurs, the industry still beckons as it did to Chaplin, Goldwyn and their earliest audiences. Welcome, children of all nations, to the New World of the movies. Welcome to America.