Iconic City Thrillers : Encoding Geopolitics Through Cinema

Abstract

Following Casablanca, throughout the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood produced a wave of thrillers that sought to capitalise on the reputation of foreign cities through exciting tales of romance and intrigue. Converting cities into marketable icons, those thrillers codified the outside world at a time when the United States was expanding its geopolitical reach. This chapter discusses how this process of cinematic iconization both elevated specific cities to myth and limited their meanings by dissociating them from political processes that did not fit the narratives of filmmakers or of the external agents pressuring them in the context of World War II and the early Cold War. It proposes a critical, attentive reading that can make the films’ omissions revealing in themselves.