Customer Reviews

It's So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture

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Schwartz's It's So French presents original research on a vital topic, and the book is very attractively illustrated. However, I regret to say that this is the most poorly edited serious academic book I have ever read.

Here are just a few examples of the many errors or misspellings: Mary Cassat (for Cassatt), Martine Carole (for Carol), Gérard Philippe (for Philipe), Edwige Feuillière (for Feuillère), Jean-Henri Clouzot (for Henri-Georges Clouzot), Edward Dymtryk (for Dmytryk), Wolfe Mankowitz (for Wolf), Siegfried Kracaueur (for Kracauer), Antonie de Baecque (for Antoine), Jean Domachi (for Domarchi), Ginnette Vincendeau (for Ginette), Akira Friye (for Iriye), John Tomlison (for Tomlinson), Barbara Wilinksy (for Wilinsky), Richard Matby (for Maltby), Moritz de Hdealn (for Hadeln), Berghann Books (for Berghahn), Paparrazi (for Paparazzi), Nôtre Dame (for Notre Dame), Arc du Carousel (for Carrousel), Lutton (for Luton), Du Rififi chez les homes (for hommes), Les enfants du paradise (for paradis), Les orgeuilleaux (for orgueilleux)... and so on.

It must be particularly galling for so gallophile an author to discover so many misspelt French names in her book. Much of this could be blamed on the poor copy-editing: the University of Chicago Press clearly did not hire someone who knew French or anything about film theory to do that job... in fact the frequent errors of punctuation, syntax and bibliographical form suggest they didn't hire a copy-editor at all. Schwartz thanks the editors at the press for accepting a book that would be `expensive to publish': I doubt if she is thanking them now.

That said, only she can be blamed for the several errors of fact in the book, for example: La symphonie pastorale is a film about a pastor in Switzerland, not a `French Resistance movie'; Le ballon rouge is set and filmed in Ménilmontant, not Montmartre; in the famous dance sequence of Et Dieu créa ... la femme, Bardot dances to a Cuban mambo, not a Brazilian samba, and the musicians in question are Mexican, not `clearly Afro-Brazilians'. On this last point Schwartz denigrates scholars `who have referred to the musicians as African'. Such hubris is what has prompted me to list in this review a few of the book's countless defects. I can only hope that the author and editors will read this review before embarking on a second edition.

This is a breathtaking book that completely upends everything that I thought I knew about Americanization and globalization, the French New Wave, cultural cliches and so much more. It's So French shows -- in a lively and very compelling way -- how a partnership between Paris and Hollywood laid the foundations of post-war global culture. Schwartz is a great story-teller, and has dug up amazing stuff on Cannes, art-house theaters, and Bardot in America. A brilliant book that will make you think differently about everything from post-war cinema to Freedom fries!

Vanessa Schwartz's book opens with an amazing Look magazine cover from 1958: "Ike's Tragedy" on one side, "Brigitte Bardot conquers America" on the other. Historians have been teaching that this was the era when American popular culture conquered Europe and the world. But Schwartz shows that "Frenchness" became a crucial part of global film culture after WWII. The book is essential reading for anyone who cares about film in the fifties and sixties.