Film scholar Miriam Hansen argues that American mainstream cinema developed a ‘global vernacular’ – what she calls elsewhere ‘an international modernist idiom on a mass basis’ - whose transnational appeal derived from diverse domestic traditions, discourses, and interests, including those of the cosmopolitan Hollywood community. ‘Hollywood did not just circulate images and sounds’, she argues, ‘it produced and globalized a new sensorium; it constituted ... new subjectivities and subjects.’^[1] Although Hansen refers to the ‘cosmopolitan Hollywood community’, American mainstream cinema was created as much in New York as in Hollywood during the 1920s and early 1930s, when the American film industry consolidated its global reach.^[2] This chapter examines some of the ways in which the New York office of Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount), America’s leading producer and distributor of films during the 1920s, consciously fostered ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘transnationalism’.^[3]

Walter Wanger, Paramount’s New York-based general manager of production in the 1920s and early 1930s, had a very clear idea of film’s international role from the beginning of his career. ‘While the representatives of the nations of the earth sit in conference at Washington searching for formulas which ... will guarantee to the world everlasting peace’, the 27-year-old Wanger wrote in the London Daily Mail in December 1921, ‘the great masses of those nations are meeting daily or nightly ... in kinema houses to see films that will eventually render Washington conferences unnecessary.’

Walter Wanger (1894–1968) was, in December 1921, a theatre manager in London. But he had worked briefly, the previous year, as assistant to Jesse Lasky, vice-president for production, then as general manager of production at Famous Players-Lasky based in New York; and he returned to that position in July 1924, where he oversaw all FPL productions, selecting story properties, scouting talent, and supervising the company’s studios at Astoria, Long Island, on the West Coast, and overseas in London, Paris and Bombay.^[5]

Wanger’s faith in cinema’s ‘foreign office’ role stemmed most immediately from his experience in the Great War, when he served first of all as Secretary of the Recruiting Committee of New York mayor John Mitchel’s Committee on National Defense, which oversaw all propaganda in the city ‘on a scientific basis under a system similar to that evolved in England’, then in the Signal Corps, which used aviation to collect intelligence, and finally in the Rome office of the Committee on Public Information (CPI).^[6] Led by political scientist Charles Merriam, this office attempted to persuade ‘as many [of the Italian] people as possible, in as vivid a way as possible’ to continue their war efforts. Wanger edited and distributed newsreels and films that he was convinced were ‘tremendously’ influential in swaying the feelings of the Italian people. As his biographer Matthew Bernstein put it, Wanger’s experience at the CPI provided him with ‘a crash course in shaping public opinion’ and the conviction of ‘the international scope of the movies’ potential influence’.^[7]

Wanger developed his conviction that more effective, up-to-date forms of diplomacy were essential in the immediate aftermath of the war when he served as an aide to Wilson adviser James T. Shotwell at the Paris Peace Conference. He did briefly consider a career in the Foreign Service and he used the foreign service analogy all his life, referring to movies as ‘120,000 American Ambassadors’ in an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in October 1939.^[8]

Walter Wanger was applying to cinema, in 1921, a pervasive idea among young American intellectuals concerning the connection between transnationalism, or cosmopolitanism, and world peace. Born in San Francisco in 1894 into a wealthy German Jewish family, his aunts Carrie, Ettie and Florine Stettheimer were accomplished artists and writers who formed one of New York’s most interesting avant-garde salons. His sister Beatrice was a modern dancer based in Paris. As a child he went regularly to Europe with his family; and after his father died in 1905 they lived for two years in Switzerland, then settled in Manhattan, where he was part of his family’s wealthy, cultured, cosmopolitan world. During his years at Dartmouth College from 1911 to 1915 he saw the Abbey Theatre on tour in New York, attended Max Reinhardt productions in Berlin and Ballets Russes productions in Paris. He became familiar with the New Stagecraft pioneered by Gordon Craig.^[9]

Eagerly gathering anything that was new and original, no matter what its provenance, under the inspiration of Diaghilev, Wanger was also no doubt open to the ideas of his contemporary Randolph Bourne, who articulated a new code for the young intelligentsia in his ‘Trans-National America’, published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1916. A response to the hysteria about ‘hyphenated Americans’ fuelled by Woodrow Wilson’s preparedness speech in December 1915 and congressional debate on the preparedness bill in March 1916, Bourne’s article advocated a fluid and dynamic approach to culture and argued that: ‘In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find that we have all unawares been building up the first international nation.’

In an address to the Harvard Menorah Society in December 1916 he elaborated on this further in a way that was particularly pertinent to the Jewish-American Wanger: The only thing that kept American culture from aggressive nationalism was the ‘hyphenate’, Bourne argued. Accordingly the task was to find a way to a ‘cultural self-consciousness’ that was pluralistic enough to avoid ‘the price of terrible like-mindedness’. In Bourne’s opinion, the cosmopolitanism of Jewish Americans (such as Horace Kallen, Walter Lippmann and Louis Brandeis) were concrete examples of the way the hyphenate American could help turn America into the first international nation.^[11]

Accompanying this cosmopolitan vision for Bourne was a sophisticated ‘modern’ approach to sexual relations, articulated most effectively by his friend, the feminist anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. For Bourne and Parsons, being modern involved the avoidance of classificatory thinking, whether of nation or of sex. The urge to classify, fear of social change, and structures of social control are closely related, Parsons contended in her Social Rule in 1916. ‘Social categories are an unparalleled means of gratifying the will to power. The classified individual may be held in subjection in ways the unclassified escapes.’ As a feminist, Parsons called, therefore, for ‘the declassification of women as women, the recognition of women as human beings or personalities ... The new woman means the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable’; and as a pacifist she called, as Randolph Bourne did, for a diminution of national consciousness and the encouragement of a transnational perspective.^[12]

After Wanger returned to Famous Players-Lasky in 1924, his career was devoted to reconciling making a profit with the production of ‘greater world knowledge, world acquaintanceship, and hence, world peace’. He did this in several ways: through his support of films with a strong documentary component; by setting films in foreign locales; after sound was introduced in 1927, by making simultaneous versions in other languages, either for a large United States minority audience such as Spanish speakers, or for foreign markets; and by developing a cosmopolitan, transatlantic style that was not identifiable as American, French, German, or British, though it borrowed elements from each of these.

Wanger’s project to encourage ‘world acquaintanceship’ through film was supported by Jesse Lasky (1880–1958), the vice-president for production who had snapped up this debonair young entrepreneur in 1920 after meeting him at a dinner party.^[13] In 1920 Famous Players-Lasky was expanding its production activities worldwide, with studios in New York, Hollywood, London and Bombay.^[14] After a brief period as Lasky’s personal assistant, Wanger was appointed general manager of production, with control over the company’s far-flung production units from his base in New York.^[15] Apart from Wanger’s organisational vision, Lasky was impressed by Wanger’s cosmopolitanism. Here was a man of the world, Lasky decided, who could ensure that the details of Famous Player-Lasky films were faithful to life, whether they portrayed events in American history, everyday life on a Pacific island, or the manners and morals of New York upper-class society.

The best of Famous Player-Lasky films already did this. In an interview with Louella Parsons in January 1922, the young Ernst Lubitsch, fresh from Germany, expressed great admiration for the care taken by the studio with ‘the little things’, giving as an example their 1921 film Forbidden Fruit.^[16] By the time Wanger had returned to Famous Players-Lasky in July 1924, Lasky had produced The Covered Wagon (1923), which told the story of the wagon trains that crossed the continent in 1848–1849 in such convincing detail that the New York Times applauded the idea of the film being preserved in the Smithsonian Institution as an historical record of the event.^[17] North of 36 (1924), the highly documentary story of a cattle drive by a female rancher across Texas in the 1870s, was in production.^[18] Even more adventurously, he was also backing a second film, Moana (1926), by documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North, about the daily life of an Inuit hunter and his family, had captured his imagination when it was released to considerable acclaim in 1922.^[19]

Soon after Wanger’s return to Famous Players-Lasky in 1924, he and Lasky began their association with Merian Cooper (1893–1973) and Ernest Schoedsack (1893–1979). These two young adventurers are best known for the enormously successful King Kong (1933). But in 1924 they had filmed, with Marguerite Harrison (1879–1967), the annual migration of the Baktiari people from the Persian gulf over the snow-clad Zardeh Kuh mountains to the grassy plains where they spent the summer months.^[20] They were attempting to market their film to the educational market in New York when Lasky saw it at a private dinner party and acquired it for Paramount in January 1925.^[21] The New York Times acclaimed this ‘Persian “Covered Wagon”’ as a ‘remarkable’ film that contained ‘drama which is trenchant and stirring’.^[22] When it was premiered before a celebrity audience in March 1925, Mordaunt Hall, again in the Times, called it ‘instructive and compelling’, filled with drama and ‘captivating comedy’ despite its lack of a conventional story.^[23] Lasky and Wanger immediately commissioned another film from Cooper and Schoedsack, who set off for Siam (modern-day Thailand) to make what was becoming known as a ‘natural drama’ – a film that constructs a story, usually of a family, using native actors and animals in their natural setting.^[24] Chang, which featured tiger hunts and an elephant stampede, was hailed as ‘vivid’ and ‘thrilling’ when it was released in April 1927. Richard Watts, in the New York Herald Tribune, considered it had ‘some of the most thrilling moments any dramatic form has been able to encompass’. Cooper and Schoedsack are shrewd showmen, Watts observed, ‘who have not been content to rely merely on the bald camera journey through the Siamese jungle’. Instead they had produced a film ‘in which comedy and drama are mingled with a showman’s conscious skill’, and the whole is put together with ‘high technical skill’. ‘The film has many of the admirable uses of tempo that Potemkin and The Big Parade employed to such effect’, Watts concludes. ‘In addition, it is filled with pictorial beauty and photographed superbly.’^[25] Chang received critical acclaim from all over the world, film historian Kevin Brownlow tells us, as well as one of the first Academy Award nominations.^[26]

Wanger and Lasky were responsible for several other ‘natural dramas’ before they were dismissed from what was by then Paramount in 1931 and 1932 respectively: The Vanishing American (1926), made on location in Monument Valley and the Betatakin Cliff Dwellings, as the New York Times put it, ‘with infinite pains’;^[27] Redskin (1929), filmed on the Navajo reservation in north-eastern Arizona about ‘the conflict of the modern red man, educated at the white man’s schools, seeking to fit himself into the present-day scheme of life’;^[28] The Silent Enemy (1930), a reconstruction of the Ojibwa people’s struggle for food in the time before European settlement;^[29] Rango (1931), made by Ernest Schoedsack in Sumatra;^[30] With Byrd at the South Pole (1930);^[31] and Tabu (1931) directed by F. W. Murnau and produced by Robert Flaherty in Tahiti, with ‘only native-born South Sea islanders [and] a few half-castes and Chinese’, according to the film’s opening credits.^[32] Most extraordinary of all, and the most successful, according to both contemporary and modern sources, was Stark Love (1927), a film about gender relations among the isolated mountain people of North Carolina. Produced by Karl Brown, who had been the cameraman on The Covered Wagon, Stark Love used untrained actors from the region to make what Kevin Brownlow calls ‘one of the most unusual films ever made in America’.^[33] As Mordaunt Hall wrote in the New York Times:

Lasky’s and Wanger’s documentary sense was not confined to American history and what newspaper commentators referred to as ‘primitive’ cultures.^[35] Based in New York, and closely associated, economically and personally, with the worlds they depicted, they encouraged the production of films dealing with ‘modern’ New York manners and morals, especially the mixture of society, show business and journalism that was creating a sophisticated transatlantic culture. This was especially the case after July 1926, when B. P. Schulberg was appointed associate manager in charge of production in the company’s Hollywood studio. Although Wanger was still technically in charge of production in both studios, Schulberg’s immediate success at the box office placed the two coasts in competition with each other, and Wanger, the ‘European-oriented American’, concentrated on a studio style described by his biographer as embodying ‘the sophisticated tone and look rooted in continental dramas and fashions as exemplified by the work of directors Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg’.^[36] Wanger’s competitive advantage was enhanced in 1928 with the introduction of sound, when his close links with Broadway gave him ready access to actors with acceptable voices.^[37] Over the next few years he signed up actors, directors and writers who came to epitomise New York and transatlantic sophistication: actresses Jeanne Eagels, Claudette Colbert, Kay Francis, Ruth Chatterton, Miriam Hopkins, and Tallulah Bankhead; actors Maurice Chevalier, Frederic March, Walter Huston and Herbert Marshall; directors George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian, and Robert Florey; writers Noel Coward, Preston Sturges, and Donald Ogden Stewart; and those exemplars of sophisticated comedy, the Marx Brothers.^[38] From 1929 to 1931 Paramount’s New York studio was known for its ‘sophisticated’ films, the best of which dealt intelligently with modern gender roles and sexual mores.^[39] Producers ought to be encouraged to make more such intelligent films, Mordaunt Hall wrote in the New York Times of Ruth Chatterton’s December 1929 The Laughing Lady, which dealt with rape, divorce and hypocrisy in New York’s high society.^[40] ‘They are real people’, he wrote of the characters played by Claudette Colbert and Ginger Rogers in Young Man of Manhattan in April 1930, ‘persons who are engaging in something of a battle with life.’^[41]

Ernst Lubitsch’s appointment as supervising producer at the New York studio in August 1930 confirmed Paramount’s commitment to ‘the sophisticated and indoor types of story’.^[42] Ladies' Man, with William Powell, Kay Francis and Carole Lombard, was ‘intelligent’ and had ‘comparatively grown-up dialogue’, Mordaunt Hall wrote in May 1931;^[43] and ‘London’s favorite American actress’, Tallulah Bankhead, made her talking film debut that same month ‘with considerable distinction’ in Tarnished Lady, written by leading playwright of modern New York life, Donald Ogden Stewart, and directed by George Cukor.^[44] Many of these films were produced simultaneously in foreign languages. (French-speaking Claudette Colbert was particularly useful for this.) And from 1930 to 1933 Paramount produced French, Spanish, Swedish, German, Italian, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Romanian versions at its Joinville Studios outside Paris.^[45]

But Paramount’s distribution wing had never liked either the ‘natural dramas’ or the sophisticated New York stories, which did not play well to American regional audiences.^[46] As the Depression started to bite, Wanger and Lasky found themselves under attack. In November 1930 Wanger told an undergraduate audience at his old college, Dartmouth, of the choice Paramount faced between ‘more sophisticated and somewhat philosophical pictures like “Holiday”’ (the Philip Barry play opposing old and new values in love and money) and ‘hokum’ with clearcut morality and ‘heart interest’, such as the current hit, Common Clay.^[47] As he put it at the end of his life, the films he promoted at the New York studio were ‘a sensation in New York, but in Kansas City, they didn’t know what [they were] all about’.^[48]

From 1930 to 1931 Paramount’s net income dropped from $25 million to $8.7 million. In an attempt to stave off bankruptcy, distribution head Sidney Kent was appointed general manager. In May 1931 he shut down the New York studio and replaced Wanger by former newsreel director Emanuel Cohen, who was more amenable to the dictates of the distributors and exhibitors. By November 1931 Schulberg could tell Variety that Paramount was moving away from ‘sophisticated’ stories in favour of ‘good old hoke tales with broader sales appeal’.^[49] The following April, Jesse Lasky was given three months leave of absence, and in September 1932 Time magazine announced, ‘Lasky Out’.^[50]

Wanger’s and Lasky’s determination to ‘get the details right’ and to educate the public about the varieties of the world’s cultures, whether among the Eskimos of northern Canada or the modern sophisticates of New York, brought them into conflict with the distribution wing of Paramount as it lost its position as industry leader to MGM and the upstart Warners in the early 1930s. But their influence remained, even at Paramount, where Ernst Lubitsch perfected the transatlantic comedy of manners in the delightful Trouble in Paradise in 1932, starring Wanger protegees Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis and Herbert Marshall in the sort of rich, luminous setting that became Paramount’s house style in the 1930s; in the unconventional threesome of Fredric March, Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins in Design for Living (1933); and in the tangled sexual and financial plots of Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray in Hands Across the Table (1935).^[51]

Their support for ‘natural dramas’ had its most direct influence in Britain and Canada through their association with documentary pioneer John Grierson. In 1925 Grierson (1898–1972) took up a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he was supervised by Wanger’s former chief Professor Charles Merriam.^[52] When Grierson visited New York in July 1925 he and Wanger found much in common. Both agreed that movies had a duty to educate the public by interpreting the contemporary scene in an entertaining fashion.^[53] Wanger gave Grierson access to Paramount’s distribution and exhibition reports for his study of the impact of movies on the immigrant audience’s perceptions of current events, paid him a retainer to analyse film technique and production methods, and engaged him to lecture at the Paramount Theatre Managers Training School on ‘The Conditions of Popular Appeal’.^[54] Grierson popularised his ideas in articles in the New York Sun and the Herald Tribune and drew on his Paramount studies for a series of articles in Motion Picture News at the end of 1926. Film ‘belongs to the strange and primitive animal with lusts in its body and dreams in its eyes which we call the mob’, he wrote; but it ‘belongs to the people as no other social institution that has ever appeared in the world before. It is the only genuinely democratic institution that has ever appeared on a world wide scale.’^[55] The Eisenstein film Potemkin, for which Grierson helped write the English titles, provided the evidence he needed that film ‘could be an adult and positive force in the world’.^[56] In a review of Famous Players-Lasky’s Moana in 1926, he invented the word ‘documentary’.^[57]

When Grierson returned to Britain in 1927 and began his distinguished career as the father of documentary film making at the Empire Marketing Board, he included Grass, Moana and The Covered Wagon in the program he mounted at the Imperial Institute cinema to persuade members of the Board of the educative and persuasive potential of film.^[58] Grierson’s first film for the Board, Drifters (1929), about herring fishing off Scotland, was ‘rapturously received by the sophisticated audience’ when it was shown at the London Film Society with Eisenstein’s Potemkin. It had ‘more real art than the much-belauded Russian picture’, in the opinion of the Birmingham Post.^[59] Grierson built on this success by establishing a small school of documentary film-makers, attracting such talented young men and women as Basil Wright, Arthur Elton, Paul Rotha, Edgar Anstey, Marion Grierson and Evelyn Spice. With his faith in film as a new way of teaching citizenship, Grierson built the documentary movement in Britain with public money, first at the Empire Marketing Board, where he commissioned Robert Flaherty, of Nanook and Moana fame, to make a film about the English countryside that became Industrial Britain, then at the General Post office, where his unit made the classic Night Mail, with text in verse by W. H. Auden. In 1938 and 1939 he advised the Canadian, New Zealand and Australian governments on setting up national film units, and served from 1939 as Canadian film commissioner. From 1948 to 1951 he was controller of the film operations of the British Central Office of Information. In 1942, during Wanger’s presidency of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Grierson was invited to present the first Academy Award for documentary. In his speech, Grierson pointed out that his first discussions of the theories and purposes of the documentary film movement had been with Wanger almost twenty years before. As he recalled:

Paying tribute to Wanger, Flaherty, Schoedsack and Cooper, among other pioneers of the documentary, he pointed out that ‘Without each and all of them, we would not today be celebrating the relative maturity of the documentary film.’^[61]

Wanger continued to pursue his belief in the educative role of film through a variety of jobs after his dismissal from Paramount. Hired by the low-budget Columbia to give ‘class’ to its products, he produced The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), starring his Paramount protegee Barbara Stanwyck as an American missionary who falls in love with a Chinese warlord; Washington Merry-Go-Round (1932), an expose of presidential politics that prefigures Capra’s 1939 Mr Smith Goes to Washington; and Night Mayor (1932), which did the same for New York City politics.^[62] At MGM he produced Gabriel Over the White House (1933), a critique of American democracy that used newsreel footage and realistic recreations of White House interiors and starred his Paramount discovery Walter Huston, and the historical drama, Queen Christina (1934), arguably Garbo’s greatest film.^[63] As a semi-independent, he again focused on political corruption in The President Vanishes (1935); and he revealed the world of the mental institution in Private Worlds (1935), featuring his Paramount protegee Claudette Colbert, now a major star.^[64] At United Artists he produced Blockade (1938), a controversial film about the Spanish Civil War coauthored by Lewis Milestone with Group Theatre playwright Clifford Odets; John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), which brought the western back to the status it enjoyed with The Covered Wagon (and grossed nearly a million dollars in 1939); and Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), which, as Wanger’s biographer put it, dealt in a compelling way with the European conflict without propagandising directly.^[65] In 1940 he joined forces again with Merian Cooper, who was now in partnership with John Ford in Argosy Pictures, on the strongly documentary Eagle Squadron (1942), about the American pilots who joined the British Air Force early in 1940.^[66] The project, which was taken over by Ernest Schoedsack in 1941 when Cooper joined the Army Signal Corps, foundered at first on difficulties with their British collaborators and distributors’ resistance to a picture ‘made in England with an English cast’. But when it was finally completed in 1942 by Wanger’s new employer, Universal, he considered it ‘the perfect Hollywood accomplishment – please the masses and serve the country at the same time’.^[67]

After the war, with ambitions of appealing to a ‘world audience’, Wanger joined the new British-American company Eagle-Lion; but his block-busting Joan of Arc (1948), starring Ingrid Bergman, was a resounding failure, perhaps because he conceived it as a ‘spiritual outrider for the Marshall Plan’.^[68] For the rest of his career, his best work was what he described as ‘adult realism’. In 1947 he produced Smash-Up (about alcoholism) and The Lost Moment (based on Henry James’s The Aspern Papers) for Universal-International.^[69] In 1954, after serving a four-month sentence for wounding the man he accused of being his wife’s lover two years earlier, he made the complex prison film, Riot in Cell Block II. In 1958 he produced I Want to Live! the story of Barbara Graham, who was executed for murder at San Quentin in 1955, starring his protegee Susan Hayward – the film that best exemplifies, according to his biographer, the combination of naturalism, message and entertainment he strove for throughout his career.^[70] Screenwriter Dudley Nicholls wrote him admiringly, ‘Your film doesn’t say one syllable pro or con, and yet it could be the one thing that would stop capital punishment.’ ‘The only real propaganda against evil is the truth’, he went on, ‘just the cold reality, saying “here it is boys, and you’re part of it too, sitting out there”.’^[71]

Always an articulate promoter of his ideas about film, the controversy over attempts to censor parts of Blockade led Wanger to help form the Conference on Freedom of the Screen to fight censorship of films. As he told the inaugural meeting

As president of the Academy of Motion Pictures from 1939 to 1945, Wanger used his position to promote what he considered the beneficial role of film in modern society, and was much sought after to participate in conferences and media discussions of censorship and popular culture.^[73] Writing to Office of War Information Domestic Branch chief Gardner Cowles in 1942, he argued for ‘a campaign to make the average American realize how miserably uninformed he is so that it will become unpopular to be an escapist and popular to seek information’. ‘“To be a strong nation is to be an informed one”’, he urged, quoting a favourite line from Thomas Jefferson.^[74] Until his death in 1968, he promoted film as the best way to inform the nation. ‘I really wanted to see our work become a respected calling’, he told Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverman shortly before his death. ‘I thought it was almost as important as the State Department.’^[75]

Walter Wanger was, in his own words, a ‘practical dreamer’ who shared with Jesse Lasky, Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, Robert Flaherty and John Grierson a vision of the power and potential of film to help build a better world.^[76] Their successes were varied and partial. Flaherty remained the ‘pure’ artist, honoured by the Museum of Modern Art but living in shabby rooms at the Hotel Chelsea.^[77] Grierson became the prisoner of the bureaucratic entities he had been responsible for creating.^[78] Cooper and Schoedsack saw their work filming in East Africa and the Sudan reduced to ‘local colour’ in The Four Feathers (1929) and they parodied their earlier selves in the enormously successful King Kong (1933). But as John Ford’s partner in Argosy Films, Cooper oversaw the production of some of the best westerns ever made: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), and as part of C. V. Whitney Productions, The Searchers (1956).^[79] Lasky never regained the influence he lost in 1932 when he was sacked from Paramount. He died in 1958 without bringing to fruition his last ‘pet project’ – to produce a film called ‘The Big Brass Band’ to honor ‘the nine million kids who spend their spare time practicing on their instruments instead of running with juvenile gangs, making music instead of mischief’.^[80] Wanger struggled throughout his life to reconcile his ideals with the demands of mass entertainment, and he never lost faith that this was possible.

Wanger had no doubt that the films he made helped create Hansen’s ‘new global sensorium’. ‘There is no argument on the influence of pictures’, he stated flatly in 1945. ‘They have influenced interior decoration, style, life, language, everything as a matter of fact.’^[81] As head of production of Famous Players-Lasky in the 1920s and early 1930s, and in his role as semi-independent maverick until his death in 1968, he was an important, and articulate, producer of the ‘global vernacular’ Hansen speaks about. Produced in New York as much as in Hollywood, this ‘global vernacular’ drew on the ‘traditions, discourses, and interests’ – to quote Hansen – of Wanger and his circle, whose hybrid, transatlantic culture and wartime experiences made them lifelong adherents of the idea of transnationalism disseminated by New York intellectuals and pacifists such as Randolph Bourne and Elsie Clews Parsons.