Runaway Romances: Hollywood's Postwar Tour of Europe (review)

The poster of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn scootering around Rome in William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953) has been a best seller in the Eternal City for years, probably decades. It has a lot to do with the Vespa they're riding, of course, but Robert R. Shandley's delightful and perceptive Runaway Romances offers a more complex understanding not only of that poster's ongoing appeal, but of a genre of films he calls "travelogue romances," appearing between 1947 and 1964. Most but not all of the films in the genre include a travelogue sequence; a woman who comes to Europe seeking renewal or self-discovery, often of a sexual kind; issues of social class; and the protagonist's decision to return home (usually America) to "remain morally anchored" (56). Because the women at the center of these films were (like Frank and April Wheeler of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road [1961]) in flight from the comfortable, uninspiring boredom of America life, and because most of the films were made all or partly in Europe by troubled Hollywood studios in search of a new business model, Shandley refers to them as "runaway" films.

One of six chapters is given over to Roman Holiday (the "'runaway' princess" in a runaway film [39]), and another to explaining Hollywood's new inclination to overseas production. A chapter subtitled "Metaphors of Transatlantic Relations" offers brief but revealing treatments of September Affair (1950), Indiscretion of an American Wife (David Lean, 1953), Summertime (1955) and Interlude (Douglas Sirk, 1957). Other chapters deal with the problems presented to the genre (e.g., in Three Coins in the Fountain [1954] and Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief [1955]) by new widescreen technologies better suited to spectacle than narrative tension; changing ideas of the postwar occupation of Germany; and the decline of the genre as it turns dark (The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone [1961]) and moves into self-reflexive parody (Paris, When It Sizzles [1964]).

Shandley's solid grasp of the basics of filmmaking is apparent throughout, and he is a careful, credible, trustworthy reader of film narrative, often getting at meaning by looking at how films create and solve problems. But Shandley is perhaps on less secure ground in claiming that the "project" of the runaway romance was "investigating the newly reconfigured relationship between Americans and Europeans" (xvi). To be sure, the German occupation films fit that description, but, as Shandley says, they make up a sub-genre, not quite the real thing. Elsewhere, he notes that the Europe offered in the genre is "one that has no intrinsic meaning itself. . . . Europe and Europeans are not real" (69).

Europe has meaning in these films, but it is meaning projected from afar, and meaning grounded, as Shandley's film narratives and readings make clear, in the domestic frustrations and desires of postwar American women, who wanted a ride on that Vespa. That's the main lesson of this thoughtful and engaging book.