In her substantial monograph on the Marshall Plan film campaign, Maria Fritsche situates her research in the field of Americanization studies and fills an important gap in the scholarly research on the emblematic American aid program for Europe after World War II. Significant propaganda campaigns were required in order for the United States’ economic, political, ideological, and strategic ambitions for the reconstruction and integration of western Europe to become reality. Being the visual medium of choice in the late 1940s and early 1950s, film has received considerable scholarly attention, but Fritsche's goal is to tell a comprehensive story of the whole Marshall Plan cinematographic experiment. She analyzes and compares the largest possible number of films that still exist—she has researched 170 out of about 200 films, in itself a methodological strength of her argumentation—using the framework of cultural history and focusing on production, distribution, and reception in various European settings. She debates the complexities of cultural transmission, or transfer, through select case studies, focusing on France, Greece, Italy, and West Germany; she also provides ample contextualization and details of the changing American and European political and cultural landscapes during the troubled years 1948 to 1954 when local, national, and international issues kept American film officers and European filmmakers on the edge. Finally, Fritsche discusses an ever-challenging topic in cultural and media history: the audiences’ responses and their possible influence on adaptation of films to local and national settings. Aiming to evaluate the impact of US propaganda on European attitudes toward American involvement in Europe, her main findings provide a multifaceted view of the mechanisms and tensions surrounding the film propaganda campaign.

The American authorities understood that Europe was much more complicated than they had previously imagined. In addition, the intensifying Cold War transformed the US objectives for western Europe from economic development and hopes for integration to an urgent request to European governments to heighten their armament spending. This was presented to audiences as the only way to secure freedom at a time of growing fear about communism. The Marshall Plan reconstructed a global liberal market order and was also a political and ideological project.

Making use of multilingual printed, visual, and aural sources, primary and secondary, private and public, from all countries involved, Fritsche has written a well-substantiated study. She provides a full filmography and a succinct but solid historiographical review of literature on the Marshall Plan, accompanied by important scholarly contributions and sources in German and other European languages, throughout her monograph. This is most welcome. The first part of her book focuses on the production context and intricate relations on both sides of the Atlantic; the second part examines the main actors. In the first chapters, she demonstrates how US policies were translated into imagery. Notably, she does not overlook that films are combinations of images in movement and sound that produce meaning and resonate in different ways for different audiences. She navigates the film campaign in an articulate way, using concepts and approaches from different scholarly fields. Adding social, cultural, and technical categories of analysis broadens our appreciation of the diverse situations faced by the propaganda campaign and goes a long way to explain the need for recruiting European filmmakers.

Fritsche devotes a chapter to the central concept of productivity, which lay at the heart of the Marshall Plan, and briefly signaled that the Information Division in Washington was aware that the term and its main components—standardization, mechanization, technical training, and so on—were shared by Marxists (104). In fact, both liberal-capitalist and socialist systems held the same belief that technology was a symbol of modernity, national achievement, and an engine of economic progress. Twenty years earlier, the Soviets had shown keen interest in American equipment, economies of scale, techniques of labor organization, and mass production assembly lines (Paul R. Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?: Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 19, 25). Contrary to its capitalist form, the socialist version of productivity could be attractive for workers as its promises were for their sole benefit.

Fighting communism became urgent for the Marshall Plan propaganda campaign. Fritsche is exceptionally knowledgeable about American and European political history. The United States had to accept that western European governments had turned away from traditional capitalism (127), but the more ambiguities there were regarding political integration and rearmament, the more political opposition to the US project crystalized. The author should explain why French communists fought so successfully against the complete approval of US liberal values, which were permeated by an intense fear of communism. Forbidden from 1939 to 1944, the French Communist Party (PCF) had otherwise been a legal political actor in a parliamentary democracy since its founding in 1920. In addition, the PCF came out of the war years a strong national partner in the French Resistance and a key player in postwar recovery. At the local level, communists had a reputation as progressive and careful administrators. Such experience prevented the French from fully sharing American anxiety about communism.

Importantly, Fritsche's investigation widens the research space on the commissioning of propaganda films for international or transnational purposes during the decade following World War II. Access to these collections is uneven, but digitization is changing the research landscape. Fritsche connects national and international archives, overlapping webs of institutions, governmental agencies, legislation, and networks of individual practitioners. Readers can follow interesting personal trajectories of some well-known and some fairly obscure film directors. Fritsche mentions the British film director Peter Hopkinson, who collaborated on three Marshall Plan films in 1951–1952 (82). Before that, Hopkinson was a cameraman for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). One can add that his historic footage of civilian relief operations in Byelorussia and the Ukraine in 1946–1947 ended up in a March of Time report in June 1947, titled The Russians Nobody Knows. Hopkinson was satisfied that American screens showed “people who had suffered appallingly in the recent war, appearing at that time in no way either able or anxious to start another one” (Peter Hopkinson, Screen of Change: Lives Made Over by the Moving Image, UKA Press, 2008, 121). Throughout the book, similarities emerge with previous UNRRA films and later productions contracted by the United Nations Film Board until 1950. The parallels pertain to significant issues, visual and aural narrative strategies, hiring practices and adaptation to commissioning authorities. Just like international organizations, the Marshall Plan teams invented and adjusted their mediation as they went along. Likewise, the Korean War represented a major game changer for all international postwar film experiments.

Fritsche successfully integrates different perspectives on the political and cultural history of the Marshall Plan film campaign and sheds light on tensions between the Europeans who may have been eager to accept American mass culture and consumer goods, but felt uneasy, or even resisted, what they perceived as American dominance (234). She concludes with a nuanced interpretation of the film campaign's impact, carefully situating it within broader and long-term changes in European economic, political, and cultural life after 1945. This long-term view may be the only way to fully understand the contribution of Marshall Plan propaganda films. Fritsche's research will open new areas for further investigation, and anyone choosing this topic will have to read her book before going any further.