Review of Made in U.S.A

Dwight MacDonald might not have liked Goddard's 'Made in U.S.A.'It is a film that marries high culture and low, which bristles DM disdain for 'masscult'. For 2016 film goers 'Made in U.S.A.'is a 20 questions quiz. It has everything thrown in from soup to nuts, from pulp fiction to politics to literature to American politics to Hollywood and even to the signature of the 'last of the Red Hot Mamas' Miss Sophie Tucker. Goddard references Horace MaCoy's 'Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye', which rests on Anna Karina's breast in the opening shot, but substitutes it with the words of say Samuel Beckett. His characters have the names of Hollywood directors, Goddard admired. Selig or Misoguchi for example. Or writers like Ben Hecht. His bad guys bear the monikers of Nixon and Robert Macnamara. Into his script he doffs his hat to the poet Prevert or Louis Aragon or the writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Otto Preminger is a street name. Richard Widmark is in good company as a killer, and he delights in Karina killing the detective novels David Goodis. Who today recalls the abduction of the Moroccan leftist opponent of Hassan II, abducted at noon in St. Germain des Pres? Or Mers El Kebir or the failure of the Free French to wrest Dakar from Vichy control? Or the destruction of Agadir during a strong earth quake or the crushing to death of protesters when the police closed the Metro Charonne? And Goddard's disembodied voice rings out on an AIWA tape recorder as he condemns the sterile politics of the French Right and Left and the pusillanimous Communist Party, a condemnation which finds echos into America's presidential brouhaha for the White House. 'Made in U.S.A.' is full of talk that today might send the viewer to turn off his DVD player. Is it a museum piece? an obscure film that best be viewed by cinema students? Goddard's film is a relic of the turbulent 1960s, of a France exiting from a long war in Algeria in 1962, ending fighting wars from 1939 till June 1962. As the country under DeGaulle's Fifth Republic energized a tired France, the American war in Vietnam brought about what the French called the 'May Days of 1968', but we are ahead of the story the film tells. 'Made in U.S.A.' reflects through Goddard's lens the 'Sturm und Drum' of those seemingly forgotten Times.