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Larry Bachmann (second from left) at work on The Bridge (1949). |
In 1957 Academy Member Larry Bachmann (1912–2004) donated his collection of over 100 16mm film prints to the Academy Film Archive. The son of Paramount film executive and agent J.G. Bachmann, Larry Bachmann was a screenwriter and producer and onetime head of MGM’s United Kingdom branch. After college, he became an assistant to Pandro S. Berman, head of production at RKO. Later he moved to MGM, working for J.J. Cohn, the head of the B unit, where he wrote many of the Dr. Kildare films. After World War II, he was an important member of the Marshall Plan’s film unit in Paris. The collection he donated to the Academy contained not only films produced under that aegis, but also a number of earlier and even rarer films made by OMGUS, the American military government in Germany. Bachmann’s collection remained unknown in the Archive’s holding for decades, but the films were rediscovered and properly cataloged in the mid-’90s. These Marshall Plan films comprise a relatively small but important collection of some of the best surviving representatives of unique postwar materials.
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The Shoemaker and the Hatter (1949) |
After World War II, Europe lay in ruins, and the Marshall Plan (officially the “European Recovery Program”) transferred over $13 billion ($90 billion today) of material and technical assistance to 18 European countries. The Plan has been described as the most ambitious and profound economic development initiative ever undertaken by a government outside its national borders. To help explain to average citizens how the plan actually worked, European filmmakers produced more than 260 films between 1948 and 1953 at the Marshall Plan’s Paris headquarters. The single overarching goal of the information program was to paint a convincing picture of rising expectations – a vision of a future in which Europeans could aspire to American-style prosperity. The Marshall Plan films found myriad entertaining ways to tell the same story: “Help is on the way, there’s hope for the future, you can do it!” The Marshall Plan filmmakers, working out of 18 country missions, emphasized cross-cultural understanding, European solidarity and cooperation, and the choices individuals face in determining how they will fit into the larger social fabric. These films exhibit a wide range of styles and subjects, as the filmmakers were given a fairly free hand during production. Some examples in the Archive’s collection include The Extraordinary Adventures of a Quart of Milk (in which the title “character” narrates his voyage of being processed), The Bridge (about the daring airlift over the Berlin Blockade), Do Not Disturb (a satire in the guise of a Communist propaganda film), The Promise of Barty O’Brien (featuring the cast of Dublin’s Abbey Theater) and the delightful animated pro-free-trade film The Shoemaker and the Hatter.
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The Story of Koula (1951) |
Because of a 1948 law that prohibited propagandizing American citizens, few Marshall Plan films have ever been seen in the United States. In 1990 Senator John Kerry introduced legislation overturning the ban. In April 2005, the Academy Film Archive co-created, with Sandra Schulberg (whose father Stuart Schulberg had been one of the Chiefs of the Marshall Plan Film Unit) what has become a national tour of four programs of 25 titles, entitled "Selling Democracy." Thirteen of the films in the series were preserved by the Archive. After the success of the Academy screenings, the series has played in Chicago, Berkeley, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
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