An old-world France tinged with nostalgia for belle-époque elegance and a picturesque demi-monde of bistros and cabarets has inspired some of post-war Hollywood's most celebrated films: An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), Moulin Rouge ( John Huston, 1952) and Gigi (Vincente Minnelli, 1958), among others. These musicals featured both French and American stars and were widely seen by audiences in both the United States and France at a moment when the French film industry was still finding its post-war footing.

The Technicolor, wide-screen, singing-and-dancing spectacles would appear to testify to the global dominance of genre-driven Hollywood production that could out-muscle other national film industries even in the representation of their own people, locations and culture, while appropriating their stars and audiences in the process. However, this corpus also provides grounds for revising characterisations of Hollywood's global hegemony and local French resistance, of centres and margins, and of industrial-scale production and a rival industry struggling to hold its own. In It's So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of the Cosmopolitan Film Culture, Vanessa Schwartz challenges the perception that post-war French cinema was the besieged victim of a one-way Americanisation imposed by its outsized Hollywood rival, and builds the argument on the big-budget musicals set in France. The idealised Paris in An American in Paris, Gigi and other films bespeaks instead a calculated coordination between French and American film industries that becomes visible when their production and distribution are considered through a transnational lens. Through a mutually beneficial alloy of French and American shooting locations, economic interests, screens, stars and publics, these films ‘construct an imagery that transcended the nation as an imagined community’. They join the cult of Brigitte Bardot, the Cannes Film Festival, and ‘cosmopolitan’ productions such as Mike Todd's Around the World in Eighty Days (Michael Anderson, 1956) as evidence of a dynamic transatlantic film culture, and of a strategic symbiosis, of a new ‘organising category’ that demands a term of its own: a transnational ‘Frenchness’, distinct from both American and French cinema, whose logic more completely explains the creation and reception of these films.