The American Marshall Plan film campaign and the Europeans: a captivated audience?

The US government launched the European Recovery Programme, otherwise known as the 'Marshall Plan', in order to save war-torn Europe from collapse in 1948.

Yet while much is known about the economic side of the Marshall Plan, the extensive film campaign that accompanied it has been largely overlooked until now.

This book explores the use of the Marshall Plan films and, importantly, their distribution and reception across Europe.

It examines every available film - the 170 that remain from the 200 estimated to have been made - and looks at how they were designed to instil hope, argue the case for economic restructuring and persuade the Europeans of the superiority of the liberal-capitalist system.