ABSTRACT
Hard as it may be for the cynical to accept, there actually was a time when Hollywood movies were America's most cost-effective goodwill ambassadors to the world. The American cinema has never been more popular with foreign audiences than it is now—nor, paradoxically, more reviled and resented at the same time. Even Europe's student radicals, scornful of the American film industry's "mercantile mentality" and what they see as its pretenses at art, avidly attend American movies. A respected German filmmaker once expressed anxiety over Rambo and similar American exports out of a fear that such films might excite and instruct the young neo-Nazis and skinheads in a Germany trying hard to go straight since losing World War II. In many countries, the fascination of the young with the American way of life, which seems unrestricted compared to their own, has widened the generation gap and led to tensions with their parents and even the vested powers that be.
