Three British movies that changed Hollywood forever

However, as much as many British films have influenced and inspired their Stateside counterparts through a manner of different guises, there aren’t many to have completely altered Hollywood forever. That’s not to say it can’t, won’t, or doesn’t happen, but it’s still a rare phenomena.

Not that anyone told the creators of the following three films, though, which are separated by decades and occupy markedly different genre spaces. Individually, they’re three great flicks that have plenty of fans, but collectively, they exist and endure as a trio of heavyweight titles that ended up changing the complexion of American moviemaking permanently.

Three British films that changed Hollywood:

The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Undoubtedly one of the greatest British movies ever made, Carol Reed’s timeless noir The Third Man also ended up as one of the most influential, sending shockwaves throughout the genre that reverberated right through Hollywood for years to come.

Some of the industry’s finest filmmakers regard it as a stone-cold classic, which is accurate. However, the DNA of The Third Man seeped much deeper into cinema than its artistic and technical merits, as groundbreaking and innovative as they were.

Martin Scorsese calling it “a revelation” is just one of the many superlatives to have been tossed in its direction over the years, and considering he’s one of America’s most monolithic directors and a titan of the industry, it underlines just how important it became to the artform as a whole.

Noir was all the rage by the time it was even released in 1949, but none of them carried the confidence of The Third Man. The stories tended to be cut from a similar cloth, and they all looked roughly the same. Coming along with its jaw-dropping monochromatic cinematography, a screenplay where not even a single word is wasted, and pitch-perfect performances, Reed breathed new life into the genre.

It was familiar archetypally, but executed with such invention and daring that it felt completely brand new. Suddenly, American auteurs were casting envious glances in the direction of their United Kingdom counterparts, hoping they could craft richly-detailed, immersive, and evocative stories of subterfuge and espionage to anywhere near the same level as The Third Man.

In addition, it was the marriage of aesthetic greatness and thematic heft that elevated the film to a pantheon above the rest of on-screen noir, with Reed capturing the socio-political turmoil of the time by passing judgement on how America viewed itself as a post-war power player through the lens of Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins.

He couldn’t understand the subtleties of the world he was inhabiting until he found out he was ill-equipped and totally unprepared, reflective of where the United States was positioned in the halls of power after World War II. Noir had largely favoured style over substance, but The Third Man showed that it wasn’t just possible to do both, but do it in a slick and accessible manner.

Noir has rarely – if ever – been bettered, and it wasn’t a coincidence that in the immediate aftermath of The Third Man capturing attention and imagination the world over, Hollywood’s own contributions to the medium suddenly adopted so many of the tricks, techniques, and intricacies that Reed had virtually perfected already.

Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962)

There were franchises before James Bond arrived on the scene with Dr. No, but the introduction of 007 nonetheless shifted the paradigm forever by giving rise to one of the industry’s longest-running, most marketable, and enduringly bankable brands.

Fast forward more than 60 years and Bond is still the most iconic secret agent in cinema history, with his on-screen adventures totalling more than $5 billion in ticket sales, with the saga having never dipped from its position as one of Hollywood’s marquee multi-film operations.

The lasting legacy was much more than that of sequels and reboots, though. The British film industry—and eventually Hollywood—benefitted immensely from the films being shot on location in UK soundstages. It was important for the rights-holders to keep the character based in his country of origin, which ultimately led to an increasing number of high-profile American productions touching down on British soil.

If it wasn’t for Bond, then Pinewood Studios may have never become a power player in the production business, with the designated 007 Stage being constructed in 1976. These days it’s one of the largest in the world, and it’s played host to a string of monumental pictures that attained historic status in their own right.

Richard Donner’s Superman, Tim Burton’s Batman, Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, and several Star Wars movies have all called the 007 Stage home, and each of them either changed the complexion of the blockbuster forever or earned eye-watering amounts of money. Both in plenty of cases, which never would have happened had Dr. No not set the template for the entirety of the Bond franchise remaining on home shores when it wasn’t required to go trotting the globe.

The explosion of interest in spy flicks throughout the 1960s and 1970s can be traced right back to Dr. No, too, never mind the entire career of Sean Connery, who became a Tinseltown stalwart and one of its most respected performers. Again, there are no guarantees any of that would have happened were it not for a British production that cost a little over a million dollars to make, but the last 60 years of filmmaking would look irrevocably different without it.

There’s barely an agent of espionage to have been created since Dr. No, who didn’t owe at least a small debt of gratitude to Bond, who was nowhere near a household name or mainstream concern when Ian Fleming published his first story featuring the character. It was a legendary lease of life created entirely by the movies, and it would be an understatement to say those tendrils stopped growing at the edge of the screen.

From the effect it had on an entire genre to the way its iconography has infiltrated every aspect of pop culture via the way it steered Pinewood towards its current position as a production hub favoured by the most powerful outfits in the industry, Dr. No has been the gift that kept on giving to Hollywood in a number of different ways.

Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

Nit-pickers might try and claim that Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up couldn’t possibly be a British film because it was directed by an Italian, produced by an Italian, co-written by two Italians, and based on a novel by an Argentina-born French citizen, but would they be bold enough to argue with the Cannes Film Festival?

When the seminal psychological thriller was named the winner of the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film—better known as the Palme d’Or—in 1967, the organisers, judges, and voters credited only one country with the production. Was it Italy? Nope, it was the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom only.

Dialogue polisher Edward Bond was British, virtually the entire cast was British, the story was set in Britain, it was Antonioni’s first feature fully in the English language, and the movie was shot almost entirely on location in London, so it was far from being a foreign affair. Beyond its many qualities – of which there were many – Blow-Up had such a seismic effect on Hollywood that it upended the entire ratings system.

Ignoring the fact it was the inspiration behind classics like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Brian De Palma’s spiritual successor Blow Out, overlooking its status as one of the greatest movies of its era and a watershed moment for both counterculture cinema and the depiction of on-screen sensuality, the way motion pictures are approved and rated has never been the same since it was made.

Made in flagrant defiance of the Motion Picture Association of America’s Production Code, the film was blasted by the National Legion of Decency for its salacious content. Quality always shines through in the end, though, with Blow-Up‘s explicit and sexually-charged scenes thumbing their nose at convention so thoroughly a sea change was instigated.

After being showered with praise by critics and audiences alike, and earning $20 million at the box office on a budget of under $2 million, the MPAA came to the realisation that maybe it needed to move with the times. As a result, the Production Code was abandoned altogether two years after its release in favour of the current ratings system, which has remained in place ever since.

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