Abstract
To date, historians have emphasized the concerns some European claims-makers expressed about youth-oriented American films in the second half of the twentieth century. By contrast, this essay argues that the Czechoslovak State Film Company's handling of Rebel without a Cause (1955), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Dirty Dancing (1987), and others reveals that some of the continent's elites drew fairly positive conclusions about this type of film.
Accordingly, the authors argue that this organization framed films like these in four historically situated ways reflective of changes in the Czechoslovak Communist Party's cultural policy: blaming parents for student unrest, demonizing American capitalist democracy, undermining subversive indigenous subcultures, and suggesting the liberalization of the cultural sphere.