In Woody Allen's "Cassandra's Dream," which opens Friday, two south London brothers find that financial need and illegality don't necessarily mix. Think of it as "Before the Devil Knows Your Debt."
Allen, who made his previous two movies in Britain, is only the latest director to commute between US and UK. Hollywood has long wooed foreign directors, of course, and none more than those who have the advantage of already speaking English. But American directors have traveled in the other direction, too.
Alfred Hitchcock wasn't the first English filmmaker to come here, but he might be seen as the patron saint of Anglo-American movies. Although he was knighted and never lost his accent, he still managed to insert himself pretty deeply in the American grain. Think of Robert Cummings hanging from the Statue of Liberty in "Saboteur" (1942); Cary Grant - the epitome of dual-nationality Hollywood - on the face of Mount Rushmore in "North by Northwest" (1959); or "Psycho" (1960), the ultimate tribute to that American institution, the motel.
Part of the fascination of transatlantic filmmaking, as the example of Hitchcock shows, is watching a foreigner go native. That's not always the case. Jules Dassin's "Night and the City" (1950) is London noir: a pretty straightforward transposition of a very American genre to the British capital. But it's the exception that proves the rule.
Soon after making "Night and the City," Dassin moved to Paris to avoid the blacklist. Joseph Losey ran afoul of Hollywood witch hunters, too, and put down roots in England. How deep those roots were can be seen in Losey's acute grasp of his adopted country's class system in such films as "The Servant" (1963) and "The Go-Between" (1971).
Not that an American director had to relocate to get the English class system - not if he was the right director, anyway. "Gosford Park" (2001) shows that Robert Altman could do for the country house what he'd done for country music in "Nashville" (1975).
If Losey and Altman looked at class with fresh eyes, Englishman Adrian Lyne did so with very jaded ones in "Flashdance" (1983). So America prides itself on the openness of its class structure? All right, then, let's see what happens when a beautiful young woman works as a welder by day, an "exotic" dancer by night, and all the while dreams of becoming a ballerina. What happens is a huge (and shameless) hit.
Alexander Mackendrick made his reputation with Ealing comedies like "The Man in the White Suit" (1951) and "The Ladykillers" (1955). What could be more British? But his masterpiece is "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957). It took a pair of alien eyes to see midtown Manhattan - at once desperately dark and blindingly incandescent - as such a visual, and moral, phantasmagoria.
Or what could be more British than "Tom Jones" (1963)? It won Tony Richardson a best directing Oscar - and brought him to Hollywood, where he tackled such only-in-America material as the LA cemetery culture of "The Loved One" (1965) and the back-and-forth between Mexico and Texas in "The Border" (1982).
It's hard to believe Richard Lester was born in Philadelphia - his movies did so much to create the image of Swinging London: "The Knack" (1965), "How I Won the War" (1967), and, above all, "A Hard Day's Night" (1965) and "Help!" (1965). What George Martin was to the Beatles aurally, Lester was visually.
Unlike Lester, Tony Scott is English. You might not know it, though, from his most celebrated title. Capturing a cultural moment on screen is one thing, doing it to a whole political ethos is even more impressive. "Top Gun" (1986) puts on celluloid how the Reagan '80s saw itself in the mirror.
Sam Mendes, also English, turns Tony Scott upside down. "American Beauty" (1999), "Road to Perdition" (2002), and "Jarhead" (2005) are all very American. They sure aren't triumphalist, though.
Leave it to Stanley Kubrick to have it both ways: more English than the English and an American fully at home abroad. Sure, he was a wisenheimer from the Bronx. That didn't keep him from adapting Thackeray ("Barry Lyndon," 1975) or making the most prescient film about Britain in the '70s and '80s (Alex the Droog, in "A Clockwork Orange," 1971, prefigures countless punks, yobs, and soccer hooligans). Yet he also managed to turn English soundstages into a New England small town and string of motels ("Lolita," 1962), the White House war room ("Dr. Strangelove," 1964), a Rockies resort ("The Shining," 1980), a Marine boot camp ("Full Metal Jacket," 1987), and a moneyed Manhattan ("Eyes Wide Shut," 1999).
One man's England is another's America, and vice versa - so long as the man is Stanley Kubrick, that is. He didn't so much cross the Atlantic as drain it.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
