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ABSTRACT: Although Portugal served as the setting for over thirty Hollywood films produced during the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933-1974), the country's cinematic image was largely a product of World War II, whose specific context encouraged a sanitized depiction of its regime, perpetuated during the Cold War. After contextualizing Portugal's presence and involvement in those productions, this article examines Hollywood's engagement with two important symbols associated with the Salazar dictatorship, namely fado music and the Miracle of Fatima. It discusses their narrative purposes in US film fiction and, in turn, how North American cinema helped promote these cultural pillars of the Estado Novo.
KEYWORDS: cinema, fado, Fatima, Hollywood, Portugal, propaganda
The Estado Novo ("New State"), the right-wing dictatorship that governed Portugal between 1933 and 1974, summed up its core values with the slogan "God, fatherland, and family," but its critics long ago coined an alternative tripartite formula to describe the regime founded by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar: "Fatima, fado, and football."1 More than denouncing the regime's environment of alienation, the so-called three F's highlight a set of key cultural symbols espoused by official propaganda.2 Fado referred to a type of acoustic ballad associated with melancholic themes and typically sung in working-class taverns (fado houses), accompanied by a Portuguese guitar. Fatima referred to the parish where sightings of the Virgin Mary (Our Lady of Fatima) were reported in 1917, culminating in extraordinary solar activity that allegedly affected thousands of pilgrims, accepted by the Vatican as the Miracle of the Sun. Given the iconic role of fado and Fatima in domestic propaganda about Portuguese identity as well as in building the country's tourist-friendly international image, this article will examine how the film industry of the United States-which dominated the world's screens throughout the Estado Novo-engaged with those two symbols. (Football, known in the United States as soccer and traditionally unpopular among US audiences, was understandably absent.)
Until 1974, Hollywood released almost three dozen productions set (at least partially) in Portugal that not only ignored the most controversial traits of the Salazar dictatorship-political repression, widespread poverty, colonial wars-but also reinforced cultural pillars of the regime.3 In order to better understand this phenomenon, my discussion will begin by briefly contextualizing the evolution of Portugal's presence in US film fiction....