This book offers, for the first time, a comparison of British and French cinema during the turbulent decades of the 1940s and 1950s. Taking as her focus the ways in which 'community' was depicted on screen, Butler shows how 'pulling together' was explicitly used by British filmmakers during the war to convey a sense of popular synthesis, while in occupied France, politically divided, the idea of community was far more problematic. She gives perceptive readings of key films, to reveal afresh the meaning and appeal of such French classics as Le Corbeau and Les Enfants du Paradis and notable British productions like Waterloo Road, Fires were Started and Brief Encounter.