DINE Acc~iu ZAvmAL


Florida became the location sets for the exotic Nicaragua, Panama, or Cuba-
and all the foreign lands into which the U.S. military and commercial
entrepreneurs were making incursionins.5 A newsreel on the Spanish
American War, filmed by Thomas Edison in 1900, was shot in New Jersey!
 As he closed a speech at the conclusion of the Spanish American War,
 Teddy Roosevelt defined the "white man's burden" for his nation:

 If it were in my power to promise the people of this land anything, I
 would not promise them pleasure. I would promise them that stern
 happiness which comes from the sense of having done in practical
 fashion a difficult work which was worth doing. I preach to you, then,
 my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for
 the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us
 big with the fate of many nations. (50)

 Hollywood filmmakers such as Emerson and Loos, inadvertently or not,
would lend themselves to this call for U.S. heroism and duty. The newly
acquired territories offered the stuff Hollywood feature films could thrive
on for they were lofty tales of moral responsibility attached to romance and
adventure. Following The Americano, there are limitless tales that speak of
young U.S. agricultural or mining entrepreneurs saving the day for foreign
others, or of U.S. soldiers saving the natives from evil bandidos while dark
seioritas cheer them on. In American Aristocracy (1917), another film written
by Loos, Douglas Fairbanks (the star of The Americano) will again play an
American Adam saving the Mexican republic from evil. In Bolshevism on Trial
(1919), a social worker and a soldier dream of creating a utopia in the
Caribbean, but the soldier's father will "prove it could never work." Soldiers
of Fortune (1919) is a remake about another mining engineer in the midst of
South American revolution. The Dictator (1922) concerns a taxi driver who
saves a republic from revolution. In Mr. Billings Spends His Dime the hero sees
a South American president's daughter in a newsreel and races to marry her
and save her father's republic. Silent classics such as Flight, The Cockeyed
World or The Stoker, all released in 1929, are tales where private plantations
are seized by bandidos with names like Lobo (wolf), and saved by U.S. warriors
in the air, or dredging through the menacing jungle. In these films the U.S. is
always, to quote a caption from Flights, "invited to lend a steadying hand and
to assist in the establishment and organizing of the forces of law and order."
 The Americano's plot seems right off the news reports that were bombarding
the public at the beginning of and during the equally controversial aftermath of
the Spanish American War. Cuba, and the general control of the Caribbean basin,
had been in the eye of the U.S. government since the presidency of Thomas

5 DeeDee Halleck's enlightening The Gringo in Mafianaland (1995) explores the early
images made of Cuba in particular, and South America in general, revealing efforts
to rally public through the effective use of the medium.