Opening with a loving dedication to Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller written in big, bold red, white, and blue—“To Nick and Samuel, who raised me to respect image and sound”—Godard’s final collaboration with Anna Karina honors Hollywood heroes while embracing the radical politics that would soon dominate the director’s work. Robert Aldrich, Otto Preminger, David Goodis, Marianne Faithfull, and Kenji Mizoguchi all get nods—but so do Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, and the Moroccan leftist Ben Barka. Karina’s character, Paula Nelson, scours an imagined Atlantic City for her missing boyfriend, listening to Marxist manifestos and encountering shady criminals while looking impossibly chic in a series of vibrant dresses and minis. An extremely loose adaptation of the crime novel The Jugger, Made in U.S.A. is a freewheeling, self-referential exploration of Hollywood cinema and simmering sixties politics. Or, as Paula famously puts it: “We were in a political movie, meaning Walt Disney with blood.”
