America at 250: The Movies That Defined a Nation

By Laurence Lerman / New York City

Clark Gable helps Vivien Leigh keep her chin up in Gone with the Wind (1939)

SCREEN TIME

In just a few weeks, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday—a milestone certain to inspire no shortage of speeches, retrospectives, and arguments about what the country has been, what it is, and what it ought to become. At a moment when Americans seem divided over everything from history and politics to patriotism itself, even a birthday can feel like a battleground.

The movies tell that story well.

The Ku Klux Klan was a poisonous force in post-Civil War America in The Birth of a Nation (1915)

For more than a century, American films have helped the country imagine itself. From the distorted historical vision of The Birth of a Nation to the democratic idealism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, from the disillusionment of Easy Rider to the entrepreneurial aspirations of The Social Network, these films reveal a nation continually revising its own story. America never arrived at a final version—it simply kept changing the narrative.

The Myth

America's earliest movie myths were often as revealing for what they omitted as what they celebrated. No film demonstrates that more starkly than The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith's technically groundbreaking but deeply racist 1915 epic, which helped shape popular perceptions of American history while promoting a profoundly distorted view of it.

By 1939, Hollywood was offering competing visions of the nation. Gone with the Wind presented a sweeping, romanticized version of the Old South, while Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington celebrated democratic idealism and the belief that integrity could still triumph over corruption. Taken together, the films reveal an America already arguing with itself over history, identity, and national purpose. Long before Hollywood began questioning the country's assumptions, it helped create them.

The Doubt

By the 1950s and 1960s, America's cinematic self-confidence was beginning to fray. The myths remained powerful, but filmmakers increasingly seemed interested in testing them rather than celebrating them.

Gary Cooper stands alone in High Noon (1952)

High Noon marked an early turning point. On its surface, Fred Zinneman’s 1952 effort is a classic Western about courage. Beneath that, though, lies a pointed allegory about the Hollywood blacklist, with screenwriter Carl Foreman transforming the town's unwillingness to stand beside Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) into a critique of those who remained silent during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the decade.

The end of the world approaches in Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

The doubts only deepened. Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb treated Cold War leadership as a theater of absurdity, questioning whether the people entrusted with civilization's survival were any more rational than the rest of us. Dennis Hopper’s 1969 road drama Easy Rider challenged another cherished belief: that freedom and individuality would inevitably be rewarded.

Al Pacino (l.) and Marlon Brando keep it in the family in The Godfather (1972)

Then came 1972’s The Godfather, which reframed the American Dream in darker, more transactional terms. Its criminal empire feels unmistakably American—not because it celebrates corruption, but because it asks uncomfortable questions about how power, wealth, and legitimacy are acquired in the first place. If earlier films imagined virtue and success moving hand in hand, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterwork suggested the relationship between them might be far more complicated.

The Fracture

Moving further into the Seventies, doubt was giving way to something deeper. The question was no longer whether America's institutions, values, and assumptions could withstand scrutiny. It was whether they had been hiding something all along.

Leatherface gets his point across in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Released in 1974, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre transformed the American landscape into a cinematic nightmare. Made on a shoestring budget by filmmaker Tobe Hooper, the movie arrived amid post-Vietnam disillusionment, economic uncertainty, and a growing sense that the country's best days were behind it. Its rough, rural horrors felt less supernatural than homegrown—and beyond control—as if the darkness had always been there, waiting just beyond the horizon.

Dustin Hoffman (l.) and Robert Redford take on Watergate in All the President's Men (1976)

Two years later, Alan Pakula’s All the President's Men brought a similar anxiety into the halls of power. The Watergate scandal exposed corruption at the highest levels of government and shattered public trust in institutions that earlier films had largely taken for granted.

An unhinged Dennis Hopper shows Isabella Rosselini an evening she won’t forget in Blue Velvet (1986)

And then there was Blue Velvet. David Lynch's 1986 masterpiece begins with one of the most iconic images of American innocence ever put on film: white picket fences, red roses, manicured lawns, and small-town tranquility. If The Texas Chain Saw Massacre suggested that the nightmare was out there somewhere, Blue Velvet proposed something even more unsettling—that it might be hiding in the backyard.

The Reckoning

The myths never disappeared—they just became harder to accept.

The national story remained intact, but its cracks were becoming harder to ignore.

Brooklyn smolders in Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing confronted one of America's oldest and most persistent realities: race. Set on a single Brooklyn block during the hottest day of the summer, the film refuses easy heroes, villains, or solutions. More than three decades later, its arguments about community, power, and belonging remain unresolved.

No Country for Old Men offered a different kind of reckoning. The Coen brothers' 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel follows a sheriff struggling to understand a world that no longer seems to operate according to familiar rules. Whether the country has changed or merely revealed what it has always been remains unclear.

Jessie Eisenberg plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010)

Then came The Social Network, which gave one of America's oldest myths a distinctly 21st-century form. In the eyes and words of director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, the frontier has become Silicon Valley. Reinvention, ambition, and self-creation remain central to the national story, but now they unfold through algorithms rather than railroads.

The Unfinished Story

Taken together, these films reveal not a single American story but a succession of competing visions—about race and democracy, freedom and power, innocence and corruption. They are less a timeline than an argument, one that has played out on American screens for more than a century.

That may be the real lesson on the eve of America's 250th birthday. The country has spent 250 years debating who it is. The movies have simply left a remarkable record of that conversation.

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Laurence Lerman is a film journalist and a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.