Jean-Luc Godard made Made in USA soon after seeing The Big Sleep. Anna Karina in the Bogart role becomes embroiled in a world of political treachery, kidnappings and assassinations, ultimately turning intrigue into exposé. “I feel I'm in a Walt Disney movie, but one played by Humphrey Bogart, therefore a political film.”

Writing at the time of its release, Richard Roud called Made in USA “Godard's most difficult film - the one in which he has pushed to its furthest limits a kind of attempt at total fragmentation of plot.... (It) is also one of his most visually beautiful and fascinating films. A curious amalgam of The Big Sleep, the Ben Barka affair, the Kennedy Assassination, it is...along with Deux ou Trois Choses...the most cutting analysis of the Fifth Republic.”

“I started off intending to make a simple film,” Godard wrote in Sight and Sound, “and for the first time I tried to tell a story. But it isn't my way of doing things. I don't know how to tell stories. I want to cover the whole ground, from all possible angles.... I couldn't prevent myself from filling in the sociological context. And this context is that everything now is American influenced. Hence the title.”