When the carnival of a globalized, neutral Lisbon dies down with the victory of the Allies in 1945, Portugal must confront the political realities of a post-Second World War Europe. Recent atrocities committed in the name of German re-conquest and expansion provoke a necessary re-evaluation of empire. The toppling of two fascist dictators, the American victory over Japan, and the growing fear over Soviet expansion supports an urgent movement away from totalitarianism and toward democracy in the West. When Viceroy Mountbatten announces Great Britain's plans for the imminent decolonization and partition of the Indian subcontinent (1945–47), the Estado Novo resists international pressure to liberate Portuguese India (Goa, Damão, and Diu, annexed in 1961). When the Indochina War (1946) breaks out, the Western colonial enterprise begins to collapse, and Portugal hurries to maintain its pluri-continental nation. As the recently formed United Nations addresses the emerging Third World in the first of many discourses about decolonization in eastern Europe and against European colonization of other continents, Portugal's world profile will be marked by international reproach of Salazar's steadfast defense of empire.

In these politically tense, post-Second World War/pre-Colonial War years, Portuguese urban musical comedies – and their familiar pobrete, mas alegrete themes – lose their cachet for an audience that has tired of introverted escapism. We begin to see films that António Ferro praises for (what he understands to be) their realistic representation of the inhabitants of Lisbon's most popular quarters, and that he classifies as “folkloric,” in which the happy, simple, urban poor disappear, and the struggling, working-class poor take center stage. The regime's propaganda appropriates the aspirations of a class that it had held in disdain because of its association with communist and socialist organizations, and confuses their aspirations with those of the regime's own ideology, repeatedly reminding the disgruntled masses of the virtues of not rocking the boat.

As a result, the Portuguese dramas present a disenchanted working class, one that recognizes the limits of its own social mobility. In contrast to the comedies – in which a warm, humble Lisbon begins to emerge – the dramas strip the poor of their folkloric poverty, and replace it with a moral poverty.