Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 791.43 MOR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) intimated that there's no safe place--the murderously bizarre can crop up anywhere. John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) portrays an America where ``television and radio beam messages at you like mind-control apparatus . . . and the social structures throb with manipulative schemes.'' Between these signposts was a decade of unruly, vibrantly realistic American filmmaking, explored by Mordden, New Yorker cultural critic-at-large, in these wonderfully perceptive essays which illuminate not only film but the 1960s and the present. Movies of the '60s challenged authority as corrupt and murderous ( Splendor in the Grass ) and/or questioned the fairness of our political system ( Advise and Consent ; The Manchurian Candidate ). The '60s' fascination with evil and violence motivated Richard Brooks's In Cold Blood and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, that most serious of comedies. Mordden's wide-angled critique fits foreign films, arty B-movies, Paul Newman, Bye Bye Birdie and even James Bond flicks into a montage of changing social consciousness. Photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Illustrated (60 photographs--not seen) film history that will leave many readers medium cool. In an effort to cover the ten years from Psycho to Easy Rider, Mordden spoons out a sometimes tasty skim, like flavored yogurt. Nothing is ever gone into deeply enough; and as page after page of titles fly by with their identifying tag lines and few threads of analysis, the reader feels trapped inside a tremendous balloon where text is less important than a big glossy gas-filled bag for Mordden to ride into the chain stores. He strives to hold each chapter together with a theme germane to the 60's, such as ""Thou shalt treat with irreverence that great American taboo, religion"" (as in Elmer Gantry)--or ""Thou shalt question the fairness of the American political system"" (Advise and Consent and The Best Man)--or ""Thou shalt question even the values of that most sacred place of all, Hollywood itself' (Two Weeks in Another Town and Inside Daisy Clover). Along with mini-talks about such artistic winners as The Misfits, Bonnie and Clyde, and Dr. Strangelove, we get the rise of the cult of the director (including a nondirector director, Andy Warhol), of exploitation and sex-ploitation films, James Bond and Elvis Presley, the ecstatically visual sf film (2001), and so on. The theses move along but the space-idler prose seldom engages (""all this forces upon Americans a new relationship with their movies, one of challenge rather than flattery, of doubt rather than certainty;"" etc.). Yes, the 60's films disturbed the public--and if these little disturbances are what spice up the book's captions, there'll be no need to read the text. A chatful of yawns. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In the Golden Age of Hollywood, film prescribed rather than reflected the values of society. Mordden says that, "for the first fifty years the movies are about romance. Nothing happens in the 1950s. Then, from 1960 on, the movies are about reality." The end of the McCarthy era heralded the collapse of the studio system, launching a rebellion against the authoritarian control of the moguls. This rebellious spirit spawned the New Cinema, a more daring, mature, sexier, and violent cinema, and an alternative to the tame pictures of a tamer time. In comparing Doris Day and Rock Hudson's Pillow Talk (1959) with Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman's Midnight Cowboy (1969), a world of difference can be seen in filmmaking and subject matter. Mordden notes that in "the 1930s, sex registered as wit"; in the 1940s, as crime; "there was no sex in the 1950s"; and in the 1960s, sex was sex. In analyzing dozens of movies, from The Manchurian Candidate and Psycho to The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Mordden offers perceptive critiques of trends and themes in a radically altered and a more socially relevant medium. To be indexed. --Benjamin Segedin
