Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America
The book’s subtitle pretty much gives away the thesis here: American films of the 1970s were influenced by revolutions both social and political. The author redefines the seventies to encompass the late 1960s and to exclude the late 1970s, allowing him to focus on the emerging filmmakers and their works: Penn, Ashby, Mazursky, Scorcese, De Palma, Coppola, Rafelson, Cassavetes, and so on. Ardent students of the history of American cinema will no doubt experience a serious case of been-there, done-that (as the author admits, and his extensive bibliography elaborates, this is not a new subject), but, on the other hand, readers unfamiliar with the subject should find the book a real education. The author, a professor of government at Cornell, draws a clear correlation between the rather startling shift in American filmmaking (increased violence and sexual themes, more overt anti-establishment motifs, the rise of the antihero) and political and social events of the 1950s and early ’60s (such as the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of key political figures, the Communist witch hunts). Libraries with active film-history collections will want to add this one. --David Pitt--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.