The Sixties: 1960-1969, and: Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (review)

Regular Feature | Book Reviews "Buddy" Rogers and David Rollins—plus one director, Andrew Stone, bantered about their motion picture work,joking about the vicissitudes associated with the silent film period. In all, Tony Villecco's interviews have achieved an important part of cinema history as each participant peeled off luminary information about a bygone period's primitive set locations, unreliable technical support, high-strungprima donnas, occasional lotharios, and shortsighted archivists. As Baby Peggy (DianaSerra Cary) bemoaned, the lost and willful destruction of these early, silent films culminated when some Hollywood producers—after realizing a good return on their investments—melted the reels down to retrieve the $2.50 worth of silver nitrate contained in the film stock. Sometimes, these entrepreneurs, unaware ofthe volatile chemical reactions found in flammable reels, jammed their pictures in warehouses where they would deteriorate or, during hot weather, burst into flames. Even worse, she bemoaned, were the numerous robberies as German agents, lacking gun cotton for their World War I weaponry, illegally paid huge sums for Hollywood's processed film, a commodity that contained this military component. But not everything was lost. By interviewing these twelve personages, Tony Villecco has preserved significant memories about the world of silent filmmaking and its impact on future motion pictures. By collecting their many anecdotes, unabashed lore, and down-home stories, Mr. Villecco has captured a weighty segment of cinematic history about an era that is slowly fading. Complete with an extensive filmography and dozens ofrare stills, Silent Stars Speak offers worthy information, some droll revelations , and offbeat experiences about a bygone world, where actors were always seen but never heard. Robert Fyne Kean University RJFyne@aol.com Paul Monaco. The Sixties: 1960-1969. Scribners, 2001. 346 pages; $90.00. David A. Cook Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979. Scribners, 2000. 695 pages; $90.00. Change and Informative Paul Monaco—who has written previously on the media and American culture—is the primary author of The Sixties, the eighth volume in Scribner's prestigious History of the American Cinema series. As in the previous volumes, there is a distinct emphasis on exploring the business and technology of the film industry, and then relating these developments to the dominant trends in Hollywood production during the designated time period. Two of The Sixties' chapters are devoted to nonfiction films and the avant-garde, written by Richard M. Barsam and Walter Metz, respectively. Monaco rightly focuses on the theme of the sixties as a decade of change in the industry, chronicling the demise of the studio system, Hollywood's desperate attempts to rebuild and recover from the precipitous decline in movie theatre attendance (postwar suburbanization and the inroads of TV being two of the primary contributors to this decline), the European influenced revisions of the so-called classical style of Hollywood presentation , and the transition to a "cinema of sensation" epitomized by such framing works asAlfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). The Sixties opens with a series of informative chapters that explore the complex interrelationship between corporate developments , technological innovations and changes in the production code and their impact upon American cinema during the decade. The chapters on the use of "Sound and Music" and Hollywood's neartotal conversionto colorby mid-decade—rarely seriously addressed in general texts—were particularly interesting to this reader. And the chapter dealing with the "Changing World of Movie Exhibition" contains an informative section on the equally neglected cinema art house phenomenon in larger urban centers and/or university towns. This a subject that perhaps would warrant greater exploration, not only with the particulars ofthis exhibition venue, including advance purchase ticket books and thematic screening series, but also its influence through large doses of French New Wave films, the Cinema Nova of Brazil, etc., upon the expectations ofkey American audiences and future prominent directors, such as the youthful sixties movie aficionado , Martin Scorsese. Finally, Monaco presents several tightly written chapters that thematically engage now classicAmerican films thatreflected various cultural movements in the society, as well as the impact of the aforementioned changes in the industry upon their content and form. This is largely accomplished...