Customer Reviews

The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties

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This is a wonderful book (I devoured it over a weekend). It examines the relationship between American social and political life and the movies during the turbulent decade of the Sixties, although the book actually covers films well into the Seventies. The book argues that this relationship was a two-way street, with the movies being influenced by what was happening in society, but also that the movies influenced politics and society. For example, Hoberman asserts that Kennedy's fascination with James Bond and secret agents and Nixon's obsession with the movie Patton to some extent influenced the style and substance of their presidencies. Another overarching theme of the book is how the Western, that most American of movie genres, evolved almost beyond recognition through the course of the Sixties and early Seventies (from The Alamo to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid).

Among the films prominently covered in the book are Blowup, Spartacus, The Manchurian Candidate, Bonnie & Clyde, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, and Dirty Harry, but the book also discusses more obscure films such as Tell Them Willie Boy is Here and Wild in the Streets. That most quintessential of all Sixties films, Woodstock, is oddly absent from the book.

A couple of quibbles: Hoberman quotes Norman Mailer far too often and it would have been nice to have a true bibliography rather than having to rummage through the source notes. That aside, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in either the social history or films of the Sixties--you will not be disappointed!

This is a great book. It touches on an almost dizzying number of milestones, from the fifties TV show ''The Next Voice You Hear'' to Brian De Palma's movie ''Blow Out.''

The point of the book, if there is one that can be easily summarized, is that political and cultural events (especially films) first became genuinely inseparable during the 1960s (not dissimilar to the points that Marshall McLuhan made in ''Understanding Media'' and Daniel Boorstin made in ''The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream'' while history was happening; but, as Hoberman points out, that history could not have been fully understood by those prophets in the midst of it).

This is a masterfully rendered cultural history. Hoberman's style can get breathless at times, and there are a lot of films and events to keep up with, but the narrative (and the analysis) are involving, cogent, and thoughtful. Think ''The Dirty Dozen,'' ''Easy Rider,'' ''Bonnie & Clyde,'' ''Blow Up,'' ''The Wild Bunch,'' ''Shampoo'' (and songs like ''The Ballad of the Green Berets''): they're all here, along with the cultural context that they fed into and the ''dream life'' that they helped construct.

Here's a new cultural history of the Sixties - through the eye of the camera as it considers the social and political impact of movies and theater of the times. Using key Hollywood productions from Shampoo to Bonnie and Clyde, senior film critic at the Village Voice Hoberman provides a lively reconstruction of the politics behind the films, examining with actors and subjects with a critic's eye for detail. A fine history evolves which uses the film world as a reflection of cultural change.

I saw this book at the university library and I like it. I'll use it as one of my sources because I plan on writing the defining book of the movies in the 1960's someday. The cover of Clint Eastwood for "Dirty Harry" is a classic. One weakness to this book is that there are no photos to keep it entertaining and Hoberman left out some other important movies from the decade. But it was ironic that choose "Blow-Up" as the movie that defied the decade considering it started three things: It was the first movie to ever delt with life after JFK's murder, it was the movie that started the porn film (in the few short years after this movie, there were sexually charged films like "Belle De Jour" and "I Am Curious (Yellow)," right up to "Deep Throat") and it started the feminist movement. We all know that Tom Brokaw wrote a book in which he believes the World War II era was the greatest generation. But I think the Baby Boomers (which includes my divorced parents) made it that title and I think the years 1963 to 1974 (from Kennedy butchered in Dallas to Nixon embarrassed over Watergate) was the REAL greatest generation and look at some of the movies that came out in that time like "Tom Jones" up to "The Godfather Part II." This does make for a good reference book.