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The Idiosyncrasies of a Movie Fan
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19036 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1991 |
1,400 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
MEDIUM COOL
The Movies of the 1960s
Ethan Mordden
New York: Knopf, 1990
301 pp., $24.95
Call me prejudiced if you will but I felt apprehensive about Medium Cool: The Movies of the 1960s from the moment I saw the dust jacket flap photograph of the author collapsed over his typewriter, head pressed to the machine, looking winningly into the camera.
The prose style regrettably matches the photograph--coy, precious, highly personal, even to the point of being down-right camp. The captions--and there are many--are out-and-out camp. The combined caption on page 45 illustrates the point as good as any:
Aggressive women of The Chapman Report. Above,
admiring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Claire Bloom is saucy,
Glynis Johns bewitched, Jane Fonda bothered, and Shelley
Winters Wintersesque. (Zimbalist is bewildered). Below,
Johns, reciting Ernest Dowson, notes hunk Ty Hardin.
Quoth Johns, "What a magnificent animal!"
The author claims he wants to give us his portrait of American movies in the sixties. Heaven knows that was a period of major change in moviemaking not only for Hollywood but for Europe as well. Unfortunately for the reader Mordden is no film or social historian. Among his previous works are: The Hollywood Musical; Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood; Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical; Demented: The World of the Opera Diva; and The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies. Also included among his oeuvre is a book on jazz subtitled An Idiosyncratic Social History of the American Twenties. Idiosyncratic is the governing word here, and could handily be applied to his current work on the sixties.
What Mordden is, of course, is movie fan par excellence--a passionate fan. He early loves being transported to magic worlds in a darkened theater. The people up on the big screen are more real to him than any on the street outside.
What the reader gets, then, is a kind
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