Guides & Reviews

British films of the 1960s are undervalued. Their search for realism has often been dismissed as drabness and their more frivolous efforts can now appear just empty-headed. Robert Murphy’s ‘Sixties British Cinema’ is the first study to challenge this view. He shows that the realist tradition of the late ’50s and early ’60s was anything but dreary and depressing, and gave birth to a clutch of films remarkable for their confidence and vitality: ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving,’ and ‘A Taste of Honey’ are only the better known titles. ‘Sixties British Cinema ‘revalues key genres of the period – horror, crime, and comedy – and takes a fresh look at the ‘swinging London’ films, finding disturbing undertones that reflect the cultural changes of the decade. Now that our cinematic past is constantly recycled on television, Murphy’s informative, engaging, and perceptive review of these films and their cultural and industrial context offers an invaluable guide to this neglected era of British cinema.

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Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II (1974) is a magisterial cinematic work, a gorgeous, stylized, auteur epic, and one of the few sequels judged by many to be greater than its predecessor. This despite the fact that it consists largely of meetings between aspiring ‘Godfather’ Michael Corleone and fellow gangsters, politicians and family members. The meetings remind us that the modern gangster’s success is built upon inside information and on strategic planning. Michael and his father Vito’s days resemble those of the legitimate businessmen they aspire or pretend to be.

Jon Lewis’s study of Coppola’s masterpiece provides a close analysis of the film and a discussion of its cinematic and political contexts. It is structured in three sections: “The Sequel,” “The Dissolve,” and “The Sicilian Thing” – accommodating three avenues of inquiry, respectively: the film’s importance in and to Hollywood history, its unique, auteur style and form; and its cultural significance. Of interest, then, is New Hollywood history, mise-en-scene, and a view of the Corleone saga as a cautionary capitalist parable, as a metaphor of the corruption of American power, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate.

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