Daniel K. Kevles Knopf, 1985 426 pp. $22.95
Keith Bradley
and Alan Gelb. MIT, 1986. 186 pp. $6.95
Don Juan (starring John Barryrnore), the first film ever made with synchro- nized, pre-recorded sound. The "talkies" revived the flagging ap- peal of Hollywood's products and created new stars for the young to idolize and imitate. Today's movies, seen on the screen, on TV, and, lately, on videocassettes, reach an even wider audience. Na-tional Lampoon's Animal House sparked a collegiate craze for food fights and toga parties; Star Wars gave us "the Force" and a name for President...
ty years ago, American moviegoers were dazzled by Don Juan (starring John Barryrnore), the first film ever made with synchro- nized, pre-recorded sound. The "talkies" revived the flagging ap- peal of Hollywood's products and created new stars for the young to idolize and imitate. Today's movies, seen on the screen, on TV, and, lately, on videocassettes, reach an even wider audience. Na-tional Lampoon's Animal House sparked a collegiate craze for food fights and toga parties; Star Wars...
Vampires from outer space, pirate treasure, time machines, cowboys defending homesteaders, dinosaurs, a half-naked warrior vanquishing hordes of enemies, a house that turns into the biggest popcorn machine in history.
These are the images you would have seen in some of Holly- wood's major productions of the past year-in Lifeforce, The Goo- nies, Back to the Future, Silverado, My Science Project, Rambo: First Blood Part 11, and Real Genius.
This list may remind some older Americans of the kinds...
MOVIES
HE AVANT-
If Louis B. Mayer, the Hollywood mogul, had lived until the late 1960s, he would have been startled by some of the changes in the tastes of movie-going Americans.
True, the lines would have been longest at theaters offering such easily recognizable Hollywood fare as Dr. Dolittle or Paint Your Wagon. But in the larger cities and college towns, a good many movie fans would have been elsewhere. Some would have been thronging local "art" theaters to see Ingmar Bergman's T...
"The coming of the motion picture," newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst once said, "was as important as that of the printing press."
Hearst, as was his wont, exaggerated a bit. But during its humble beginnings in a Medo Park, N.J., laboratory, nobody could have guessed what an enormous impact on Americans' fantasies, mores, and morals the motion picture would have-least of all its inventor, the re- doubtable Thomas Alva Edison.
Edison and his assistant, William D...
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The mind, wrote John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667), "can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n." Metaphor or spiritual reality, men's notions of Hell have always reflected developments within their earthly societies as well as the ruminations of philosophers and poets. Here, historian Alan Bernstein ponders the major West- em views of Hell from the ancient Hebrews to the present.
Hell today is enveloped in silence.
Among those in the West who unquestioningly accept its...