GOOD MORNING, MR. ZIP ZIP ZIP: Movies, Memory, and World War II. By Richard Schickel. Ivan R. Dee. 329 pp. $27.50

Good Morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip (the title comes from a children’s song) is Richard Schickel’s engrossing memoir of a "silly, hopeful boy" growing up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, in the 1930s and ’40s. He dreams of literary fame until discovering the world of the movies, a world more "immediate and potent," and ambiguously illuminating, too, than the sun-dappled suburban streets and sandlots around him. The author, an only child, looks back at his family’s "sad failures of ambition, more subtle failures of love" with clear-eyed honesty and not a hint of "false nostalgia."

We have come to expect sophisticated and articulate plain speaking from Schickel in his long tenure as film critic for Time. He has written more than 30 books about the movies and iconic American figures such as Walt Disney, Clint Eastwood, and D. W. Griffith. But he is also the author of the thoughtful study Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (1985), which, with what he calls here "a certain contempt for the false pieties and hypocrisies of our old public culture," explores America’s enduring fascination with manipulated (and manipulating) images. The contempt is more rueful than sour.

In this memoir, he aims to weave together an unremarkable boyhood with the movies that informed it and, at the same time, to bring perspective to the "greatest generation" myth that wraps a flag around the realities of a dreadful war, much as wartime movies did. World War II films "always insisted on putting heroism within reach of ordinariness," he writes. "This was, of course, nonsense. It may even have been—in the long run, for me and my generation—dangerous nonsense. Dangerous in the sense that it created false anticipations of adulthood, falsely idealized expectations—at least in me, trying so hard to decipher the mysteries of the universe."

Schickel acknowledges the uplift, reassurance, and hope imparted by such films as Mrs. Miniver and Since You Went Away, with their sanitized parables of home-front courage and unity. They provided solace; they served freedom’s cause. Yet they also "shyly, secretively, but authoritatively spoke" in the tongue of "wartime lies" for the "official culture." He writes with an immediacy derived from having looked again at every film he discusses. Best image: captured nurse Veronica Lake hiding a live grenade in her cleavage as she lures a leering Japanese soldier to a fatal tryst in So Proudly We Hail.

The hateful Japanese, we can see now, were easier to demonize than the hateful Germans because, with so many Americans of European extraction, Hitler and fascism could be made to seem temporary aberrations. And never mind about the Holocaust, which virtually no American movie even mentioned, despite Hollywood’s and Washington’s certain knowledge of the developing horrors.

If this sounds merely revisionist or iconoclastic, Schickel’s tone is elegiac and humane. Deploring the feel-good fraudulence of The Story of G.I. Joe and, postwar, The Best Years of Our Lives, he writes that "if we cannot remember truthfully, we cannot think clearly or behave decently"—goals this honest, gracefully written book achieves. It is surely accidental, but Schickel’s pages are made more potent by the unavoidable parallel to our contemporary moment of bumper-sticker rhetoric as newer generations—ours and theirs—serve and fall in missions far from Main Street.

—Steven Bach