Tom Shone, the ex-film critic of the Sunday Times, is out to pick a fight. The clue is in the subtitle of this book, a surprisingly sympathetic history of Hollywood’s most despised school of moviemaking. To the untrained eye, it will simply conjure up Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but more seasoned observers will spot the resemblance to the subtitle of another book, Seeing Is Believing: Or How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties by Peter Biskind.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a deliberate bit of provocation on Shone’s part. Six years ago Biskind wrote a book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls in which he argued that the phenomenal box-office success of Jaws and Star Wars, the two films commonly acknowledged to have kick-started the blockbuster era, brought about the end of the most creative period in Hollywood’s history, a period beginning with Easy Rider in 1969 and ending, appropriately enough, with Apocalypse Now in 1979.
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