Wednesday, April 28, 2010

New York in the 50s (2000)

3 comments:

Imposs1904 said...

A review . . . of sorts.

mikeovswinton said...

Just out of interest; do either Dwight Macdonald or Alan Watts feature at all?

Imposs1904 said...

Neither was mentioned.

The doc was a bit of a hotch-potch. Based on Dan Wakefield's book of the same name, it went from being an interesting enough overview of the period and the people who populated Greenwich Village in the mid-fifties to a much more pesonalised film about Wakefield in the last quarter or so. It lacked a bit of focus, imho.

Heavily featured - or talked about rather - were Mailer, Kerouac and Baldwin, and amongst the talking heads interviewed in the film were Robert Redford, Robert Wakefield, Calvin Trillin, Joan Didion and Norman Podhoretz.

Not the best documentary I've seen this year, but interesting enough that I might check out Wakefield's book of the same name.