It Don't Worry Me : The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies

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Summary: The Begining of the end of movies.....
Review: Toward the end of the 1960's,the founders of the studio system were retireing and the film companies were bought by coperations that went by marketing research to make pictures and sell them to the lowest commen percentage of the audience that they could find by gathering cold hard data. The traditional values that had guided the studio directors like John Ford and Frank Capra were gone, to be replaced by this new generation of film makers that made movies that were not much different then the sitcoms and melodrama of prime time television. Of the ten movie makers covered in this book, only about three of them stayed true to the art of film making and of using film to tell the stories that they wanted to tell. All the others sold out to the coperate side of the business and made films just to make a quick buck.

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Summary: Witty, brilliant survey of Seventies Cinema
Review: Granted, I am already a fervent fan of the "Raging Bulls-Easy Riders" Seventies filmmakers, the era when American Cinema flourished- and yet Gilbey's work brought me fresh, witty insight into the works. The author is a master of the succinct summation that captures a detail in the films you might overlook, even with repeated viewings, plus the book is great fun to read. It's a perfect balance of scholarship and entertainment, with just enough potentially divisive opinion making to keep you plunging ahead to finish a chapter. There is an obvious debt to Pauline Kael but Gilbey's fresh perspective on the era (due to his youth) lends the analysis more insight and depth than Kael. It's a shame this book isn't getting more distribution. The author needs a better publicist in the US! Keep writing, Mr. Gilbey! A new generation needs your writing to remind them of what they're missing at the soulless multiplexes of today!