Word: 60s
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Milton Viorst is a liberal. He is a journalist--in name and spirit--who knew some of America's heroes. His book is an ambivalent portrayal of America in the '60s, a series of profiles of 14 heroes of the time. Some of them are still heroes. Fire in the Streets is honest history, good American story-telling, but there are no judgments or conclusions, and little adulation. Remember, Milton Viorst is a liberal...
ALLARD K. LOWENSTEIN was a man who fought all his life against the scourges of poverty, intolerance and violence. He joined the civil rights movement in the '40s, worked with Martin Luther King in the '60s, and spoke out early against South African apartheid and for Namibian independence. As an antiwar activist he won his greatest success, turning his lonely struggle to "Dump Johnson" into a mass movement. This feat drew from Robert Kennedy praise, "For Al, who knew the lesson of Emerson and taught it to the rest of us: `... if a single man plant himself on his convictions...
...late '50s and early '60s, the world was struck by a catastrophe: thousands of babies were born with grotesque deformities, no arms or legs, or at best, flipper-like appendages. The cause was traced to a sleep-inducing drug that the mothers had been taking during pregnancy-thalidomide. The U.S. escaped the disaster only because of the determination of a doctor at the Food" and Drug Administration who suspected that something was wrong with the drug. This British program is about one of thalidomide's victims and what happened after the headlines stopped...
That seems to cover everything significant about student life in the U.S. during the very wonderful late '60s. But the very completeness of the survey offered by A Small Circle of Friends afflicts it with a curious self-consciousness. It comes to seem less a movie than a picture history of an era-one of those tomes that offer a garble of familiar images held together by a pseudohistorical text. Books of that sort make almost no demands. One leafs idly through them, hoping the telephone will soon ring. A film, unfortunately, demands attention, and here one fixes...
...really involved in the larger events of the story; they are acted upon by them but are not really actors in them. Papering over this discontinuity gets the picture into trouble. There are witty, intelligent observations, throw-away lines actually, that skewer some of the nonsense of the '60s. They lead one to think that this movie perhaps started out to be something wiser than it is, that along the way the film makers fell prey to the desire to ingratiate themselves with a generation they might have better served simply by observation and quiet reflection...