Movie Review

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Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

The 1960s. Prod. by Jim Chory. NBC-Television, 1999. 240 mins. (NBC Video Archives, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112)

A Walk on the Moon. Prod. by Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn, 1999. 105 mins. (Miramax Films.)

NBC's press packet for The 1960s billed it as "the movie event of a generation." Plans for a sequel on the events of the next decade are already in the works. The 1960s ambitiously tells the story of the decade from the perspectives of two different families: a white, middle-class, blue-collar, Irish Catholic clan in Chicago and a black minister/civil rights activist's family in Greenwood, Mississippi. The story line of the black family takes a backseat to the travails of the three siblings in the white family: Brian, who enlists in the marines and serves two tours of duty in Vietnam; Michael, a Northwestern University history major turned antiwar activist and conscientious objector; and Katie, a sixteen-year-old who gets pregnant and runs off to Haight-Ashbury to find herself. The film begins with the Kennedy-Nixon debates and concludes shortly after the Woodstock festival. The result is a very fast paced tour through the sixties that is superficial, trite, and oversimplified. To borrow the historian Marilyn S. Young's phrase, The 1960s represents "dangerous history." 1

The film reinforces many cultural stereotypes of the era. Viewers could easily come away with the impression that all soldiers smoked pot, that all college students protested against the war, and that everyone under the age of thirty attended Woodstock. The film defies reality when the three siblings, who have been on their own separate journeys, are magically reunited at Max Yasgur's farm among the crowd of over four hundred thousand people. . . .

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