The Movies That Changed Us : Reflections on the Screen

There are movies we love, but only one movie in a thousand actually changes the way we live, the way we look at life, or the way we define entertainment.

Broadcast journalist Nick Clooney, best known as the silver-haired movie host on the cable channel American Movie Classics, has selected twenty movies that changed us, some for the better, some for the worse.

He starts with the recent past: Saving Private Ryan, a movie that changed the way people across the world view the American generation that fought World War Two; Star Wars, a motion picture so important that a missile defense system was named for it; and The Birth of a Nation, not only the first film to be hailed as the artistic equivalent to opera, literature, and painting, but also the first film to give a cloak of respectability to racial prejudice.

Clooney's debate-starting distinctions will engage, delight, and challenge everyone who loves movies: Did Taxi Driver change the way we view individual violence? Did The Graduate change the way we view romance? Did Dr. Strangelove change the way we contemplate mass destruction? Did The Best Years of Our Lives alter our behavior toward veterans? And did Triumph of the Will almost help the Nazis win the war?

Clooney ends with an epilogue on "The Movie That Never Was": the film that could have spurred the civil rights movement if only it had been made. "Sports changed things, the military changed things, and eventually the federal government changed things," Clooney writes, but in the matter of race, he concludes, the movies changed nothing.

Thought-provoking, entertaining, and compulsively readable, "The Movies That Changed Us" will delight film fans of everygeneration.