Nick clooney

THE MOVIES THAT CHANGED US

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 every generation.

Nick Clooney often sat in the Saturday darkness of the Russell Theater in Maysville, Kentucky, with his older sisters, Rosemary and Betty. His legendary broadcasting career spanned the end of the age of radio and the beginning of the age of television.

Nick writes a column for The Cincinnati Post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; hosts the Goodlife TV Network cable channel; and does a radio show on station WSAI. He and his wife, Nina, live in Augusta, Kentucky. Their daughter, Ada, graced them with a granddaughter, Allison and a grandson, Nick; and their son, George, is a television and film star and a director and producer.