Hollywood hysteria: the 60s movies that showed a time of madness

  (The Guardian) : During a decade of American disillusionment, a series of films, from Seconds to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, represented a culture cracking up In assembling a slate of films, a programming team or other curatorial body will often be made to answer the question of why now, what relevance old art has to the current moment. In the case of the Criterion Channel’s new series Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind, a sampling of arthouse hysteria from across the 60s, the argument all but makes itself. These bursts of celluloid madness come from a not-so-remote time when governmental credibility had hit an all-time low and the culture-war rift yawned wider than ever; when the disillusionment of a mistreated youth generation exploded into student protests against an overseas war colored by unsavory political imperatives; when ascendant minority groups demanded rights and dignity in the face of high-boil prejudice; when a terrified old guard felt that everything they could once take for granted had been upended and replaced by unfamiliar, strange, anti-authoritarian new normals. Calamity was in the air. Surely, somehow, we can find it in ourselves to relate. The 16 fever dreams of delusion, brainwashing, public violence and other forms of deviant psychology – all with expressionistic, delirious aesthetics to match – offer variations on the theme of anxiety, a many-tendriled morass of unease oriented most centrally around the shifting balance of power. John Frankenheimer’s sci-fi classic Seconds (a crucial influence on Mad Men, which stands as a ..