Book Review
"God, Man & Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema From 'The Birth of a Nation' to 'The Passion of the Christ'"
by Mark Royden Winchell
Intercollegiate Studies Institute. 490 pp. $28.
The problem with common sense, Voltaire observed, is that it is not common. A similar complaint could be made about popular entertainment -- that it's not "popular" -- by those who feel that the values it promotes don't reflect those of most Americans. That opinion is lucidly articulated in conservative scholar Mark Royden Winchell's "God, Man & Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema From 'The Birth of a Nation' to 'The Passion of the Christ.'"
Winchell, an English professor at Clemson University (who died shortly before the book's publication), subscribes to the old Winston Churchill adage: History is written by the victors. And in the polarizing "culture war," the victors, in Winchell's scoring, are the liberal intelligentsia who commandeered the Hollywood dream factories during the 1960s and '70s.
