Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip: Movies, Memory, and World War II

by Richard Schickel

In Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip, the celebrated film critic and biographer turns to a story of his own life - as a child growing up in a comfortable Milwaukee suburb during the years of World War II. Richard Schickel's engaging memoir is not a fashionable tale of child abuse, but it does chart the growth of one a boy's attraction to the movies, which was to become a lifelong passion.
Mr. Schickel explains how the movies during those war years showed us fantastic possibilities and made them plausible - but in so doing they profoundly misled us about the nature of the war, our soldiers, our government, and the home front. Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip is Mr. Schickel's effort to set the record straight about that view of the war promoted by our popular culture (including the inflated idea of the "greatest generation"), and he does it by illuminating the meaning of wartime films set against the background of his own growing up. His unsparing honesty and clear-eyed criticism lead us to a new perspective on the World War II experience, both on the home front and abroad.

Genres: History, Media Tie In

336 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2003

About the author

Richard Schickel is an important American film historian, journalist, author, filmmaker, screenwriter, documentarian, and film and literary critic.

Mr.Schickel is featured in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. In this 2009 documentary film he discusses early film critics in the 1960s, and how he and other young critics, rejected the moralizing opposition of Bosley Crowther of The New York Times who had railed against violent movies such as Bonnie and Clyde.
In addition to film, Schickel has also critiqued and documented cartoons, particularly Peanuts.

Schickel was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. He has also lectured at Yale University and University of Southern California's School of Film and Television.

Reviews

[Michael Arden · Rating 2 out of 5]

A curmudgeonly look back at the World War II era through the eyes of a child by noted film historian and Time movie critic, Richard Schickel. The author delivers some well crafted movie reviews of Hollywood's war-time output while lambasting the film colony's tendency to view everything through rose-colored glasses in what amounted to a major propaganda effort for the Allies. Sometimes the glasses were in fact pink-colored: the author is unafraid to label a Commie screenwriter a Commie, while acknowledging the abuses of the blacklist to come in the 1950s. Schickel insists that Hollywood glossed over major shortcomings in the American war effort largely due to the prejudices, naiveté, small-mindedness and downright ignorance of both the movie makers and his parents' entire generation. He naturally sees Tom Brokaw's label "the greatest generation" as so much blather, in other words. Instead, he notes (correctly) that America's superiority of arms, materiel and troop strength along with its separation from the action by two vast oceans ultimately led to the Allied victory over Germany and Japan.

While making a point that the World War II generation had all the faults of any other American generation, Schickel comes across as a real sourpuss. Likely his attitude is largely due to the unhappy story he tells in detail of his own moderately dysfunctional family. The trouble is one wishes Schickel, on the other hand, would have put aside his dung-colored glasses and just given us the straight skinny on how it was to live through those momentous years as a kid. For that, I am grateful for my parents' own reminiscences which struck me as being much more of a straight up eyewitness account of that critical juncture in the 20th century.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Partly a memoir of living through World War II as a child and partly an analysis of the messages sent by wartime movies. The movie part is very interesting, though I wish he'd dug deeper, covered more of the B-films of the era, and expanded his discussion of the "messages"; I don't think he ever uses the word "propaganda" even though that's what he's talking about. The memoir material is much less interesting--he comes off as a cold and brittle man who never quite figured out his family problems. His back-and-forth balancing act about just how "great" the Greatest Generation is/was is quite compelling, mostly because few other writers at the time (2003) would have dared to be so critical.