Both the first and the last word

Tom Shone, the ex-film critic of the Sunday Times, is out to pick a fight. The clue is in the subtitle of this book, a surprisingly sympathetic history of Hollywood’s most despised school of moviemaking. To the untrained eye, it will simply conjure up Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but more seasoned observers will spot the resemblance to the subtitle of another book, Seeing Is Believing: Or How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties by Peter Biskind.