Content area
Full Text
The Odyssey of John Dos Passos. Prod. by Stephen Talbot. Educational Film Center, 1994. 57 mins. (Educational Film Center, 5101-F Backlick Road, Annandale, VA 22003)
The Odyssey of John Dos Passos does everything a biographical documentary ought to do, and it does it well. It is historically accurate, analytically sophisticated, and visually interesting. It shows how John Dos Passos exemplified his generation of writers and how and why he was different.
The film takes its form from a Dos Passos novel. His life is set against a backdrop of social, economic, political, and technological change. We learn of the milieu of talented young people coming of age during World War I and maturing through the 1920s and 1930s, their bohemian hangouts in Greenwich Village and France,...