A History of the American Film is a great foolery…. It might also be described as a crazy quilt stitched together by a loose thread of a "story" and a shred of an idea….

The vocabulary of American film, from the early days to more recent ones, is employed with especial reference to various news features or, if you will, historical events of the past sixty years or more. What we see is supposed to be a film (and people watching several different films), but the convention is not strictly adhered to. Everything goes: it is all slapdash improvisation, naively sophisticated, collegiate, smart-ass. One can think of it as vaudevillesque surrealism or self-congratulatory nonsense. If there is sense—and there is some—it may be thought of as cartoon commentary on the imbecilities of the passing scene.

There are allusions to both World Wars, to popular slogans, to...