Film lovers will applaud John McCombe's lively and insightful re-imagining of the late 1970s and early 1980s American cinema. This book offers original and provocative takes on films we thought we knew well and films we need to rewatch.

Linda Mizejewski, Distinguished Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Ohio State University, USA

In between Watergate and the election of President Reagan, himself a newsmaker as America's first divorced president, President Jimmy Carter spoke to America's morality and growing materialism at a moment of domestic and global turmoil. In the wake of his death, much has been made of President Carter's post-presidential life, while less attention has been paid to the domestic and global diplomacy of his presidency. John P. McCombe's American Film in the Crisis of Confidence examines films that detail generational anxieties about energy and cars, racial unease, and foreign threat. McCombe's study offers us a window into how past anxieties from when the U.S.S.R was a Communist block and the U.S. was car king of the world have shaped America's citizens and the world of today.

Johnson Cheu, Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University, USA, and Editor of Diversity in Disney Films (2013)