2) THE ROARING TWENTIES

...or THE JAZZ AGE

F.S. FITZGERALD

Check your knowledge about the author of The Great Gatsby with this quiz about his biography

the Fitzgeralds, Scott and Zelda

Watch the trailer to the 2012 movie adaptation and complete your worksheet.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Migrant mother, 1936

When the Dream turned to Nightmare, Dorothea Lange, an American documentary photographer and a journalist,

was asked to take photos during the Great Depression era, following the 1929 Wall Street crash, by the Farm Security Administration,

along with other photographers such as Walker Evans.

Read this article written by Steinbeck in 1936 about the poverty he witnessed in migrants' camps in California at the time.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HEROES of the TIME

The real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow,

famous bank robbers during the Great Depression,

who died in 1934 shot by the Police, aged 24 and 25.

Louise Brooks, famous actress during the late 20s and early 30s,

also known as Loulou thanks to one of her films,

while cinema in Hollywood was growing to become one of the most lucrative industries in the USA.

A webquest on AL CAPONE and ELIOT NESS

________________________________________________________________________

  • Useful website about Some Like It Hot, by Billy Wilder (1959) with script extracts

SOME LIKE IT HOT
SomeLikeItHot_CHARACTERS
  • The Godfather II, by Coppola (book p.77) - an extract: Ellis Island

  • The gangster film, a genre by itself - the genre explained by Scorcese (film director of Taxi Driver): Gangster Movies and Film Noir

  • Good reads: The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1925, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in 1939, here is an excerpt.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Check your knowledge

- 20s and 30s QUIZ

- Prohibition

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTIONS TACKLED

- SPACES and EXCHANGES (Prohibition: smuggling of alcohol, emigration during the Depression, Wall Street's Stock Market)

- SEATS and FORMS of POWER (the rise of the Mafia, 18th and 21st Amendments, the Suffragette Movement, the Temperance Movement to prohibit alcohol, Hollywood growing importance, Wall Street rising and falling)

- MYTHS and HEROES (famous criminals, growth of cinema and its first "stars" + actors and actresses who much later played famous characters from the 20s and 30s, important writers and books The Great Gatsby, etc...)

- The IDEA of PROGRESS (invention and massive production of cars, Fordism, chain production, new weapons such as machine guns, Prohibition called "the Noble Experiment", telephone and radio more and more available, silent and soon talking films, first planes...)