THE MOVIE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE ...

THE MOVIE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE edited by David Rosenberg (Penguin: $12; 304 pp.). Rosenberg asked a diverse group of writers to “look inward to their experience of one movie--lodged in memory and confronted again on videotape” with intriguing, if uneven, results. Bharati Mukherjee recalls her adolescence in Calcutta and the vision of free American womanhood that emerged from the Doris Day musicals her family enjoyed; Joyce Carol Oates revels in the grim delights of Tod Browning’s “Dracula.” Infuriated by the racial imagery in “The Birth of a Nation,” David Bradley recounts his desire to ban Griffith’s epic--a desire he was forced to reexamine when an angry reader tried to suppress his own writing. Unfortunately, many of the essays lack Mukherjee’s warmth or Bradley’s dramatic insight. Russell Banks and Francine Prose deplore sexism in politically correct rhetoric, but they don’t tell the reader very much about “Bambi,” “The Little Mermaid” or “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”