Winter Is For Movies
By • January 25, 2019 0 551
Let’s talk about marches and shutdowns and “life-threatening” temperatures and scuffles and bigots and presidents and politicians.
Let’s not.
Let’s talk about Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow and the Wizard and the Wicked Witch (oh, my!).
Let’s talk about the movies.
It’s Oscar time again. Nominations are out this week. Now and forever, at the first mention of “Shallow,” you will not think it’s the title of a movie about the Hollywood state of mind, but rather an emotionally fine-tuned romantic song that Lady Gaga will eventually ride to the presidency (in the not-so-distant future in a galaxy only one or two red carpets away).
Let’s talk about the movies — new movies, old movies, what they mean and have meant to us, all of us.
First and foremost, movies are an invention, a French one, technically, but one invested in our minds as an American vehicle for escape, for fun, for dreams and dreaming. “We have no troubles here,” says Joel Grey, winner of an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor playing the Kit Kat Klub host in “Cabaret.”
Ours are movie times, for sure. So were the Depression years in Hollywood and America. There were breadlines and good, honest men dressing up every morning as if to go to jobs. But the movies and Hollywood were telling a different story — about showgirls, dancers, deeds of daring and heroes who swung from trees (Errol Flynn as Robin in Sherwood Forest, swimmer Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan).
There were Broadway Melodies and Busby Berkeley spectaculars in which chorus girls strutted down and up a stairway to paradise, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced sublimely in glittering settings in movies like “Top Hat,” “Flying Down to Rio” and “Swing Time.” “Heaven, I’m in heaven,” Astaire sang, and so were we while Ginger danced, backwards in high heels.
Standing at the side of a road to a dusty town somewhere, a rifle slung over his shoulder, was John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in “Stagecoach,” directed by John Ford, the curmudgeon Irishman who had his finger squarely on the pulse of American mythmaking. A lot of what many of us think and feel we know about American history we experienced on Saturday afternoon in a movie theater.
What we learned at the movies somehow stuck in our minds more than what we read in our history books. To this day, some of us think that Abraham Lincoln was: (a) affable, lanky, log-splitting Henry Fonda in “Young Mr. Lincoln,” (b) Raymond Massey in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” (c) Gregory Peck, because he impersonated (and won an Oscar playing) the Lincolnesque Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” or (d) Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (Day-Lewis won for Best Actor and Spielberg for Best Picture).
Ford recognized this in many, if not most, of his movies. In the classic western “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” a reporter tells a senator: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Americans, among others, have long been fugitives from our daily strivings. These days,
amid the 24-hour news cycle, our escape route leads through comic books come to life, the fabulous world of Marvel and DC superhero movies, in which conglomerates make billions from the adventures of Thor, Spider-Man, Superman, Batman and, hello, Wonder Woman. Even more hello, here’s to Black Panther, which changed the landscape altogether.
We love our stars — so glamorous, so endearing, so brave, so sexy, so funny — so much that they imprinted themselves in our dreams, our conversation, our real-life memories. We think back to when we met them on-screen in movie theaters and greet them once again like old friends on Turner Movie Classics.
Today, stars tend to be creatures of the celebrity world, denizens of the red carpet, which cannot fly. They talk a good deal about politics and social justice and gender and boys and girls not together on the same page. The Oscars, like everything else in Hollywood, are different now. Can you imagine Seth MacFarlane singing “We Saw Your Boobs,” as he did in 2013, without suffering serious bodily harm?
Old movies get old, and sometimes suffer for it, like us, but some have a way of seeming fresh and new. We come back to John Wayne standing in the dust with the rifle over his shoulder, playing the part over and over again in “Hondo,” “The Searchers,” “Rio Bravo,” “El Dorado,” “True Grit,” “The Cowboys,” “Rooster Cogburn” (for which he won his sole Best Actor Oscar) and, lastly, “The Shootist.”
It is, of course, unwise to be too nostalgic, as they don‘t make them like that anymore. And they shouldn’t. Every movie is a product of the time it was made and lasts the lifespan of its viewers (rarely more than that).
But thanks to the films we have seen, some repeatedly, we each have a mental warehouse of plotlines based on concepts we believe in as much as we do in motherhood, apple pie, football, the idea that chocolate is good for you, true love and goodwill toward all men.
Why?
Because we saw Marlon Brando take a beating for the right reasons in “On the Waterfront” and, a few years later, send his son Kal-El (Superman) to Earth. We believe that the earth was once a dangerous place because we saw Victor Mature rescue Carole Landis from burning lava in “One Million B.C.” (or was that Raquel Welch?).
We believe that if your heart is tolerant, your decency basic and your honesty dearly held, you will triumph — because we saw Jimmy Stewart triumph in the end, courtesy of director Frank Capra, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “You Can’t Take It With You.”
We believe that a fat guy and a thin guy can make you laugh anytime, especially when they’re named Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel (see the movie about them that’s just come out).
Most of all, we believe that anything can happen, that the good guys and gals always win — usually in the last minute or two — and that love conquers all.
Why? Because we saw it in the movies.
