Silver screen
Fuck the writers.
– Frank Capra
I once worked with a darling girl named Ninette who’d go deep into mourning whenever she heard of any celebrity’s passing. She’d be listless for days after having learned that some long ago actress, born in 1907, had expired peacefully on a deck chair in Palm Springs.
It baffled me.
But I note that a lot of people will take drama wherever they can get it, even if it’s somebody else’s.
While it didn’t make me sad (except in a denying our mortality sort of way), the passing of Katherine Hepburn nevertheless reminded me of my unrepentant addiction since the rainy Sunday afternoons of my girlhood.
For sheer entertainment value, quick wit and pleasure, few films today compare to the movies out of Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s.
(I also like Doris Day, but we’ll talk about that some other time. Or, better yet, read Judith Williamson’s view in Consuming Passions.)
Sure, nowadays there’s an occasional glimmer of intelligence and clear viewpoint, an exception like Scorcese, Soderbergh or the Cohen brothers, someone infinitely watchable like Meryl Streep or Philip Seymour Hoffman but, no…
There’s little coming out of the machine as giddy as The Thin Man series, as good and noir as Out of the Past, as perfect as The Third Man, no-one who makes you grin like Cary Grant or William Powell, girly bawl your eyes out like James Stewart (the younger), as delicious as Garbo, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur… No chemistry to compare to Hepburn and Tracy.
And the screenwriters, oh, what a treat… Charles Lederer, Clifford Odets, British novelists, drunken southerners… There’s an odd misconception that those times were pristine. I’ll argue that they were simply more subtle.
Some will argue that the filters of time have left us with only the finest, but I wonder which of our movies will make it through the years (aside from Shrek, of course).
Films these days seem like so much striving for the lowest common denominator, sequels and remakes and remakes of remakes, crass passing for hip, once greats acting for food (oh, Marlon, please stop), pretty things with the emotional range of an amoeba, plot lines held up by three toothpicks, two silicone breasts, FX, Jennifer Lopez and a more forced than willing suspension of disbelief…
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Comment
- Kate’s passing is sad. But what about Buddy Hackett? Where are the tears for Buddy?
— Beerzie Boy Jul 2, 12:19pm # - True enough…I guess nothing really compares with “Philadelphia Story”—tomantic comedy to end all romantic comedies. But there is something to be said for gems like “Auberge Espagnole”...
— Julia Jul 2, 3:59pm # - Here’s a very good discussion of KH and her career, with high praise balanced against sharp criticism; it’s long but well worth reading:
http://www.filmint.nu/netonly/eng/hepburn.htm
— language hat Jul 2, 5:23pm # - There are some, still lost in b/w, who think anything done in colour is suspect. Thankfully, however, there have been at least one or two movies since the mainstream introduction of colour, that have been worth watching.
As for the future of not only cinema but film, who knows, given that lack of any talent to fill the ever growing void.
— The Fish Jul 11, 5:51pm # - I think what gets most people so discouraged about movies these days is that the movies they want to see are usually not in the mainstream genre (it truly is category all its own) and so they have to look a little harder to find a movie worth watching about an idea worth expressing. They do exist, so keep looking! I can’t stand to hear people say things like “the film industry is dead”. It’s not dead, it’s just dying.
— elemenopiate Jul 20, 7:58pm #
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