Out of the Past

The always-good Charles Taylor looks at our constantly changing film culture. It's an excellent artice. It also attempts to address why people so often laugh at old movies.

The swooniest, silliest moment I've seen in movies in the past few years, equal to any of the melodramatic ludicrousness Hollywood ever produced, is the moment in "The English Patient" where Ralph Fiennes carries Kristin Scott-Thomas' corpse from that cave, the music swelling while her scarf billows in the wind. Were a similar moment, shot in black-and-white, to be shown to a contemporary audience, it's likely the theater would break out into hooting. And while the suffering of a drama queen like Joan Crawford is a guaranteed pants-wetter today (and in many of her films, it should be), nobody dares to connect Crawford's brand of showy masochism to Isabelle Huppert in "The Piano Teacher," a performance where the masochism of a Crawford movie is made literal, and all the juice that might make it enjoyable is drained away. (It's the only performance I've ever seen that might be described as drab flamboyance.) And nobody talks about Meryl Streep, who I think gave the worst performance of her career in "The Hours," in the same terms. A Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation that showed a middle-aged white man tearing up over a drawing from a poor African child would be immediately (and rightly) treated as sap. But nobody gags at the same thing in "About Schmidt."

I have to admit, I often laugh at old movies. I'm not entirely sure why, because it's certainly not because I feel superior to them. But even though I will laugh at the silliness, I am no less willing to embrace the power and emotion of those films. I mean, heck, one of my favorite movies is Written on the Wind, a movie sure to generate howls of laughter from a modern audience, as it did from me. But I was still moved and shaken by it. But maybe I am peculiar that way. Humor never turns off my brain, and I am quite willing to reflect and laugh at the same time. Taylor, I think, comes close to identifying the real problem:

You do have to make allowances for people to get over the reinforced notion that classic Hollywood stuck rigidly to safe, proper notions that never challenged the audience.

Good movie watchers always give the film the benefit of the doubt. You've got to take the makers as real people, with free will and reflective minds. This is the problem with too much literary criticism as well. Melville may have been a middle class white American male, but he was also a person, with a mind that could judge and relflect on its own, apart from the society that molded it. Taylor finds a wonderful quote from Jean Renoir, something that reflects some of my own recent thoughts about the movies:

"There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth."