We have a very large collection of movies, many of them old. The movie business isn’t ancient. It’s possible to be fairly conversant with its entire history if you have a big enough hard drive, and skip Fletch movies and similar shallow puddles of pixels. I used to think that the average person must have seen every movie and TV show ever made, simply based on the amount of time they spent going to the movies, watching television, cable TV, VHS, DVDs, and then streaming stuff. But I learned later that most people just watch the same things over and over again. We’re just as likely to re-watch things as the next person, I guess. We just re-watch different things, and fewer. Our relatives have a tradition to watch Christmas Vacation every year, ye gods. We watch It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that for many people, anything older than about 1990 might as well be silent movies.
But we like the older stuff. It’s not vegetables we choke down because they’re healthy. They’re entertaining, and often illuminating. They understood the concept of spectacle better than the CGI mavens do now. Part of the appeal of old movies is survivor bias. We have lots of good movies from the 1950s, but I’m sure there were just as many bad ones made as good back then. It’s just that no one bothered to put the dreck out on VHS or DVD or load it up for streaming. Stuff disappears. Nothing you see on Tubi will still be around 50 years from now.
An exception is when dreck becomes exalted simply because it’s widely available. Do I really like the Three Stooges, or do I like them because they were the only thing on TV when I got home from grammar school? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. I think way too many people who are in charge of making entertainment these days watched Kimba the White Lion instead of Moe, Larry, and Curly while eating their Handi-Snacks. They could use a few good blows to the head.
Many movies are interesting enough to watch multiple times, with an appropriate interregnum. I’ve noticed that anything that has Netflix, or Apple, or the Amazon logo in the opening credits is never worth a second look. Most don’t deserve even a first look. Their descriptions alone are generally enough to elicit a hard pass. What, exactly, qualifies a streaming service, or company that buys telephones from the Chinese, or an online dollar store, to make movies? It’s especially silly for streaming services. In 1950, Louis B. Mayer didn’t hire projectionists and ticket booth girls to direct movies, and for good reason.
In the re-run department, we’ve watched Niagara (1953) multiple times over the years. I’m not sure why, exactly, but we have.
It’s a straight noir plot, if a little muddled. Scheming temptress wants to throw over her slightly shellshocked hubby for a hubba-hubba guy with two-tone shoes. Everything except hilarity ensues. It breaks the cardinal rule of noir without losing anything in the bargain. It’s in Technicolor. I don’t know why more directors didn’t try to adapt noir plots to Technicolor. The three-strip process had a way of making colors look way more lurid than any black and white movie ever accomplished in the yeah, see genre. And there can’t possibly be anything more lurid than a closeup of Marilyn Monroe in Technicolor after Ben Nye got done with his brush and roller work.
Niagara was the first movie that gave Monroe top billing, and from watching the trailer, you can tell the producers figured Marilyn’s butt on the screen would put butts in the seats. They weren’t wrong. Niagara was a money-maker when it was released, even though reviews of the film were somewhat mixed. Jean Peters, who was once Miss Ohio, and married to Howard Hughes, was cast as the plain Jane wife of about the goofiest character ever set to celluloid, played by Max Showalter. Max exuded tons of sexuality, don’t get me wrong, but not the kind of sexuality that was going to do Jean Peters any good. So how do you make Jean Peters look average-y? You slam the battleship Monroe into her side.
I gather that the generations that followed my parents and mine don’t “get” Marilyn Monroe in quite the same way. She entered the pantheon of weird notoriety that Fat Elvis and Michael Jackson and Santa Claus reside in. Andy Warhol’s paean to her cemented that status way back in 1962, with the Marilyn Diptych:
It’s not an accident that Warhol’s literally reverential treatment of Monroe was cribbed from a publicity still from Niagara:
That look, there. Sleepy eyes, a smile that could mean anything. She perfected it. Her face is a circus poster pasted on a brick wall. God only knows what goes on in the building itself. But it’s a brick shithouse, that’s for sure.
It’s beyond my ability to explain the appeal of Marilyn Monroe. Whatever recipe she’s using was more closely held than Colonel Sanders ever managed. I think Lawrence Oliver, who hired her to star in The Prince and the Showgirl, and maybe wished he hadn’t, is the only person who truly understood what was going on. And even he, completely aware of how acting works, how actors behave, how notoriety works, and constantly surrounded by the most attractive female humans in the world, admits he was flummoxed by her.
Some movies like Niagara make excellent cultural artifacts. By watching them, and trying to immerse yourself in the time and place they sprang from, you can understand the vibe that produced them. Niagara is modestly entertaining as a story. It’s got Niagara Falls for a backdrop, which is monumental. It’s fun to watch. And Marilyn Monroe is in it. I have no idea why that matters. But it does.
9 Responses
The old movies are about people not CGI. Difference.
Hi Jean- It’s funny, but most modern movies that are spectacles like comic book movies, and murder spree movies, show no character development whatsoever. For instance, In Raiders, Indy is just Batman with a whip and a doctorate. He does stuff, stuff happens, but he’s a robot. He ends up like he starts. The movies concentrate on what happens, not much on why it happens. The motivations for things are minor (John Wick kills 150 people over a dog and a car), and serve only as an excuse to get the ball rolling. Old movies were generally better at showing character development. The non-special effect chariot race in Ben-Hur is better than any action movie made since, but Ben-Hur is shown to go through profound changes over the course of the film.
Exactly.
That looks like a great movie, and I’ve never even heard of it. I will check it out. There were so many great movies from the 1950s. I like many of the David Lean movies from the 50s and the British comedies. I’ve seen the man in a white suit with Alec Guinness about four times. I love the accent of Joan Greenwood. She’s wonderful. They also turned the sound effects from the movie The Man in a white suit into a samba, but it’s absolutely dreadful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUfMsIx3cfc
Hi Robert- The Man in the White Suit is lots of fun, and has plenty of trenchant social commentary mixed in.
I’m sure you’ve watched it multiple time, but one of my favorite precursors to the noir era was “M”, Fritz Lang’s masterpiece starring Peter Lorre. What a performance, and how beautifully captured. The thing that keeps it memorable for me is the lead gangster character, and the prelude to Nazism that Lang captures. The whole thing is incredible.
We’ve not got very many DVD’s, but they are (with one or two exceptions for my peculiar taste that should be no reflection on my wife) almost uniformly classics. As far as Guinness goes, “The Man in the White Suit” is excellent, but for me it’s his performance in the David Lean masterpiece “Bridge on the River Kwai” that was a landmark. His soliloquy on the bridge with the Japanese commandant Saito (Sesue Hayakawa) was a stunning performance.
We can’t get any of our friends to sit still long enough to watch a classic movie. Even “Casablanca” bores them to tears; we’ve had many people tell us that they “simply can’t watch anything in black-and-white”. Ooooh-kay.
Hi Blackwing- We all learned to do Peter Lorre imitations (badly) from M. The black and white of that movie made the movie all the more intense.
I’ve read that David Lean considered Guinness his good luck charm, and tried to use him in all his movies, even though they argued a lot. That scene you mentioned in Kwai is a good example. Guinness didn’t want to perform the scene with his back to the camera, but Lean insisted on it. I’m not surprised you found it so memorable. I think the scene where Commander Shears refuses to leave the injured Major Warden behind, and explains (yells) the difference between the American and British attitudes about war, and everything else basically, is like the marker where one empire is eclipsed by the next one.
The bridge on the River Kwai was wonderful. It’s one of my favorite war movies. However, I think the war movie I have seen the most has to be The Great Escape. It’s probably in the top 10 of the movies I’ve seen the most. Out of all of David Lean’s movies. I would have to say the one that I’ve seen the most is Ryan’s daughter.
It’s funny what you said about young people not being able to watch black-and-white movies. I have had the same experience with young people at work. Back when I used to work.. However, I had an old aunt and uncle and I went to visit them once and they had an old-fashioned console TV in their house and it was on and the picture was out of tune as everything seemed to be black and white and I offered to adjust it for them and they both looked at each other and started laughing. Come to find out, they did not have a color TV. When their old black-and-white television broke. They went to Sears to get a replacement and they had stopped selling black-and-white TVs for years so they had a special order from a company that still manufactured black-and-white televisions for scientific purposes sell them a black-and-white television which was installed in their console TV so they could continue watching their movies because they said the color TV bothered their eyes. They were my favorite aunt and uncle. Whenever I would visit, they would both start talking to me about two different subjects at the same time. They did this while talking over each other. However, the table that they set was incredible. I would go for lunch, and they would have three different meats and seven or eight sides and two or three different desserts. I felt like royalty. I feel sorry for people who can’t watch watch black-and-white. Imagine never having experienced Buster Keaton. Or WC Fields.
The falls is the star, I guess, and just as thrilling as Marilyn Mon-Dieu! I imagine people, debarking ( hopethatzaword🙏🏼) after visiting the falls, asking their spouses, “Was it good for you?”