ALAN writes:

I am one of those uncool, untrendy people for whom there is no comparison between movies today and those from an age now long gone. What kind of memory do Americans take with them when they walk out of a theater after watching a current movie?  I don’t know the answer to this question, because I don’t watch current motion pictures.  You couldn’t bribe me to do so.  The only movies I have seen over the past 25 years were “Titanic” and two others whose names I prefer to forget.  I saw them with friends who insisted they were worth seeing.  My judgment was quite different:  I found all of them insufferable and not worth a moment or a nickel.

On the other hand, I have always thought that old movies are worth viewing not because they are old but because many of them are well-written, decent, inspiring, and therefore timeless.

Motion pictures that are now regarded as classic were shown late at night by local TV stations in the 1960s.  That was how I first saw and began to appreciate movies featuring actors like Walter Pidgeon, Mary Astor, Joe E. Brown, Merle Oberon, Frank Morgan, Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Claudette Colbert, James Cagney, Barry Fitzgerald, Adolphe Menjou, Glenda Farrell, Walter Huston, Gene Lockhart, and Beulah Bondi, among many others.

Concerning old movies, Anthony Esolen has written:

The best movies affirming the beauty of manhood and womanhood, and their being for one another, to enhance and complete one another, were made before people fell under the new censorship, that which allows obscenities left and right, but bans the thought that men build the house and women make the home.

In other words: Before the 1960s.

I agree.  It was precisely in that traditional moral framework that so many classic and ordinary movies from the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s presented the happy endings that left audiences fully satisfied and wanting more of the same.  Consider the final or penultimate scene in three such movies:  “Random Harvest” (1942), “The Sky’s the Limit” (1943), and “-30-“ (1959).

In each case, that scene depicts a woman’s face expressing happiness, hope, confidence, or tears of joy after a severe test of her moral strength in relation to her husband.

— In “Random Harvest”, Greer Garson’s happiness in the closing scene comes just after she has abandoned all hope, when her husband (Ronald Colman) recovers at last from the lengthy amnesia that had prevented him from remembering who she is and that they had had a happy marriage years earlier.

— In “The Sky’s the Limit”, the joy, hope, and confidence that we see in Joan Leslie’s face in the closing scene as she looks skyward and watches a squadron of planes depart for combat in World War II are a result of her reconciliation moments earlier with the pilot she loves (Fred Astaire) and their plan to wed when he returns from military service.  That this scene is backed by the wonderful, inspiring melody of “My Shining Hour” makes it all that more effective.

— In “-30-”, a story about a night in the offices of a Los Angeles newspaper, the happiness conveyed by Whitney Blake’s expression comes only after her husband (Jack Webb) has abandoned his resolute opposition to her wish to adopt a child and shows it not by what he says but by how he responds to the little boy who interrupts their silence by wandering into his office.

In each case, these scenes were expertly filmed and spoken, with no element overdone or out of place.  Each is an uplifting resolution to the despair faced by sympathetic characters.  These are the kinds of things that people have in mind when they say “They don’t make them like they used to.”  Indeed they don’t, and that is our loss.  How they make them today is not a subject fit for polite discussion.

Unlike most modern movies, these three movies are not filled with noise or commotion. There are no chases, no explosions, no hysteria, no murders, and no streams of profanity in these movies—just ordinary, decent men and women dealing with the inevitable problems of life and love.  Whether it is amnesia or apparent incompatibility or a disagreement between husband and wife, the problem or the conflict is resolved without either the characters or the audience being dragged into a moral sewer, which I understand is the locale for today’s hip, trendy movies.  The happy ending takes place within the moral framework which all those characters understood and to which they were loyal, and the integrity of marriage is one pillar of that framework.

In 1968, Greer Garson said of movie scripts that were offered to her: “I’ve been offered nymphomaniacs, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, homicidal maniacs, and just plain maniacs.”  She said no to all.  She preferred stories with love and courage and happy endings.  [ Michael Troyan, A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Life of Greer Garson, Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999, p. 327 ]

So did American audiences in years now long past.  That is precisely how they left movie palaces or smaller neighborhood movie houses:  Feeling uplifted and perhaps with  renewed confidence for dealing with the particular problems or conflicts in their own lives.  Those feelings were inspired or reinforced by the kinds of “uprightness, confidence, well-spokenness, strength, courtesy, humor, and élan that marked American actors and the characters they portrayed” in such movies, as Lawrence Auster wrote in one of his essays [ “The Etiology of Cultural Suicide”, View from the Right, Feb. 24, 2013 ].  He was absolutely right.  To that list, I would add self-restraint and self-discipline, qualities evident in hundreds of old movies.

May I encourage your readers to enjoy old movies by all means.  But also study them and learn to appreciate them.  To do that requires a certain kind of moral imagination, which is formed in childhood.  Unfortunately the moral imagination of Americans today is one of the greatest casualties of mass culture.  And by that I mean not only the depravity and imbecility that the “mass communications” industry purposely promote and celebrate; I mean also the very forms in which it has become possible to do that over the past 75 years, among which I have long thought that television is the worst.

“Television is from Hell,” William Lind has written. That is true.  Modern mass culture is also from Hell.  That is why the two go together so nicely.  One consequence is that the simple act of “watching a movie” is now far different from what it was in 1935 or 1950.  The experience has been so cheapened and coarsened that it is doubtful whether young and middle-aged Americans today possess even a portion of the kind of moral imagination that Americans had 50-75 years ago and through which they were able to appreciate motion pictures like the three I named above.  (I am not saying that those three were perfect.  I am saying that they are superior in many ways and for many reasons to anything produced in the dumbed down culture of post-1965 America.)

From the first two movies I listed above, only actress Joan Leslie is still alive and, at age 90, one of the few survivors from a time in American motion-picture history that performers like her helped make into a “golden age”.  When they are gone, an era will have ended, and even the capacity to appreciate their achievements will most likely vanish as today’s older generation dies.

Late in her life, actress Marion Shilling spoke about her career in the 1920s-‘30s, remembering the “wholesome values of those movies, their spiritual uplift…  The choice of films of that period brought a higher dimension to our lives, an enchantment…”   [ Michael G. Ankerich, The Sound of Silence, McFarland, 1998, p. xii ]

That kind of enchantment and uplift are notable by their absence in American movies today—because Americans today are so dull-witted that they cannot comprehend those things or even imagine how and why they should learn from them.

The moral framework and moral tenor depicted in many of those old movies are things we may never see again.

— Comments —

Tyro writes:

Alan and I must have watched completely different “classic” movies. Romantic comedies and family dramas have always been with us, but so have crime dramas and film noir. The classic film noir “Double Indemnity” came out in the 1940s. Hitchcock’s thriller oeuvre begins in the 1920s. Errol Flynn’s movies and the hundreds of forgettable westerns from the mid-20th century satisfied the public’s need for the mindless action movies in their day. “[H]appy endings that left audiences fully satisfied and wanting more of the same” weren’t universal in the past, and they are certainly available almost everywhere in movie theaters now.

Decry the explicit sex and violence on screen these days, but let’s not pretend that movies were all about happy family dramas in the past or that the public has somehow lost interest in such things today.

Laura writes:

I am not as fond of Hollywood’s classic movies as British movies of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, but  Alan’s assessment rings true. Even the Westerns and crime movies produced by Hollywood in those days contained more psychological depth, more restraint, longer scenes and certainly more of a moral framework than movies of today. Yeah, there are many happy movies now, but they often convert family breakdown, child abuse or sexual liberation into saccharine, happy idylls. And it is rare to find a movie without what was, not all that long ago, considered obscenity or vulgarity.

James N. writes:

I’m glad someone else hated “Titanic” (1997). The thing that stood out to me about that film was the transposition of 1990s people onto a ship in 1912. Two incidents stand out: The first, of course, is the scene of Rose, a young and inexperienced girl from a high social background meeting a drifter followed shortly by her screwing him in a car (sorry, but “making love” doesn’t really fit). Had this REALLY happened in 1912, well, let’s just say that it was quite implausible. The second is Rose’s fiancé striking her in front of his peers. Had this REALLY happened in 1912, his peers would have either a) pitched him over the side immediately, or b) disaffiliated themselves from him, ruining his good name and his future.

The message of “Titanic” is that casual sex (and the breaking of prior promises) and abuse of women by men is perfectly normal, and has always been the way things were.

The character of Rose, who cheats on her fiancé and hooks up with a drifter she barely knows is an heroic figure. The drifter, “Jack”, freezes to death in the ocean at the end. That was the high point of the movie for me.

Pan Dora writes:

I must take exception to James N’s post regarding “Titanic.” First, Cal did not hit Rose in front of anyone. They were quite alone when he did so, so we can only speculate on the reality of a public display of domestic violence. While Rose may have suffered terrific consequences for her actions with Jack, I note that Mr Guggenheim’s flagrant adultery and Mr Rockefeller’s marriage and subsequent impregnation of a woman young enough to be his daughter, while probably not applauded, weren’t enough for anyone to distance themselves from either man. Regarding abuse of women, I found it interesting that they showed a woman to be an abuser; namely Rose’s mother.

Laura writes:

James N.’s point about Rose was that her actions, not any consequences that might have followed in real life, were unrealistic.

Bill R. writes:

As a long-time Titanic buff (and enjoyer of good movies), I totally sympathize with James N.’s disappointment over the silly adolescent fantasy from James Cameron called “Titanic” (1997). It makes you sick to even think of comparing that not-one-frame-of-it-rings-true garbage to, say, “A Night to Remember” (1958) with Kenneth More, or the moving performances by Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck in the original “Titanic” (1953).

There are scenes from the latter two films I’ve seen numerous times and they still move me when I see them. I can almost quote entire scenes from them verbatim only because I’ve seen them so many times and been that moved by them. There was not one scene or moment that I could even slightly warm to in Cameron’s entire film. There is no depth, character, or nobility in any of it. Not even with his hero and heroine. There was nothing memorable in it at all.

James N.’s social commentary is also spot on. All of those scenes were phony. But I also understood why Camerson was doing it. It was his attempt at cultural critique, his way of stating how repulsive and hypocritical the traditional norms of those times were, particularly among the wealthy class. Even his hero and heroine, Jack and Rose, are good only because they represent rebellion against these norms, not for anything original in themselves. Even their fornication is part of that rebellion, for surely only the stuffy, mean, narrow-minded, and repressed would think of waiting until they were married before that! That is why the presumed “goodness” of Jack and Rose has no real depth or substance, because in the end, it has been defined solely in negative terms, in what it rejects and attacks, and nothing else.

One can take the measure of the distance of Cameron’s scenes from the truth as a measure of his hatred of those times and of that society and what they represent. To Cameron, the only possible good there could ever have been among Edwardian Anglo-Saxons could only have been found in those that defied them and everything they stood for. (Now, of course, the poor Irish of those times, typical of your Titanic third class passengers, would be good in Cameron’s eyes, but even they, not so much in being non-Anglo-Saxons — they are, after all, still white Europeans — as in the fact that they’re poor and therefore, as with all the poor, are so because they’re victims of traditional, and therefore evil, white Anglo-Saxons. In Titanic symbolism, one can, however, take the Irish as effectively standing for Negroes and other non-whites if one wishes to take the Anglo-Saxon critique for what it really is, a critique of traditional white civilization in general.)

An overall assessment of Cameron’s film perfectly mirrors the society of which he is a product; technically brilliant, but emotionally depressing, dramatically flat, and morally empty.

The thing that was the stupidest of all to me in the film was that whole spitting business. It’s the kind of stupid that makes you embarrassed to know you’re sitting in a public theater watching such a film. But it would nevertheless be a mistake to think that that got into the movie because Cameron was stupid, or because he really wanted you to think his hero and heroine had the mentality of 12-year-olds. What the spitting scenes show you is how Cameron regards that entire culture. And just in case you didn’t get the point, he doesn’t leave it with merely spit over the side of the ship, but makes sure the spit finds its way right into the face of his premier villain and representative of that culture. I’m sure Cameron can only lament (as long as he can do so on his way to the bank, that is) that the face of that time and culture was not spit in more often. How much further along we would surely be by now in our march toward the cultural Marxist utopia that awaits us if only it had been!

Laura writes:

You write:

Even their fornication is part of that rebellion, for surely only the stuffy, mean, narrow-minded, and repressed would think of waiting until they were married before that! That is why the presumed “goodness” of Jack and Rose has no real depth or substance, because in the end, it has been defined solely in negative terms, in what it rejects and attacks, and nothing else.

Well said.

I have never seen all of the 1997 Titanic because only a few scenes were enough to turn me off, but your point reminds me of some of the scenes in the television series Downton Abbey, such as when Mary Crawley allows herself to be violated by an Arab guest. It is unrealistic and its main purpose seems to be to accuse the British aristocracy of hypocrisy and to suggest that the sexual revolution never occurred.

Paul C. writes:

I sympathize with Alan’s frustration over the immoral behavior generally accepted today in movies after about 1960.  I grew up beginning in the 1950s, watch Turner Classic Movies, and every week find a pre-1960 gem I have never seen.  So I encourage others to do so.  TV’s virtuous The Rifleman (1955-1960) had mild (by today’s standards) violence, but it always ended with Chuck Connors telling his son that violence is a last resort.  It still plays on Saturday mornings on AMC while I drink my coffee.  Also, like-minded people will even enjoy many of the modern TV Christmas movies that used to start at Thanksgiving but last year started on November 1.  Nice.  They are found by far on the Hallmark and Lifetime channels.  (I think Hallmark was the one that started on November 1.)  Most are not to my liking, but I sometimes find a gem.  Use the twenty-minute rule.  If you don’t like it by then, you never will.

Alan is right about how men would have treated men who mistreated women.  A few days ago, my brother (a combat medic in Vietnam from 1968 to 1971) told me that if a soldier were to mistreat an Army or Navy nurse, he would never have made it back to his barracks alive.

Bruce writes:

Lawrence Auster referred to Titanic as a “trashy Marxist movie epic.”

Bill R. writes:

As a follow-up to my earlier point and partly in response to Pan Dora’s defense of the film, so determined was Cameron to portray Anglo-Saxon culture in as vicious a light as possible, the film actually depicts Titanic’s First Officer Murdoch as a bribe-taking coward who kills two passengers with a revolver (naturally, they were third class passengers) before turning the gun on himself. There was absolutely no historical foundation whatsoever for this depiction of Murdoch. When members of Murdoch’s family protested the film’s treatment of him, Cameron apparently apologized and made a modest donation to a memorial fund on behalf of Murdoch (although Cameron apparently ignored earlier pleas from the family that were made before the film was released). The point is, though, Cameron obviously had nothing against Murdoch. He had everything against Murdoch’s people and culture.

Pan Dora writes that, “Regarding abuse of women, I found it interesting that they showed a woman to be an abuser; namely Rose’s mother.” I can assure you that had nothing to do with any supposed pro-male or anti-feminist leanings on Cameron’s part, if that was the point. That was just more about the villainous class and culture, not anything about a villainous woman. Have a look at his “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) if you want an idea about what he thought of men, particularly white men, vis-à-vis women. Here’s a clue, though; when his ultra-feminist, ultra-heroine (and, inevitably, therefore, ultra-masculine) Sarah Conner reflects on how good the Terminator really will be, after all, as a companion for her young son, she thinks to herself, “It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die, to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up.” The anti-white-male viciousness in that piece of script is so obvious it doesn’t even need further commentary. (I tell you, there must be people who literally get high off of self-hatred.) And lest there be any doubt about the “white” part of “anti-white-male,” his Sarah Conner character has this reflection while she is at a home in the desert preparing to head into Mexico (where, naturally, there is at least a chance at avoiding the horrors to come), and being treated, of course, in nothing but first rate fashion by her kind, caring, thoughtful, compassionate, unassuming Mexican friends who live there. Instead of heading to Mexico, however, she decides to head to the home of the genius who is the future creator of the Terminators in order to murder him and thus prevent the Terminators from ever having existed. This genius turns out to be a wonderful, kind, thoughtful father and dedicated family man, completely unaware of the horror his genius is destined to unleash, and ultimately willing to sacrifice his life in an effort to prevent it. Within five minutes you know that he is everything all of Sarah Conner’s “would-be fathers” to her son weren’t. But this time he’s no machine. No, this time he’s a real, genuine human being — a Negro. (At this point in the script, one imagines Cameron struggling mightily with whether or not to send Sarah Conner off to the home of some wonderful Chinese family man in case his audience still didn’t get it.) So that was the only problem, you see. It wasn’t that men were all bad, after all. Just white men. If only Sarah Conner had dated a Mexican or a Negro. That’s the only reason “this thing, this machine” was so morally superior to any man she’d ever known. Of course, we know she would not have had this unfortunate non-white gap in her dating history but for the horrible, white racist America she grew up in, and but for the white racists, we are expected to appropriately imagine, who brought her into the world and raised her. (If that’s not enough and you want to see a Cameron film that really puts the anti-white message on steroids, check out “Avatar.”)

In fairness to Cameron, though, and the important point, the point that Alan started with, is that these kinds of ugly films and this kind of ugly, anti-traditional, anti-white-male theme is quite the rule now. In that regard, there is nothing special about Cameron at all. He is just another member of a very big, and very bigoted pack, who’ve made a great deal of money off of their hate. Of course, the source of most of that money and its voluntary surrender by the targets of that hate themselves is, by far, the biggest, saddest tragedy of it all.

Paul C. writes:

Bill R. provides a clever, accurate analysis of Terminator 2.  And although Avatar (an awful movie with ugly aliens) can help to evoke hatred against white males, the word hate is overused in current social and political speech.  It is therefore in danger of becoming meaningless, as the word racist has become.  It means, “a very strong feeling of dislike.”  I doubt Cameron had such a feeling. The word is best reserved for rare situations such as what went on in the minds of many Germans and Japanese during WWII, and many of their battlefield opponents once they got a taste of the hate directed at them.

Another example of the overuse of the word is when segregationists are labelled as haters.  Most segregationists did not hate blacks.  The segregationists hated what they knew would occur (and did occur) upon desegregation. This no doubt caused resent, but not hate.

MAY 19, 2015

Mark Jaws writes:

What a great thread this is! I can only describe its tone and insights as…as….dare I say? Austerian! Your readers are the best on the planet!

As someone born in 1955, I consider myself fortunate enough to have lived a short, precious time in an age before the cultural Marxists sunk their claws into society. By no means do I sugar coat the past. Certain aspects of pre-1960 society did indeed stink, however, the previous generations did get the basics down pat. First, most kids were raised by two parents. And second, kids were taught in schools to love their country, their culture, and their race. Even what relatively few accomplishments blacks had achieved, were highlighted and lauded 50 years ago. Who has not seen the films in school assembly about George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington?

With regard to movies, I notice that nothing, and I mean nothing on the screen moves me to tears today. Nothing. But how many times do I cry when watching the “Grandmother Janou Scene” in the classic tearjerker, “An Affair To Remember?” Why? Because the grandmother character played to perfection by Cathleen Nesbitt is so intense, so well depicted, the lines so well scripted, that in the 15 minutes Janou is on the screen, I seem to know all the vitals about her, and I can sense her joy, her love, her faith, and her anxieties.

There used to appear characters on the screen with whom I could identify. Not any more. It takes all the fatherly love I can muster to drag myself to a theater so my teenagers can watch the latest hit of the year, which normally puts me to sleep. Although, I did enjoy “The Incredibles”.

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