[Reposted from March 8, 2015]

ALAN writes:

When interviewed by UPI reporter Vernon Scott in 1981, actress Joan Fontaine said: 

“During the golden years, movies were filled with actresses and actors playing ladies and gentlemen.  Well, there is no elegance left on the screen and there never was any in television.  Come to think of it, there’s little elegance left in our culture or society…”

She was right.  It is of course much worse today.  Elegance?  Who could find a trace of elegance today in movie theaters that look like rooms in a warehouse?  In the dreck, drivel, and depravity that Americans now accept as entertainment?  In profanity in place of dialogue?  In moviegoers who think they have a right to inflict their beeps and tweets and cell phone rings on everyone around them?  In movie patrons who prove themselves as ill-mannered and vulgar-tongued as the fourth-rate actors and actresses they have been taught to admire in the absence of such elegance?  Where are today’s equivalent of Irene Dunne, Greer Garson, Loretta Young, Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, Deborah Kerr?  Of Walter Pidgeon, Fredric March, Ronald Colman, James Stewart, Fred Astaire, Randolph Scott?

How American motion pictures went from excellence to decadence could form the basis of a lengthy chapter in the soon-to-be-written history of the suicide of Western Civilization.

Meanwhile, I want to say that it was not always thus.  If I had gone to sleep in 1965 and awakened yesterday, I would conclude I am in an alien land or on another planet or in Hell.  A commenter recently said that young Americans today can have no idea “how horribly this country has changed since the mid-60’s.”  I can verify that, because I was there.  The year 1965 was a pivotal year in American culture’s drift leftward, but there was still much to admire in America that year and especially in one American motion picture.

It was on a Sunday afternoon in April of that year when my mother and I walked up an elegant staircase to find our seats in the balcony of the movie palace called the St. Louis Theatre, located in midtown St. Louis in the stretch of Grand Boulevard that was once known as the “Grand White Way” because of the lighted marquees of four stately movie theaters.  Those two balcony seats cost her the astronomical sum of $4.00.  The new motion picture we had gone there to see would justify that investment many times over.  At age 15, I had no idea what to expect from it and no awareness that it would prove to be one of the last of its kind.

Am I the only one among your readers old enough to remember when The Sound of Music was released in 1965 and played for month after month in movie palaces across the nation?

Oh, to be that age again and to feel for the first time the wonderful feeling of uplift imparted by that quiet background music building slowly to a crescendo at the moment we first see the character Maria in a vast field of green, a feeling made that much more enjoyable and memorable when seeing those opening scenes on a giant screen and hearing that glorious music in a movie palace filled with well-dressed and well-mannered people.  Such things were possible to ordinary Americans in 1965.

The Sound of Music is not just a movie; it is an expression of a sense of life, a frame of mind, a code of moral and esthetic values.  Its virtues, its discipline, and its decency all come from another world and a better one, a world now gone forever, a world many of your readers have never known but one that Lawrence Auster remembered as well as I do and wrote about from time to time at View from the Right.

The Sound of Music was one of the last motion pictures to respect the moral, cultural, and esthetic standards that made so many movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood as enjoyable as they are.  Those things included:  Masculine authority, marriage, the integrity of the family, hierarchy, good manners, balance and proportion, the conflict between good and evil, heroism, uplifting music, and the unpretentious, uncomplicated and uncorrupted joys of childhood.  Such a motion picture reflects restraint on many levels.  By contrast, today’s motion pictures are firmly entrenched in the sewer; they reflect decadence on many levels.  In place of merit and morality, they offer spectacle, sensation, profanity, and esthetic ugliness whose depth and degree are impossible to describe.  It could be argued that such entertainment befits a nation of spoiled brats.

Leftists and intellectuals did not like The Sound of Music. It was too square and too sweet and fit only for 6-year-olds, film critic Judith Crist condescended to pronounce from her perch high in the New York intelligentsia.  It is a wonder she was able to watch it and live through such agony.

Leftists cannot stand the fact that millions of ordinary men, women, and families enjoy entertainment that does not include Leftist platitudes or perversions.

They resent it even more when all those people find such a movie so richly enjoyable and worthwhile that it moves them to tears of happiness and prompts them to view it again and again and to introduce it to their children and grandchildren as if it were one of the most extraordinary and beautiful achievements in the history of American movie-making—which it is.

The Sound of Music is one of those movies that Leftists love to deride as “escapist”.  And they are right–but not in the way they think they are.  Movies like The Sound of Music are indeed an escape from the grotesque ugliness that Leftists have engineered into every corner of American life, and an escape to the vision of an alternative to that ugliness—to something decent, something beautiful, something joyful, something inspiring, something wonderful, something to work for and value and defend, something far above the muck that Leftists would drag all of us down into if they had the power.

After not having seen it for many years, I sat down one day to view The Sound of Music again and to give it my undivided attention.  Certain scenes now impressed me much more than they had back in 1965.  The opening sequence remained as impressive as it was then, as did the closing scenes.  “The Lonely Goatherd” marionette sequence now seemed to me to be one of the highlights in the movie.  No comparison is possible, but the joy expressed in Liesl and Rolf’s dance in the gazebo recalls the similar joy expressed in Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire’s wonderful dance in the gazebo in their equally wonderful “Top Hat” (1935).  I was also more favorably impressed now by actress Eleanor Parker’s excellent performance in her role as the Baroness.  The sequence wherein Maria and the children sing “Do Re Mi” as they hike and bicycle through Salzburg seemed now to be one of the best and most enjoyable scenes.

I am a dinosaur and a 24-carat curmudgeon.  But the scene where Captain Von Trapp walks into the house and overhears his children singing and realizes at once how wrong he had been in denying them that simple pleasure and how unfair he had been to the woman who had taught them to sing….is a scene that moved me to tears.

My mother enjoyed Hollywood musicals from the 1940s-‘50s with stars like Gene Kelly and Kathryn Grayson and Esther Williams.  But none gave her greater happiness than The Sound of Music.  Thirty years after that Sunday in 1965, we sat in her apartment and watched it again and talked about it afterward.

One of my aunts lived 97 years, most of them long before movies became available on videocassettes.  She was content to have seen Gone with the Wind during its original release to movie theaters when she was in her mid-30s.  She talked for years afterward about how that movie had impressed her.  I wonder how many Americans today realize how fortunate they are in being able to watch a movie like The Sound of Music whenever they please, a luxury they take for granted but that my aunt would not have imagined possible.

The Sound of Music is an artifact from a civilization that is now gone, not because it was lost but because it was abandoned and surrendered by people who had become soft and extremely foolish.

The men and women who created such motion pictures worked on the basis of a particular moral code and conceptual frame of mind.  Those things have long been absent from Hollywood and are now virtually extinct in America.

Whatever few Americans may be left who can understand and appreciate the shining virtues in a motion picture like “The Sound of Music—who understand not only that those things are virtues but also why they are virtues—should take pains to preserve it and other films like it for their children and grandchildren.  They are among the last concrete expressions of the talent, restraint, decency, and meritorious achievement that  were on display in American entertainment in our nation’s best years, which are now far behind us.

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