Cinema & Movies: United
States
[Under development: 31 May 2005]
I have watched thousands of American (US) movies, and have over a hundred in
VHS format. Most of what I ‘know’ about the US
is derived from movies and television series. I have
learned relatively little US or Canadian from books, which is a massive
shortcoming.
American history starts in the seventeenth century with the Pilgrim Fathers
arriving on a ship called the Mayflower, but had trouble with witches. Their
descendents had trouble with tea and fought a war of independence from the
British (although for many years I had only the vaguest of notions that the War
of Independence and the Civil War were separate events). The slave economy of
the ‘south’ gets going in the eighteenth century. As more people arrive from Europe,
so they want to build little houses on the prairie and set off for Oklahoma.
Davy Crockett pioneered his way westwards towards Arizona
and eventually Hollywood. In the meantime the American Civil War kicked off in the 1860s when
gangs were roaming New York, and
the ‘south’ was gone with the wind. Railway lines were built
from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts. Around this time,
the ‘west’ went wild, and the indigenous peoples of America
(but I thought that history started with the Pilgrim Fathers) became very
uppity. While Buffalo Bill Cody was butchering the buffalo, thus removing the
staple food and resource of the so-called ‘Indians’, Soldier Blue was busy
butchering the so-called ‘Indians’. At Little Big Horn the so-called ‘Indians’
got some of their own back. However, after a brief historical lull, during
which Eddison invented the electric lamp, Alexander
Graham Bell invented the telephone, and Mark Twain paddled endlessly up and
down the Mississippi (looking for
the Chattanuga Choo Choo), gangsters started getting uppity. Chicago
became the centre of attention, and there was a massacre on 14 February because
a brewery/distillery would not relinquish control of some nightclub/speakeasy.
Elliot Ness felt insulted when someone accused him of being a dirty rat. In
Hell’s Kitchen, New York, the
stevedores were getting uppity, whereas on Broadway the show went on. Pearl
Harbour changed everything, and
suddenly everything was about the Second World War. When they ran out of
Japanese extras, attention switched to the Korean theatre, where many people
were injured, and they had to set up a mobile army surgical hospital. While
organised crime was being taken over by not-so-good fellows
of Italian extraction, the Soviet Union (not in the US)
was launching Sputnik 1. This galvanised the space race, even though both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King got shot.
The smell of napalm in the morning lured film crews to
the apocalypse that was Vietnam,
where US soldiers killed and were killed in the very heart of darkness. Shortly
after the US
military tactical withdrawal from Vietnam,
aliens started to visit the US.
The encounters were initially distant, but then closer, and eventually in the
form of extra-terrestrials. Suddenly the known-universe was
populated with warring empires, the armies of which had to be beaten off
with ‘star wars’ satellites. Signs of American paranoia reached record
intensity when the US
authorities decided that henceforth 11
September 2001 would be known as 9 November 2001: what had been done
with the missing 59 days?
As a young child although I watched movies made for children, I mostly
watched movies that my mother enjoyed. In my youngest days, I recall watching
at a local cinema (probably Kilburn, north
west London, UK)
South Pacific, West Side Story, Seven Brides
for Seven Brothers and Singin’ in the Rain. Little wonder I feel
comfortable with Woody Allen’s Everyone
Says I Love You. It is true that I also watched Bambi, Snow White, 101 Dalmatians and The Wizard of Oz, which whilst appearing to be more appropriate
fare for a child, gave me terrors relating to parental loss (Bambi) and malevolent women
(respectively: the wicked queen, Cruella Deville, and
the wicked witch) (psychoanalytical/dynamic people do your worst!). I was taken
to see neither Mary Poppins
nor Jungle Book, and felt hard done
by when all my classmates were singing the songs, and had to wait until my
daughter was ready to watch them in VHS format in the mid-1990s. The only Star Wars movie I have watched at the
cinema is Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I never saw any of the Harrison Ford tomb raider
movies, although I have more recently caught glimpses of them on television. On
the other hand, I must have seen every cowboy movie ever made. Jean Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir would sit endlessly in
Nazi-occupied Paris watching cowboy
movies. When I was about twelve years old I came to believe that
most US movies
were about the Wild West (and the rest were about the Second World War).
Watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid at the Odeon in Chester, UK,
served only to strengthen that belief. Although I was aware of Sergio Leone’s
‘spaghetti westerns’ being screened, I never saw them until they were on
television many years later. I find their violence simultaneously unpleasant
and tame. I am not keen on the portrayal of violence (either in movies or in
books). It is not that I am overly squeamish, more
that I find it all too easy to empathise with the victim. (Hmm.)
I have watched a majority of the movies made by director / actor Woody
Allen, some at the cinema, some on television, and I have 18 of them in VHS
format. I prefer his later, more nervous work to his earlier slapstick. Were I
to pick only one it would be Manhattan
Murder Mystery.
1.
Small Time Crooks
(2000)
2.
Sweet and Lowdown (1999) (VHS)
3.
Celebrity
(1998)
4.
Deconstructing
Harry (1997) (cinema & VHS)
5.
Everyone Says I
Love You (1996) (cinema & VHS)
6.
Mighty Aphrodite
(1995) (VHS)
7.
Don't Drink the
Water (1994) (TV)
8.
Bullets Over
Broadway (1994) (VHS)
9.
Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) (VHS)
10. Husbands and Wives (1992) (VHS)
11. Shadows and Fog (1992) (VHS)
12. Alice (1990)
13. Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) (VHS)
14. New York Stories (1989) (segment 3) (VHS)
15. Another Woman (1988) (VHS)
16. Radio Days (1987) (VHS)
17. September (1987)
18. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) (VHS)
19. Purple Rose of Cairo, The (1985) (cinema)
20. Broadway Danny Rose (1984) (television
& VHS)
21. Zelig (1983)
(VHS)
22. Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, A (1982)
23. Stardust Memories (1980)
24. Manhattan
(1979) (VHS)
25. Interiors (1978)
26. Annie Hall (1977) (VHS)
27. Love and Death (1975)
28. Sleeper (1973) (VHS)
29. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About
Sex (1972)
... aka Everything
You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) (cinema
& television)
30. Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971) (TV)
31. Bananas (1971)
32. Take the Money and Run (1969) (cinema
& television)
33. What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)
I have six Joel and Ethan Coen movies in VHS format. Were I to pick one it would be Raising Arizona.
1. Fargo
2. Blood Simple
3. Raising Arizona
4. The Big Lebowski
5. Oh Brother wherefore are thou?
6. The Man Who Wasn’t There
I love the fact that Casablanca
(television & VHS) is as good as everyone says it is! Twelve Angry Men (television & VHS) stands the test of time,
and is better than its recent remake. I have watched most Hitchcock’s
and can recognise shower-scene strings before the second note.
I have a sneaking belief that St Elmo’s Fire achieved more effectively the premise of The
Big Chill: “it’s cold out there after the warmth and buzz of our time at
college”. However, not least because of its wonderful retro soundtrack, The
Big Chill, starring William Hurt, Glen Close, Kevin Kline and Jeff Goldblum, is a tremendous feel-good movie.
[To be continued. Episode XIV: Revenge of the Wookies]
p.g.h@btinternet.com