Have a look at the short The House I Live In (1945). We start a new year of blogging today, and a new era tomorrow. We're going to accentuate the positive this year, look for hope in the darkness, and maybe finding it in each other. I'm with Frank, I don't like Nazi creeps, either, especially ones that call themselves Americans. But there is yet an overwhelming tenor of decency and fairness and compassion in this country that even the worst monsters among us can't defeat. I like the way he grins, looks the mob of kids in the eye ("you have to be carefully taught") and calls them Nazis, hoping they'll challenge him. "Religion makes no difference, except maybe to a Nazi or somebody as stupid." Great line. Lump the Nazis with stupid people. Call a spade a spade. Trample all over their self-superiority. There were plenty of people in this country who would have seen this short in the theaters in 1945 and thought that Hollywood was overstepping its bounds, preaching a liberal message. To borrow another classic movie reference, the bad guys are coming into town at high noon tomorrow. Let's meet them at the train. Don't forget to grin when you challenge them by calling them Nazis or somebody as stupid, and hit them with unwavering, unrelenting truth. They hate that. They have no defense against truth, except more lies, and we've heard them all by now. If they cannot feel shame for their words or their deeds, then make them feel aggravation that respect, let alone cooperation, will be denied them. Let them know the apologists and excuse-makers among them will be held equally accountable as the instigators. Force them to look into the mirror of their depravity. And don't forget to grin. This year we'll be covering a lot of movies with plucky heroes - in classic films they come in the form of the average joe, the little guy - and they come to us in comedies as well as dramas. We'll be spending a good part of the summer with musicals - an art form as unabashedly exuberant as any known to man. We're going to examine this house we live in, and clean it up a little. See you next Thursday, when we'll discuss a plucky Pat O'Brien who helps to stop a run on Walter Huston's bank in the coincidentally named American Madness (1932).
In Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Our Modern Maidens (1929), Joan Crawford epitomizes the daring flapper, living only for the moment, the eternal symbol (one of many glitzy symbols) of the 1920s. We continue today with part 3 of our series on the 1920s – Then and Now. Novelist-turned-Hollywood-writer F. Scott Fitzgerald saw in Joan Crawford the essence of the flapper, as he is noted to have remarked: Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living. He might have been describing her in these two movies. Our Dancing Daughters stars Joan as a high-octane flapper or “modern,” her name for the first time above the title. This movie and Our Modern Maidens are "modern" morality plays of sorts – Joan Crawford is not s...
The March of Time short subject Teen-Age Girls (1945) is a window on a societal ripple in postwar America that is, unusually, both dated and prescient. The documentary examines the emergence of teens as a new and important demographic, particularly females in this case, with a lighthearted and even amused attitude, but with a curious reservation—perhaps not unlike the way a parent first notices that a child isn’t a child anymore. This is our final post in this series about how Hollywood depicted children during World War II. The March of Time apparently felt, and perhaps not wrongly, that the dawn of the Teen-Age was as likely to be as influential a force in American society as the nuclear age. The narrator begins: Of all the phenomena in wartime life in the United States, one of the most fascinating and mysterious…has been the emergence of the teenage girl in her own right. This was not something Hollywood evidently considered earlier in the war, when the worldwi...
The Racket (1928) is surprisingly cynical, even while still coyly presenting what we recognize as frothy 1920s images – including speakeasies, callow youth, and an almost manic desire to rebel. Even those inclined to think that silent movies, by virtue of their being silent, are a bit of a joke will still see much in this movie that is starkly modern and which speaks to us today. Producer Howard Hughes was only twenty-three years old when he took this on for one of his very first projects in the film industry. It is a story of Chicago gangsters and the honest cop who tries to bring them down. The honest cop, played by Thomas Meighan, one of the most popular leading men of his day, is not so incorruptible that he doesn’t resort to beating up suspects to get the truth. This is, after all, Chicago, and it is, after all, the 1920s. The film makes no explanation and certainly no apology for his beating up suspects in custody, rather it paints him as a savvy hero of the dirty streets he pa...
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