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We generally become interested in movies because we enjoythem and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art.The movies we respond to, even in childhood, don’t have the same values as theofficial culture supported at school and in the middle-class home. At themovies we get low life and high life, while David Susskind and the moralisticreviewers chastise us for not patronizing what they think we should,“realistic” movies that would be good for us—like “A Raisin in the Sun,” wherewe could learn the lesson that a Negro family can be as dreary as a whitefamily. Movie audiences will take a lot of garbage, but it’s pretty hard tomake us queue up for pedagogy. At the movies we want a different kind of truth,something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybeamazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful. We get little things even in mediocreand terrible movies—José Ferrer sipping his booze through a straw in “EnterLaughing,” Scott Wilson’s hard scary all-American-boy-you-can’t-reach facecutting through the pretensions of “In Cold Blood” with all its fancy bleakcinematography. We got, and still have embedded in memory, Tony Randall’ssurprising depth of feeling in “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao,” Keenan Wynn andMoyna Macgill in the lunch-counter sequence of “The Clock,” John W. Bubbles onthe dance floor in “Cabin in the Sky,” the inflection Gene Kelly gave to theline, “I’m a rising young man” in “DuBarry Was a Lady,” Tony Curtis saying“avidly” in “Sweet Smell of Success.” Though the director may have beenresponsible for releasing it, it’s the human material we react to most andremember longest. The art of the performers stays fresh for us, their beauty asbeautiful as ever. There are so many kinds of things we get—the hangoversequence wittily designed for the CinemaScope screen in “The Tender Trap,” theatmosphere of the newspaper offices in “The Luck of Ginger Coffey,” the automatgone mad in “Easy Living.” Do we need to lie and shift things to falseterms—like those who have to say Sophia Loren is a great actress as if her actinghad made her a star? Wouldn’t we rather watch her than better actresses becauseshe’s so incredibly charming and because she’s probably the greatest model theworld has ever known? There are great moments—Angela Lansbury singing “LittleYellow Bird” in “Dorian Gray.” (I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend who didn’talso treasure that girl and that song.) And there are absurdly right littlemoments—in “Saratoga Trunk” when Curt Bois says to Ingrid Bergman, “You’re verybeautiful,” and she says, “Yes, isn’t it lucky?” And those things have closerrelationships to art than what the schoolteachers told us was true andbeautiful. Not that the works we studied in school weren’t often great (as wediscovered later) but that what the teachers told us to admire them for(and if current texts are any indication, are still telling students to admirethem for) was generally so false and prettified and moralistic that what mighthave been moments of pleasure in them, and what might have been cleansing inthem, and subversive, too, had been coated over./ L/ r5 u) W3 p/ cVI
Movie art is not the opposite of what wehave always enjoyed in movies, it is not to be found in a return to thatofficial high culture, it is what we have always found good in movies only moreso. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitementsustained longer and extended into new meanings. At best, the movie is totallyinformed by the kind of pleasure we have been taking from bits and pieces ofmovies. But we are so used to reaching out to the few good bits in a movie thatwe don’t need formal perfection to be dazzled. There are so many arts andcrafts that go into movies and there are so many things that can go wrong thatthey’re not an art for purists. We want to experience that elation we feel whena movie (or even a performer in a movie) goes farther than we had expected andmakes the leap successfully. Even a film like Godard’s “Les Carabiniers,” hellto watch for the first hour, is exciting to think about after because its onegood sequence, the long picture postcard sequence near the end, is soincredible and so brilliantly prolonged. The picture has been crawling andstumbling along and then it climbs a high wire and walks it and keeps wantingit until we’re almost dizzy from admiration. The tight rope is rarely stretchedso high in movies, but there must be a sense of tension somewhere in the movie,if only in a bit player’s face, not just mechanical suspense, or the movie isjust more hours down the drain. It’s the rare movie we really go with,the movie that keeps us tense and attentive. We learn to dread Hollywood“realism” and all that it implies. When, in the dark, we concentrate ourattention, we are driven frantic by events on the level of ordinary life thatpass at the rhythm of ordinary life. That’s the self-conscious striving forintegrity of humorless, untalented people. When we go to a play we expect aheightened, stylized language; the dull realism of the streets is unendurablyboring, though we may escape from the play to the nearest bar to listen to thesame language with relief. Better life than art imitating life.VII
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Harper's, February 1969
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