Moviegoing

Generation gap. Al Pacino and Marlon Brando

I spent my preteen years in movie theaters with friends, gobbling up a lot of dumb movies—the Pink Panther series with Peter Sellers (The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975, The Pink Panther Strikes Again in 1976, The Revenge of the Pink Panther in 1978), The Gumball Rally (1976), Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), Animal House (1978), King Kong (1976), Rollercoaster (1977), and all those damned Irwin Allen disaster epics (The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, The Towering Inferno in 1974, Earthquake in 1975). So I’m nostalgic for those stray movies I saw between about 1979 and 1984 that I honestly loved, movies that gave hip audiences a sense of deeper connection to those movies (unlike the bland mass-audience productions that were designed to get kids into the mall)—a smaller-scale version of what appealed to college audiences in the late 1960s with Antonioni and Altman and Mike Nichols. By the end of the decade, we had already been dumbed down by the space-serial blockbusters and the ripoffs of Jaws (1975), or been scolded by the didactic, calculated emotions of The Goodbye Girl (1977) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). But these other movies—lovely, low-key movies like Peter Yates’s Breaking Away (1979) and the Bill Forsyth movies Gregory’s Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983) and Fred Schepisi’s Barbarosa (1982) and the extraordinary Iceman (1984)—treated moviegoers like intelligent people with sharp minds and good taste in stories and dialogue. I was at U. C. Santa Barbara when Local Hero and Peter Weir’s alluring The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) opened in theaters, and the university audience in Isla Vista just ate them up. I remember fellow viewers walking outside afterward into the crisp night air, hit with the pleasurable reminder that movies could actually be good.

But whatever it was, it was evanescent and got swallowed up, again, in crummy commercialism and emotional banality—crass and impersonal junk like Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), and Top Gun (1986): TV on steroids. My heart sank just thinking about how the deluge of teen crud in the 1980s was pushing out what little bits of quality appeared, almost by magic, every so often in American commercial film.

Thirty years later, American movies are largely a crass, obnoxious art of hyperactive cutting and visceral sensations—computer dinosaurs and what-all—with the mental dimensions of arcade games and theme park thrill rides. Movies are designed for ultra-high dpi resolutions and nanosecond refresh rates. Those who find the current experience of today’s blockbusters breathtaking must be having the time of their lives.

Transformation scene. Bette Davis

Before HDTV and home theater systems, people were better off going to the theater to see not only those movies with impressive visual dimensions (Citizen Kane, 1900, La Ronde) but also movies whose intended effects relied on communal audience involvement—sidesplitting comedies and melodramas like Now, Voyager (1942) seemed stronger when people around you laughed or gasped as you did when you first saw the slimmed-down, elegant Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) in spectator pumps and hat on the ship’s gangway. When we opt to stay home to watch, I think we forgo the communalism of an audience of strangers who are reacting just like us. In many cases, moviegoing really is a shared experience—like a neighborhood’s banding together in the face of adversity.

Not so much these days, but there were times when I went to see an old movie (Genevieve, for example, or a Jack Barrymore comedy) at a revival theater to experience the audience reaction to my favorite parts. I wanted to see these strangers respond like me, because their responses made them seem, momentarily at least, closer than actual friends. After a good movie—an immersive, great narrative experience like The Godfather Part II (1974), for example—I loved walking back up the aisle in the dim light with the rest of the audience, and I just knew that everyone was dazedly thinking the same thing, and the god of movies had bestowed a rare gift.

Brownies

Unfortunately, the groovy classic scenes in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1969)—the blocked car, the Hispanic family with whiplash, the brownie party with Mom and Dad (where everyone’s oblivious to the ingredients), the funeral—occur in the first hour. The movie fizzles out. Even so, the comedy is just about enough to carry the remainder of the picture; audiences are already on its side when the laughs start drying up.

Culture clash. Peter Sellers and Leigh Taylor-Young

The shtick fizzles when Peter Sellers (Harold) puts on hippie beads and a psychedelic bandana. Why turn Harold into a hippie, anyway? The point is that Harold is a boring establishment lawyer who rejects his idiot brother Herbie’s counter-culture life because that life is so stoned and vapid; Herbie (David Arkin) has no direction and no sense of urgency—he’s just a flower-loving bum in Venice Beach. Harold is his mother’s archetypal Jewish son—the successful lawyer—but Harold’s brother gives her tsuris. The first hour of the movie is a mishpucha comedy; it makes fun of Jewish parental expectations.

The last thirty minutes misfire repeatedly: inchoate scenes of Harold and his new girlfriend Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young) making love in an automobile when the police show up and kick them out (the scene just crumbles before your eyes); the law-firm partner, an unfunny letch, propositioning Harold’s ex-fiancée; a middle-aged cross-dresser entering the dress shop where Nancy works and trying on a mini-skirt, and so on. Taylor-Young wears American Indian suede with fringe trim and beads and brings a Marilyn Monroe–like softness to her scenes; her erotic warmth is balanced by her sweetly vacuous line readings—it’s a charming performance. 

The Jewish jokes grow stale and humorless, and the gimmicks get careless. Why are there flowers at the Jewish butcher’s funeral, and why is his casket so ornate? Why is the Lohengrin march played at Harold’s wedding? Elmer Bernstein may as well have not even bothered, either. He repeats the theme song with practically no variation for two hours. Peter Sellers droops with the dearth of good gags, Mrs. Fine (the scene chewer Jo Van Fleet) turns sour, and the butcher’s widow wails hysterically. Were the writers smoking too much dope?