My Fox Searchlight

Once two days ago I composed some thoughts about this matter off-the-cuff; and when I was about to submit my lazily-directed ramblings I got side-tracked by some link promising to teach me a few tricks about hyper-text-markup-language. Regretably I followed that link in the mistaken notion that I could return to my gathered thoughts and send them along to their intended destination: Here. But unfortunately, as I said, I was mistaken.

So, to begin again (an allusion to a film with Albert Finney) I must take us back to those obscure black & white days of silent speech and tin-sounding piano music. Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, & Buster Keaton were the lead male stars back in those days; and Tulula Bankhead might have been in there along with Greta Garbo from Sweden, a most mysterious woman who lived like a recluse, so I've read, especially in her later years. Interestingly, Buster Keaton did a one-man job in Samuel Beckett's "Film," this misunderstood writer's only personal venture into screen-writing. He was also a recluse.

Of course the first major 'paradigm shift,' if one is allowed to use such a lofty phrase, came with the the innovation of color film; perhaps developed in the R&D at the Kodak labs, but I'm only guessing there. And it was probably fortunate that this happened because this fell right into the beginning of the Depression Years from about 1929 to say the late 30s when it became all too clear to those moguls in Hollywood at least that Adolf Hitler was bent on over-running all of Europe and causing untold grief among completely innocent and hard-working civilians of a certain religious persuasion which this dictator had a pathological hatred for.

Thus Hollywood soon got into the business of making essentially propoganda films which agrandized the American military, but under the circumstances this could be easily forgiven, particulary after the unprovoked Japanese atrocity upon Pearl Harbor.

After WWII was brought to rather abrupt conclusion thanks to, among others, the men on a bomber called the 'Enola Gay,' which flew over Japan, Hollywood found a huge audience in the form of returning GIs with plenty of severance pay. These guys liked the detective movies which later became known as film noir, a style first rendered in France obviously. They probably did not care too much for the musicals which flourished in the 30s and 40s.

From these remarks one might get the inkling notion that "Audience" has much to do with what type of films are manufactured, since indeed this sort of production is a very costly enterprize. . . . During the Cold War/Eisenhower years college men and their lovely sorority dates were the main target. And this encourage the production of such interesting fare as "The Ugly American," "The World of Suzie Wong," and some other film based on a James Clavell novel set in the Orient featuring Steve McQueen and gun-boat diplomacy.

So what is going on here? There is not a little politics in any film, and some are overtly political. Take Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July," or, more recently, Steven Spielberg's "Munich."

The teenagers and even many college-aged movie goers are typically quite unconscious of how their taste and ideas are subtly moulded by the films they view with such voracious pleasure. Only a century from now will future thinkers and historians be able to see with something approaching clarity just what transpires sociologically with each type of film. As for those of us now, I believe the closest we can get to a clear vision of the impact of cinema in the broadest and deepest sense possible are through sheer intuitions alone.

Mr. Diggs