My Addiction To Classical Movies
I found an affinity for, addiction to and must have attitude towards classic movies about a year ago. Well, decades ago I watched classic movies, the “old” black and whites, one at a time as they would appear on Saturday afternoons (when we could get the TV away from brother and Dad, who were glued to racing. Then in college, I watched the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel, somehow drawn back to quiet and subtle intellectualism of the earlier artists.
For the next few years, I got sucked in, as many do, by the prime-time channels, for it was in those years that Seinfeld was airing…and not in re-run but first-run. Friends and other must-see TV shows—mostly comedies, sit-coms--kept me in ambient sound, company for my first solo apartment. But then, about a year ago, I made a connection between the “noise” of advertising that is slowly engulfing precious show time and my anxiety levels. At the end of a long day, having worked at home with the TV on, I was so amped up, spinning with ideas and garbage thinking, that I couldn’t sleep.
So I found the new movie classics channel, TCM (Turner Classic Movies). I would turn it on in the morning, work through the afternoon and evening, and realize that not only could I sleep without products flying at me in Technicolor volumes but was getting an education on a whole new world of filmmaking. That is, the emcee (or host), Robert Osborne, of Turner Classic Movies gives the viewing audience (us, not a canned audience) biographical and technical information before and after the movie slated for that period. Sometimes, for example, Osborne will give us insight into the level a stardom an actor has reached, or an ad lib that was intentionally left in, or directorial choices, or themes and one-line summaries of the films we are about to see.
For example, after showing A Foreign Affair, Osborne explains how the war’s ending had returned many actors to the sets, leaving relative newcomer John Lund, to very few great parts. But he made it into An Affair to Remember and was a versatile and engaging performer. In one instance, he ad libbed a line, “Not on Mother’s Day” (or something like this) and it was left in…which was most unusual as the director was Billy Wilder, who did not usually stray from the script or approve strayings.
So we learn stuff, we get caught up on all the classic movies we haven’t seen, and we have less of a headache or fewer ghosts of ads past haunting our down time…which is as precious as those old black and whites. Now that is “must-see” TV.
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