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Horizons, v. 5, issue 3, whole no. 19, June 1944
Page 5
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We Go to the Movies One of my chief claims to fame, intelligence, and sensible living has gone by the boards, vanished, utterly disintegrated. I have begun to attend the movies rather regularly. Between Tucker and me, there stretched an awesome gap only a year ago: he, the projectionist, witnessing four or five complete shows six days a week, I the ordinary fan boasting that I had seen not more than two movies a year during the last half-decade. From this very commendable stage, I have disintegrated since last summer to the point where I rarely miss a week, though to be frank about the matter, the world of finance is responsible for the change. I now get paid in check you see, banks close at 3 p.m., and my work doesn't begin until 4. That means I must go downtown--no mean problem, when you live in the edge of the open country and have no car--at least an hour and a half early once a week, and to kill the intervening time, I've gotten into the habit of dropping into a moompixure bistro. Some notes on what I have found during the last year, and the impressions on my virginal sense of movie appreciation, may not be lacking in interest. Main decision I've reach is that the average good motion pictures--the one's that come to the town's first-run theater and play, three, four, or seven days at a run--are unbelievably bad and that the public attends them for every reason except to find entertainment, even as I do. At least a fourth of the audience is always made up of children who are not even watching the screen, I find between 2 and 4 of a Friday afternoon, and don't ask me why they aren't in school. Quite a few more are slacked women who work in local war plants, and very often remain in the place not more than a half-hour or so. They only people who really seem interested in what goes on are the very old ladies who always sit to themselves, carry a huge black pocketbook and find a seat rather close to the screen. At least half of the forty-odd features I've witnessed during the last twelve months are now inextricably blurred together in my memory, and form a pattern no more distinct than what comes to mind when I think of "a summer day". Among them are all the "musicals" with the single exception of "This is the Army", and all of the war pictures excepting "Bataan", "Corregidor", and "Edge of Darkness". Add "The Watch on the Rhine" to that trio, if you consider it a war picture. "Corregidor" stands out because it was so unbelievably bad, and "Bataan" because with the same basic idea and methods, it was a really tense and gripping drama. The men striding through the low mists of the Philippine jungles are just as firly in my mind now as the trenches of "Journey's End" and the airplane shots and combats in "The Dawn Patrol". "Edge of Darkness" had an excellent title to begin with. Not having seen "The Moon is Down", I can't compare the two, but found myself enjoying "Edge of Darkness" rather more than I enjoyed reading the Reader's Digest version of the Steinbeck story. The only real fault was the stereotyped ending, of a picture that was otherwise sound and for all I know presents a possible picture of what may have happened here and there in occupied lands. "Watch on the Rhine", of course, suffered from attempts to adapt situations written for the stage to the "effects" movie directors love to employ. Otherwise, the Hellman drama came over very well, the acting was for the most part superb, and it came as close to justifying the present conflict as anything I've seen or read. What stands out then from the rest of the hours I spent in flickering darkness? Well, "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek", for the astonishing treatment of the problem of a pregnant and unmarried girl. By completely ignoring the usual movie cliches and stock situations and whirling along the action so fast that the patron didn't have time to be disappointed over the absence of the routine stuff, a very remarkably excellent picture was produced--the only movie over which I actually laughed. "The Human Comedy" because of its disappointing demonstration that Saroyan's stuff isn't so hot when put on the screen. While not pure Saroyan, this came out close enough to the level of his average stores to
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We Go to the Movies One of my chief claims to fame, intelligence, and sensible living has gone by the boards, vanished, utterly disintegrated. I have begun to attend the movies rather regularly. Between Tucker and me, there stretched an awesome gap only a year ago: he, the projectionist, witnessing four or five complete shows six days a week, I the ordinary fan boasting that I had seen not more than two movies a year during the last half-decade. From this very commendable stage, I have disintegrated since last summer to the point where I rarely miss a week, though to be frank about the matter, the world of finance is responsible for the change. I now get paid in check you see, banks close at 3 p.m., and my work doesn't begin until 4. That means I must go downtown--no mean problem, when you live in the edge of the open country and have no car--at least an hour and a half early once a week, and to kill the intervening time, I've gotten into the habit of dropping into a moompixure bistro. Some notes on what I have found during the last year, and the impressions on my virginal sense of movie appreciation, may not be lacking in interest. Main decision I've reach is that the average good motion pictures--the one's that come to the town's first-run theater and play, three, four, or seven days at a run--are unbelievably bad and that the public attends them for every reason except to find entertainment, even as I do. At least a fourth of the audience is always made up of children who are not even watching the screen, I find between 2 and 4 of a Friday afternoon, and don't ask me why they aren't in school. Quite a few more are slacked women who work in local war plants, and very often remain in the place not more than a half-hour or so. They only people who really seem interested in what goes on are the very old ladies who always sit to themselves, carry a huge black pocketbook and find a seat rather close to the screen. At least half of the forty-odd features I've witnessed during the last twelve months are now inextricably blurred together in my memory, and form a pattern no more distinct than what comes to mind when I think of "a summer day". Among them are all the "musicals" with the single exception of "This is the Army", and all of the war pictures excepting "Bataan", "Corregidor", and "Edge of Darkness". Add "The Watch on the Rhine" to that trio, if you consider it a war picture. "Corregidor" stands out because it was so unbelievably bad, and "Bataan" because with the same basic idea and methods, it was a really tense and gripping drama. The men striding through the low mists of the Philippine jungles are just as firly in my mind now as the trenches of "Journey's End" and the airplane shots and combats in "The Dawn Patrol". "Edge of Darkness" had an excellent title to begin with. Not having seen "The Moon is Down", I can't compare the two, but found myself enjoying "Edge of Darkness" rather more than I enjoyed reading the Reader's Digest version of the Steinbeck story. The only real fault was the stereotyped ending, of a picture that was otherwise sound and for all I know presents a possible picture of what may have happened here and there in occupied lands. "Watch on the Rhine", of course, suffered from attempts to adapt situations written for the stage to the "effects" movie directors love to employ. Otherwise, the Hellman drama came over very well, the acting was for the most part superb, and it came as close to justifying the present conflict as anything I've seen or read. What stands out then from the rest of the hours I spent in flickering darkness? Well, "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek", for the astonishing treatment of the problem of a pregnant and unmarried girl. By completely ignoring the usual movie cliches and stock situations and whirling along the action so fast that the patron didn't have time to be disappointed over the absence of the routine stuff, a very remarkably excellent picture was produced--the only movie over which I actually laughed. "The Human Comedy" because of its disappointing demonstration that Saroyan's stuff isn't so hot when put on the screen. While not pure Saroyan, this came out close enough to the level of his average stores to
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