Wokesters Take On Classic Movies
YouTubers encounter “Casablanca” for the first time.
by Bruce Bawer
June 17, 2022, 11:33 PM
During his last few years, Gilbert Gottfried, the great stand-up comic who died in April at the age of 67, hosted a terrific weekly podcast on which he interviewed elderly showbiz veterans, some of them legendary actors, some of them obscure craftspeople. His main objective, he often said, was to help keep alive the memory of, and affection for, the old movies he loved. He’d grown up in New York City at a time when some of the local TV stations ran several movies a day, and as a kid he’d often wake up at the crack of dawn, or stay up late into the night, to watch them. I grew up in New York during the same era and did the exact same thing. Gilbert spoke frequently on his podcast about how New York TV — in those days before VHS tapes and Blockbuster, and very long before DVDs and Netflix — had been comparable to the very best film schools or revival houses. I agree. I’ll always be grateful, as he was, to have been afforded — and for free — such a wonderful, years-long immersion course in cinema.
Looking back, I don’t know how I got anything else done. There were days in my childhood when I watched three or four films, exhibiting no discrimination whatsoever in regard to period or genre or critical reputation (about which, in any case, I knew nothing). My old diaries record that on September 19, 1961, my double feature consisted of the 1961 science-fiction film Atlantis, The Lost Continent, and Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 Lolita. (Although I was just 13, it never occurred to my parents to monitor my viewing habits.) On my 14th birthday, October 31, 1970, I reeled from the 1949 adventure movie Mighty Joe Young to the 1960 Doris Day thriller Midnight Lace to the 1957 Ingmar Bergman drama The Seventh Seal. And so on: the highlights of that November included Lifeboat, Great Expectations, Guys and Dolls, The Music Man, High Society, Miracle on 34th Street, The Bells of St. Mary’s, The Bride of Frankenstein, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
These and hundreds of other movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age have been a part of my life for so long that it’s strange to think that many people my age have never seen any of them, and that to almost everybody who’s more than a decade or two younger than I these films might as well be relics from ancient Egypt. Yes, they may adore movies, but older fare leaves them cold. Some of them are put off by black and white. For many, the old movies move too slowly, are much too talky, and understandably (having almost invariably been filmed on backlots) look fake. In fact, for many young people these days, “old movie” means something from, at the very oldest, the 1970s or 80s — Jaws or The Godfather or Star Wars. Which, for me, is a shame, because the old pictures from the 1930s through the 1960s imprinted on me a respect for such values as love, friendship, respect, responsibility, citizenship, and heroism. Along with the American popular songs of the same era, they made me a romantic.
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https://spectator.org/what-wokesters-think-of-old-movies-casablanca/
