Features No More?

Movies Are Like, So Yesterday

There was a show called Suits that ran from 2011 to 2019, “was” and “ran” operative words because old episodes still run, rather streams, to a gigantic worldwide audience, it said recently to be the most watched series, most watched anything, on devices including TV, laptops, smartphones, and Dick Tracy wristwatches. Success of Suits is beside point however, of characters quoting movies which meant much to them and sometimes to other characters being addressed. We were expected to recognize dialogue from filmic oysters still yielding pearls. Principals aged twenties to forties being weaned upon features reflected Suits writers raised the same, thus words borrowed from The Godfather(s), Rocky, A Few Good Men, even Fast Times at Ridgemont High, all to remind us there are those who carry memory of features when feature-watching was still meaningful. I follow with interest so-called “culture war” pitting longtime Star War fans against present corporate ownership (Disney) said to disrespect the Force and Jedis and all of rest, intent it seems on dismantling modern American folklore, sacred as odysseys and Iliads passed from Greeks down centuries to now. To be a boy born since sixties-became-seventies is to revere Star Wars and guard same against those who’d profane the brand, the 1977 original and sequels having segued from entertainment to religious expression. You Tube apostles v. pagans seems a daily, no hourly, battle fought without chance, even hope, of a victor emerging.

When did dialogue become inconsequent? “Action” as essential thing has been the thing for generations now, part of outreach, they say, to the worldwide audience said to overwhelm domestic viewing. To be understood is to be necessarily understood in any language, and that means in terms of movement, constant movement. Movies may well have had it best during a silent era when everything could be translated by titles to reach lookers anywhere, though that presupposed a willingness to read pesky titles. Is such willingness lost to all now and for all time? Talk-less films did and for too short a time truly unite a wide world’s viewership. How else could someone like C. Chaplin achieve recognition on awesome scale as no personality could equal today? Action as the universal language seems on one hand a viable way, the best silents after all bent toward that, but what of happy times when talk was the action? Summit I’d aver was Sliver Age we know as the thirties through at least some of sixties when characters spoke much before coming to blows or firing a shot. Instances abound to offer endless pleasure: The Thing where chat and wit make a title monster superfluous and the more effective for most-part absence, Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet verbal sparring in Across the Pacific, shock the greater when latter whacks former with his stick, and behind a scrim so we don’t even see it. Late as the 60’s came James Bond to leisurely investigate Crab Key and gruffly ask “why cahn’t we go there” with Scottish burr. 007 conversing with Robert Shaw is as tense as their later fight on FRWL’s train and look at whole of the golf game in Goldfinger.

Talk as chief led always to a showdown, if verbal, a constant with Bette Davis melodramas and everybody else’s melodramas. Think of swordfights to cap Errol Flynn ventures, Stewart Granger finally having it out with Mel Ferrer, westerns a primary font of kettles boiled to bursting, conflict embodied for most part in talk, and who’d want it otherwise, that last me speaking for myself and aware that others may not see things a same. I often dope on Ride Lonesome at You Tube, cued up not to shooting guns but to word exchange that has more impact, pausing wherever I see Randolph Scott stood still and in conference with Pernell Roberts or Karen Steele, dialogue and how it’s delivered eternal joy of Lonesome and other habitual YT stop, The Tall T. Contrast these with action amounting more to what Gilbert Seldes called “ the emptiness of violence” (Seldes said that in the late forties, so imagine how he’d react to films today). The John Wick series, enjoyable as they are, remind me of Tex Avery’s roach spray commercials. Past action was confrontation with violence as a last resort. Bogart shooting Conrad Veidt in Casablanca is the least memorable of their contra taunts, language to then a more lethal weapon. Sydney Greenstreet seldom raised a hand, him and select others my Action as Talk ideals.

Old-timers today are often those in 30-50’s, longing for lost moments of moviegoing from before folks quit going to movies. These are who Top Gun: Maverick and Beverly Hills Cop 4 are meant to entice, yearners after a past where it can be recaptured. But will youth care about tropes dating far back of their birthdates? And what of nostalgists let down by a latest and hopefully last Indiana Jones, or Star Wars renouncing all that was Star Wars before? Loyalists decry output aimed at what’s ruefully called “modern audiences,” while upholders of latter call an old guard cranky, out of touch, or unkindest cut, plain old, this to fandom far from dotage. Spry in his sixties Eddie Murphy talked in a recent interview of running Beverly Hills 4 to a group including his teenage son, who rather than paying attention to narrative scrolled away on his phone and put it aside only when entreated by Dad. Might Eddie have glimpsed future of features here, let alone Beverly Hills cop features? Significant is this newest made not for theatres, but Netflix, where up-down, in-out subscribers can make hash as they choose of it. Longing too is had for a vanished sitting audience, crowds that laughed at a first Beverly Hills Cop forty years ago when even small town theatres could fill up nightly. But what do “crowds” and an “audience” have to do with most movies today? Remarkable exceptions are the more remarkable for being so few, like recent Deadpool – Wolverine, superheroes back from a seeming dead. Want a full house? Invite enough to fill your den for a Netflix opening. It isn’t movies now but gaming and scrolling that matter. “Movies” mean features as in length, as in too much length for those distracted at best of times. Attention spans aren’t going, they’re gone. Gilbert Seldes complained of films given over entirely to adolescent viewership. When adolescents can’t be bothered with moviegoing, which appears to be the case today, what’s to do but fold theatrical tents?

Are we to a point where feature films are looked upon like literature or classical music? To sit focused upon any one thing for two hours seems like prison minus bars. Doesn’t matter how “good” your feature is, such consume of others' time and patience can make well-intentioned steps a mis-step. This applies not just to civilians unschooled in favorites (distinctly yours, not theirs) but fans, kindred spirits even, who embrace also the life, or formerly did. They had favorites too, happiest times wrapped around once-upon watching, but when will they submit to these again? I had assumed it was age that made us restive, a contemporary who said how much he adored The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly but would not contemplate another three-hour sit. What's to treasure for some is recall of it, as in sentiment's placement at a table long cleared. How many younger people who haven't seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly will submit to do so where entertainment is consumed quick or not at all? To be fast-fed information is to reject what isn’t digestible in under fifteen seconds, that now including much of what was once enjoyed at leisure. There is Facebook option of scrolling endless half-a-minute narratives constantly reloaded to algorithm-fed preferences all your own, preferences known and chosen for you. Pleasure in music say some observers has become a matter of opening bars heard at Tik Tok, then abandoned toward next blink-of-ear sampling, to which cue Jerry Lee Lewis shaking our nerves and rattling our brains.

Most are casual consumers of film, if that. I’ve been since 1968 (new films that is). Boy on my hall at college came back from a weekend having seen Stranger on the Third Floor on Channel 8’s Shock Theatre, an event no more important for him than flicking a gnat off a soup bowl. I of course had watched too, asked his reaction to Peter Lorre, my voice impression reminding Jeff it was an actor named Lorre who played the title character. He laughed even as I realized neither Stranger on the Third Floor nor Peter Lorre would ever cross his mind again. Such was a random film watcher, for there were always more compelling amusements than a Shock Theatre, especially where it’s Saturday night and you’re age nineteen. My own priorities at college did not include going to movies, even as I collected them on 16mm, old vs. new the distinction, choice always the old. Shows were more a social outlet than an aesthetic one. It seemed nothing on current screens could challenge what had been done thirty/forty years before. We’d sit through High Plains Drifter, Live and Let Die, the “Reader’s Digest Edition” of Tom Sawyer with Johnny Whitaker (what ennui drove us to that?). Where The Sting or Young Frankenstein were regarded as the best things going, you’d not blame anyone putting movies down a list of recreations. And now fifty years hence we find options expanded past conception of days when movies were at least some folks’ idea of a best entertainment. Hollywood’s goal was always to prolong adolescence. Now adolescence has found better things to do than watch movies, much like Jeff but on mass scale thanks to diversions not to be had in his day.