
When I was a senior in college, I was certain American film culture was going to be destroyed by dilettantes who didn't really love cinema, just the sound of their ringing disapproval of "movies." I knew nothing of Cahiers du Cinema and the French effort to uplift American movies of the 1940s and '50s, from John Ford to John Garfield. All I saw--or felt, or something--was a cartoonish uplifted snoot, an overly theorized, agenda-ridden disregard for good movies. And they turned even the living body of "art," that is, foreign, films, into an embalmed corpse, coldly worshipped under glass, like Snow White or Lenin. And while all I knew of international cinema was two or three each of Felinni, Truffaut, and Kurosawa--with Grand Illusion, Beauty and the Beast, and King of Hearts off in the distance--I believed they were in danger of deadening enshrinement.
Looking back, I simply cannot pinpoint why I felt this way. I must've read something, maybe in Esquire, which could be pretty smarmy--I still rankle at the "overrated literary works" list I came across at that time: A Clockwork Orange and Slaughterhouse-Five were on it. Or someone might have said something--I had some friends who seemed to me a bit snobbish in their tastes--about Star Wars or Jaws. I honestly can't say. But in the late '70s I developed a kind of defensiveness, one for which I compensated by upholding certain movies, genres, and actors as the Truth and the Light. I can distinctly remember talking about The Fury (1978) as one should about Citizen Kane, and anyone polite enough to listen was subjected to my description of the death of some bad guys in a Tilt-a-Whirl as though it were Welles' breakfast montage. Horror films in general were my mainstay--and, given my lifelong tastes, this makes awful sense--but I also could work up a lather over actors. I remember seeing Brad Davis* in a Baretta episode (and you do not want to hear me wax rhapsodic about Robert Blake; it gives even me the creeps), and announcing he was as good as De Niro-- and then comes Midnight Express--and isn't this weird: I've just realized that both examples of American movies I've come up with in this post--and each off the top of my head--were released the year I graduated from college, 1978. It's particularly odd because of the destination for all of this:
Anthony Hopkins, whom I first noticed in the third 1978 film of the day: Magic, another genre picture I couldn't stop talking about. And it is a pretty good movie, featuring one of those post-kitten Ann-Margret performances that make my head swim--even as I write, and think of her in those baked beans in Tommy (1975), I must take the Pause That (Sort of) Refreshes. Maybe I defended a movie like Magic because it was a latter version of two animate-doll pictures of fairytale-changeling grotesquerie and shrunken-self dread I had seen in childhood: Devil Doll (1964) and Dead of Night (1945), both of which contained evil ventriloquist dummies (and both named Hugo). And I was still reeling from Karen Black's 1975 encounters with not only a Zuni fetish doll (Trilogy of Terror) but also Donald Sutherland--another actor I couldn't stop praising--as the child-stomping Homer Simpson (yikes) in The Day of the Locust. (I must watch that one again, just to resurrect those morally conflicted feelings from my first encounter with it.) So by the time I got to Magic I have both Ann-Margret and Karen Black to wrestle with--so to speak--as well as a long, dark history with the little people--perhaps, at least in movies, starting long ago and far away with Dr. Pretorius' homunculi in Bride of Frankenstein (1935). A guy I knew when I was little still remembers that I cried when Boris Karloff died; I didn't think he would ever take himself seriously when at the end of Bride he announced, "We belong dead," before pulling the switch. I can still recall the drawing I rendered of that moment, with the Monster's send-off line as voice-balloon.


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