When I was a child, I had no particular interest in film. I mean, sure, I liked movies, as the wear-and-tear on my old VHS copies of 101 Dalmations and The Lion King would indicate. I always enjoyed going to the local Blockbuster, browsing the racks, trying to pick out something that looked interesting out of the thousands of weird video covers staring at you from shelf after shelf after shelf.
I watched 10 Things I Hate About You to the point where, if I am watching it now, I can recite the entire script along with the movie. There are multiple jokes in 10 Things that I learnt the exact wording and cadence of before I ever understood what the words actually meant.
Given the fact that the entire film is a reasonably accurate Shakespeare riff, a lot of the jokes that I didn't understand at the time basically boil down to, "I have genitals. You also have genitals. Wouldn't it be funny if our genitals either touched or where injured in some way?"
There were plenty of movies that I liked. There were a bunch of movies that I loved. But I simply did not care about it in the same way that I do now. There were three moments throughout my teens where all this changed for me. Three moments without which I would quite possibly not be the weird, emotionally stunted film nerd I am today. Those three moments were, in chronological order:
MOMENT ONE: The shower scene in Psycho
What an incredible scream Janet Leigh has.
Being forced to watch Psycho in a High School Media Studies class was the first step. Before watching the film I had the exact same, “black and white movies are boring” thoughts that everyone has when they didn’t watch old movies as a child. After the first half hour or so, I remember thinking, “oh, okay, maybe this isn’t as boring as I thought it would be.” And then, half way into the film, they kill off the main character.
In just the creepiest goddamn scene, too.
My teenaged brain exploded.
I knew enough about film and storytelling structure as a weird child to know that you just do not do that. You don’t set up a suitcase full of money and then ignore it half way through. You don’t put the climax of your film at the midway point. And you certainly don’t spend 45 minutes establishing your protagonist’s entire convoluted backstory just to have her die at the end of the first act. It would be like if you were watching The Lion King, and the first half hour is exactly the same. Simba hangs out for a while, sings some songs, his dad dies, he runs away, he’s lying there in the middle of the desert, the buzzards are all circling him. And then, instead of Timon and Pumbaa showing up, the buzzards just proceeded to rip Simba to shreds and eat his still-warm entrails, and the rest of the movie was all about some other stupid garbage. It would be like you were watching Cinderella, and instead of the fairy godmother showing up, Cinderella just doesn’t get to go to the ball and her life continues to be exactly as miserable as it was before, the end. It would be like if you were watching a fairly conventional seeming thriller about a suitcase full of money and then halfway through the main character just gets murdered in the shower for no reason! This taught me that classic movies could be absolutely insane.
MOMENT TWO: Humphrey Bogart being cool in The Big Sleep.
Just look at that face. So hang-dog cool. He can wear a rumpled suit like nobody else.
I was watching the 1946 version of The Big Sleep in High School, doing an elective “Film Classics” subject that I had chosen specifically because it sounded like a bludge. And it was a bludge, but what a wonderful, glorious bludge it was. We were looking at film noir, watching The Big Sleep as a study of the epitome of Humphrey Bogart’s inherent coolness. I was enjoying the film well enough for the first hour or so, thinking, “well, it’s certainly better than doing actual schoolwork.” Then it got to a scene that is maybe my favourite thing that I have ever seen in a motion picture.
It’s night-time. Bogart is sneaking around a house that a bunch of criminals are occupying. He comes across one of the criminals. Both Bogey and the bad guy have their guns out. Pointed at each other. About three feet between them. Stalemate. Bogart, nonchalant as anything, tosses his gun on the ground between them, throws his hands in the air. Has a “you got me, fair play” grin on his face. The criminal bends down to pick up the gun. Bogart, swift as anything, kicks the criminal in the head, picks up the gun, and fires.
It was just… so effortless. It was like the sequence in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark where Harrison Ford shoots the crazy sword-wielding guy instead of fighting him, except Bogart is somehow even cooler. I still think about that moment roughly once a week, and it taught me that classic movies could be awesome.
MOMENT THREE: The Mexican Spitfire series.
People complain about modern-day movie posters being boring, but old posters are exactly as inane and terrible.
Psycho, The Big Sleep, and a couple other movies had taught me that maybe old movies did have something to offer after all. And so, being the weird pop-cultural knowledge-obsessive I am, I sat down to watch all the films that were considered “classics”. From Here to Eternity, Citizen Kane, Gentleman’s Agreement. And here’s the thing: they were all super boring.
I was not connecting with any of them. My opinion on some of them has changed since then – I now think Citizen Kane is a masterpiece, From Here to Eternity has some interesting stuff in there, Gentleman’s Agreement is well intentioned garbage. But at the time, I thought these were what old movies were. I thought old movies were stuffy, self-serious, slow moving, and just basically kind of tedious. “Oh well,” I thought to myself, “never mind. I guess I’m not going to become an old movie buff after all.”
But I still wasn’t sure, so every week when the new TV Guide came out, I would check what old movies were playing on ABC in the middle of the night, and I would check this against a copy of the 2000 edition of Leonard Maltin’s Film Guide. If any of them got good ratings, or sounded interesting, or had Humphrey Bogart in them, then I’d set the VCR to tape them, and watch them the next day. To be honest, given how tedious I had found so many classic movies, I was often as concerned with “does this film have a relatively short run time?” as anything else.
One day, I read in the TV Guide that a 1940 comedy called Mexican Spitfire was playing. I looked it up in Leonard Maltin – it got three stars, it only went for 67 minutes, what the hell, I’ll record it. I got home from school the next day. Rewound the tape. Pressed play. And what I was greeted to… was not great. It was a movie about a strait-laced American businessman who is married to a stereotypical fiery Latina woman, played by Lupe Velez. The film was clichéd, over the top, very stupid, and had an excessively obvious ending.
This is the level of ham we're dealing with.
But it was funny. And, more importantly, it was very easy to watch. It moved at the pace of a sitcom, and was even structured like one. It had the farcical plot of a Frasier, the culture clash comedy of a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the hang out vibe of a Friends, the silliness of a Newsradio. It spoke a language I knew, the language of situational comedy, and it did so in a breezy, enjoyable way. It was comfortable. And that was when I realised… not every OLD movie is a CLASSIC movie. And that was okay – not every piece of entertainment was aiming for greatness. Sometimes they just wanted the audience to have a good time.
From there, it was easy. I had learnt the trick – don’t try to force an old film to be important just because it was old. And it was important, at least for me, to learn it from something that was as obviously dumb and inconsequential as Mexican Spitfire. If I had attempted to learn that same lesson from something that was generally considered to be a comedy classic, I don’t think it would have worked. I think I would have approached, say, the Marx Brothers, or Buster Keaton, or even Some Like it Hot with an inherent seriousness that the works themselves would have been unable to support. After having seen Mexican Spitfire, however, I was able to watch Charlie Chaplin getting hit in the face with a ladder or whatever on its own terms, not bogged down with the weight of history and implied importance.
So if there is anyone reading this who thinks they don’t like old movies because they are all boring, you are wrong. They are not all boring. Just the boring ones are boring. You probably just haven’t seen any of the non-boring ones yet, because unless they are Singin’ in the Rain, they aren’t the ones pretentious gits like me talk about as being “great.”
Seriously, though, Singin' in the Rain is the most infectiously exuberant movie ever made. There is no way anybody could possibly not enjoy it.