Where Were You In '62? A Look-Back at 'American Graffiti'

Where the gang meets: Mel's drive-in

Directed by George Lucas, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola, ‘American Graffiti’ has stood the test of time as  an extremely entertaining and enjoyable film. It’s a film that stays with you for life; especially if you first saw it when you were the same age as the characters that are portrayed in the film. You will either remember -- for example --  where you were living, or -- what theatre it was where you first saw it. Or who you saw it with. Or what year of school  you were in when you first saw it – trust me: ‘American Graffiti’ has that kind of effect on a receptive audience. Made on a miniscule budget when George Lucas was a struggling film school geek, driven by Francis Coppola’s belief in the project, and featuring a cast, that, with the exception of Ron Howard, no one had ever heard of, I would argue that ‘American Graffiti’ is an ideal example of  American independent film at its most vital and creative.

Back in the days before the Ewoks, Princess Leia, or Luke Skywalker existed, George Lucas first  wrote a screenplay about a night in the life of a group of teenagers in a small California town. Unfortunately, no studio was remotely interested in his project, and financial backing was difficult to obtain. Finally, with the assistance of Coppola, Universal studios expressed a  tentative interest.  Thanks to the subsequent collaboration with  screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, as well as casting director Fred Roos, Lucas got the green light from a studio that had no confidence in the project, much less any interest in how it would be made, or received by a mass audience. Lucas ploughed ahead anyway, and the result was a totally enchanting portrait of the lives of a group of young Californians against a tantalising backdrop of America’s loss of innocence: the end of the first chapter of American rock and roll, and the beginning of the nightmare of the war in Vietnam. But the greatest enjoyment of ‘American Graffiti’ is that it captures the tentativeness, joy and despair of growing up in a way that doesn’t patronise adolescents. This makes it a virtual fountain of nostalgia  for those of us who are older, but remember  what it was like to be on the verge of adulthood, believing we had the capacity to achieve anything we chose to do in life.

Built upon a number of storylines which are ‘free-standing’, the film’s narrative structure would today be considered ahead of its time.[1] By free-standing, I mean that there are several self-contained stories within the narrative; a group of two or more characters share the same story, but are not included in others. This prevents audience interest from flagging, with so many things going on, unlike a more enclosed narrative which contains only one story that caters to all of its characters. Hence we have Steve’s story (played by Ron Howard) as he tries to convince Curt to leave ‘this turkey town’ with him, to pursue their lives  further on the east coast. Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) has his own story, as he aimlessly wanders the town at night, hitching a ride in the backs of other people’s cars as they cruise around to celebrate the end of the school year. Terry the Toad (Charlie Martin Smith) also has his own story. He is looking after Steve’s car, and picks up a pretty girl named Debbie (Candy Clark) for a night of somewhat downbeat, but funny adventures. John Milner (Paul Le Mat) is the elder of the group, an expert cruiser who complains about the  ‘slim pickins’ of the current drag and is finagled into picking up an eleven year old girl who gets him into all kinds of trouble.

  Legendary casting director Fred Roos auditioned hundreds  of young performers for the main as well as minor parts in ‘American Graffiti’, and apart from Ron Howard, known for his television work, most  of the performers were unknown to the audience. This was a stroke of casting genius (or maybe just a matter of not having the budget to pay big salaries to the performers). To have picked better known faces would have compromised the film’s freshness and turned it into a gawking parade with the audience. The film was shot on location in Petaluma, California over 27 nights. There are no daytime scenes at all. A cast member recalls how, after 27 straight nights of shooting it wasn’t hard to act being tired, when everybody actually was – tired. [2] 

Terry and Debbie on the prowl for good times

The film was completed properly in post-production. Walter Murch was responsible for the brilliant soundtrack of at least twenty songs from the era that began with the birth of rock and roll to the death of Buddy Holly, the emergence of the Beach Boys, and the pre-dating of the British invasion in the United States. Instead of a regulation score, the music is used  in a subjective fashion, in order to gain audience empathy for the emotions of the young characters. [3] The soundtrack becomes an indispensable part of ‘American Graffiti’, in a way that is unthinkable to most other movies, especially those that use mickey-mouse scoring as a way of filling up dead time on-screen.

Universal Studios continued to be un-cooperative with Lucas until it dawned on them that maybe they had a hit on their hands[3] The film-maker arranged private showings and persuaded the lower echelons of Universal to attend. They all loved what they saw and word-of-mouth escalated about the film. ‘American Graffiti’  grew to be one of the biggest moneymakers in the history of the studio. [4] The film’s arrival in Australia for example,  was heralded with a lot of publicity, so the studio must have started taking an interest in it.  It had done better than  expected when it was first released in the United States to mainly positive reviews. [5]

Wolfman Jack without his melted popsicles

 Whilst  ‘American Graffiti’ was a big hit in its day, I would argue it has become less well known as the years have flown by. George Lucas went onto bigger things; Coppola became embroiled in the making of ‘Apocalypse Now.’  Perhaps its greatest claim to fame has subsequently been the fact that Harrison Ford, who became a famous star, has a very small role, and he became better known than the other cast members who had the larger (or main), roles. Also, because it was so popular on first release, it was not a well-known fact at the time, that ‘American Graffiti’ was made on such a small budget, and everyone concerned with the project had only modest ambitions for it to succeed. [6]

I think that when you live with a film for so long, it becomes hard to remember, or understand, what your first reactions to it originally were. I only started out as a humble member of the audience, and wasn’t meant to be writing essays, unless they were about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  You know what I’m saying? There are some things you are made to love, and there are others you aren’t.  I don’t recall exactly what it was I liked the most about about ‘American Graffiti’. But since then it’s just been an accumulation of positive thoughts and feelings, ever since I first bought my own copy on video.  So, if you haven’t seen it at all, or just haven’t seen it in ages, take a look (or another look.)  And for me, taking the time out of  my Christmas break to write this post will have been worth it. Enjoy!!

The above citations are taken from the Making of documentary contained on the freely available Universal DVD.

Writers on Film: From Emile Zola to Truman Capote

Biographical portrayals of writers lives through their work

Samuel Beckett 

Of the broad range of  human activity available to us, the act of writing is probably the least exciting for a cinema audience to be asked to  observe. But it can’t be denied that there are a number of interesting movies out there, concerning themselves with the lives of famous (and infamous) members of the western literary canon.  When entertainment value should be considered, you’d  think that watching someone with a pen and paper in front of them is not exactly  a world-beating idea for a movie. Just some hack sitting down at his desk, either tearing his hair out from writers’ block, or just ‘there’, in deep prestidigitation about -- God knows what.   Despite the Paris Review interviews that have been archived for posterity, and all  the biographies, and  the autobiographies that pass themselves off as fiction, (not to say the academic research), writers seem to have us convinced that they carry out  a uniquely public function in the world. But is this assumption correct, or merely a collective creation of writers’ lofty ideas about themselves?

 I believe that literary biographies on film fall into two broad categories: one is what I  call the ‘literature as public function’ category. The other, I call the confessional category, in which the writer is more subjectively  portrayed as dissolute, drug-addled and/or incapable of functioning in normal social activities.  The first category provides the public with the reassuring cliché that writers are concerned human beings, interested in what ‘normal’ people are, what they do, and their aspirations. They lobby about important issues on behalf of ‘normal’ people. They criticise repressive social structures like the government and the Church on behalf of ‘normal’ people. Hence they push the envelope of possible human experience on behalf of ‘normal’ people. The second or ‘confessional’ category is more problematic, which to my mind makes it more interesting.  In a number of filmed biographies that use a mixture of fiction and fact, the lives of writers are mythologised and melded into our collective bourgeois experience, without us knowing, or probably caring, if the so-called facts as presented are true, or not.  

Oscar Wilde

The function of this second category is not to be historically representative, its purpose is far more important than that. Its purpose  is to enable us to  carry  on, as if what writers do is important to the social fabric of our lives as individuals. Often, its their incoherent personal involvements which entertain us; or their problems with their art; or problems with their publishers. We want their lives to entertain us and we are less encouraged to listen to their opinions about the world. In this respect their public function is less important than their lived experiences and how these nourish their work and our appreciation of it.

  As a fan of literary biography, I once recall reading, in tandem, one biography of Oscar Wilde, and another of Samuel Beckett; you could not find two more contrasting personalities. Beckett was an aesthete, quiet, shy and retiring. Before he became famous in middle age, he led an uneventful life. Wilde was notorious all his life, for his flaunting of Victorian conventions, his homosexuality and his incorrigible wit. He chose to live in the glare of the public spotlight and was never ashamed of it, but had enemies who eventually  destroyed him. Beckett on the other hand, never had an enemy, was strict about his privacy, and never sought the public gaze for any other reason than it was possible that his work could enlighten people. I’ll give you three guesses as to  which book was the most entertaining: it was the one about Wilde. His very public and intriguing life seems to have been made for biography and the biographer did not let his readers down.

What point am I trying to make exactly? It’s this: no matter how much writers may talk, they exist in a state of perpetual self-creation, so what may have been right yesterday, could be wrong the next -- it’s their entitlement for putting in so many man hours. I suppose most of us do live in a state of perpetual self-creation, but the fact is, we just don’t write about it. We live it, and let the writers write about it. And how important is their function as public mouthpieces in any case? Wouldn’t we rather see them dissolute, drunken, sleeping with as many people as they could find, and generally living a life the rest of us dare not imagine?   Despite my  reservations,  I’ve picked five of my favourite films about  how writer’s lives, and our perceptions of them become  tangled webs of fact and fiction. It will be easy to see  how my ‘public function’ category has taken a beating lately, as political correctness is being questioned and writers are being told to loosen up more so we can watch them making more (and better)  fools out of themselves.

Emile to the rescue

 The Life Of EmileZola (1937). Made after the advent of the Production Code, but before the outbreak of WWII. With contributions from at least four writers (see IMDB) and directed by William Dieterle.   Starring Paul Muni in the title role,  produced by the Warner Brothers studio, which pitched its output to a less sophisticated audience. There were a number of titles in their catalogue such as this starring Paul Muni, and considered as more prestigious pictures than the studio was used to making, such as ‘The Story of Luis Pasteur’ (1936) and ‘Juarez’ (1939).


We see the emergence of this great French writer as he struggles to find his voice in various writer’s garrets, grappling with personal and professional problems. Not very long into the film, there is a time jag and we suddenly see Zola as a rich and successful older man, with his lovely wife and genteel home. At the risk of his personal comforts, he becomes involved in the Dreyfus affair, a scandal involving a Jewish soldier transported to Devils Island for a crime he didn’t commit.

 The film is expertly executed and it becomes understandable why Warners chose to make it. Zola is portrayed as a man of integrity speaking truth to power, a selfless fighter against injustice and prejudice, in the same way that connects the better known  Warners gangster movies with the social issues of Depression-era America. ‘The Life of Emile Zola’ almost has an aspect of propaganda to it, considering it was made before the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939. It focuses   on the sensitive issues of freedom of speech and the inequities of crime and punishment.  This must have struck a chord with liberals in the 1930’s who were concerned with German aggression and what it meant in terms of whether hostilities would break out once again in Europe after an uneasy hiatus.


The film’s style reminds me of Zola’s writing, the narrative is reasonably conventional, despite the time jag just mentioned, and it does not concern itself much with Zola’s personal life, save how he sacrifices personal considerations in order that he perform the public function of assisting a man who has been falsely accused of an act he did not commit. In this way ‘The Life of Emile Zola’ becomes a hagiography to the point of us today having little choice but to believe what we see in the movie, with no other surviving  recollections or testaments that Zola’s life may have been any different. Despite this, Zola emerges only as an enigma, with little personality, merely functioning as a public mouthpiece with no other purpose than to stir the masses into action.  3 ½ stars

Another example of the all-star cast. See older post.

Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962).  The brainchild of producer Jerry Wald and made by 20^th Century Fox, with an all-star cast including Paul Newman, Susan Strasberg, and Eli Wallach, with a screenplay by A.E. Hotchner. The film  is an old-fashioned rendition of the writer-as-hero and a good example of the German bildungsroman, which concerns a writer’s coming-of-age and his ultimate decision to practice his true vocation in life. Based on the autobiographical short stories of Ernest Hemingway, we can never know the veracity of the events portrayed in the book, much less the film that its’ based upon.  Made with obvious care in the aspects of cinematography, acting and production design, the film sadly is a bit stodgy, in its efforts to mythologise Hemingway as a post-war American cultural hero.

 Richard Beymer gives a glum performance as the young Ernest, dwarfed by the scenery, and lost  amidst the sturm and drang of family conflict and the wider tragedy of the First World War’s negative impact on an entire generation of young people. These Hemingway labelled as the ‘lost generation’  because of their experience of European indifference to what I would (perhaps unkindly) label  American war neurosis. A deeper examination of this phenomenon  would have been welcome, but sadly the narrative doesn’t concern itself with themes of such importance. Instead ‘Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man’,  is all around the ballpark and doesn’t seem to be about anything in particular. As  literary biography, it is sadly lacking in direction or purpose, save the limited criteria  to transcribe Hemingway’s stories into a narrative that the audience will be able to understand. I can’t deny though, that it works as conservative Hollywood entertainment, reflective of its time and place.  Whilst  disappointing and not terribly inspiring, it  endures as a testament of sorts to an antiquated notion of so-called manhood, and Hemingways’ undying commitment to such a notion in which he firmly believed.  3 stars

Jane Fonda plays Lillian Hellman in 'Julia'.

Julia (1977). One of legendary director  Fred Zinnemann’s last feature films, ‘Julia’ is a story originally from the collection ‘Pentimento’ published in the ‘70s by Lillian Hellman in her emeritus years as an acclaimed American playwright and screen writer. It was in turn adapted for the screen by Alvin Sargent and stars Jane Fonda as Lillian and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia. Some critics tossed ‘Julia’ off as being too effete and old fashioned. But the subject matter is compelling and to make it more so,  it’s  told from a woman’s point of view, which so rarely happens in any movie, much less in the genre of literary biography.  The story is told in flashback and concerns  a reminiscence of how Lillian Hellman once did a favour for a friend, and how this favour put her in great danger. Hellman was Jewish and was required to pass through Germany with a sensitive package at a time when Jews in Germany were the scapegoats of the Nazis. Nevertheless, out of friendship and a sense of public duty, Lillian succeeds in her task. The rightness of the task, or even its ultimate purpose, is left up in the air as the narrative jumps in time to explain Julia’s sad fate.  Lillian is unable to forgive what happened, nor  to forget what Julia’s friendship meant to her.

 The sequence in which Lillian boards the train in Moscow to make a trip into Germany  makes for a lot of suspense, the audience alerted to the fact that it may be possible that she will be prevented by the Nazis from carrying out her task. If you’re familiar with Hellman’s memoirs, you will be aware of her radical political stance in the 1930’s and how her life was detrimentally affected when partner Dashiell Hammett served a prison term for being a communist sympathiser. She belonged to a generation of writers who fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and supported Russia against Germany when war broke out in 1939.  It seems natural that ‘Julia’ is primarily concerned with a writer’s attempts, in her own small way,  to be part of a public political process which has always in the past been the bastion of male participation. ‘Julia’ wears its feminism on its sleeve in a method which is audience-friendly, so that no one could possibly be offended by what it’s trying to say. In a world of limitations, I guess this is necessary if you want to get your point across without being killed by the critics, or at the box office in the process.


‘Julia’ actually exists within the frame of a dual narrative, in which the private lives of the two characters are as important as their ambitions and fortunes in the public arena. Personally, what I found the most appealing about this film was its portrayal of the private friendship of two women, and how that friendship sustained them through wars, and other great moments in history.  4 stars

 Johnny Depp as Wilmot, the libertine of the title

The Libertine (2004). Written by Stephen Jeffreys and directed by Laurence Dunmore, ‘The Libertine’ is the story of John Wilmot, 2^nd Earl of Rochester, who lived during the 17^th century of Charles II, restored  to the throne of England in 1660. Alternately a royal favourite, who was banished from court for causing offence and embarrassment to the monarch, the Earl’s poetry became better known after his death at the age of 33 years, due to his alcholism, provocative behaviour  and sexual proclivities. ‘The Libertine’ is by turns, serious and mocking, as it attempts to convince the audience of the pointlessness of the Earl’s adventures, since, as a man who does not believe in love, he can never be a romantic hero, but is, instead, a monster created from his own massive sexual appetites. He rejects absolutely, the  conventional society of which he is a part, but which he cannot bring himself to acknowledge. The women in his life, played by Rosamund Pike and Samantha Morton do their best to assuage the Earl’s debilitating fears and desperation, as he loses Charles’ support and begins a downward spiral of alcoholism and familial rejection, leading him eventually to death’s door. From this description, you may ascertain as to the lack of veracity of the argument that the Earl of Rochester had any interest in bettering the state of his society. (He certainly didn’t.)

Mock up of famous Avedon shot for the film

 Writers in 17^th century England struggled along as best they could, with a combination of royal patronage, and family money, as they were usually  high-born aristocrats who weren’t expected to work. This goes to show that a different context existed for the writer in the 17^th century. They did not exist for the betterment of society, but merely for its entertainment.  ‘The Libertine’ is  best described as an example of confessional biography. It deals with the Earl’s struggles with his inner demons and his desire for his work to gain some kind of acceptance, if not from the ‘merrie gang’ he socialises with,  then at least from his royal patron. ‘The Libertine’ is an excellent example of in-your-face confessional.  It’s an entertaining re-imagining of what it must have been like for a man with the Earl of Rochester’s intelligence to be penned by convention, and ultimately unable to come to grips with his innately creative nature and aspirations.  4 stars

Capote (2006). Directed by Bennett Miller, screenplay by Dan Futterman with material based upon the biography by Gerald Clarke. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives an understated but effective performance as Truman Capote who, whilst researching the murder of a family in Kansas, forges a relationship with one of the alleged killers, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jnr). Capote needs plenty of material for his book, but there’s something the killers aren’t giving away, and it’s the one thing he needs, but I have no intention of revealing  it, since it’s the moral pivot the movie revolves around.  Initially, I found ‘Capote’ puzzling. It’s pace is leisurely,  not hurried. The camera doesn’t seem to move much and there are many long takes with little MTV-variety cutting. It’s very lack of a judgmental narrative made me wonder exactly what the film was trying to say, or, on the other hand, trying to avoid saying. This elliptical approach was annoying at first, but then grows on you, as you begin to notice small gestures, and make connections which serve to illustrate Truman’s deepest feelings about the murders, and his ambivalent relationship with Perry.

Obscure purposes aside, ‘Capote’ is a fascinating journey concerning the nature of the artistic process, and the price it exacts upon writers, (but not only them),  aware that their words have the capacity to maybe hurt people, but go on writing anyway. The writer’s  public function in the 20^th century  as seekers after truth is blurred by the ongoing redundancy of popular culture. It chews up and spits out information, seemingly for the sake of it, with little or no thought for the lives that are detrimentally affected in the process, and one of the lives in this case, happens to be that of the writer himself.  ‘Capote’ is an elegant, and elegiac, examination of the writing process in microcosm, over a period of years in which the work is created, produced, introduced to the world and finally left to rest. Unfortunately, there is little left of the protagonists, or the creator, to live to tell the real tale. But at least it’s a good movie. 4 ½ stars

Barbarism From Whose Side: The Intellectuals or the Masses?

Review of ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ by Prof John Carey

T.S. Eliot sets out one of his plays as a diagram

 I found ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’  (as is often my wont) whilst browsing in a bookstore, uncertain of what subject I was interested in exploring further. Playing devil’s advocate with my own soul, I interpreted it on a very personal, and confrontational level. Giving myself more credit than I deserved, I felt I had reason to be offended by the premise of an elite group who did not have the noblest motives, in their desire for social and intellectual control of the rest of the population. But there are times when I am not the most accurate barometer of my own purposes. Rather, what this book did for me was to confirm my deepest fears about the nature of intellectualism itself. As a result, I have opened my eyes a little wider in order to observe that class-based societies are in and of themselves, evil, and intellectuals (of all political beliefs) only exist in order to create a consensus that permits  nasty things to occur without a stir or whimper from the rest of us. I grabbed onto this book for dear life, knowing full-well that it explored a decadent period of history in a far away place that I really didn’t have anything to do with. But the way it castigates these so-called great minds, who were deluded into thinking they were superior to everyone else,  appealed to my Australian sense of fairness, and I guess my own youthful sense of idealism.

Who else but D.H. Lawrence

‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’  is an excellent book which made me wonder about my taste in reading, and whether it had turned me into an right-wing intellectual snob, promoting  the benefits of eugenics and the advantages of having Adolf Hitler in power in Germany.  It seems that my literary heroes such as T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and H.G. Wells, in their attempts to pass themselves off as big brains,  were essentially  cold-blooded elitists who didn’t give a damn about the public -- or the term which I prefer, originally coined by Edmund Burke -- ‘the swinish multitudes’. Between 1880 and 1939, a yawning gulf existed between the upper and lower echelons of society in Britain as well as the rest of Europe and  Prof. Carey makes an entire book out of the fact.  A number of writers, despite a benign image of goodwill they fostered toward the rest of humanity, were merely a grubby and insalubrious group of elitist charlatans. They actively encouraged a vicious and reactionary mind-set of  perpetual and fatalistic class bias in order to have their privileged place within society unquestioned into  fruitful perpetuity. I had to investigate further.

Professor Carey aims  accusations against  Yeats, Wells, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence among others. These accusations mainly concern the writers’ shabby treatment of those ‘not in the know’. Who these people are, Carey cannot ascertain, only that they are probably poor, living in the London suburbs, and attempting to make a paltry living at anything that their betters claim is not ‘art’, however their betters may define what ‘art’ is, exactly.  This lumpen mass of proletarians, or whatever you want to call them,  read newspapers and go to movies in an attempt to make sense of their limited lives. The fact that their lives are limited does not move the intellectuals  to  compassion. Instead, they react with outright condemnation. They complain that there are too many people in the world and believe that this creates a mass kind of culture that interferes with their livelihood and their belief in themselves as an intellectual elite.  To highbrows looking across the gulf, it seemed that the masses were not merely degraded and threatening, but also not fully alive. [1] p.10.

 The ‘science’ of eugenics was created as a means for writers such as Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot to bemoan the lack of an intellectual aristocracy of which they could be part, in order to stem the rise of the mediocre, and those they regarded as inferior and retarded. [2] p.13.  Instead of supporting the concept of universal education, the intellectuals did everything in their power to discourage and undermine it, tantamount to deliberately making their writing so obscure and irrational that it was almost impossible for anyone (presumably with or without an education),  to understand. [3] p.17.  The self-proclaimed theorist of Modernism, Spanish writer Ortega Y Gasset argued that modernist art acted like a social agent which separated people into two different castes, for the purpose of allowing the elite to distinguish themselves from the drab mass of society. [4] ibid.

The rest of the book is a well-researched and written argument that points to the elitism of a  number of revered writers and how such a mindset  can be directly linked to the rise of European totalitarianism and the persecution of the Jews.  The final chapter entitled ‘Wyndham Lewis and Hitler’ is a devastating critique on the similarities between Hitler’s ideas about culture and those of the English intellectuals of the same period. The Americans possessed cars, clothes and refrigerators, but the Third Reich boasted 270 opera houses, giving it the right to look down on American philistinism and crass materialism, an attitude shared by many English writers and intellectuals. [5]p. 198-99.

Wyndham Lewis was also a painter

 Needless to say, these attitudes seem antiquated to us today, and I was shocked at the pointedness of Carey’s attack on such writers as Lawrence and Yeats, who have been canonised for years by the universities, and our WASP first world society at large. I also had the same reaction when I once  wrote an essay on the life of German composer Richard Wagner. I was shocked to discover that he wrote anti-semitic pamphlets in his own lifetime, and also that his second wife flew the Nazi flag at their Bayreuth residence out of  admiration and support of Adolf Hitler, his rise to power which Wagner himself never lived to witness.

 I think that books and investigations of this kind have the capacity to inherently change the way we think about the people whom we view  as having a talent that is somehow unique, and superior to anything we would be capable of doing ourselves. I recall wading through the letters of outrage published in the Age Monthly Review from readers who were convinced that these accusations of Wagner being an unattractive individual -- at the very least -- were not only superfluous when it came to judging his music, but downright slanderous, that is, if Wagner had been alive to answer to them. With time however, this new information becomes accepted as part of the textual rendering of the person’s life.  It becomes  possible for any individual interested enough to either accept this new information as fact, or deny it for their own personal reasons. To accuse the investigator of being intolerant of the person in question’s own beliefs or the times in which he lived, or  attempting to  be too politically correct. cannot stand up if the information is well researched and argued in a convincing way. I believe this is the case with Cary’s book.

 ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ galvanised me in its own way, concerning the nature of social elites, their purpose, and the people we inadvertently choose to rule over us.

My footnotes are taken from 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' by John Carey, London, Faber & Faber, 1992.

The Intellectuals and the Masses

Apocalypse Tomorrow: The end of the World on Film

  The end of the world on film can be a risky business.  What’s the point of making a film about the end of the world when it could actually happen and there’d be no one left to patronise your movie? So what if you’d made a correct prediction; what good would that be? The end of the world is no longer merely the subject of apocalyptic hearsay, it is a serious issue,  especially when separated from the religious realm to which it has been relegated since (at least) the middle ages. The reason for this is that nuclear holocaust is an apocalypse of our own making and perhaps this is what makes it a good subject for drama.


 However audiences do not go to see movies to be confronted by reality, since instead they wish to escape from it. Serious issue movies walk the tightrope between sending out positive messages about humanity and at the same time, providing a certain entertainment value. So my theory is, if you can make a movie about the end of the world that’s entertaining, but you don’t win any awards for it,  then at least you should be remembered for attempting to walk that tightrope.

The movies in this brief list  are not science fiction. You could maybe class ‘The Seventh Sign’ as science fiction. But more of that later.  My worst   sins of omission are  War Game, and  Testament. I have seen both of these,  but so long ago, I can’t remember enough about them to write anything that would be of  interest. ‘Threads’ and ‘Miracle Mile’ I haven’t seen, but look forward to seeing in the future,  so these will also unfortunately be omitted.

As you may have figured out by now,  classifying films into a particular niche or genre is a big deal to me. What is omitted has the opportunity to become just as important as what’s not. So there’s no disaster films.  No Deep Impact,  Mad Max, or the Book of Eli. Or 28 Days Later. One of my glaring omissions is ‘Dr Strangelove’ because it’s a comedy. I don’t like it, to be honest. I think it’s too forced and obvious, as well as a tad on the cheap side. People may laugh, but it doesn’t make them feel particularly comfortable to be doing it.  Neither are there any titles that concern themselves with life AFTER the end of the world, (a concept invented by successful horror writers and the military industrial complex of Hollywood. Re-imagining  life after the holocaust makes some writers rich, but it can also lead to a misunderstanding of the basic concept of apocalypse. It is supposed to mean after all, that there will be NO survivors. But I digress.)

 I am referring to two particular examples of this sub-genre, ‘The Stand’, a television movie, and the Will Smith version of ‘I Am Legend’, and its cop-out ending, the rest  ruined by too many compromises and  its overuse of pointless Computer Generated Imagery. All  these titles are science fiction I know, but they act as a reminder of what the films I actually want to discuss,  deal with. That is, nuclear war in a realistic context, and how these titles engage the audience with important questions such as the existence  of a larger  morality,  the nature of political expediency, the advantages and disadvantages of human progress,  and other less fanciful, more earthbound  topics of interest than your normal borderline horror film with an apocalyptic scenario.

Hollywood does not have an easy time attempting to fictionalise something as disturbing as the prospect of the human race’s permanent annihilation.  In real life, the more strained diplomatic relations become, the easier it is to trot out lists like this, whose titles may have nostalgic value, but offer little  explanation of the new disputes on the world stage that have nothing in common with what’s gone on before. There is consensus for example, that the Cold War is  over; so what have the issues concerning that period in history  to do with us at this moment? There’s  sabre rattling going on right now as I write this,  concerning Iran and Russia, but the sabre rattling has nothing to do with  me  writing this particular post at this particular time. I have no control over world events and I don’t pretend to be a Cassandra, (or should I say snake oil salesman.) So, for the hell of it, (and if we’re all still here by the finish),  these are my favourite films about nuclear apocalypse and the end of civilisation as we know it today, Hollywood-style.  You may also find a  useful critical article here about The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, a book about apocalyptic literature and other issues of interest concerning literary narrative outside my scope as a humble blogger.

On the Beach (1959): The films of Stanley Kramer are being reappraised these days,  mostly in their favour, and I think this is one of his best efforts. Based upon the novel by Nevil Shute, it has Anthony Perkins speaking with an Australian accent, and Ava Gardner wondering why she bothered to go to Melbourne to make a film about the end of the world. The population of the northern hemisphere has been decimated by an unexplained nuclear exchange, and Australia waits for the radiation to be blown in its direction, as it lays in wait as the last bastion of human civilisation. Gregory Peck is solid but unremarkable as an American submarine commander landed in Melbourne, and Fred Astaire is very touching as an Aussie scientist who feels partly responsible for what’s happened. The plot is a little slim, but these people are simply waiting to die, and I for one felt empathy for their situation.


  There are no pyrotechnics,  nor are there any big dramatic scenes of panicking people doing emotionally stressed out things. It seems that people die in their beds, and a hush of deathly quiet comes over a city once it’s been contaminated by radiation. ‘On the Beach’ is less interested in politics and/or history and more concerned with emotional trauma involving what it feels like to know that you are not a survivor at all, but just another victim. This is a downbeat message, but ‘On the Beach’ is admirable in that  it doesn’t pull its punches. It’s as honest as it was possible to be,  about the devastation which a worldwide  nuclear war would unleash, and the cruelty of a distant power elite who are never seen, but are the cause of this human catastrophe.   4 ½ stars

The Day After (1983): This was originally made for television, but ‘The Day After’ has its own stature as fine piece of work and at the time of its broadcast, the highest rated TV movie yet made up to that time. Set in the seemingly bucolic American state of Kansas, its folksy feel is undercut by a feeling of apocalyptic dread when revealed that a vast population has been set up for death by a smattering of nuclear installations that will be struck by  Russian missiles if World War III ever breaks out, which of course it does. There are a number of different storylines and sub-plots. But the story mainly concerns the survival of a farming family, and  an idealistic doctor (Jason Robards) who somehow carries on despite losing his family and home. There are a number of memorable set pieces including the onset of the Russian nuclear attack, taking place on a crowded highway of people in their cars attempting to leave ground zero. Another near the end of the film seems like a homage to the sequence in ‘Gone with the Wind’ that has Scarlett O’Hara tending to literally hundreds of sick and wounded Confederate soldiers. To me, this sequence is a superb visual metaphor for everything the film has been trying to say, the terrible cost of political brinkmanship in a crisis situation, and how a combination of government negligence and stupidity can mean the end of humanity as we know it. 


 The makeup is very good, in that injured people really seem that way and they haven’t been made up – their physical injuries somehow equate with what has happened to them and it’s not meant to be pretty.   ‘The Day After’ issues a disclaimer of sorts  at the end of the film, by warning the viewer that what they’ve just witnessed is nothing compared to the reality of what would happen if there was actually a nuclear attack against the United States. Directed by Nicholas Meyer with an excellent ensemble cast including Steve Gutenberg, Amy Madigan, and local Kansas people who were cast for the sake of the piece’s authenticity.  4 ½ stars

The Seventh Sign (1989): Not a big hit when first released, ‘The Seventh Sign’ was initially  dismissed as a load of religious hokum. This may be so, but its hokum  well produced and acted, with a believable and appealing female protagonist in the person of Demi Moore who gives a performance that would  best be described as heartfelt. She plays wife to a yuppie lawyer in Los Angeles, and a prospective mother who falls pregnant, but is worried about carrying the child to full-term. In walks a Christ-like figure who wants to rent their spare room, played by Jurgen Prochnow. Meanwhile,  husband Michael Biehn is struggling to save a man from execution who murdered his parents, his only defence being that it was a sin before God that they go on living without some kind of divine intervention. A young Jewish biblical scholar is consulted by Demi, in order that she brush  up on some of the pertinent prophecies as set down in the Revelation of St John.  Demi becomes convinced that the end of the world is nigh, and that the guff of souls is empty because God does not wish us carry on any longer. Curiously enough, not being religious myself,  I fell for ‘The Seventh Sign’ hook, line and sinker when I first saw it at the cinema.


 There are a number of compelling and beautifully photographed sequences of nature gone awry in various parts of the world, indicating that all is not well and that God is not  happy with us. These scenes are undercut by the constant flow of television images in the couple’s living room,  of constant war and unrest in a mad slaughterhouse of a world in which time may be running out, and divine intervention could provide relief to all our woes. I found this take on apocalypse within its original context of divine retribution compelling and strangely believable, because I think that director Carl Schultz does such a good job of making it  audience friendly. Personally I wouldn’t label ‘The Seventh Sign’ as either science fiction or religious fiction. It’s more a genre horror film that concerns itself with the end of the world in a refreshing and interesting way that is as thought provoking as it is entertaining.    3 ½ stars

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The Bedford Incident (1965): Starring (and produced by) Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier, Martin Balsam and Eric Porter, ‘The Bedford Incident’ makes the prospect of nuclear confrontation seem as suspenseful as it is onerous. Set on an American naval military boat as it patrols Arctic waters on the lookout for Russian submarines, ‘The Bedford Incident’ takes place at the height of Cold War tensions. It   illustrates a possible scenario where we have the case of a commander who is unfit to command, along with a demoralised and weary crew, pushed to their limits and liable to make disastrous mistakes because they are simply…human.  The film is carried along by audience expectations of how long it will take for someone in the crew to crack, or for the commander (Widmark) to stop playing a game of cat and mouse with a Russian sub he will not allow to surface.  A showdown seems inevitable,  with one side or the other pressing the nuclear button, thus starting a nuclear war between Russia and America. 


The macho atmosphere of all the guys together using a lot of technical, naval language running around giving each other orders is a bit of a turn-off, but this is undeniably  exciting and a reasonably thought-provoking film regarding first-strike capability and which side should have the right to claim it as their own.  By the last scene, the audience is mentally drained, and has pause to wonder what difference it makes who strikes first, if the result will eventually lead to annihilation. If I’m not mistaken, the James Harris who directed this is the same James Harris who produced a number of partner Stanley Kubrick’s films. It’s an excellent effort and I think still relevant today, when one considers the broken minds, as well as bodies that have tragically resulted from the extended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  4 stars.

Failsafe (1964): The brainchild of produce Walter Bernstein, ‘Failsafe’  calls into question the nature of computerised warfare in which the parts have built-in  malfunction, and can inadvertently cause provocation toward the so-called enemy where none was originally intended. There seems to be a lot of trauma in the military, caused by their awareness of their responsibility.  They are protecting us in spite of ourselves, but not doing a very good job of it in the process.  Dan O’Herlihy and Walter Matthau represent opposing sides of the coin as respectively a military dove who believes in nuclear containment, and a civilian hawk who believes in the inevitability of nuclear war and the responsibility of America to rise out of the ashes and build a brave new world after. Washington’s political elite are portrayed as a bunch of careless hedonists who use the prospect of war as fodder for their pointless and trite dinner party conversations, whilst the rest of the population is left helpless in the face of possible destruction by its own side.


 ‘Failsafe’ is for a Hollywood movie, extremely downbeat and austere. I guess for a film about the end of the world, you couldn’t ask for more than that. An ensemble cast put together by director Sidney Lumet are all exemplary (listen to the audio commentary on the DVD for Lumet’s illuminating comments about the cast and other aspects of the making of the film.) This is probably the big daddy of all films concerning the end of the world, and for good reason. O’Herlihy’s dream of being the matador at the beginning of the film becomes a fulfilled prophecy by the end, and ‘Failsafe’ is perhaps the only commercial American film that does justice to its subject matter.  5 stars.

I gotta go to the zoo Mac. There's a tiger having a birthday party.

The China Syndrome (1979): As a suspense thriller about an accident at a nuclear power plant, and how an attempted cover-up is exposed by a television crew working for a local station, I would propose that The China Syndrome is an excellent film about the possibility of the end of the world, and how it would transpire.   Made, and then released at the time of a real accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the film initially caused a stir at a time when there was a significant anti-nuclear lobby attempting to limit the power and influence of the nuclear industry in the United States.  The  death of anti-nuclear activist Karen Silkwood in mysterious circumstances is reflected in an attempt on the life of one of the characters in this film in a sobering evocation of what can happen to whistle blowers when they dare to tell the truth to power.


 Looking back on ‘The China Syndrome’, to portray the film as merely a thriller would be doing it a disservice.  It is also a serious reflection on the need of a vigilant media in order for a democratic society to operate effectively. Among other things, The China Syndrome exposes the scary lack of public accountability within an industry that exists for profit, without taking into consideration the safety and well-being of its consumers, who are after all, citizens with their rights. Starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, all three who have their big moments, but Lemmon was a revelation to those of us who were only familiar with his comedic roles. Everything about ‘The China Syndrome’ works, and even the idea of the possibility of a ‘china syndrome’ situation happening in future, was enough for many of us to start building bomb shelters. Or at least move to Tasmania. 4 stars.

Creatures in Love Part I: Road Runner and Coyote

An existential desert back-drop as Coyote ponders next move

 I have a theory that the Coyote is in love with the Road Runner, but being totally inept,  he could never divert the  Road Runner’s attention away from the road. The Road Runner exists purely for the purpose of running along a stretch of desert road that lasts only as long as the running time of the story, (that is, cartoon),  but as far as Coyote is concerned, exists in eternity.  The Road Runner has an almost existential purpose of looking straight ahead, neither left nor right, in his determination to stick to his schedule of getting from one place to the next, inA a pointless journey of which only he knows its destination and purpose. The audience as well as the Coyote are well aware of this, but are compliant, in awe of the Road Runner’s determination to live his own life.

Did you ever see such running shoes?

 To Coyote, Road Runner is the prey, but Road Runner is blissfully unaware of this.  Hence the Coyote exists in a state of perpetual frustration, making a fool of himself, as Road runner shows off his superior attitude to life by constantly and easily escaping from the Coyote’s childish attempts at capture. Road Runner is modest, but also a show-off, with his expert ability to survive the travails and pointless hijinks  of the Coyote, always  at great costs to the Coyote’s physical well-being, whilst the Road Runner escapes without any injury. The well-being of the Coyote is even of less concern to the Coyote himself. He does not seem to care what happens to him, or what he does to himself, in order that he captures the Road Runner. The prize of his effort seems to be that once this has been achieved, all will be well, and the Coyote will be happy and fulfilled.

Glue on the road only worked if it was a truck

 Superficially at least, it appears that the  Coyote is chasing the Road Runner for food, but I think this is a diversionary tactic, in order  to make Coyote out to be smarter than he is.   Whether he catapults  himself out of a giant sling slot in the direction of  Road Runner; whether he positions himself in front of a giant truck only to get run over by  Road Runner; all of this points to the Coyote’s obsession with catching that which is the most inaccessible and closed off to him, thus the most inviting. Road Runner appears to be the only food supply there is.  There is nothing else in the desert available for the Coyote to eat.  A few empty tin cans are on the ground, which the Coyote kicks away in derision, knowing that his well-being is not being  provided for in the most rudimentary fashion.

Another ridiculous contraption doomed to failure

 The Road Runner is constantly oblivious to the existence of the Coyote. He is unafraid of the Coyote; he is alone in the wilderness, cut off from the Coyote and their desert backdrop in a fashion that is almost attractive in its singularity. The Road Runner seems perfectly calm and at ease. He is almost Zen-like in his acceptance of his fate as a cartoon character who exists only inso far as he is a moveable pencil drawing. In contrast, Coyote lives in a state of perpetual and constant dissatisfaction. He is not one with his environment. He constantly uses dynamite in an effort to attract Road Runner’s attention,  which leaves their desert environment in a state of mayhem, as Coyote  attempts to track Road Runner’s whereabouts,  which are always unsuccessful and ridiculous in both their rudimentary planning and execution.

 The Road Runner constantly rises above the Coyote’s efforts with a silly pointing of the tongue, but with dignity. He  silently berates the audience as well as  the Road Runner for their ineffectuality and inability to grasp his superior nature and ability. Does the Road Runner have any feelings for the Coyote? We will never know, but I think it’s certainly possible -  it’s the romantic in me.

Dynamite was often the funniest

The travails of the Coyote in attempting to capture the Road Runner exists in our collective imagination as a state of Nietzscheian  perpetual (or eternal),  recurrence. Every cartoon is exactly the same as the last. Like the trope of a horror movie that gets used by all  the best directors because they have nothing better to do than steal from the film which used the sequence originally. 

The Road Runner and Coyote also remind me of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Their love for each other will never be consummated; they don’t die but are both virgins and will never end up caring for anyone else. They still exist in our minds  after the story has been told over and over again, like a folk tale a Serbian peasant might once have told  his  children at bedtime.

Whatever Became of the All-Star Cast?

Whatever became  of the ‘all-star cast’? This is the question I ask myself in moments of unease when I look my DVD collection up and down, wondering if I will ever decide what movie it is I want to watch next. Should it be ‘The Towering Inferno’ or ‘The Poseidon Adventure’? ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ or ‘Mulholland Drive’?  And why is it with me that escapism usually wins out over art? I guess I was programmed that way, and I’m old enough now  not to complain and just enjoy it. 

Lewis who?

Once upon a time, movies were one of the  few sources of popular  entertainment available for the mass public. Television reached its zenith of popularity in the fifties, sixties and seventies, and it was  popular to the extent of eating into the movie industry’s profits in the fifties and sixties.  What about when going to the movies, (apart from following your favourite sporting team) was the chosen pastime for the majority of people, not only in America, but for people in virtually every corner of the globe who could afford to while away a couple of hours at their local flicks when they had the time or inclination? 

I recall a story my mother once told me, about maybe the first  bizarre case of mass audience stalking. Gary Cooper, who was a big star during the Depression was in a film called ‘The Plainsman”, and at the end he gets shot in the back by the baddie. Gary Cooper always played the hero and his fans loved him.  Gary’s fans found out where the actor who played the part of the baddie lived, and harassed him constantly day and night because he was the one who had killed ‘their Gary’. Apparently they were very upset.  Such was the power of movies to sway audiences who, because of economic circumstances, were in thrall of their heroes on the big screen to a degree that seems naïve to us today. Also, it goes to show how performers have always been treated as commodities by the Hollywood studio system, and also by the public.

 

Great silent screen star Mabel Normand

The movie industry is extremely  profitable, especially  in periods of the greatest economic hardship. I don’t have the box office receipts at my fingertips, but  it seems to be a provable fact  that any leisure activity that can take people’s minds off their problems is  bound to make its investors better off. This sounds like profiteering in the harsh economic climate of today, but a buck was a buck in those days, and there were no politically correct liberals running around telling people that it was a sin to make money off people when they could ill-afford it.  

In the days of silents it was discovered that audiences attended movies to see people that they like to watch on-screen. They wanted to know their names and they wanted to see them in as many movies as possible. Consequently the world was introduced to  such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Lon Chaney and lesser lights   known  by only the most ardent specialists in the genre of silents in the present-day.  To collect all of them all together on the one project must have seemed a difficult task, and the idea of assembling an all-star cast began proper with the advent of sound movies.

Silent movies aside, (the films of D.W. Griffith immediately spring to mind, but since I haven’t seen them I cannot include them in this discussion), I would say that the first  attempts to produce movies with all-star casts occurred as America was struggling with the economic disaster of the Great Depression. 

The book-ended films ‘Dinner at Eight’ and ‘Grand Hotel’ were  both produced by the MGM studio in the 1930’s. Both these  are what you would call comedy-dramas. The plots concern the private lives of rich socialites, down-at-heel actors and  elderly matriarchs, ‘disparate’ characters brought together for a dinner, or conversely, reservations at an exclusive hotel. The majority of Americans were poor and out-of-work at the time, and they fell for these films hard,  presumably for the escapism they offered in a time of economic despair and uncertainty. 

Irving Thalberg is credited with creating the concept of the ‘all-star’ cast since he was MGM’s most important producer, but he never formally asked for a credit on any film he worked on.  MGM was the studio in the ‘30s with the majority of the prestige. It had many stars signed to long-term contracts, and it must have seemed like a good idea to get them to work together.  Both movies were a big success with the public and the ‘all-star cast’ was launched onto an unassuming public. ‘Grand hotel’ and “Dinner at Eight’   were cast with  major names  such as Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, John and Lionel Barrymore, a young Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler. This forms an important leitmotif of the all-star cast: few of the performers just mentioned are remembered in the popular imagination today, but  as interesting relics of a by-gone era, no matter how popular they may have been in their own lifetimes. 

The next film of any note   with an all-star cast was  ‘Gone With the Wind’, produced by David O Selznick as an independent producer.  Granted, Vivien Leigh was a new discovery after a much-publicised search for the ideal actress to play Scarlett O’Hara, so she was hardly a major star when she was picked for the part.  Many  better  known actresses were screen tested but were turned down for various and probably, long-forgotten reasons.  But there are a number of others in the cast who were well known to the public including Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Hattie McDaniel and Thomas Mitchell. 

The first movie I ever got taken to see

To flash forward twenty or so years on, Roadshow movies often used to have all-star casts and  depended heavily upon  casting  a number of well-known performers in the roles which would attract an audience. Film in America  had passed its pioneering period. Movies were coming to be regarded as a serious medium. To get audiences interested in  more serious subject matter, (adaptations of Broadway plays and books for example),  big casts of famous actors were assembled to ensure the studios managed to recoup their losses.  Roadshow movies were  initially conceived by an individual producer or Hollywood studio to have a big cast and a big budget. They were especially  made to a certain time-frame designated in pre-production,  in order that exhibitors, (ie the people who owned the cinemas),  could fit in a certain amount of showings per day that would make them a profit.

 

Forty, fifty years ago, people had stricter hours of work and could only go to the movies either at night or on the weekend. The busiest nights and the weekends  were called ‘no free list’ periods where booking was essential, and you just couldn’t show up to buy a ticket.  These were the days, when, after a movie was withdrawn from exhibition it would take years for it show up on live-to-air television (at least where I come from). Video tape was not made for domestic consumption, cable TV was merely an interesting idea, and digital entertainment was non-existent. There was also a certain snobbery involved that appealed to the upwardly mobile, in that you could boast to your neighbours about getting in to see ‘Spartacus’ on a Saturday night with the kids, when maybe the neighbours had tried but been unable to.

 Talented directors, most notably David Lean, were attracted to this more showier and commercial style of filmmaking than they had previously been used to. ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ were phenomenally successful  with audiences and critics and they boasted big casts of well-known actors, such as William Holden, Peter O’Toole, Anthony Quinn, and  Alec Guiness,  Also, the stories and themes were grandiose. They were ideal  middle-brow entertainment for undiscerning audiences, or audiences that were thirsty for more substance to their entertainment. 

Stop him! He's got a bomb!

Roadshow movies  gave the medium a certain reputation for prestige that it may not have known previously, and the ‘epic’ became Hollywood’s ideal export to the rest of the world. ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’; ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’; ‘The Ten Commandments’; ‘Ben-Hur’; ‘King of Kings’; ‘Doctor Zhivago’. These are just a handful of the roadshow films that dragged audiences back into the movie theatres and away from their television sets and with their all-star casts made money (hopefully but not always!)  for the Hollywood studios (and overseas investors) who funded them.  The roadshow film was also an effective method of displaying Hollywood’s superiority to television, with its normally 70mm ratio, stereo sound, big casts and grandiose and important historical, biblical or political stories.

Steve McQueen: 'when will you architects ever learn?'

As the seventies dawned, Hollywood seemed less interested in making roadshow films. For one thing, they were expensive, and sometimes took years to make. They involved extensive pre-production and filming away from the studio at remote locations around the world, in difficult conditions for the cast and crew. No matter how much mystique surrounded these epic movies, if they didn’t turn a profit, well, then, what was was the point of making them? Audience expectations also changed to include films that were ‘smaller’, and less influenced by the financial aspirations of the Hollywood studios.

We didn't know a swarm of bees could be so scary. And they weren't.

But all-star casts never really went out of fashion, and when the disaster movie was born, there seemed to plenty of takers for roles in films such as ‘Airport’ and its sequels, ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ ‘Earthquake’ 'The Swarm'  and a number of others. ‘Airport’, arguably one of the worst films to gain a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars, kicked off this cycle of disaster films, with a cast heavily publicised as stupendous. But sadly, many of the players are less well known today. The cast includes Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Helen Hayes, Jean Seberg and Jacqueline Bisset. ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, which I happen to think is a very good film, has a excellent cast including Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Stella Stevens and others less well known today. ‘The Towering Inferno’ may be the best known of this cycle simply because of its cast including Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, William Holden and others. Sadly this cycle of disaster films reminds us of the ready-made redundancy of popular culture, when performers can be relegated to supporting parts or even to the scrap-heap as they become older, do not win any awards, or are less interested in making themselves better known to the public.

Iconic Poseidon Adventure poster

I for one, am nostalgic for movies with all-star casts. They are usually entertaining, fun to watch and offer the best that Hollywood, at least in the past, had to offer. Dare I wonder who would be cast in one of them these days? It’s a well-known fact that movie budgets are excessive, and people (including me) rail against films costing the gross national product of a small third world country that  flop with the audience, because they happen to be lousy. Maybe what Hollywood needs is more panache, and less political correctness. As a place as well as a state of mind, it would be far more fun, and entertaining for the rest of us.