Title : Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s.
link : Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s.
Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s.
I have what I called my "imaginary movie project, " but it's been stalled since 2019. It began in 2019. The idea was to see how I react to these things today and try to remember and relate it to how I felt at the time. I began with the year 1960, when I was 9, and I got up to 1968, with the last of the movies I saw when I was in high school. Oh, how I cried!
Now, my son John is doing a movie blog project, where he identifies his favorite movie of every year beginning with 1920, reaching a new year each day. He got up to the point where I left off, and his 1968 movie just happens to be the same as mine. Then one of his 1969 movies is the movie I watched for 1969. I watched it, but I didn't blog about it. And then I've also watched my movie for 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1973 — my college years! — all without blogging.
So now there's a horrible disconnect between watching and writing, but let me solve the problem by writing about all 5 movies right now. Here they are — in their ghoulish, gouldish glory:
1969 — "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"
1970 — "MASH"
1971 — "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"
1972 — "Play It Again, Sam"
1973 — "The Long Goodbye"
1. That's a lot of Elliot Gould! He was Ted in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," one of the doctors in "MASH," and Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye." And he could just as well have been the bumbling fool played by Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam" or the bumbling fool played by Warren Beatty in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller."
2. Whatever was happening to American manhood in the early 70s, it was embodied in Elliot Gould. Let me pick one scene to help you contemplate this issue. It's this, the beginning of "The Long Goodbye":
3. We might understand early 70s American manhood through what it is not. It is not Humphrey Bogart. In "The Long Goodbye," Elliot Gould plays Philip Marlowe, the character Humphrey Bogart famously played in the 1940s, but he's 70s Marlowe, and there's a big difference. We're tasked to remember Bogart and compare, but in "Play It Again, Sam," Humphrey Bogart appears to advise the Woody Allen character on manly behavior. Allen tries repeatedly to follow the advice, fails ludicrously, but ultimately finds a way to incorporate some of the advice into his own version of a man.
4. Why was I absorbing so much movie material about the struggles of the 1970s man? What about me, a woman? There were some women in these movies. The great Julie Christie bested Warren Beatty in the wild West whorehouse business "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." Diane Keaton was a fine match for Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam." Sally Kellerman embodied order in "MASH" — where the yin and yang are reversed and then men are the chaos.
5. The movie with the most substance was "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." Here's something I wrote to John when he had just watched and loved that movie: "You didn’t live through the period when adults were doing those things, so what they were satirizing wasn’t really available to you. I saw it when I was 18 and that’s what the generation just ahead of me was doing. They seemed quite awful to me so it was easy to laugh at them and feel not at risk to be anything like them. I was half the age you are now when I saw that. Adulthood, even (or especially) among the supposedly hip people, looked sad and clueless."
6. Things? What things? — you may be asking. There's an Esalen-type retreat, training Bob & Carol in how to be progressive in their sexual relationship, and that challenges the more conservative Ted & Alice.
7. Three of those 5 movies were directed by Robert Altman. Oh, my, was he a big deal at the time. I thought "MASH" was excellent at the time (and I never watched the TV show "MASH" because I didn't want to see different actors and different stories). But "MASH" didn't mean as much to me this time. My favorite at the time was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," and I felt about the same this time. "The Long Goodbye" annoyed me at the time, but I thought it was great on rewatched. When I got to the end this time, I went back to the beginning and watched it again.
8. I could have said a lot more about these movies if I'd written about them one by one as I did my rewatchings. What held me back?
9. Something about college? We watched so many older movies in those years as Cinema Guild — right across the street from our dorm — served up 2 classics every day. So many decades of great old films to see — and all for 50¢. Why go to the regular movie theater and pay $2, just because something's new? There was the lure of the old. All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave. We were hungry for movies, but we had half a century of great stuff to catch up with. And, of course, back then, you had to see a film when it was playing or it would be gone and maybe you'd never get a chance to see it again. Here's "Ikiru" or "Design for Living" or whatever. Better get over to Cinema Guild or you'll regret it — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
10. But maybe what has held me back from writing about those movies is that it's too personal. 1969 to 1973 — those were the years when I met and married the man who was my first husband, and those movies had so much to do with our relationship. Writing is an invasion of your own privacy and the privacy of others, but the writer is always deciding where and how far to invade.
I have what I called my "imaginary movie project, " but it's been stalled since 2019. It began in 2019. The idea was to see how I react to these things today and try to remember and relate it to how I felt at the time. I began with the year 1960, when I was 9, and I got up to 1968, with the last of the movies I saw when I was in high school. Oh, how I cried!
Now, my son John is doing a movie blog project, where he identifies his favorite movie of every year beginning with 1920, reaching a new year each day. He got up to the point where I left off, and his 1968 movie just happens to be the same as mine. Then one of his 1969 movies is the movie I watched for 1969. I watched it, but I didn't blog about it. And then I've also watched my movie for 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1973 — my college years! — all without blogging.
So now there's a horrible disconnect between watching and writing, but let me solve the problem by writing about all 5 movies right now. Here they are — in their ghoulish, gouldish glory:
1969 — "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"
1970 — "MASH"
1971 — "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"
1972 — "Play It Again, Sam"
1973 — "The Long Goodbye"
1. That's a lot of Elliot Gould! He was Ted in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," one of the doctors in "MASH," and Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye." And he could just as well have been the bumbling fool played by Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam" or the bumbling fool played by Warren Beatty in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller."
2. Whatever was happening to American manhood in the early 70s, it was embodied in Elliot Gould. Let me pick one scene to help you contemplate this issue. It's this, the beginning of "The Long Goodbye":
3. We might understand early 70s American manhood through what it is not. It is not Humphrey Bogart. In "The Long Goodbye," Elliot Gould plays Philip Marlowe, the character Humphrey Bogart famously played in the 1940s, but he's 70s Marlowe, and there's a big difference. We're tasked to remember Bogart and compare, but in "Play It Again, Sam," Humphrey Bogart appears to advise the Woody Allen character on manly behavior. Allen tries repeatedly to follow the advice, fails ludicrously, but ultimately finds a way to incorporate some of the advice into his own version of a man.
4. Why was I absorbing so much movie material about the struggles of the 1970s man? What about me, a woman? There were some women in these movies. The great Julie Christie bested Warren Beatty in the wild West whorehouse business "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." Diane Keaton was a fine match for Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam." Sally Kellerman embodied order in "MASH" — where the yin and yang are reversed and then men are the chaos.
5. The movie with the most substance was "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." Here's something I wrote to John when he had just watched and loved that movie: "You didn’t live through the period when adults were doing those things, so what they were satirizing wasn’t really available to you. I saw it when I was 18 and that’s what the generation just ahead of me was doing. They seemed quite awful to me so it was easy to laugh at them and feel not at risk to be anything like them. I was half the age you are now when I saw that. Adulthood, even (or especially) among the supposedly hip people, looked sad and clueless."
6. Things? What things? — you may be asking. There's an Esalen-type retreat, training Bob & Carol in how to be progressive in their sexual relationship, and that challenges the more conservative Ted & Alice.
7. Three of those 5 movies were directed by Robert Altman. Oh, my, was he a big deal at the time. I thought "MASH" was excellent at the time (and I never watched the TV show "MASH" because I didn't want to see different actors and different stories). But "MASH" didn't mean as much to me this time. My favorite at the time was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," and I felt about the same this time. "The Long Goodbye" annoyed me at the time, but I thought it was great on rewatched. When I got to the end this time, I went back to the beginning and watched it again.
8. I could have said a lot more about these movies if I'd written about them one by one as I did my rewatchings. What held me back?
9. Something about college? We watched so many older movies in those years as Cinema Guild — right across the street from our dorm — served up 2 classics every day. So many decades of great old films to see — and all for 50¢. Why go to the regular movie theater and pay $2, just because something's new? There was the lure of the old. All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave. We were hungry for movies, but we had half a century of great stuff to catch up with. And, of course, back then, you had to see a film when it was playing or it would be gone and maybe you'd never get a chance to see it again. Here's "Ikiru" or "Design for Living" or whatever. Better get over to Cinema Guild or you'll regret it — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
10. But maybe what has held me back from writing about those movies is that it's too personal. 1969 to 1973 — those were the years when I met and married the man who was my first husband, and those movies had so much to do with our relationship. Writing is an invasion of your own privacy and the privacy of others, but the writer is always deciding where and how far to invade.
Thus articles Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s.
You now read the article Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s. with the link address https://welcometoamerican.blogspot.com/2021/07/rewatching-5-movies-i-saw-in-theater.html
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