THIS week in the U.S. of 1968, a Negro waiter will shuffle off, mumbling: "Yassuh, I'se hurrin' fas' as I know how." An angry Indian will vow: "Many white eyes will die!" A Marine sergeant will cry: "Come on, let's get the yellowbellies!"
Such quaint language endures in the movies from the '30s and '40s that unreel on television with the steady persistence of an arterial throb. Ranging back to the baby talkies, late-show films represent what Jean Cocteau called the "petrified fountain of thought." Ghosts of America's past, they evoke the naivete, exuberance—and problems of a simpler society. To middle-aged Americans, they can also be embarrassments with commercials. Did the public truly love those painful Blondie pictures so much that Hollywood made 28 of them? How did Turhan Bey ever become a star? Did anyone really take Errol Flynn seriously in Desperate Journey, after he sabotaged German munitions plants, hijacked a Nazi bomber and shouted: "Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs!"?
Says Producer Billy Wilder: "A bad play folds, and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says: 'My father is an idiot.' "
Most children are not related to film directors, however, and to them movies on TV are an integral part of their epoch; they are growing up with a borrowed nostalgia for a time they never knew. The once-irretrievable past has become as salable as a personality poster, as audible as a Fred Astaire LP. The late show is ransacked for trivia questions and recherche cliches (see Box).
Children to Cheer
With more than 13,000 films waiting to be rerun on television, old movies have become America's National Museum of Pop Art, the biggest repository of cultural artifacts outside the Smithsonian Institution. On TV, of course, the movies are tiny, like warriors who have become trophies of a head-shrinking tribe. Despite this diminution—despite faded prints and commercials perforating climactic scenes—old flicks remain more compelling than most of the shows that surround them. Films may go in one era and out the other, but even the flattest Tarzan epic or the corniest war saga offers a series of clues to history. Like a paleontologist reconstructing a Brontosaurus from a vertebra and two teeth, the patient late-show viewer can reconstruct some of the main currents of American thought.
The old movies almost always portrayed U.S. dreams—and thus, indirectly, realities. Just as the peasant tales retold by the Grimm brothers spoke of common maidens who could spin gold from straw, Hollywood created its own folk stories from the yearnings of 1930s audiences. If I Had a Million, for example, tells of a quirky financier who sends million-dollar checks to strangers. A colorless clerk played by Charles Laughton receives his check in the mail, goes to the president of his company, sticks out his tongue and delivers a loud Bronx cheer. Blackout. In those precarious years, the vicarious thrill of giving a razz to the boss was irresistible—to say nothing of the complex moral that a nobody can suddenly acquire the money that can't buy happiness.