Daily Blague

Working through Mr Emerson's little list, I've seen Easy Rider, Modern Times, and The Big Red One. At no time did I wonder how I had missed these films. Two were very uncongenial, while the third, Modern Times, was ultimately inconsequential.

Watching Easy Rider was like doing homework - until the very end, when the gratuitous shootings made me angry. Of course, it stoked a lot of memories, all of them tinged with disappointment. In the Sixties, I was as convinced as any bright young student that our parents were soulless hypocrites, but the counterculture was either feckless or strident. I thought that older Americans had lost touch with significance - I still do - and my response was to think more seriously and comprehensively than they seemed inclined to do in their suburban dens. The Maoist option - throwing culture out the window and "starting fresh" - was the last thing I was inclined to exercise. And then there was the matter of tribalism, which divided relatively uneducated people into hostile clans. Easy Rider distills the wasteful distractions of its time into a nasty cocktail that reminded me of being uncomfortable and friendless.

The Big Red One, in contrast, roused no personal recollections, because I never served in the military, and I don't remember World War II. I spent the entire film waiting for one of the five gallant soldiers to be shot and killed. If I'd known that this wasn't going to happen, I'd have been a bit more relaxed, but, even so, I don't know what to make of a war picture such as this. As a platform for showcasing attractive American manhood, it comes close to glamorizing warfare for the opportunities it offers to bring out the best in people. As a war story, however, it brings home the sheer slog of battle: one damned thing after another. I watched; it's over; The End. 

Modern Times is a very curious picture: made in 1936, it remains effectively a silent movie despite  its sound track. Aside from singing a naughty song in gibberish, Charlie Chaplin doesn't make a sound. I felt that I was watching him impersonate himself, as if the Little Tramp were a routine, an amalgam of tics and glances, the point of which was to make some sort of fun. But of what? The romance with Paulette Goddard's "gamin" is utterly stillborn, broken by the attempt to simulate Twenties simplicities with Thirties production values. Some of the bits, particularly at the start, are very funny, but the insistent accompaniment of "Smile" takes Modern Times on a turn for the gloomy.

The more I savor the list overall, the more obviously it appears to be the work of an earnest man. Where's Top Hat? Where's Laurel and Hardy? (Music Box is a Sisyphean tour de force of comic agony.) Where's Douglas Sirk, or Separate Tables. (Where's Pygmalion, for the matter of that?) Here's another substitution I'm almost certain to make: What's Up, Doc? for Bringing Up Baby. Madeline Kahn's Eunice is surely one of the 102 most memorable performances in film.

Next: The Searchers and The Best Years of Our Lives. Meanwhile, I sinking into utter decadence, watching videos by daylight!