Movie Magic

All of us have, from time to time, been queried as to what movies are our favorites. Sometimes this is an identifying question when completing a financial application, more often an inquiry which sheds light on one’s personal preferences, or even personality, giving our friends and acquaintances some input on compatibility. It's great fun to see and discuss movies.

Even those of us who rarely visit theaters have viewed many movies . . . they are one of our best-loved mediums and a universal source of entertainment. Through their work in cinema, we are familiar with hundreds of actors now gone . . . Ingrid Bergman, Katherine Hepburn, John Wayne, Natalie Wood; they lived, worked in films and made permanent impressions on generations of those of us born from the thirties through forties, and who lived the fifties, through the present time. Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelley, dancers of another time . . . their films were often set in the war years, during which they lived and worked.

It would appear to be less difficult to produce a film which is faithful to its own period of time, rather than re-creating a time period accurately . . . costuming, lines, interactions, much less the social auras which existed. One film comes to mind, in 1938 . . . Jezebel, with Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. It was set on a Louisiana plantation in the 1800s. The sets were managed, including spanish moss and white columns, carefully crafted southern accents, and a mammy, and while it was entertaining and the actors were superb, no one who was familiar with the antebellum south during that period of time could believe the film to be representative of the place and time. Gone With the Wind was another story entirely. Released in 1939, based on a carefully researched and beautifully written novel by Georgian Margaret Mitchell, it was simply almost perfection in its depiction of life during that period of time, in the south. It exists today as a window into life as it was, as a faithfully crafted reproduction of the culture. A sparkling jewel of a film . . . timeless in its pristine facets.

In the eighties, a small group of people set about to make a film about a family whose daughters grew up in the fifties and became adults in the early sixties. The lasting magic of Dirty Dancing was its exact depiction of life as it was during that period of time. The story of the characters was less compelling than the actors’ meticulous portrayal of the way people during that decade lived their lives, interacted with each other, what they expected from one another . . . in the cultural era in which the film was set. It was an exact picture of the late fifties and sixties at that time, and the actors, producers and directors 'got it' perfectly, exactly. It's a work of art, just like a painting or a piece of music.

The industry calls many beloved films ‘cult classics’ and indeed, they are. Evidence of this type of magic is that rare quality of timelessness . . . the ability to create excitement and to entertain, whether twenty-five or seventy years later.