Miscellaneous Musings: On a Right of Every Generation

April 5, 2023
 

On a Right of Every Generation
 

1967 saw the publication of Bosley Crowther’s book The Great Films: Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures. At that time, movies were entering into what could be considered their fourth generation, the first three being the Silent Era, the early years of the Sound Era, and the years in which the Hayes Code was enforced. 1967 was also the year Bonnie and Clyde was released, and it is often said that it was Mr. Crowther’s negative review of that film that ultimately cost him his job. The following years would see movies move in two telling directions, becoming both more graphic and more commercial, and that pivot would be rewarded. Gangsters films, as well as an X-Rated film, would go on to win Best Picture, and stories that had been thought of as B-movie material would become the savior of Hollywood studios. In other words, change was afloat, and for a generation of moviegoers and film critics, these would be the movies that shaped their childhood and became a lens through which later movies – and perhaps earlier ones, as well – would be judged. Just look at the AFI’s first list of the Greatest Films of All Time: 40 of them were released post-1966.
 
And that is how it should be.
 
Crowther’s book is a snapshot of one generation’s ideals and preferences, and as such, it is a valuable document, shining a rather humbling spotlight on the impermanence of praise and appreciation. The book is divided up into 39 “chapters,” each one a year in which “great films” were released. It begins in 1915 with The Birth of a Nation, a film that appeared on the first AFI list, but, interestingly, not the updated one released a decade later, and Intolerance, which appeared on the updated list but was omitted from the first. Here are the films Crowther included that are of the most interest to me: The Covered Wagon (1923), The Thief of Bagdad (1924), Greed (1924), The Freshman (1925), The General (1927), The Crowd (1928), The Public Enemy (1931), The Informer (1935), A Night at the Opera (1935), Camille (1936), Ninotchka (1939), In Which We Serve (1942), Henry V (1944), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Tom Jones (1964), Blow-Up (1966), and Ulysses (1967). What all of these film have in common is that they were excluded from the AFI’s original list.
 
There may be a variety of reasons for this. Movies like Greed and The Crowd were much less available to the public in the years before the advent of home video, and even then, many of these films were hard to find after the arrival of VHS, released by specialty labels and priced anywhere between $75 - $100. It is highly likely that some great films just slipped from public consciousness during this time. It’s also possible that a particular genre, such as comedy, began to be seen as lesser than another. The truly important movies, this thinking goes, are about something and not just entertainment. And then there’s the matter of relatability. I suspect many moviegoers today don’t recognize the kind of college life depicted in Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman or find it hard to completely get into a film about a soldier on the wrong side of the Civil War. Or perhaps a film just hasn’t aged well. Its story simply no longer captivates or reflects values that are a relic of the past.
 
There have been other best of lists, of course. The AFI has put out a number of genre-specific lists, Sight & Sound Magazine continues to publish an annual list of the greatest films of all time, and magazines like Time and Rolling Stone occasionally release their own (the former even included The Lord of the Rings trilogy on theirs). 1988 saw the publication of John Kobal Presents the Top 100 Movies, which, like Crowther’s list, contains both American and International films. Roger Ebert created a ever-expanding list of Great Movies, a technique that saw numbers as pointless and great movies as numerous as the stars. Other writers wrote books claiming to include the 100 or 1,000 movies you simple have to see before you die.
 
The problem is that since so many lists have been created, there has come to exist an expectation of uniformity, that every credible list simply has to include particular films. No 2001: A Space Odyssey? Sorry, not credible. Citizen Kane isn’t number one? The writer does not know what he’s talking about. No Shawshank Redemption? Perish the thought, and cancel the writer. This is definitely not how it should be.
 
It should be remembered that Citizen Kane, Duck Soup, and Monsieur Verdoux were not considered classics until the 1950s, when a new generation, one living through McCarthyism, the Korean War, the early days of the Cold War, and dramatic events of the Civil Rights movement, discovered them and saw in them something their predecessors has either missed or been unmoved by. They now resonated. I imagine they also saw movies that their predecessors had praised and wondered what all the fuss was about.
 
Recently, there have been a number of articles on movies that have been re-evaluated. Most of these have been movies that were panned by critics or ignored by audiences upon their initial release, movies like Event Horizon and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and a new generation of viewers is giving them a second chance. Rotten Tomatoes routinely asks its readers “Were critics wrong about…” a particular movie, and websites such as Buzzfeed occasionally publish lists of movies that viewers think are undeserving of their stellar reputation.
 
Again, this is the way it should be, a series of evaluations followed by re-assessments and adjustments. The worst thing about lists is that the more of them there are, the more uniform and codified they become, leading to the believe that a certain group is truly the greatest ever made and that anyone who disagrees is either misguided or incapable of judging true quality. This has led to accusations of elitism and snobbery on both sides. Of course, this is not the way it should be.
 
Every generation has the right to look back and decide what speaks to them and what they see value in. Sure, Star Wars was groundbreaking in 1977, but it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether its reputation has been diminished by its multiple prequels and sequels and its seemingly endless stream of television shows, the quality of which has varied immensely? Citizen Kane introduced a new language in filmmaking, but 84 years after its release, it seems natural to wonder whether it still speaks to moviegoers that way it did to viewers living through the Vietnam War and the Nixon Administration. And it seems justified to wonder just how much contemporary reviews of classic films like Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have been influenced by the previous generation’s insistence that there is greatness in them.
 
We have demoted movies before, relegating them to honorable mention. For his part, Mr. Crowther included a Supplemental List of 100 Distinguished Films. In other words, of films that were great, but not great enough. He could have included thousands more. To the best of my knowledge, no current list of the Top 100 includes The Covered Wagon, Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, or The Informer, and no one accuses the writers of lists excluding them of being ignorant of film history. Values just changed, and those and many other excellent films found themselves on the outside looking in. Why shouldn’t young critics and moviegoers today be allowed the same freedom?