Movies were built differently then. You didn't get "immediate gratification" on action set pieces. You had to wait. Hitchcock built up suspense and character in between, and in NXNW, gave us such frolics as the UN murder(a perfect mix of mayhem and mirth) and the trainboard sexual innuendos) en route....
It was perhaps more deliciously tempting to have to wait for those big action scenes. Rather like eating your dinner before getting dessert.
Those teens liked NXNW, by the way.
It's the *rich-ness* of a NbNW or a Godfather or.... that ultimately wins people over typically some time in High School or College. Or, put the other way around, many people by the time they're 13 or 14 have subsisted on a diet of strictly contemporary films, mostly from only the top 3 or so at the box office every time. In almost every era that's just a *horrible diet*, and you end up kind of starving,....and then one day sooner or later you see Casablanca or Citizen Kane or The Graduate or Sweet Smell of Success or Persona or Now, Voyager or All That Jazz or Strangers on a Train or Vertigo or Dirty Harry or Kind Hearts and Coronets or The Third Man or.... and, given a little bit of basic open-mindedness, suddenly you're off chasing directors, truly magnetic stars, and quality.
You read stuff and suddenly you're seeing 'old movies' not out of any sense of duty, but rather simply because your odds of a good Friday Night *radically* improve if you get to choose from the acknowledged best of the last 50-80 years rather than just whatever handful of choices the multiplex and advertising are currently shoveling in your direction.
Update: On the *duty* front, I finally got around to seeing D.W. Grffith's infamous Birth of a Nation (1915). Jesus, it's depressing... 3 hours of ultra-racist fantasy and pseudo-history. There's kind of layer upon layer of bloody nonsense and absurd myth-making in it that would take many hours (even now) to debunk...so that in the real world you could never talk anyone out of this world view if they really believed it - there's too much of it and it's all self-supporting. Griffith explicitly offers his whole film as a kind of prayer for peace begining with the idea that the importation of Africans to America is a kind of original sin, not because slavery is abhorrent but because there are always these damned doo-gooders around who oppose slavery and who'll ultimate make war rather than allow it to continue. The film ends with an image of Jesus presiding over a peaceful all-white America, and opposed to an image of a multi-racial America that is in a constant state of internal war.
Despite its incredible alien-ness on most technical levels, BOAN feels *very* familiar. Maybe Fox News and Trump and co. don't believe and fear the exact things that BOAN does but they cover a lot of the same ground (only with a little more hedging and code), and they follow Griffith's recipe of spinning a truly vast web of lies and conspiracies so that the whole structure becomes an alternate reality that's immune to easy refutation. Dee-pressing.
Griffith's inventing the feature film as we know it in BOAN but unless you have a clear idea of what film was like prior to BOAN (I don't) then it's hard to find the actual film-making here very exciting. His subsequent films including Intolerance and Broken Blossoms and Way Down East are a lot more impressive as films I believe than BOAN is - Griffith continued to learn fast after BOAN. The main reason to see BOAN, however, is broadly political. If you watch it, however, prepare to be pretty shattered afterwards. I've been in a bad mood from it for a couple of days, and am only just starting to recompose myself!
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movieghoul
8 years ago
Yes, that's a good point that the top BO films usually provide a horrible diet in any era, for example, in 1941 people flocked to Andy Hardy films, not Citizen Kane.
And Birth of a Nation may have been the first American feature film but the Italian epic Cabiria predates it by 3 years, but likely had limited US release. And I love the line in Peter Bagdonovich's dreadful Nickelodeon, where after watching BOAN, Ryan O'Neal, playing a fledgling filmmaker, despondently says, "What's the point of making a movie when the best movie ever has already been made?" BTW, the clips from BOAN in N are all taken from the first half.
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ecarle
8 years ago
Movies were built differently then. You didn't get "immediate gratification" on action set pieces. You had to wait. Hitchcock built up suspense and character in between, and in NXNW, gave us such frolics as the UN murder(a perfect mix of mayhem and mirth) and the trainboard sexual innuendos) en route....
It was perhaps more deliciously tempting to have to wait for those big action scenes. Rather like eating your dinner before getting dessert.
Those teens liked NXNW, by the way.
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It's the *rich-ness* of a NbNW or a Godfather or.... that ultimately wins people over typically some time in High School or College... and, given a little bit of basic open-mindedness, suddenly you're off chasing directors, truly magnetic stars, and quality.
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I expect this is so. The US is a big country, and its a big world, and films are now being taught in high schools and colleges much as great novels always have been(hello, Mr. Dickens and Mr. Twain.) A certain percentage of young people will fall in love with the older stuff, and lets face it...The Godfather looks like it could have come out last month.
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You read stuff and suddenly you're seeing 'old movies' not out of any sense of duty, but rather simply because your odds of a good Friday Night *radically* improve if you get to choose from the acknowledged best of the last 50-80 years rather than just whatever handful of choices the multiplex and advertising are currently shoveling in your direction.
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I have younger people in my life nowadays and I will often pull a "golden oldie" from my DVD stack if only to share a few scenes with them. Then they go pull out the DVD on their own...
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I think what I'm trying to say about showing them NXNW the other night is that I now have to remind MYSELF how I once saw that -- inviolate and for decades -- as the most exciting movie of my life (next to Psycho, which was exciting in a different way.) I have to "travel back in time" to my age and mental state when I first saw it.
I might add that a lot of that excitement was seeing "regular guy"(well, rich and handsome regular guy) Cary Grant start the movie having drinks at a hotel bar with friends, and eventually clinging from Mount Rushmore -- with, it just so happens, the love of his life hanging there with him, and he only found HER like, two days before. The adventure in between was very much a wish-fulfillment fantasy to me, even though it got scary along the way.
After two "CBS Friday Night Movie" network showings(1967 and 1968), NXNW got shown about once a year on my local channel. Every time it came around, NXNW was like Christmas or Thanksgiving to me -- an event, not a movie. It was perhaps most like how The Wizard of Oz used to be for everybody : a once a year event.
But I recall this: one year, the only-once-a-year showing of NWNW coincided with the night of my Senior Prom. I'm not THAT nerdly...I took the girl out and announced to my family: "North by Northwest is on tonight, you'll have to watch it without me."
I think it was my mother who whispered: "You really must love this girl."
I did.
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Update: On the *duty* front, I finally got around to seeing D.W. Grffith's infamous Birth of a Nation (1915). Jesus, it's depressing... 3 hours of ultra-racist fantasy and pseudo-history. There's kind of layer upon layer of bloody nonsense and absurd myth-making in it that would take many hours (even now) to debunk...so that in the real world you could never talk anyone out of this world view if they really believed it - there's too much of it and it's all self-supporting.
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I saw it once, in college, with a guy who emerged in a rage, believing that the film should be burned and never shown anywhere again.
Then(and now, perhaps less strongly) I believed it needed to be kept and shown...under careful circumstances. For it is at once a "seminal masterwork of cinema" and ...an outrage. A living testimony to the potential power of film as propaganda of the worst sort. That it could do double duty as the Greatest of achevements(cinematic) and the lowest of acheivements(social) is perhaps its great claim to fame.
But like I say...I only saw it once. I don't intend to ever see it again.
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We have the double irony this year of an Oscar-favorite film also called "Birth of a Nation" but with entirely different, pro-African American content. I say double irony because the film's star(director?) has been implicated in a rape trial from his past. How will this ultimately affect the success of the NEW Birth of a Nation?
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swanstep
8 years ago
I saw it once, in college, with a guy who emerged in a rage, believing that the film should be burned and never shown anywhere again.
BOAN is going to send almost anyone into turmoil, it *is* just so enraging!
I wouldn't go the full 'burn it' route myself or even endorse the sort of (only recently lifted) long-term ban that Mein Kampf received in Germany after WW2. But I'd never screen BOAN in any normal history of film class (save it for more detailed history and cultural studies courses on race and reconstruction, etc.). Later Griffiths are better films and, as MovieGhoul notes, Cabiria (1914) is the actual first proper feature film (and it was a hit too). I saw a two-hour version of Cabiria a long time ago (I believe that a full 3 hour restoration is available these days), and was impressed. And, thank goodness, it blocks one argument for BOAN being compulsory viewing.
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