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"All of Life's Riddles Are Answered in the Movies"

posted 4 months ago by roger1 (2351)
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(aka ecarle.)

There is a 1991 Lawrence Kasdan movie called Grand Canyon. I don't remember much about it, but I do remember one line. I think I will always remember it.

The movie is set in contemporary Los Angeles. Steve Martin(in a serious role), plays a successful producer of action movies, and Kevin Kline plays his "regular guy" friend(prosperous, but not rich and famous or in the movie biz like Martin.)

At a certain part in the story Martin offers Kline this advice:

Steve Martin: That's part of your problem: you haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.

I can't hardly remember a thing about Grand Canyon. I recall it was good, not great, and philosophical(and it also dealt with race in a Lawrence Kasdan way.)

But I remember liking that line THEN, and here, 30-odd years later, it remains a GREAT line.

If -- you love the movies. Like I do. Like some of you do. Where would we be without the decades of great lines that the movies have given us? Particularly when those great lines ADVISE us about life.

Consider this line -- yet another line from Steve Martin, in yet ANOTHER serious role, in David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner.(1997.) Martin plays a mysterious, well-off man who is mentoring a younger, less well-off man and Martin offers the young fellow this business advice:

Steve Martin: Always do business as if the person you're doing business with is trying to screw you, because he probably is. And if he's not, you can be pleasantly surprised.

I remember laughing at that line and thinking "Yeah, THAT's it...that's how you comport business with people." (Or romance with people.) Don't trust 'em until they prove they're OK.

I suppose that Martin's "business advice line" can open the door to a real FOUNTAIN of such lines -- The Godfather. I mean, how many people have used lines from that one to conduct business:

Brando: I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.

Well, that's more like a gimmick. Here is a less famous line, Brando berating tough guy son James Caan for saying too much in a meeting with rival gangsters.

Brando: NEVER tell anyone other than family what you're thinking!

I've tried that approach over the years, feeling confident sometimes ("OK, I'm doing like Don Vito told me to...") but sometimes finding that actually it HELPS to tell others what you are thinking -- like they better not screw you over, etc.

The Godfather lines cross from I to II and even on to the benighted III:

Pacino: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Pacino: I keep trying to get out, and they keep pulling me back IN!(That's not so much advice as a rueful observation -- haven't we all been there in our careers?)

I believe that Godfather III had one of ITS great lines only in the poster:

"Power isn't given to you, you have to take it."

Yep.

And there is this interesting line from Don Vito(Brando) in 1:

"Men cannot be careless. Women and chlldren can be careless, but never men."

(As a feminist 1972 film raises an arched eyebrow at a man of the 40s born in the early 20th Century -- late 19th?.)

--

I'm drawing another blank at movie lines that give us life advice. Hopefully others will come to mind. I'll leave this thread here as others pop up.

But there are other types of lines. I just remembered this one from To Kill a Mockingbird, near the very end, when a decent and rather minor character - the local sheriff -- tells Gregory Peck's upstanding lawyer Atticius Finch that there will be no trial for the murder of an evil man named Bob Ewell who tried to kill Finch's children, because the man who saved the kids was a recluse and a good man:

Sheriff: I may not be much, Mr. Finch, but I'm still Sheriff of Macomb County, and Bob Ewell fell on his knife. Good night sir.

Great memory, that one.

And some funny ones:

From Animal House, as the sly leader Otter(Tim Matheson) consoles Flounder after "the guys" wrecked his borrowed brother's car.

"Hey, relax. You fucked up -- you trusted us!"

I've used THAT line a few times.

Or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Michael Palin's Sir Galahad is trying to escape a crowd of sex-hungry women in a castle. The following dialogue:

Palin: Well, I must be going.
Woman: You're not going to stay for the oral sex?

Palin: Well, I could stay a BIT longer..

I've used THAT line, too.

One more funny one. Tom Hanks to John Candy in Splash:

Hanks: So this naked woman comes out of the bay and wants to be in my life. What do you think about that?
Candy: Well...personally I'm FOR it, of course.

So three lines:

You fucked up. You trusted us.
Well, I could stay a BIT longer.
Well, personally I'm FOR it, of course.

...have gotten me by for decades now. Believe me , when the time arrives to say one of those lines , you KNOW it. Movie lines make me seem funnier to people. Within bounds, movie lines have helped with the women.

But what of Psycho?

Ha. Thought this was OT? Naw.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

Psycho has a few famous lines, and a lot of simply well-written great ones that flow through this ostensible "horror shocker."
Very few of these great lines were in Robert Bloch's novel(which nonetheless had the great PLOT.) Joseph Stefano wrote them and his "Best Adapted Screenplay" snub is as egregious as the others to Psycho.

Now one line existed long before Psycho came out(I think) but got a new context forever more: "A boy's best friend is his mother."

Along similar lines, a phrase that existed long before Psycho but got a new context forever more: "Why...she wouldn't harm a fly."

But how about the lines coined FOR the movie:

"We all go a little mad sometimes (long pause)...haven't you?"

Now often, that line can be "chopped off" and still work: "We all go a little mad sometimes." But "haven't you?" brings us ALL into the themes of the film. And Marion Crane's response is key in the film itself:

"Yes. And sometimes, only one time...can be enough. Thank you." Marion GETS it, finally. From this guy, who gently corrects her : "Thank you...Norman." An interesting exchange.

--

I was looking for an "advice" or "inspriational" line in Psycho along the lines of The Godfather and I can't really find one. Though maybe "We all go a little mad sometims," can suffice -- note to selves: don't go AS mad as Norman Bates.

But I'm gonna leap all the way to the first hardware store scene(where Sam, Lila, and Arbogast all first meet) to a line I've always liked out of My Man Arbogast, about Marion:

"Well, you know we always are quickest to doubt those who have a reputation for being honest."

THAT's an out of nowhere observational moment , indicative of Arbogast's sharp mind and his approach, I suppose to his job (seeking out the wrongdoers among "honest people.") It certainly isn't the kind of line you would find in "House on Haunted Hill" or The Tingler. It represents the innate intelligence of Psycho and the characters in it.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

I've seen Psycho many times with many people, and I DO remember one time after Arbogast said that line --"Well, you know we are always quickest to doubt those who have a reputation's for being honest" -- a female patron nearby said "That's true...he's right." Hah.

Here is something: in Van Sant's remake, William H. Macy as Arbogast changes the line by one word. See it?

"Well, you know, we are always quickets to doubt those who have a record for being honest."

A record. Not a reputation. I like "reputation" better. I checked Joe Stefano's 1960 screenplay -- it was written with...TA DA..."a record."

So Martin Balsam changed the line.

But Martin Balsam changed a LOT of his lines in Psycho. He was Method-trained and seemed to want to personalize everything Arbogast said. He also gave himself MORE lines..more screen time...like when he prefaced a line in the screenplay with this: "Now let's say, just for the sake of argument, that..." THAT isn't in Stefano's screenplay. Balsam added the touch humanized it...got more time on screen.

I've read the Psycho script and as I recall, ALL of the other actors stuck to their lines exactly. Even Perkins. Perhaps they were scared to try to improvise. Not Balsam.

William H. Macy also said that Arbogast "is the best written part in Psycho." Hard to disagree. Like most good support, he gets some of the best one liners:

Let's ALL talk about Marion, shall we?
My name's Arbogast -- FRIEND -- I'm a private investigator.
Somebody's seen her -- somebody ALWAYS sees a girl with 40,000.
If it doesn't jell, it isn't aspic. And this ain't jellin.' Its not coming together. Something's missing.

And I suppose you could say that the line about "suspecting people who are honest" or about "someone ALWAYS sees a girl" are part of...back we go ...that "answering of the riddles of life" that Steve Martin's producer was speaking to in Grand Canyon.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

When we aren't collecting movie lines because they are funny or witty ("Well, personally I'm FOR it...") we are collecting them because they give us life lessons (The Godfather, To Kill a Mockingbird.)

There is an overemotional, hysterical, almost maudlin line -- yelled and cried, not spoken -- by Richard Gere in "An Officer and a Gentleman" that I used as a form of dark inspiration when I first heard it.

Drill instructor Lou Gossett is trying to break his rebel recruit, Gere. All sorts of physical and mental torture with a goal: drop out of the program! And Gere eventually screams out.

Gere: I CAN'T drop out!
Gossett: Why?
Gere: Because I've got no place else to GO!

Sounds maudlin on paper, but I found it moving. Gere's character was from poverty, no parents who care for him, a virtual orphan. The military is IT for him. No place else to go -- but to MAKE IT in this program. Its the Rocky thing to be sure("I just want to go the distance") but with a reality I could relate to. Sometimes you feel you've got no place else to go...you've GOT to acheive that goal. Answering one of life's riddles.

Out on a funny line -- a "mini-speech" from North by Northwest that I also found became more and more relevant as life went on.

From Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill:

"Now you listen to me. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders depending on me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself slightly killed!"

Not necessarly a "riddle of life" -- but a litany of life, maybe...

[–] Doghouse (447) 3 months ago

""Well, you know, we are always quickets to doubt those who have a record for being honest."

A record. Not a reputation. I like "reputation" better. I checked Joe Stefano's 1960 screenplay -- it was written with...TA DA..."a record."

So Martin Balsam changed the line.

But Martin Balsam changed a LOT of his lines in Psycho. He was Method-trained and seemed to want to personalize everything Arbogast said."
- - -
Hi, roger. Jumping back in from out of nowhere.

It's yet another indication of Balsam's dead-on instincts as an actor. I recall we had an exchange about his altering the line, "I'll just have to pick up the scent from here" to, "I'll just have to pick up the pieces from here" and how it suited his apparent interpretation of Arbogast not as a bloodhound but as an analytical assembler of puzzles, fitting pieces together to form a complete picture (as well as being more attuned to Hitchcock's morbidly corny sense of humor).

A "record" is empirical: verifiable facts about a person. A "reputation" is really only subjective opinion: what others think about a person ("For heaven's sake, a girl works for you for ten years, you trust her"). The difference here is attuned to the film's theme of duality, and people not necessarily being what they seem: a trusted employee who yearns for respectability giving in to larcenous compulsion; a genial and mild-mannered young motel manager masking a psychotic killer...masked even to the killer himself.

Taking a step back for a philosophical overview of the topic as well as swanstep's pushback on it, I'm reminded of Rosie O'Donnell's line in Sleepless In Seattle: "It's not true...but it feels true." What Stephen Colbert called "truthiness."

CONT

[–] Doghouse (447) 3 months ago

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

Hi, roger. Jumping back in from out of nowhere.

---

Hi, doghouse. Always a welcome surprise. "I know you're out there somewhere."

---

It's yet another indication of Balsam's dead-on instincts as an actor. I recall we had an exchange about his altering the line, "I'll just have to pick up the scent from here" to, "I'll just have to pick up the pieces from here"

---

One of the great things -- if TRICKY things -- about your occasional visits here is to see that you REMEMBER our exchanges of long ago. The tricky part is -- "Uh oh, this guy knows I said this before." The truth of the matter is that while I repeat previous opinions here a lot, its usually NOT because I'm forgetful -- its because I assume new readers and I'd like to get that thought out again.

But if YOU remember things I said...well, sorry for repeating.

And indeed, we discussed Balsam's change of "pick up the scent" to "pick up the pieces" before and I remember that, too. My quick thought on Balsam discarding "scent" was that it was perhaps TOO visceral and maybe even sexual (he's "following the scent of a woman" -- Marion.)

--

and how it suited his apparent interpretation of Arbogast not as a bloodhound but as an analytical assembler of puzzles, fitting pieces together to form a complete picture (as well as being more attuned to Hitchcock's morbidly corny sense of humor).

---

In the book Arbogast wasn't just a tall tan Texan in a Stetson...he was cold, just the facts...a bit of a bully with Norman and even with Sam and Lila. On the page of the screenplay, Stefano's Arbogast was only slightly more warm. But once Balsam stepped into the role, he became much more "human": warm, nodding, understanding, wry...even if he used some of his warmth to trick information out of his suspects.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

But Balsam also made Arbogast...smarter. He's heading for that historic slaughter on the stairs and he makes Arbogast a truly tragic victim -- all that wit and intuition wiped out in a matter of seconds by an unfeeling human monster(mother.)

I daresay that Balsam as Arbogast was part of my "growing understanding" of Psycho as I went from not being able to see it, to seeing it, and to clearly UNDERSTANDING that part of the reason Psycho was truly a great movie ...and not just "a little horror movie," is because of what Balsam brought to it. (And Perkins, and Leigh -- those three above the rest -- but the rest of the actors were pretty good too.)

A little personal history:

When Psycho was re-released in 1965 and the whole block was talking about it(kids on up to parents), I decided to ask my mother the plot. She told it, condensed. I recall her sayhing this: "And then this private detective shows up looking for the girl and the young man tells him he must talk to his mother...and the detective goes up the hill to the house out back and...well...you just never see that detective again." My mother got it a bit wrong -- Norman doesn't tell the detective to go talk to the mother -- and she clearly didn't want me to hear about the bloody murder. So I pictured it that way: the detective is never seen again. (Better still, I DID almost get exactly right, in my mind, the REAL shot of Arbogast walking up to the house -- just DESCRIBED to me, I saw that shot, just on more level ground from motel to house, as I recall.)

Flash forward to 1967. Some friend who saw Psycho on its late night TV debut was telling me about it. This dialogue between him and me:

Me: So the only one who gets killed is the woman in the shower?
Him: No. NO. This DETECTIVE gets killed. And its WORSE!

(I still remember how agitated he got. He proceeded to tell me the scene EXACTLY right -- shot for shot -- but with much more violence and blood in it.)

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

Flash forward to 1968. I open bookstore table copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut and move rather warily to the pages on Psycho and BAM...there they are. The two murders. Marion in the shower was murky and abstract. Arbogast on the stairs -- Balsam's shocked, bloody face -- kept me awake a few nights. (And I KNEW it was a process shot and -- that didn't matter.)

But you see, that wasn't really the end of my relationship with the Arbogast character at all. When I finally saw the film for myself -- and added in a couple more viewings -- I became aware that all that bloody murder stuff was the end-point of a very well developed, well acted, well written ADULT character. Suddenly Psycho wasn't just a scary movie anymore. It was real, sophisticated...a classic for reasons other than the shocks.

I don't know from "unlocking the riddles of life," but just from demonstrating what a sophisticated script and performance can give you - Balsam's work as Arbogast(truly in support of Perkins) -- is a life lesson, too.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

A "record" is empirical: verifiable facts about a person. A "reputation" is really only subjective opinion: what others think about a person

---

Yes, I RELATED to that when I heard Balsam say the line in the original. But when Macy changed it (BACK to the script) to "record," it just felt wrong.

---

"For heaven's sake, a girl works for you for ten years, you trust her").

---

Spot on! I don't think I saw the connection between Lowery's line and Arbogast's later line before!

---

The difference here is attuned to the film's theme of duality, and people not necessarily being what they seem: a trusted employee who yearns for respectability giving in to larcenous compulsion; a genial and mild-mannered young motel manager masking a psychotic killer...masked even to the killer himself.

--

Yes...yet another guide to the movie's innate sophistication and what I call "the Hitchcock rhyme." Sometimes its shots (how Arbogast walks away from Sam and Lila first, and then Norman the same way) sometimes its lines ("A girl works for you..."; "We always doubt people who have a reputation..')

That Lowery never saw a thief in his most trusted employee and WE never see the psycho killer in gentle Norman well...what was Steve Martin's line in The Spanish Prisoner? ("Always think people are trying to screw you..then if they don't, you'll be pleasantly surprised.")

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

Taking a step back for a philosophical overview of the topic as well as swanstep's pushback on it, I'm reminded of Rosie O'Donnell's line in Sleepless In Seattle: "It's not true...but it feels true." What Stephen Colbert called "truthiness."

--

Ha. Well isn't everything we read, hear and see "truthiness.?" We make it what we want it to be.

In his bluntly written, almost coarse autobio "The Kid Stays in the Picture," the late Paramount mogul Robert Evans writes a credo several times: "There is your version, my version, and the truth."

---

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

O'Donnell has another line that's rather the flip-side of Martin's and speaks to swanstep's admonition, "Simplifications, approximations, idealizations, modeling x as a better-understood y... all these steps *can* be useful, but have to taken very carefully if what you are running up against, as you almost always are, is a complex world."

---

Wow. I saw Sleepless in Seattle once -- on its 1993 release -- and I can't say I much remember any of the lines. Its funny to realize the difference between movies with lines that I remember and those that I don't.

And yeah, what O'Donnell says there(written for her) makes as much sense as any other of the "takes on the riddles of life" out there.

---

She tells Ryan, "That's your problem. You don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie." It's funny at face value and even funnier when drilling down to the irony of it being uttered in a rom-com. A movie.

--

There you go. Its a bit meta. I often find it funny when people talk about movies while they are IN a movie.

It happens just a little bit in Psycho early on when Sam says to Marion: "Shall we send sister to the movies? Turn mother's picture to the wall?" For Sam "the movies" is just a throwaway time waster, a way to get Lila out of the house so he can get a little hey-hey with Marion. For US, the movies can be as profound and life changing as...Psycho.

It also happens in Hitchcock's 1948 Rope, when Notorious is discussed without naming it ("It has a one word title") and..in a bit of future-predicting, James Mason is brought up as a fine actor(11 years later, Mason would work for Hitchocck in North by Northwest.)

---

"You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in the movies." Now THAT line IS meaningful to me.

Because, over a lifetime of relationships, I must admit that from an early age I rather IMPOSED the romantic ideals found in romantic movies to REAL relationships. And whlie it works somewhat, the fantasy always fades away eventually and you have to deal with a REAL relationship.

I will add that this "movie inspiration" extends to male friendship , too(as I'm sure it does to female relationship.) Moreso when i was a lot younger, I joined my male friends in rather incorporating the "buddy buddy banter" of Butch Cassidy, The Sting, Animal House, Caddyshack and every buddy cop movie ever made into our lifestyles so life could FEEL funnier and more adventuresome than it really was.

Thank you, movies.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

That's the spirit in which I took Martin's line: self-referential; self-aware; self-mocking. But "truthy."

--

Well, yeah. On the one hand, I probably shouldn't have weighted it with such profundity. On the other hand, I DO remember than line, and I DO think sometimes great dialogue DOES tells us something.

How about this, from Woody Allen in Annie Hall:

Woody: There's an old joke...two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says "Boy, the food at this place is terrible." And the other one says, "Yeah, I know -- and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life-- full of loneliness and misery , and suffering, and unhappiness...and its all over much too quickly.

You tell 'em, Woody!

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

And yeah, a lot like life (and its reflections in literature, theater, music, movies or whatever), leaving lessons lying all over the place for us to pick up and apply as we will, or reject or even walk past without notice.

---

Well, a lot of people have experienced a lot of things and left behind things to watch, read or listen to...there's bound to be SOMETHING in there.

---

There probably isn't a single source from which all answers can be found, but movies can come as close as any other art form - or even any personal experience - and we all take whatever wisdom we can where we find it.

---

Well, the movies have spoken to the largest swatch of humanity for some decades now. The "mass" aspect of it, the shared aspect of it.

I've got two quotes here that I have to paraphrase, and for the life of me I have not been able to trace them since I first read them, but I do think of them (and the SECOND one is self-incriminating and dangerous to me, but here goes)

ONE: "Among the greatest pleasures of my life has been going to the movies."

That one makes a HUGE case for the value of the movies -- in some manner -- and its true for me. Disney movies when I was little. Psycho haunting the late sixties. "The Hitchcock Jones" I got around 1966-1968. ALL the other movies of a lifetime(The Music Man, Its a Mad Mad World, The Great Race---The Godfather, Jaws and Star Wars--personal favorites like LA Confidential, Love Actually, and Licorice Pizza.) What a life of movies!

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 3 months ago

TWO: "I would spend the entire week waiting for Saturday when I could see a movie."

THAT's the one that's self-incriminating and dangerous. It was Sundays in the family I grew up in . A movie every Sunday -- sometimes a double bill. Saturday was reserved was watching or attending college football. But my parents were movie fans from the 30s and 40s and they carried it on a generation and here I am . A bit too sedentary a lifestyle? Oh, not that badly, there were days to exercise away from the movies. I will admit that from high school on, I was more about seeing movies at night -- with friends and on dates -- so exercise could be had in the day.

But yeah...the anticipation of knowing that "I'd be seeing a movie this weekend" was like anticipating a small holiday right there near home. And that OTHER guy who wrote that quote knew of what he spoke. And then, if the movie had been REALLY memorable(like A Mad Mad World as a kid) I thought about it for the whole week AFTER.

[–] swanstep (2619) 4 months ago

All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.I respond allergically to this sort of idea. For one thing, when this idea comes up in Hollywood films or on Oscar night it reeks of self-importance (and think of its converse - if something isn't answered (or even addressed) in any Hollywood film then it's not really one of life's important riddles - isn't it just crazy to believe that a rigidly profit- and market-driven big commercial enterprise driven by formula after formula would magically cover *everything* that's important to human beings?).

For another thing, and setting aside the movie business's cloying self-regard, the idea that movies have all the answers is in the same genre as lots of other ideas that are pure wish-fulfillment, e.g., 'All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten', and of course lots of people will tell you that some particular book - The Bible or The Koran etc. - or some particular, easily masterable subject or topic - Baseball or Poker or Arbitrage or Science Fiction or '80s movies in particular or even just Glengarry Glen Ross by itself - has all the answers *they* need. People *really* wish their lives and the world were simpler that they in fact are. People often *do* feel overwhelmed, and this leads them to be drawn to various councils of simplicity. Simplifications, approximations, idealizations, modeling x as a better-understood y... all these steps *can* be useful, but have to taken very carefully if what you are running up against, as you almost always are, is a complex world (with lots of novel, poorly understood, or even irreducibly chaotic features).

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

Well...uh...er...

One sends out a musing missive to the universe and can't always predict the answer that comes back. Pretty hard-hitting there swanstep.

I shall leave much of it alone and declare "I can see that, I get you."

But some clarification:

ONE: Context. In that movie "Grand Canyon," I suppose we can take "producer" Steve Martin's line at face value -- "Hey, audience, think about it -- all of life's riddles can be answered at the movies," but in context, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan may be mocking the character.

Martin's producer is based on Joel Silver -- maker of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and all that action stuff. In Grand Canyon, Martin''s producer character is mugged for his expensive watch, on the street, and shot in the thigh. A GRAPHIC surgery scene follows. Martin now walks with a cane and -- swears of never making"those violent movies" ever again. He makes a humanistic art film. It bombs. He goes back to making action movies. Kevin Kline says "But you said you were never making violent movies again." Martin replies: "Aw, c'mon I was on drugs from the surgery. I was delusional. I didn't know what I was saying."

So maybe his "answer the riddles" line was meant to be delusional too. Moreover, Martin is speaking to Kline about the famous movie "Sulivan's Travels'" in which the director IN THAT movie swears off action movies to make dramas and finds that convicts love MIckey Mouse movies, not bleak drama, to help them forget their misery. Back to action.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

2. BUT WAIT... for me, I remembered that line from Grand Canyon and actually, I don't know about "answering the riddles of life," but great movie lines and dialogue have certainly marked MY life, for decades now, and I can't really turn my back on how meaningful I found them.

I DID take Don Vito's "Never tell anyone what you're thinking" line as part of my business life(except when I couldn't.) I DO use John Candy's "Well, personally I'm FOR it, of course" line whenever it fits. I'll use "well, I could stay a BIT longer" in the company of other guys who know it -- and its our personal in-joke.

Does a movie like Vertigo -- with its rather ridiculous murder plot -- answer a riddle of life? Somewhat, a bit: the issue of how men obsess over women, put them on a pedestal, and then reject them(as Scottie rejects the "real" Judy.) The issue of "trying to bring back the past" when you can't anymore. I'm not sure if this answers a riddle of life or just comments ON a riddle of life.

Marlon Brando, in a typically uncooperative 1978 interview with Playboy, where he generally refused to talk about his movies, grudgingly acknowledged that the reason his "I coulda been a contender" taxi cab speech in On the Waterfront moved people was because "EVERYBODY thinks they could have been a contender, EVERYBODY thinks they could have done more with their life, gotten better breaks."

I am currently going through a phase -- I don't know how long it will last -- of remembering my past decades of moviewatching with a sense not only of great nostalgia, but of great WONDER -- all those movies, all those actors, all those scenes, all those memories. They have to count for SOMETHING.

I guess I'll find out...