How to Watch a Movie Read Online Free PDF

more from Lang than Hitchcock), The Godfather, The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo … The Sopranos, Dexter, Breaking Bad .
    That’s too dark a view? How many real killings have you seen? I’m guessing and hoping very few—zero perhaps. And how many have you seen presented and pretended to on some screen? Well, if you’re thirty and American, the number is around thirty thousand. Does that imbalance amount to an attention disorder?

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    A LONE TOGETHER?
    I n the last chapter, I was treasuring the community of film-going in the late 1940s. But I wonder if I was being unduly sentimental or nostalgic, for I know in my innermost being that another thing that has always appealed to me about the movies is the solitude, or the aloneness, they foster. How can those reactions coexist?
    The community wasn’t simply a mythic idea promoted by the business. Moviegoing was the national pastime. By the late twenties, a third of Americans were going to the pictures once a week. In the war years, that figure reached 70 million admissions on a population of about 140 million. Immediately after the war it was 80 million—or still half the population. The average admission price was less than 50 cents. The theaters were crowded or packed. People went in groups and they sawfriends there. The spirit of the war was reinforced by the movies and enshrined by them. It was in theaters that we formed our idea of what war looked like, granted that the newsreels were carefully controlled and very positive. But the mood of the audience was already in favor of the war and these regular gatherings for entertainment focused team spirit as well as the pathos of those who were “away” or in danger.
    Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is set in 1904, and it delights in the prettiness of period clothes and an idealized home built on the M-G-M lot in Culver City. We meet three generations of the Smith family all living in the same house. They are excited about the World’s Fair coming to St. Louis, but then a fresh adventure appears on their horizon. Alonzo, the father, is offered an important new job in New York City. If he accepts it, the family must move, and suffer the disruption and transience that many regard as characteristic of American life. But then comes Christmas Eve (the picture opened in November 1944). The teenage Esther (Judy Garland) sings to her sleepless kid sister, Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as they look out at the backyard with the snowmen they have built,
    The song is one of the most beautiful and melancholy in the American songbook (by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin), and the film and its director, Vincente Minnelli, use it to bring a tear to our eye—an honest tear and an innocent eye. Tootie is so torn about leaving St. Louis that she rushes down to the yard in her nightgown and destroys the snowmen. This is an M-G-M musical, but still it is one of the best domestic moments in American film. The father hears and sees this, and on the spot he quenches his own ambition and his urge to move. The Smiths will stay in St. Louis. There’s no place likehome. (It was the same message as delivered in another Garland film, The Wizard of Oz —and so the war was bookended.) But surely Alonzo is more alone amid togetherness.
    The American home had not been bombed—think of the education if it had. But American families had been split apart, and here was a film that reassured the troops overseas (they were an extra audience on top of the domestic box office) that home would still be there waiting for them and their old life would resume. Those were white lies, and anyone shrewd enough would have guessed that. But the audience wanted to believe in stability, persistence, and the war being worthwhile. So the movie houses were home away from home, and strongholds of a positive and conservative state of mind.
    Meet Me in St. Louis