San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mick LaSalle
Not long ago, I was teaching a course on comedy, with the idea that I would only show movies that were genuinely funny. Not funny, here and there, but strongly and consistently funny — like “Girls Trip” and “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.”
My idea was that people don’t respect comedy enough. They sit and laugh for 90 minutes, then walk out and say, “Well, that was stupid.” No, it wasn’t stupid. A comedy may be coarse and may appeal to the lowest common denominator, but if it makes you and a room full of strangers laugh from beginning to end, it’s the furthest thing from stupid. It’s some kind of brilliant, and we should admit it. And celebrate that.
The second idea I had was that I wanted to show movies across a spectrum of 90 years. The goal was to demonstrate how styles of comedy change, but how certain things remain funny from generation to generation. I put “Airplane” on the syllabus. I had a Marion Davies movie on there, and for the 1940s, I chose “The Palm Beach Story” (1942), which I had seen several times and remembered as hilarious.
“The Palm Beach Story” is one of a string of eight comedies, written and directed by Preston Sturges, in an amazing burst of creativity in the early 1940s. When I first saw it, in the 1980s, it was very funny, and it was still very funny when I saw it in the late 1990s. But in 2018, it was barely funny at all.
I’m not going into details, because if you haven’t seen the film, they won’t make sense to you. But there’s a whole thing at the beginning about an eccentric millionaire that’s labored and lame. And there are recurring bits involving drunken guys on a hunting trip that go on forever and couldn’t be less funny.
Some things still work. Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea are charismatic leads, and Rudy Vallee is mildly amusing in a comic role. But all in all, an old movie that was playing perfectly well 20 years ago is now pretty much a bust.
For years, critics have said that if a movie lasts 50 years, it’s a classic, but critics have said this only because that is how it works with books. The truth is, we have no idea how it works with movies. For a book to continue to exist, people have to continue wanting to read it. But movies exist passively. They’re just on. You can accidentally watch a movie. You can’t accidentally read a book. This phenomenon may keep movies alive past their natural life.
Lately, I’ve been noticing other examples of movies falling apart past the age of 70. “His Girl Friday” (1940) was a delight for six or so decades. Now, despite the appeal of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, the whole film rings false — the relationship, the newspaper setting, the story. And by the way, have you seen Alfred Hitchcock’s movies lately? They’re not all great — even “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), which is suddenly showing its age after a vigorous half century or so.
It’s frustrating how little we know about movies. I like to assume that in the year 2300, people will still find George Clooney and Jennifer Lawrence likable and engaging, but face it: They might be considered repulsive. We don’t know the future, and we don’t know about the longevity of film — not in the way we know about music, art or literature. It just hasn’t been around long enough.
But here are two things that I believe to be true: (1) Fifty years is nothing. A movie needs to last 75 years to be safe from deterioration; and (2) Certain movies and performers will last forever. But we can’t say for sure which ones.
Finally, like it or not, we are all now people of the 21st century, with all that implies in terms of thoughts and attitudes, values and assumptions. As we go forward, individually and as a culture, we will be taking many 20th century movies with us. But we’ll be traveling lighter than we expected.
Editor’s Note: Ask Mick LaSalle will return next week.