Talking Movies

Gresham’s Law Strikes Again! That sounds not unlike the title of a pulpy 1930s B-movie. Which is somehow entirely appropriate.

I can’t be the only one who with monotonous regularity sees Ghostbusters pop up on the TV schedule, goes ‘Oh cool!’, and then when clicking to set a reminder discovers it is not the beloved 1984 comedy but instead the 2016 movie that has been universally memory-holed without most of us even having to suffer thru the indignity of watching it first. In the distant past I always wondered why on earth TV channels, with the gamut of cinema to choose from, insisted on showing bad new films instead of good old films. The Film Editor had to sit me down and explain the concept of bundling. A studio knew the networks wanted to show the big new film, so they insisted that if they wanted to show the big new film they must also show their lame new film.

And so we get ‘Ghostbusters’ floating around TV schedules like a spectre of such low-level irritation that nobody is even bothered capturing it in a trap. Pick any godawful flop (RIPD) that mooches around mysteriously and you have the explanation; it is there because it has to be so Top Gun: Maverick can draw in viewers for the network. The only problem is that there is only so much space, and there are a lot of films competing for it. Every time a bad movie is legally obliged to be shown, a good movie cannot be shown in its stead. There is a good business reason, from the studio side, for this. But it might be self-harming. If people only saw good movies, wouldn’t it make them more interested in movies per se? Is that not worth accepting flops flopped?

And from the 1990s to the 2020s we have added a lot of stuff to the list of circulating titles. It is getting harder to watch 1960s titles on TV, because that decade is now as distant as the 1930s were to the 1990s. As for getting 1930s movies on TV right now… It’s getting harder to even see the Marx Brothers on TV after the loss of TCM. As specialty movie channels shutter, and the competing walled-garden streaming services simply will not host old movies, all we have left are the networks – who are swamped with dreck. Off the top of my head these are the 1930s movies I actually expect to see on TV over a year: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Robin Hood, King Kong, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes.

It’s not enough. It shouldn’t be the case that Back to the Future is considered a very old film and The Lord of the Rings is viewed as an old trilogy. (Not least because LOTR somehow has better VFX than nearly all current blockbusters). In the late 1990s the Man with No Name trilogy of Sergio Leone from the 1960s held considerable cultural cachet, the way that the great 1990s flowering of crime movies still holds much esteem now. But this is something that should be compounding not substituting; For a Few Dollars More and Heat should both have a place in the firmament, not just Heat. And the further we get away from the beginning of cinema the worse this problem is going to get. We also move further from a recognisable conception of cinema, but that’s another piece.

In 2007 I saw Zodiac in the cinema and M on DVD from the college library, and as a result the two movies are bound together in my memory; because of the great continuity displayed between Fritz Lang and David Fincher working in the same territory. The dearth of 1930s movies on television deprives us of that sense of continuity. Which I fear leads to the contempt I witnessed in the 2016 screening of Halloween at the Lighthouse, which has now been referenced so many times on this blog as to constitute its own Boogeyman. In this instance I think it is lack of familiarity that breeds contempt. People are too used to sitting in smug judgement of the past, which increasingly seems to mean the first thing they encounter that they don’t remember personally. Because they don’t know it.