Read Online How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson - Free Book Online

Lloyd. It was a Warner Bros. picture and I trusted that studio and its blithe sense of history. The film was in color, photographed by Ernest Haller, with music by Max Steiner. Both men had done Gone With the Wind . It was directed by Jacques Tourneur, and Waldo Salt had written the script.
    Later on, the film scholar would discover that Waldo Salt had been blacklisted. He had joined the Communist Party in 1938. He was vital to Joseph Losey’s superb remaking of M . Butlater on he would write Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home . So maybe the story of peasants revolting against cruel lords in old Lombardy was a political metaphor? Tourneur was a director with great visual aplomb: he had done Out of the Past just a few years earlier, and that is still a classic noir with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.
    Still, The Flame and the Arrow was routine fare, and a big hit: it had domestic rentals of $3 million. It was ideal for a nine-year-old in 1950, and something some six-year-olds would enjoy now. But truly you could have too much of it, or take it too seriously. You wouldn’t worry that most of the pleasure and the sensation of the film was there now, immediately, the first time you saw it—perhaps 90 percent? Here was a film like thousands of others meant to fill around ninety minutes with delight, and which was based on the principle that in three days’ time there would be something else on your screen just as entertaining.
    Could it be studied— should it be? Was there a Marxist sub-text and Ph.D. prospects in The Flame and the Arrow ? Had this movie threatened American military cohesion in the year the Korean War began? (It was released two weeks after the Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel.) Or was there another subtext that it took me fifty years to discover? Was the movie begging for the kind of affectionate parody of Hollywood movies provided by Carol Burnett or Monty Python? And once you were alert to parody, what was this about two chums, Dardo and Piccolo, hiding out in the forest and sniping at tyranny? Their acrobatics and their insouciant smiles were a kind of schoolboy ballet. How did forest dwellers stay so buffed and trim? How were their teeth perfect? (Their smiles were as important as any love of nature, archery, or Anne ofHesse. Virginia Mayo’s promotion: from her days in St. Louis and vaudeville, she was known as the pin-up who had come to life.) Was there a suggestion of gay brotherhood in Burt and Nick Cravat? The two actors had been boyhood friends; they joined the circus together; and then went to Hollywood. Both of them were married with children, but there is a legend now that Lancaster was gay, too. Why not?
    There were more far-reaching films made in 1950, like Sunset Blvd., All About Eve , or Max Ophüls’s La Ronde , which was regarded as a “naughty” film not fit for children. Was it “naughty” to expose anyone to an ironic, dispassionate survey of love as a human infection? Whereas The Flame and the Arrow in Britain had a U certificate (open to any age) and I actually went to see it on my own. In those times, I tried whatever was on—like the bulk of the filmgoing audience. Sometimes I knew no more than a title, a poster, and an actor’s name. What I really went for were the ninety minutes of escape, the fun, the sensation, the silly nowness of it all.
    That attitude meant a film could never match that first impact when it came up on the screen like this morning’s sun, and innocence could ask, “Will Dardo win?” There are still good, pleasing films that deserve no more than a single viewing—I hope this doesn’t shock you but I’d put The Artist, Slumdog Millionaire, Million Dollar Baby, The King’s Speech , and Gravity in that category. Some of them won Best Picture at the Oscars, but once was enough. They are smart, confident entertainments, nicely played, but they have no significant ambition or