Impact (Jan 1972)

youduiy of yyuow Adada wjif {oO uoisiA anbiun uMo siy juasadd IM [AD “LOJJUaWWUOD W]I{ MOU puD ‘daj1dM UOISIAaja] “JsIuuiN -]09 O1ppd puv dadvdsmany ‘Sa2dnosad . upuiny jD1juassa S,ppouvD fo auo sp pasiaua spy 2Zjuplawuod joy ‘“pjlya D SD SsuluUuisag ajquiny Ssiy WOdy Nobody’s happy in movies. If you’re rich and famous (Who is Harry Kellerman etc.), you can’t be happy, because money won’t make people love you. And if you’re poor and crippled (Midnight Cowboy), you can’t be happy because poverty and crippledness are bad things and to be happy about bad things is sick. And if you’re happy (home movies), you definitely can’t be happy, because you’re not really happy, you only think you’re happy, because you’re not rich and famous and you’re not poor and crippled. But as we all know, happiness defined by what you’ re not is not happiness. And how happy can a happy man be without happiness? You still there? Good. I guess what I'd really like to see is more fun in movies. Quite often, the non-movie world can be not very nice. There’s war in Vietnam and gum on the seats and I think movies should take us away from these things once in a while. But in most “now” movies, you sit down and you make gumcontact and you tell yourself: “All right. I’m on gum! What should I do? I think Ill forget about it. No gum on the seat’s gonna stop me from enjoying the picture!” So you sit back, determined to forget the world and watch the movie and the lights go down and the flick comes on and it’s called .. . Gum on the Seats! But just because I don’t want to be reminded of what I’m sitting on doesn’t mean [d like a return to “Sugar-Pill’” pictures: “Just close your. eyes and go to sleep and when you wake up tomorrow, your dog will be back!” Those “all’s well” movies depressed me almost as much as the “nobody’s happy’ movies, because their dog does come back. But the world’s dog, him you don’t hear from anymore. And you shoulda seen the girls! Remember them? “Hi there, I’m Patsy Pucker. When it comes to great bodily parts, I’ve got them all! That’s why the chick you’re with doesn’t have any!” It’s like they had auditions for human beings and if you won, you got in the movies and if you lost, your punishment was to pay to go in and see who you aren’t. Of course, we tried to duplicate their cinematic perfection but forget it! Y’see, film folk have one great advantage over us real people. It’s called Retakes! A movie male can make kissing mistakes ’til his lips chap, but they'll only show the “good” one. Out here, you kiss a lady nine times wrong and by the tenth time, she’s locked herself in a vault. Alan ‘Shane’ Ladd was a perfect example of a star who got kissing help. It seems Al was too short to reach the lips of the kissee. So they stood him ona box. Can you imagine walking your date up to the front door... She: I had a wonderful time, Harold. Wanna kiss me good-night? He: Sure! She: Hey, where are you going? He: To get my box! But worse even than fabricating tallness, old movies also fabricated truth. Apparently, John Wayne did not win World War II all by himself. — No, history says The Duke had help. But typically enough, Hollywood never made a picture called John Wayne’s Help! (They also never made a movie called The Enemy’s Got A Point). And when we found out there was lying going on, we re acted like children who’d just been told there’s no Santa Claus and started taking it out on the toys. Movies were rebuked, reformed and realistified. And that’s when they started feeding us slices of life chock full of witty repartee like: ““Whaddaya wanna do, Marty?’ “I donno. Whadda you wanna do?”’ And from then on, happiness hit the skids and nobody sang Zippity Doo Dah anymore. Or if they did, they sang it slow, to bring out the irony of it. New movies breathed the fresh air of truth into our souls by giving us head-on confrontation with all the probems we went in there to forget. The only real similarity between these pictures and the pictures of yesteryear lies in the suggested solutions to these problems. What we’ve done is gone from pleasant movies that don’t hurt to hurty movies that don’t help. And we called it “The Movies Grow Up’’. Well sir, if growing up means all problem pictures and no pirate pictures, I’m kind of sorry movies bothered. ZjUeIIWOg [1ey Suns Wl d 294M UOJ }1 Je SUTYOOT