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INTRODUCTION
Many intelligent people are vaguely suspicious of the movies. Movies, they say, are not "serious." Nevertheless — and unfortunately — they go to the movies. They can't help themselves; they need the comforting darkness, the abandonment of reality, the startling immediacy of fantasy which can be found at the neighborhood movie house. But films being declasse, these people have had to discover cultural attitudes to legitimatize their attendance. They have found two. One is the insistence that movies are art and going to see them is a quest for aesthetic enlightenment on the same level as theatergoing, gallery-trotting or the reading of Henry James. The other, wrapped in the warmly protective cloak of social science, is the view that the film is a way of sampling public opinion; at the movies, it claims, you can measure popular sexual attitudes, the level of unconscious violence in the society, even the shifts in the sociopolitical wind.
Both of these attitudes have been productive, at their best, of some provocative writing, but neither has given a total picture of the experience of the movies as most of us understand it. It is almost impossible to retain critical objectivity about the movies. It is the nature of the medium to hit below the belt. One is drawn into a film in such a way that visceral responses quite overcome critical faculties. All is lost, save attitudes which are hastily readjusted, once the film is over, much in the way the clothes of teen-dge lovers are readjusted — hastily, and with a great pretense of nonchalance— when a cop's flashlight suddenly shines through the window of the parked car.
In short, the attitudes we take to the movies generally prevent us from fully understanding what we see and even
The old Hollywood meets the new, in the best movie about movies ever made, Sunset Boulevard. In a projection room Gloria Swanson, as the forgotten star, recalls her youth and that of Hollywood for William Holden. In their styles, director Billy Wilder found the perfect contrast between the old grand manner and the new naturalism. The film they are watching is Queen Kelly, a 1930 Swanson film, directed by Erich Von Stroheim, but never released by Paramount.