Changing Perspectives of Films and their Times.

It's interesting how a view of a film can shift over the years.


For instance, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane has finally been toppled after decades on top of the British Film Institute's Top 10 films of all time list in favour of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.  It certainly shouldn't be a surprise apparently since it had been rising in critical favour for decades. For myself, Citizen Kane is an interesting film with its wit and a bleakly satiric look at the American Dream at its materialistic worst with bold cinematic techniques to tell that story.  By contrast, Vertigo does have the virtues of nightmarish surrealism and it's own bleak tragedy of obsession, even when it's for the truth, to make for a interesting film experience.

Now, Mike Nichols seems to inspire similar reassessments such as with the great film critic, Roger Ebert, changing his tune about The Graduate. In 1967, he praised the film to the skies with his affection for Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock and then thirty years later, sympathizing for the ostensibly villainous Mrs. Robinson dealing with Ben who Ebert now calls an "insufferable creep." Yet, he still likes the film, but more has a museum piece of  whose time has passed, except for Simon and Garfunkel's music, which contrary to his first review, turned out to be not "forgettable" at all.

For myself, I can never have Ebert's perspective reviewing Nichol's greatest films considering he first saw them in the 1960s when they shook up the Hollywood film with their bold content for their time.  I can only rely on a historical perspective and appreciate them in that context, but my own perspective and my tastes in film will reflect my time on a visceral level I just can't shake.

In that regard, I finally got myself to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Mike Nichols' 1966 mega-successful adaptation of  Edward Albee's classic play. This was a film with such raw content that dealt a heavy blow to Hollywood's stifling Production Code and paved the way to more freedom for American film, if imperfectly.

However, for all this appreciation, I can't escape the fact that the film was almost unwatchable to me. The whole story about this bitter couple continually sniping at each other and sucking a young couple in repellently divorced from any real humanity or character logic. At no time do Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's characters seem to convey one gram of warm or humanity, but carry on as nightmare caricatures of domestic emotional hell.

Furthermore, the younger couple seem to act with any feeling of basic common sense or self-preservation. After all, when someone visits a couple who are sniping at each other so hatefully that the husband brandishes a rifle at her, you'd expect any visitor would practically be running for the door.Yet, these twits stay after all and get sucked into their vicious mutual emotional torture. So, I'm expecting to be interested in seeing two emotional sadists wreak havoc with their drunken idiocies while two young nitwits go along with all this, even to the point of taking a ride with them to a bar to make it a public spectacle?  Yes, by the end, there is a shocking revelation that can give the main couple's turmoil a bit of perspective, but it is far too late in the story for me to care.

I've read that part of the appeal for its time was not only the lure of the forbidden with the rough material, but also two of the biggest stars of that time indulging in such wild antics that were once thoroughly hidden behind closed film doors.  As it is, I've grown up in a time when such material is now commonplace for TV movies and the simple shock value has long since faded. As much as I bet Albee's original play has a more nuance tone that can be properly toned for today in the confines of the stage, this film just feels like a gleeful sledgehammer that had already flattened the play's possible subtleties for a generation that was perhaps not ready for them in that medium.

Christopher Reeve, an actor's actor.

Then there is also the fact that this film was a star vehicle for Burton and Taylor.  For myself, I try to avoid seeing films because of the actors, but I first grew to like film like Star Wars and Superman where the larger story is paramount and the actors playing it who best suited to it was all important.  To me, Christopher Reeve is my ideal; a relatively unknown actor hired to play the Man of Steel, but had to do so in the shadow of Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman in third billing. Yet, Reeve is the one who proved himself brilliantly in a fantasy role that could have been hopelessly silly, but made it feel so warmly believable and appealing on its own terms.

Since then, and helped along by being bored to tears with Star Trek: the Motion Picture's glossy, but crashingly boring tale I look to story and the skill telling it above all else. Then again, I am also someone who consults the film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes more than any publicity or advertising for films to see.  I'm not immune to good marketing such my interest in the upcoming animation film, Wreck-It Ralph, with its enthralling trailer, but that is balanced against the suspense to waiting for its RT score to say whether it lives up to it.

With that in mind, I plan to be writing reviews of older films on top of other subjects for this blog to see what a modern perspective can bring and see what I can discover.