For Reel?

CNN's six-part documentary "The Movies," produced by Tom Hanks' and Gary Goetzman's studio Playtone, just concluded this past Sunday, and I'd like to say that I thought it was very good.  Instead, it was only okay.  And at times it almost wasn't even that.

So what was wrong with it?  Let me count the ways!

Lack of a discussion of foreign movies.  I must have missed the memo that said "The Movies" was to be a chronicle of only American cinema, and if the series had been called "American Movies," that would at least have been an honest description of what it documented.  But by simply promoting it as a documentary of movies in general - "the movies we love" - anyone whose cinematic loves include French New Wave movies, Italian neo-realism movies, or Japanese cinema having nothing to do with Godzilla was bound to be disappointed. Playtone's series covered none of those subjects.  The result was that some of the most groundbreaking movies from non-American directors - Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Fellini's La Strada and 8½, Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, Kurosawa's Rashomon - were overlooked.  Many American directors have cited these titans of cinema as major influences, yet Playtone's Hanks and Goetzman felt no need to acknowledge them.

But then, maybe that's not their fault.  I am constantly reminded that a good chunk of metropolitan areas in Middle America don't have theaters devoted to showing foreign movies and never did, because complex movies with subtitles don't appeal to moviegoers there.  And not just in the heartland.  When I was in college, I couldn't help but notice how many foreign pictures that played in Manhattan seldom got runs in theaters in the northern New Jersey suburbs (although that situation has since improved).  The movies this documentary series did cover are primarily movies that average Americans are more familiar with, and CNN tried to appeal to a mass audience that has no patience with movies made in other countries and in other languages by directors they've never heard of.  Which beings me to my next compliant . . .

Lack of a discussion of foreign actors.  If Ingrid Bergman hadn't worked in Hollywood, she would have been as ignored in this series as Ingmar Bergman.  Any look at the great stars of cinema that doesn't acknowledge leading men like Alain Delon, Marcello Mastroianni, Oskar Werner, Klaus Kinski or Toshiro Mifune is woefully incomplete.  The great foreign movie actresses fared better, if only because Hollywood was a repository for women like Bergman, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, but there was no mention of Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, or Sophia Loren - no mention of Sophia Loren, who has her own share of Hollywood credits to boast of?  And of course I need to mention Catherine Deneuve - the first and only movie star I've ever had a crush on - because Hanks' and Goetzman's documentary didn't mention her either.  But what do you expect when Americans know Deneuve better as a spokesmodel for Chanel perfume than for classics like Belle de Jour or The Last Metro?

Silly me - this was a documentary about movies. Foreign motion pictures are called "films."  Difference.

Where was the rock and roll?  Musicals were widely covered.  When the episode about the 1960s looked at the musicals of the period, I had no problem with looks at Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, or the Streisand vehicle Funny Girl, all musical movies that debuted in 1964 - and no, the French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which was released that same year and launched Catherine Deneuve's career, didn't get a nod.  But did you notice another missing title there?  A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles' first movie from 1964, which Roger Ebert credited as the wellspring of what became the counterculture that made movies like Easy Rider possible?  Don't get me wrong, I love Julie Andrews, but I am willing to bet that "A Spoonful of Sugar" didn't have as much impact on the culture as "Can't Buy Me Love."

Yes, yes, you say - A Hard Day's Night was made in Twickenham, not Hollywood, and so it wasn't going to get acknowledged, but then none of Elvis Presley's early movies like Jailhouse Rock and King Creole were, either, nor was The Girl Can't Help It, one of the earliest rock and roll movies made.  Grease, though not purely a rock musical, was thrown in to the 1970s episode as an afterthought - but Rock and Roll High School, which came out forty years ago today and featured a soundtrack from and an appearance by the Ramones?  Nah, no time for that.  The absence of rock movies was enough to make me want to be sedated.

Tom Hanks should had have an idea of how much rock and roll influenced the movies as much as it influenced everything else.  After all, there was that 1996 movie That Thing You Do!, a rock and roll movie about a fictional band in the sixties, written and directed by and starring . . . Tom Hanks.

Lack of chronological order.  The series started with an episode about the movies of the eighties, continued to the present, then followed with an episode about the seventies, and then one about the sixties, concluding with one about the golden age of Hollywood from 1927 to 1959.  Imagine a documentary series about the history of America that starts with Reconstruction, goes to the present, then has an episode about the antebellum period and concludes with an episode about the American Revolution, and you understand how asinine that is.

Lack of early history.  Now imagine a documentary series about the history of America that doesn't mention the colonial period.  Well, Playtone showed no interest how motion pictures were invented and developed in the first place by inventors like Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Edison, and there was no look at silent films or pre-talkie stars like Rudolph Valentino.  The only way Edison could have been acknowledged here is if he'd been played in a movie by Jimmy Stewart.

Too much middlebrow fare.  When the first episode of "The Movies," about the 1980s, aired, one director that the actors and directors interviewed waxed rhapsodic about was John Hughes, who was sort of the Woody Allen of teenage movies at that time . . . even though his movies were mostly the same story - upper-middle-class white kids in the Chicago suburbs going through self-absorbed trauma.  I should have known from that moment that this series was going to look more at crowd-pleasing flicks like franchise movies, slight romantic comedies, frat-boy flicks, and other movies of that ilk - movies that weren't necessarily bad but wouldn't be remembered today if they hadn't been big box-office successes or been rediscovered on television. Oh, sure, "The Movies" looked at serious films like Citizen Kane and looked more closely at directors like John Ford and Billy Wilder as well as latter-day giants like Martin Scorsese, but the overall feel is like a greatest-hits compilation produced for a pedestrian cable-TV movie channel.  The illustration below used to promote the series pretty much sums up its approach toward the history of cinema in a nutshell, depicting characters from movies mostly absent from a college-film-course syllabus.  

 

I hate to agree with National Review on anything, but it's hard to argue with National Review film critic Armond White's observation in his column about this documentary series and how the list of movies celebrated in it included films like Jaws, Pretty Woman and Jurassic Park: "Even if your personal favorites are among them, it is a moronic fanboy’s view of movie history . . .. CNN’s 'The Movies' is not designed to celebrate films that established the art form with moral power - Intolerance to Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia to Nashville - but to win ratings through quasi-populism."

And if commercial breaks hadn't taken up so much room that could have been used for a more comprehensive look at cinema, that wouldn't have been a problem. Although, White, a conservative, is probably against the idea, "The Movies" is probably the best argument in favor of a BBC-style national public network for the United States since PBS was forced to cancel "Mercy Street."

I'm sure White bristled at the extra attention given to female and non-white directors for what he thought was the sake of political correctness, though I had no problem with that.  I did, however, find it interesting that, while talking about the plight of female directors in Hollywood, the series, by ignoring foreign directors, overlooked European female filmmakers like France's Agnes Varda and Italy's Lina Wertmüller, who were directing films long before anyone heard of Kathryn Bigelow.

In summation, "The Movies" is a documentary series that means well but doesn't do well.  Playtone's style of fast-paced clips and interviews may have been appropriate for Hanks' and Goetzman's earlier CNN docu-series about previous decades of contemporary history, but not for a subject this sweeping.  I have a feeling that Sue Ann Estevez, whose film-history course I took at Drew University, saw "The Movies" and did not approve.