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Old Movies, Eternal Morals
 They’re
still making James Bond and Rocky
movies, and the latest ones are getting surprisingly good reviews. A guy
named Daniel Craig has now taken the role of Bond, which I guess means that
George Lazenby has lost his box-office magic, but  Sylvester
Stallone is still playing Rocky Balboa, who, at age 60, is making another
comeback in Rocky Balboa.
This suggests an idea
for another movie. Why don’t they make a beach-party movie, with an
eye to the aging Baby Boomer market, called Old Gidget? Gidget
would still wear a bikini and retain her virginal innocence, but now she would
carry a cell phone and deal with such contemporary problems as
Islamofascism. Of course her blonde hair might be silver now. And
she’d wear Depends under her bikini bottom.
I love old movies,
because I learn so much from them. They remind me how much we have
changed. In fact, they are among the things that have changed us. They are
paradoxical that way. Light romances like the Gidget movies celebrated
monogamy and unconsciously undermined it at the same time.
The old prudes who
were suspicious of all movies had a point. So do the later liberals who deplore
violence in films; maybe they don’t go far enough. The movies teach
us to expect too much from romantic love and to think violence can make
the world just.
The films I like best
treat love and violence with irony. I think this may be why Alfred
Hitchcock’s movies wear so well. They respect moral norms, but they
show happiness and justice coming at a price. It’s no accident that
Hitchcock never made a war movie, not even during World War II. Frank Capra
could make stirring patriotic propaganda; Hitchcock couldn’t. He was
too aware of the other side, the dark obverse of things. Maybe it has
something to do with religion. Not that he could do religious propaganda
either, but his Catholicism, as many critics have noted, seems to color his
work, even Psycho.
![[Breaker quote for Old Movies, Eternal Morals: Bond, Balboa, and Gidget]](2006breakers/061228.gif) The
morality of a great writer, as G.K.
Chesterton says somewhere, “is not the morality he explains, but the
morality he forgets to explain.” A Shakespeare doesn’t spell
out his moral; he makes it felt through his characters, through the
situations, and so forth. Hitchcock’s morality is implicit that way.
When I watch his films, the last of which was made a generation ago, I never
feel I’m watching something essentially quaint, like a period piece; I
feel its moral immediacy. The passage of time hasn’t really changed
our reactions to Notorious or Strangers on a
Train, despite certain differences in moral fashion.
By contrast, even a
Christian watching Ben-Hur today feels that it was obviously
trying to manipulate the emotions of the audiences of another time. The
spectacle is still thrilling, but the dialogue feels dated.
The moral law is
eternal, but elusive. At times we easily confuse it with our own desires,
passions, opinions, customs, and fashions. We marvel when other people do
this, but we often fail to notice when we do it ourselves. It becomes more
obvious in retrospect, which is why movies — reflections of our former
selves — may assist our insight and help us to see ourselves more
objectively. Those old war films can make us wonder why we hated our
enemies so much. Had we perhaps gone a little mad? And are we still doing it
today?
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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