Scout Moves

Because my parents grew up when Hollywood produced happy movies with little objectionable imagery--cue the fade to black so as not to reveal anything too, um, private--and with little objectionable language--even "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" was racy for its time--I was not allowed to see movies in a movie theater. I was allowed to go to a drive-in with the neighbor family once to see Herbie the Love Bug, but I think that exception was made because my aunt dated Dean Jones in high school. My mother liked to reminisce about the days when movies were worth the 25 cent admission. Stars were stars, and women were beautiful. Children were respectful, and America always won. She remembered the day Gone With the Wind was released in 1939, and for a school girl in Alabama, it was an event. The schools closed early so all the children could go to the matinee, and they were embarrassed when Rhett Butler delivered his final line. What a day that was, and I grew up hearin...

I recognize the need to generate income by repackaging--publishers do it all the time, but the text is left intact. Here is a short list of some film remakes in which the "text" is altered, besides A Christmas Carol or Scrooge or Old Man and the Ghost, whatever they want to call it: The Philadelphia Story/High Society: Here is a perfectly good movie with excellent casting, and someone goes and messes it up with bad casting and color. And who decided that adding music makes a film better anyway? The Shop Around the Corner/You've Got Mail: I think the remake is kind of cute, but the original was so much more than cute. The characters had depth, and the boss wasn't a bad guy. I hate movies that make the boss out to be bad just because he's the boss and has money. It's a small mind that thinks so flatly. The Parent Trap/The Parent Trap: I'll give them this one. I didn't care for the first one, and I thought its casting was sluggish. But really, what a ridi...

I've been thinking (if just one person says, "I thought I smelled something burning, I swear, I'll swear just for Old Knusdon)...if you were to change just the last ten minutes of any movie, whether it was based on a novel or not, you could completely change the entire film. So, if you had been watching The Prize Movie with Ione in 1972, and she blabbed on and on so there wasn't enough time to show the last bit of film at the end of the two-hour time slot, you could rewrite the meaning of the entire movie using your own imagination. When Hitchcock first filmed "Suspicion," Cary Grant did actually kill Joan Fontaine , making her suspicions about his character justified, but the preview audience was so appalled at the idea that Cary Grant would commit murder that the ending was rewritten and re-shot. Grant doesn't shove Fontaine out of the car on the cliff but tries to save her from her own paranoia--suddenly the rest of the film makes no sense. That...

There used to be this show on WLS in Chicago called The Prize Movie with Ione . Every day, Ione would sit on the set and host a movie, and by "host," I mean she would introduce the film, and then with each commercial break she would completely break the train of thought with chit chat about no particular subject with people who called in. Sometimes callers would talk about the movie and sometimes they would talk about anything but. Sometimes Ione would do exercises on a mat with this fluffy, white immovable dog beside her. And sometimes a man in an ape suit would rush the stage pretending to be her husband. And if there was too much talking or too many crunches or too much ape and not enough time to show the full film, they would just not show the end--you could miss the last ten minutes if time ran out. During the summers, my sister and I never missed a morning with Ione . I think I was twelve before I ever saw a movie straight through without commercials--it was Gone Wi...