LET’S SEE SOME REAL OLDER PEOPLE

The Z Channel has featured the three Barrymores this month, and watching them all, but especially Ethel Barrymore, made me realize with a start how long it’s been since we’ve had a forceful older presence on American movie screens with any regularity. What a loss. We need our teen-crazy screens balanced with an image of older people--vital, experienced men and women with something of worth to impart.

Movies used to be full of them: not only Lewis Stone as kindly Judge Hardy but Jane Darwell, Edward Arnold, Thomas Mitchell, Fay Bainter, Sara Allgood, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, Walter Brennan, Frank Morgan, Donald Crisp, Dame May Witty, Charley Grapewin, Sam Jaffe, Mildred Dunnock and Mildred Natwick, just to pick quickly out of the air. But somewhere in the rush for the young audience, writers and directors have mislaid a whole segment of society. So much so that an affirmative action statement from the Screen Actors Guild lists “senior performers” along with “women, people of color and the disabled” as faces crucially missing from a balanced picture of the world. We need them back.

(I suppose I should define “older” roles, realizing full well that to young audiences, that can mean 37 and, gulp, beyond. I guess the age range I have in mind is about 10 years north of the upper reaches of Shirley MacLaine’s character in “Terms of Endearment,” and a little south of Margo’s last moments in “Lost Horizon.”)

What’s odd about this vanishing identity is that our population is growing older--and that older group is increasing at a remarkable rate, by 24% since the 1970s. By the year 2000, based on U.S. Census estimates, 54 million of us will be older than 55 and 32 million will be older than 65. That’s a sizable hunk without a mirror or a voice on the screen, or with precious few reasonable ones.

What we don’t need are more images of older people as cheerful, uninhibited whackos: bizarro mixtures of television’s tiny Clara Peller who could or could not find the beef and Ruth Gordonesque old ladies who talk dirty and buzz about on motorcycles. Or skateboards.

In two hand-tailored roles, “Harold and Maude” and “Where’s Poppa?” Gordon created an electrifying new image for older people: the kooky madcap savant. Unfortunately, it quickly became the only way that old people were seen--and a little of the jiving and/or ditsy grandparent goes a very long way. This was never plainer than while watching Lillian Gish’s role as Alan Alda’s senile mother in “Sweet Liberty,” a part certainly written Gordonesquely.

Gish performs its grotesque requirements perfectly, softening them slightly by her own innate sensibilities, but the role adds absolutely no depth to the comedy and leaves an unpleasant taste behind. Her character, Mrs. Burgess, is confused, fixated, tiresome, an irrational nudge, and above all, the focus of her son’s constant and thinly disguised hostility. The role is all the more peculiar to have come from the pen and the directing hand of Alda, a good-hearted, well-intentioned man whose support of feminism has been long-standing. Don’t feminist interests extend to protecting the interests of older women, too? Or has the habit of viewing old age either as ludicrous or dangerous.

I’m not suggesting that older characters need judge’s robes or halos before they step in front of a camera. But, using Gish as an example, think of how co-writer/director Robert Altman chose to utilize her powers.

In “A Wedding” Altman cast her as a delicate-seeming matriarch of an enormous family. He even drew on our silent-movie image of her as a radiant sufferer, and teased it a mite. The fact that early in the proceedings she died a silent-film-perfect death that went virtually unnoticed by most of her family was one of its deadpan gags, yet it was never distasteful. Altman gave her power, grace, humor, strength and dignity, and Gish reflected all those qualities back at us.

And there was the indelible moment from Altman’s “3 Women,” as the elderly country parents, Ruth Nelson and John Cromwell, are accidentally glimpsed making love in a little narrow apartment bed. It is one of the most personal and deeply moving moments involving older characters on a screen (and one of the few that allowed them simple, unsniggering sexuality). And there were the scenes between Lila Kedrova and Melvyn Douglas in Lee Grant’s “Tell Me a Riddle,” another high point in the relationships of older couples. What have we had recently?

Peter Masterson’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” in which faith and a dogged, unquenchable persistence sustained its heroine, played by Geraldine Page, for one last trip home again. What “Bountiful” proved beyond a doubt was the interests of older people can speak to wide, appreciative audiences of every age--given a vehicle with the simplicity and power as this one, with Horton Foote’s pure, clear writing.

There is “Cocoon,” of course. I’ve had a lot more time to reflect about it since its opening last year. Its message--that the neatest thing to do with the old folks is to send them off the planet to a civilization where their talents will be utilized--is more than a little depressing. It’s also (and not at all incidentally), an open-hearted and guileless solution of a quite young director, Ron Howard, another pleasant humanist.

His ending is a major stumbling block. There’s also the question of why older people have to do trendy things like break-dance in order to be thought “with it.” Presumably these cutesy actions create respect among the young. If so, the film makers are entirely missing the quality for which one looks to mature actors. But “Cocoon” did give us an intelligent, interesting cross-section of well-defined older characters, and a memorable cast, and those are no small achievements.

We can also look at Wayne Wang’s gently instructive, enchanting “Dim Sum,” or beyond the manipulation and the fortune cookie aphorisms of John Avildsen’s “The Karate Kid” to its positive image of Noriyuki (Pat) Morita as an older mentor. To “Hannah and Her Sisters,” for Woody Allen’s bittersweet view of the fraying bonds that have seemingly held Maureen O’Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan through thin and thin. Or to Walter Hill’s “Crossroads” and its great old salty dog, Joe Seneca, in one of the year’s killer performances. It’s Seneca who, in one, rich rounded syllable, sums up the great prize of age: “Mileage.”

We’ll need movies for that mature population in the year 2000--we need them now. They cannot be neglected or frozen out because they have been given so little of value to identify with. Forward-looking film makers will have to begin to add grown-ups to their movies, yeast to make the stories rise. The actors are certainly there, enough to make a new Golden Age of character performers.

And perhaps, looking at the contributions--lifelong and recent--of directors like John Huston, Marty Ritt, or Akira Kurosawa, the thought might arise to tap a pool of older, experienced directors and writers, instead of the latest whiz-kid out of USC or UCLA, to tell these stories. Because there really is no substitute for the richness of mileage.