Yesterday’s Film ‘Classics’ Too Loosely Defined

Howard Rosenberg’s article on classic films (“Anything but Movie Classics,” Sept. 4) shed a different light on a recent trend I’ve noticed developing in movies, television and home video: Hollywood’s uncritical unearthing of its past. Thanks to baby boomers and nostalgia networks like American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies, the term “classic” now applies to any film made before 1989, thus making eligible for deification virtually the entire catalog of cinematic endeavor, no matter how weak. To paraphrase a motion picture slogan, old movies are better than ever.

This is especially true since contemporary films seem to be mired in an adolescent preoccupation with technology and special effects (films now possess the ability to realistically create any effect imaginable except the ones they have always needed the most: plot and character). Hollywood, rather than examining why the single most distinguishing characteristic of films of the ‘90s is a palpable sense of unrealized potential, instead encourages moviegoers to pack all the increasingly lowered expectations into an old kit bag and smile, smile, smile all the way to the nearest video store, revival house or cable network. There they can indulge in a little wistful sentiment (“Hollywood knew how to make movies back then . . . “) while blocking out the bleakness of the present with the help of a multitude of ingeniously marketed “special editions,” re-releases and anniversary restorations of films from Hollywood’s golden past. So dazzlingly have these films been remastered, reedited and letterboxed, audiences have scarcely noticed that in most cases the films are ones that barely warranted even an initial release.

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Over the past year, films of such varying degrees of merit as “Grease,” “Valley of the Dolls,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Halloween,” “Citizen Kane” and “The Exorcist” have all been given the “classic” treatment. And this looks like just the beginning. A reedited version of Welles’ “A Touch of Evil” was just released and a theatrical re-release of “The Big Chill” is forthcoming. Plus we have this to look forward to: a “re-creation” of Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” a concept that rivals Crystal Pepsi and ‘new’ Coke in its arrogant stupidity.

Without bothering to figure out just what might actually constitute a classic, greedy film and video distributors are happy to lump together the stupendous with the stupid and paste the word “classic” on any ancient title it thinks it can wring one last drop of revenue out of.

As dismaying as this rearview mania is, it’s an understandable enough response to the caliber of films being made today. With movies determined to orchestrate their own demise by catering to the clarion call of big box office, who can argue with a revisit with “The Wizard of Oz” or “Vertigo”? Anything is preferable to another “The Rock.” But with the growing assumption that any and all old films are potential classics, I fear there will come a time when a film as execrable as “Batman and Robin” will be ranked equally with a “Bonnie and Clyde” just because it happened to have made a few bucks and avoided disintegration in its film can.

Without some criteria established that takes into account issues of relevance, craft and artistic merit, I think we are in danger of applying the same dumbed-down standards to the films of yesterday that we have accepted in our current movies. How worthwhile all this neo-”classicism” would be if perhaps a re-release of a low-budget bit of brilliance like Charles Laughton’s 1955 film “Night of the Hunter” might one day incite audiences to demand that our under-achieving movies today at least rise to the level of what Hollywood was capable of more that 40 years ago.

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