Reality Isn’t in Hollywood’s Script Yet

Expecting Hollywood movies to be “up to the minute” is like thinking it will be easy to hail a cab in a downpour at 42nd Street and Broadway. There’s too much money and ego and money and effort and (have I mentioned?) money involved in big studio productions to make movies that are in sync with the headlines.

So when people ask, as they have for weeks now, how pop culture in general and movies specifically will reflect the traumatically altered world we live in, the answers are still too far away. Yes, a couple of movies with strong terrorist angles were shelved. But don’t count on such restraint to last indefinitely.

Meanwhile, speculation on what will be green-lighted and shipped out to the multiplexes over the next several months ranges from a sharp increase in gung-ho military slugfests to a rich surplus of romance and “family-oriented” melodrama.

And this would be different how? In the last couple of decades, everyone’s been trying to figure out how to ape the success of “Top Gun” in 1986, including the people who helped make it. The mushier stuff never goes out of style, whether we’re at war or not.

Few of these speculations bother looking at historical precedent. Movie history tends to be perceived in a vacuum, insulated in tinsel and rose-colored shrink-wrap from events in the so-called Real World.

But the movies aren’t shrouded from reality. They’re just out of sync with it, usually by at least 10 years. You can, as they say in baseball, look it up.

Think of what are now regarded as prototypical movies of the 1930s. While the country was enmeshed in a soul-depleting Great Depression, the films released as comfort food were for the most part set in a brightly lighted deco world of elegantly dressed gangsters, molls, dancers, hucksters and heels. The romantic roundelays of Ernst Lubitsch, the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals and the screwball slapstick of Howard Hawks weren’t staged in an economic wasteland but in the “we’re in the money” 1920s.

Rare was the 1930s feature film that directly engaged the grim struggles of the hungry and jobless taking place outside the movie houses. It wasn’t until the hinge of the decade that such films as “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940) and “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941) poked their heads out to reflect on hard times that, as far as anyone could tell at the time, were beginning to recede.

Hollywood did its part, and then some, throughout World War II to boost morale and stay in step with the rush of events. Patriotic revues (1944’s “Hollywood Canteen”), rousing battle epics (1943’s “Bataan,” “Air Force” and “Sahara”) and tear-jerking sagas about home-front life (1944’s “Since You Went Away,” 1945’s “The Clock”) were as much a part of their era as they were chronicles about it.

But the 1940s were also the crucible of what came to be known as “noir” films--dark, sardonic stories, mostly about romantic guys rendered hapless by fate and/or women. Though conceived in wartime and during the nervous, heady years immediately afterward, such films as “Detour” (1945), “Double Indemnity” (1944), “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946) “Nightmare Alley” and “Dark Passage” (both 1947) reflect the hard-boiled disillusionment that trailed dreams crushed by the Depression.

Note, for example, that in “Indemnity,” the year given for Fred MacMurray’s confession is 1937, seven years before the movie’s release. No market back then, one supposes, for romance this forbidding. But an increasingly prosperous nation could later be comfortable watching poor saps squirm in the shadows.

There were so many kinds of movies in the 1950s, from grainy shock schlock to overstuffed musicals, psychological westerns to teenage psychodrama, that it is hard to sum up the era. One could say, however, that as far as the movies were concerned, the 1950s took a long time to end. “Dr. Strangelove’s” gallows humor, however fresh it seemed at the time, was aimed at the heart of 1950s culture, though people were more receptive to it in 1964 than they would have been in 1956. Otherwise, the status quo of wide-screen epics prevailed through the early 1960s, while European films such as 1964’s “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Band of Outsiders” were alert to burgeoning rebellion against status quo thinking.

The ‘60s Truly Emerged

Only After ‘Easy Rider’

Hollywood got around to such matters by 1967, a benchmark year with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate.” The latter, even at the time, was tagged an emblematic youth movie of its time. But, seeing it now, would anyone regard Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock as a prototypical 1967 college graduate? He’s so much more a “silent generation” type that you’d swear the movie should have come out in 1957 to be truly cutting edge.

But to really absorb the spirit of the 1960s, you’d have to look at the films that came after 1969’s “Easy Rider.” Only then, it seemed, was Hollywood willing, if not always able, to engage in the risky thematic territory of sex, drugs and the darker side of American prosperity. Even up-to-the-minute enterprises such as “All the President’s Men” (1976) and “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) evoke a 1960s insurgency and drive.

This seems as good a time as any to concede that the historical patterns I’ve described aren’t quite smooth or schematic. But I still think it’s axiomatic for purveyors of mass taste to take their sweet time trying to get a fix on what masses will or won’t accept as being safe for entertainment. Whether present times are good or bad, they’re too ... present somehow to employ as a distraction.

So does that mean that the movies coming out over the next five to 10 years will be about dancing dot-com tycoons and the women they love? Anything’s possible. (I suppose if you made “Primary Colors” in 2010 rather than 1998, its nostalgia value alone would pre-sell millions of tickets.)

However things go in a world whose comfort level has been drastically reduced by terror, you can count on one thing: Someone will remember something that made us happier than we are now and figure out how to make a movie about it. And, if the movie makes a lot of money, many others like it will follow.

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Gene Seymour is a film critic at Newsday, a Tribune Co. newspaper.