The great escape

This cryptically titled book by the esteemed movie critic of Time magazine (and writer of the “Film on Paper” column for Book Review) is not as cute as the Zip stuff seems to threaten. By quoting this line from a popular World War I wake-up song (the next line goes, “with your hair cut just as short as mine”), Richard Schickel, in his book “Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip,” hopes to suggest his own late “awakening” to the news that the movies he loved for most of his lifetime were engaged in a programmatic denial of both the idea of evil and the human certainty of ironic failure. Schickel’s book belies its title. It is serious and thoughtful, comparable, in its 21st century way, more to the instructive tragic ironies of, say, Sophoclean drama than pop-culture horse laughs.

Instead of gags, Schickel offers a combined memoir and historical analysis of the morale-sustaining American movies released during World War II. In his leisurely projection of this dual plot, Schickel writes wonderfully readable prose, and it’s a rare page that fails to fascinate.

We have long known that the movies (Schickel abjures the classy term “films”) specialize in escape -- from dullness, meaningless routine, failure and misery, especially in dreary times. Schickel grew up in a WASPy, all-white Wisconsin town, which, without even reading Sinclair Lewis, he perceived as a trap. It was a seat of social lies and failures shrewdly covered up, as well as a representation of “the casual anti-Semitism of American life.” In time, he says, “I became a participant in some of these failures. Taken together, they formed a story of dreams deferred and denied, of small safe pleasures embraced, and larger passions unexpressed.” Life there was “above all an incomplete story in which the fiction of uninterrupted un-improvable middle class standards of culture, politics, and morality was at all costs maintained.”

The war jolted him into an awareness that he was alive in a world characterized “by death of a scale unprecedented in human history. Yet it was constantly lied about.” The movies kept their audiences believing that soldiers were noble and died “in defense of ‘our way of life,’ ” never “in vain,” absurdly, stupidly or scared to death (the facts of self-inflicted wounds among combat troops never leaked out.) Thus, the current “greatest generation” deception, lending weight to the assumption that Americans, being instinctively decent and wise, may freely lead the world by bombs and missiles and machine gun fire toward good sense, secularism and “democracy” -- forgetting that it was precisely democracy that brought forth the unindicted criminal Richard Nixon.

Movie theaters were everywhere in the early 1940s, and admission cost 11-year-old Schickel 8 cents. This book has perhaps most to offer readers who will recall vividly the middle-class cultural scene, with uncritical consumption of Big Little Books, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Life and Look magazines, radio offering Jack Armstrong and the Lux Radio Theatre. All aspiring, as essayist and critic Claudia Roth Pierpont has emphasized, “to the condition of the movies.” At that moment, the movies were busy intensifying for boys the essential American optimism and “falsely ideal anticipations of adulthood.” The movies, Schickel finds, in their caricatures of the Japanese and Germans, helped accustom audiences to killing civilians by strategic bombing. Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed in due course.

By late 1942, Schickel writes, “I was attending the movies virtually every week, and I have to say that their obsession with the cruelty, duplicity and implacability of the Japanese enemy permanently affected me.” Also, a moviegoer of the early 1940s had to struggle to overcome the high valuation of anything groupish promulgated by the numerous screenwriters who were not just patriots but communists as well, such as Dalton Trumbo and Albert Maltz. The screenwriters specialized in “overheated common-man rhetoric” as well as a quasi-Stalinist conviction that a bit more social adjustment would bring the world to universal happiness.

Movies Schickel interestingly now reconsiders include “Mission to Moscow” (thoroughly communist), “Hollywood Canteen” (celebrating the magic of groups), “My Friend Flicka” (the friendliness of pseudo-human animals), “The Fighting Sullivans” and “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” (war propaganda). There was some relief in comedy like “Hail the Conquering Hero” and really good drama like “The Maltese Falcon” and “Double Indemnity.” Schickel’s favorite films from this period are “Wilson,” which he finds a noble biography, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” of course “Casablanca” and a few good, honest war films like “They Were Expendable” and “The Story of G.I. Joe.” We may ask why Schickel doesn’t adore “The Best Years of Our Lives.” It’s because “no blacks are visible in the film.”

That suggests a sometimes feeble sense of chronology (which becomes history), visible in a sometimes annoying omission of dates for specific films. And I wish he had dealt with wartime newsreels, like Fox Movietone News, introduced by unforgettable march music. Millions of Americans got their cliches about the war and their weekly dose of hate from this newsreel, which they assumed was bringing them moments of reality. I missed also an excursus on movie music and its inviolable conventions -- for example, strings to underlie moments of chaste lovemaking or sudden woodwinds, brass and percussion to signal most kinds of success.

If the book has a larger weakness it is Schickel’s occasional confusion over the notion of, on the one hand, entertainment and show business, and, on the other, serious moral meaning. This sense that the movies had a duty to inform morally (the apparent conviction of the Hollywood censorship crowd) impels Schickel to scold the filmmakers for avoiding not just tasteless and stomach-turning material but also neglecting the incipient Holocaust revelations. This disturbing double-vision seems to sometimes weaken his reasoning.

But in general it’s a fine book, and for the elderly there is great pleasure in recalling moments when these movies gratified us. It was a pre-TV culture and mass recreation tended to lean toward bowling and roller-skating. The celebrity age was being born and was well on the way to embracing politics as well as advertising. Discussion of “the stars” of mass entertainment still conveys, even if one deplores it, an undeniable thrill, and Schickel is a master at interpreting the mystery.