An Essay As Long As The List

May 1, 2016

In 1961, director Frank Capra retired after over 35 years in filmmaking and with three more decades of life left in him. The Catholic movie legend who directed so many films in which good triumphs over evil, such as It's A Wonderful Life, gave among his reasons for quitting the trend in moviemaking of glorifying vice and romanticizing criminal and antisocial behavior.

If you were born the year Capra retired or in the decades afterward, you were likely and mainly raised on the entertainment garbage that Capra saw coming. Because you were raised on garbage, you are accustomed to garbage. So while you watch It's A Wonderful Life every holiday season or two and probably say, "I love that movie! It's my favorite!" you return to watching garbage much of the rest of the time.

You don't have to. Chances are, if you have found your way to this obscure web site about Catholicism and culture, you are, to say the least, aware of and disturbed by the fact that much of the entertainment available to you is garbage that is neither good for you nor your children.

The trouble with modern movies is that they peddle politics, popular morality and pornography.

In the old days, as Professor Anthony Esolen writes in a LifeSite essay (1) which is recommended additional reading on this subject, movies

"were made by men who remembered what it was to work in the fields [Capra's family owned and lost a citrus farm and he worked two or three simultaneous jobs to put himself through college] or in the mines or on the girders...by women who remembered what it was to till a garden, to patch a dress, to put up fruit and vegetables...by [not necessarily religious] Jews who could chant prayers in Hebrew, and by [again, not necessarily religious] Catholics who made the sign of the cross whenever they passed by a church...."

The best movies, Esolen continues, "affirmed the sanctity of human life...before people took it into their heads to approve the snuffing out of inconvenient children," "the beauty of manhood and womanhood, and their being for one another, to enhance and complete one another."

Regarding the sanctity of life, you may be surprised to learn that some of these old movies are positively pro-life. A wife announcing that she is a mother-to-be, usually in a comical scene, was the greatest thing to happen to movie families. Likewise the loss of a child as occurs in The FBI Story and The Long Gray Line is the worst. Capra's Arsenic And Old Lace is a very funny movie, but it also foresees, decades ahead of time, the culture of death, as does The Bride of Frankenstein.

Filmmakers in those days had a sense of legend that modern moviemakers tend not to have. Perhaps because of the religion in their lives, they knew how to create moving icons, how to take a person and deed everyone knew about -- for example, Charles Lindbergh and his transatlantic flight -- and enshrine it in film.

But the experience of moviemakers was not the only factor. A more religious public, among it the devout rank and file of a very influential Catholic church, would not stand for movies in which crime paid or in which lives characterized by sin and what are now called "bad choices" were glamorized. Why? Because in moral teaching and in the dark cellars of collective memory were past experiences of times of lawlessness and of the weakening of the traditional family. If Hollywood pushed the envelope, as it did even in the early days, the public would get disgusted and Hollywood would appease it by trotting out a Ten Commandments or equivalent.

In the early 1930s, movies were pulled back from becoming very raunchy by the adoption of the Hays Code, in force throughout the golden age of movies, which prohibited certain content. Censorship went out the window with the 1968 MPAA ratings codes (G, PG, R, X). These were spun as a warning to aid families in avoiding "mature" content, but they really proclaimed, "There's some nudity in this R-rated movie, folks, and this X-rated movie is all about it!"

What happened? Initially and even when the greatest classic movies were being made by those makers who knew faith and struggle (ca. 1938-47), organized, worldwide Communism bent on global domination infiltrated popular culture as it also wormed into academia. Decent rich people, even if they were only screwballs, disappeared from film plots to be replaced by evil rich people. To an American audience, one of the striking novelties of the recent British series Downton Abbey is that the rich family, despite their making some "bad choices" and working up a huff when the scullery maid is in the room she's never supposed to be in, are not greedy and evil but gracious and appreciative of their employees.

It was during the communist infiltration of Hollywood that movie people started shilling for leftist causes. Although organized communism is dead (or more likely living under other names: "progressivism," "reason," "intelligence," "sanity"), there are still plenty of people carrying and spreading it like a retrovirus. The success of "reason," "intelligence" and "sanity," the hegemony of despotic and totalitarian states relies on the destruction of traditional family, of religion and of Judeo-Christian morals.

Along with and after the earnest, scheming communists came moviemakers who grew up in suburban plenty, leisure and decadence, where religious faith dwindled, where black and white blurred to gray and where the attitude toward knowable truth became like Pontius Pilate's (John 18:38). Some sneered outright at traditional family and morals. Their fathers were abusive drunks or feckless. Their mothers were bitches. Both perhaps put on religious faces, but displayed their true rottenness behind closed doors. Their children, arrived in Hollywood, figured that all families were made up of the abusive, the ineffectual, the hypocritical, that no family could possibly be like the Morgans (How Green Was My Valley) or the Baileys. However families like the Morgans and The Baileys are as real as messed-up families. The Morgans and The Baileys deserve a place in storytelling as well.

Moderm moviemakers further concluded that religious faith is a crock. And so since the 1960s religion has been usually portrayed in movies as something corrupt (Think The DaVinci Code) or crazy (Think Carrie). The only good priests or nuns are those who espouse liberal causes and attitudes. If there is a good religion at all, it consists of running soup kitchens or fighting the death penalty. A Fr. O'Malley (Going My Way) who tells inner-city kids not to be "fat and lazy and extremely rude" and who teaches them to use their talents to achieve something, or a Fr. Murphy (Lilies of the Field), who travels around in a trailer, not to agitate poor Hispanic labororers, but to simply say Mass and hear confession, are incomprehensible.

One way to attack traditional family and gender roles is to mock them and discredit them as is done to rich people. Another way is to portray alternative lifestyles as normal and their followers as sympathetic. Hollywood has succeeded wildly in making Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts acceptable and in making many sympathizers of such lifestyles crazy to the point of rejecting our culture of free speech and diverse opinions.

So much for the leftist politics. Popular morality, what I also call "canned morality," is fashionable morality, the kind practically bought off the shelf by people who never learned The Ten Commandments or otherwise anything about God's law and natural law. Such people are again, types who come from affluent and other backgrounds were religious faith is negligible. Canned morality is morality without God. Environmentalism, Climate Sustainability, Diversity, Inclusion: these highest goods of the godless are the best sellers in the canned morality aisle.

Modern movies peddle pornography. I wanted to include the 2003 movie, Cold Mountain on my list. The genuine decency of the good characters as they confront evil -- and there is a lot of violence in this film -- is of a caliber that is not seen in modern movies. Cold Mountain is also a story about true and enduring love. It would be, I think, the best movie made so far in the 21st-century were it not for about a minute of gratuitous nudity.

There is no protecting children from pornography anymore, certainly not in public schools that view your kids and all humans as animals that are happiest when they scratch their itches. You can't shelter children completely from pornography (or the politics or the canned morality), but you can counteract those poisons with truth and beauty, good stories of character, courage, achievement, sacrifice in which the characters aren't sex-obsessed or trying to get away with whatever they can.

Not all movies made during the past 55 years are garbage. In fact, I would say that movies have gotten better since I was a kid in the 1970s and the offerings were Ben, Frogs and Little Darlings. Full disclosure: my parents refused to take me to movies in the '70s because they had gotten so raunchy. The Lord of The Rings Trilogy is good. So, I suppose, are the Star Wars movies. Watch them, but when you have the urge to watch them again, spend that time watching an old classic such as The Battle of The Bulge. Instead of watching Harry Potter with the kids again, watch classic movies with child protagonists such as The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, How Green Was My Valley or To Kill A Mockingbird.

A Christmas Story is not a bad movie. But should it be the film that is synonymous with Christmas? There is nothing in it about the real Christmas (same goes for the 1947 Miracle on 34th Street), nothing about the benevolent supernatural entering the world to save as Clarence The Angel saves George Bailey or as the ghosts save Ebenezer Scrooge. A Christmas Story is about getting a thing (the bb gun). It's very funny -- I certainly can relate --, but it reinforces what Christmas has become for most people, a materialistic orgy. Give it a rest for a few Christmases. If you're Wonderful-Lifed-out, watch Going My Way/Bells of St. Mary's, or the 1951 A Christmas Carol instead.

When I was growing up in those days of cinematic dross such as the aforementioned Frogs and Ben and Little Darlings, the old folks used to lament, "Why don't they make movies like they used to?" Those of you in my age group and younger don't ask that question because you're all inured to entertainment crap. I myself have hoped for a Catholic movie industry to develop with the millenial renewal, but I am currently not holding my breath.

Making world-class movies requires lots of money and lots of talent, educated talent that knows the best of the past. Unfortunately, wealthy Catholics and other Christians who have the means and desire to fund media want to save souls (especially their own) with their buck. They want in-your-face preaching rather than iconography or subtle storytelling or art that works on the emotional level. If the cast doesn't include a character named Jesus, the backers at least want a guy dressed in white and wearing a beard.

And then there's the typical lifestyle of faithful Catholics. The path across the soccer field leads to the CPA or the law office, not to creative professions. As a friend of mine said of Catholic upbringing years ago before she became famous, the attitude is "Doctor, lawyer or nothing." Catholics must wake up to the fact that filmmakers are now, as Percy Shelley said of poets, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Creating movies and other media are important occupations.

And nobody will make great movies in the future if nobody watches great movies from the past. Fortunately as this list attests, there are plenty of great old movies, many more than enrolled here. One can experience with one's family wonderful storytelling, lovable characters -- characters that one can really care about and relate to -- and in some cases, sublime music.

Some of the movies on this list are fun escapes from reality such as The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Others fill that human need for adventure, for being scared and for being held in suspense. Many are about realistic characters or actual historical figures in realistic situations.

You and your children should watch stories of courage and faithfulness without being distracted by wizards and elves and dwarves. You should be drawn into the delightful masterpieces of Catholic directors such as Capra and Leo McCarey and George Pal. You should ponder the similarity between St. Thomas More (A Man For All Seasons) refusing to sign oaths in the 1530s for reasons of conscience and the Little Sisters of The Poor in 2016 for refusing to authorize contraception coverage for employees.

Without turning family movie time into Ethics class, you should point out to children right and wrong behavior that you watch on the screen. It's wrong to be as stingy as Scrooge. Again, keeping it light, you might want to work in that Scrooge is like he is because the government has taken over charity (tax-supported workhouses) in England. That creepy Dr. Pretorius, who usurps what is God's right alone in The Bride of Frankenstein thinks like a lot like people today: "Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, no nonsense about angels and being good."

What would you do if everybody thought you were the bad guy, as they think Sefton is in Stalag 17? Or if nobody believed you as they don't believe Bernadette Soubirous? Why do you think Miss Havisham is the one who gave Pip all the money? If the enemy held you prisoner and ordered you to build a bridge over the River Kwai, would you do a good job? Do you really think eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark murders people because she was born that way?

It should be obvious that I did not select these movies because they're like Carebears (which, never having seen, I can only imagine). Boys' aggression which comes out in playfighting needs to be nurtured into protecting, defending and upholding what is right. The sooner your children understand that there are evil people and things in the world, and that evil can and should be opposed -- even to the point where the bad guys "get it" -- the better prepared they'll be for life, especially for the kind of life that I think is coming as the 21st-century unfolds.

And then there's sublime music. The outstanding soundtacks of movies such as King's Row or the all-around great, It's A Wonderful Life, were thoughtfully composed by real musicians who knew the history and power of music as they also knew many instruments. Composers such as Franz Waxman, Dimitri Tiomkin and Eric Korngold knew how to help you hold your breath as you watch Charles Lindbergh pilot the first flight across the Atlantic. They knew how to amplify your rejoicing when George Bailey finds ZuZu's petals back in his pocket. They knew how to prepare you for the next adventure when Parris Mitchell of Kings Row ascends the steps over the farm fence as a boy and descends as a man. Children should witness such power in music. They should learn that there is much beyond synthetic music, guitar-and-drum music, hip-hop music.

But the kids won't pay attention, you object. Don't worry about it. I didn't pay attention to, nor did I understand, many of these movies when I "watched" them with my parents as a child. I paid attention to the battle scenes and action, but I ignored the dialog and romance. I first saw It's A Wonderful Life around 1971 when it was an obscure movie shown occasionally on the Saturday night late show. (I never went to sleep before Midnight.). At age 10, I thought Wonderful Life was cool because of the spooky black and white and the old cars.

What didn't go over my head was my parents and grandmother enjoying these films, all of us together. I heard them laughing. I didn't understand A Man For All Seasons or Green Dolphin Street, but they left good impressions on me and I returned to them when I was older. So don't be discouraged if the kids play with their toys or fall asleep.

Truth, beauty, goodness, fun and adventure await you. Happy viewing.

Endnotes

(1) Anthony Esolen, "Why you should watch old movies, and eschew the smut of the new," LifeSiteNews, December 19, 2014.

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