I sense we could all use a break in life’s drama so I’m reporting on movie night. Now here at Casa MOTUS we stopped “going to the movies” as a thing sometime shortly after The Big Chill (1983). Honest. It wasn’t exactly a conscious decision. More like our lives were so over-booked that what downtime we had was too precious to spend it in a dark theatre watching some schlocky film.
So gradually movie night became dinner and a movie at home. At first take-out and a video tape from the local video store (where selections were quite limited), later CDs from Blockbuster. The cable movie channels were even more convenient as you no longer had to leave home and with the advent of the DVR one could record the movie to watch when we felt like it rather than when they offered it. Then Netflix - before they became a streaming service – would mail videos of your choice as another option. By that time we were retired and “dinner and a movie” actually included cooking dinner, making it an entire evening’s entertainment.
With the advent of streaming services we have gotten pretty close to the 1999 Quest commercial that predicted that someday you could watch “every movie ever made in any language, any time.”
Of course by the time that day arrived there were no new movies worth wasting 90 minutes of your life on. So last night we watched Laura - which ironically I got from the library – after hearing the theme song on our dinner mix one night last week and recalling that while I’ve fallen asleep with it playing on late night TV several times I’d never seen the whole thing from start to finish.
Laura is a 1944 American film noir produced and directed by Otto Preminger. It stars Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, and Clifton Webb along with Vincent Price and Ann Treadwell. It is in the Library of Congress’ U.S. National Film Registry as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” film, and was selected by The American Film Institute as one the 10 best mystery films of all time. In other words it’s a classic of the film noir category.
In the film Manhattan detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews)
investigates the murder of Madison Avenue executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney)
who was shot in the face inside her fashionable apartment. On the trail of her murderer, McPherson questions Laura's arrogant effete friend and mentor, columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb)
and her parasitic playboy fiancé, Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price)
who is also a kept man by Laura’s rich, socialite aunt (Ann Treadwell), and Laura’s loyal housekeeper, Bessie. As detective McPherson pursues his investigation he grows obsessed with the dead woman. In case you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it recently enough to remember it, I won’t divulge any more of the plot. I do recommend it as a worthy diversion.
It occurred to me that if Hollywood remade the movie today Waldo would have been gay, Shelby bisexual, Detective McPherson would have been black – and possibly a woman - and the housekeeper would have been Mexican (doing the work Americans are unwilling to do because they’re collecting generous unemployment benefits). Very likely Laura would have been sexually abused as a child and sexually harassed by her Madison Avenue boss. There would have been much more gore, including a closeup of the gunshot wound to the face and multiple sex scenes involving all conceivable combinations of the 2 sexes and 31 “genders.” And while there would have been plenty of drug and alcohol use there most assuredly would not have been any smoking – such a nasty habit!
And that’s basically why we haven’t been to a movie theatre in 35 years.
Oh, and we made clam linguine for dinner.
And dined on the deck. Good grief, are we ever getting old!
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