Last Saturday morning, I spoke before a small crowd at Oakton Community College, advocating the teaching of media literacy to high-school and middle-school students. Among the many reasons for teaching media or film literacy is to understand how movies are cultural artifacts that capture the issues, problems, and concerns of the era that produced it. In my research, I found an article from the journal Social Studies in which education expert Trenia Walker, who teaches media literacy to high-school educators, noted that too often teachers use movies to “illustrate” a historical time period or event. In other words, they show something like JFK or Far and Away, because according to the teachers, “Students would see what a time period was really like” (“Historical Literacy: Reading History Through Film,” January/February 2006). But, the narrative feature film is a fictional mode, even when the story is a biopic or a historical drama based on an actual person or event. So, showing a movie in this manner misrepresents both the history and the film.

Movies can be used as a tool to help teach history but not in such a simplistic manner.  Instead, character types, plot events, themes, genre conventions, and bits of dialogue must be interpreted to understand how they recreate, reflect, or recast the issues, problems, concerns, and preoccupations of the era that produced the film. In other words, instead of showing Pearl Harbor (2001) to show the attitudes and concerns of America at the outbreak of World War II, teachers should be showing Casablanca (1942) and explaining the anti-isolationist position that is part of the film’s subtext. Unfortunately, as Ms. Walker pointed out in her article, the vast majority of teachers and schools associate “literacy” only with print media, and their methodologies and teaching models are all geared toward print literacy.

These ideas were still swirling around in my head when I attended the classic movie series at the Bank of America Theater that evening to see Eddie Cantor in Ali Baba Goes to Town, a vehicle tailor-made for the musical comedy star that turned out to be a perfect example of history via the movies.  Released in 1937, Ali Baba Goes to Town is a snapshot of Depression-era America, offering jokes, wisecracks, characters, and musical styles reflective of the politics, tastes, and culture of the time. READ MORE

The 33rd Stars Denver Film Festival still has a week to go. It offers up hundreds of films that were divided this year into 16 different programs, some of which are festival staples (such as Red Carpet Presentations and Documentary Films), others being very unique (case in point being the four-film selection titled Forgotten Transports: To Latvia, To Belarus, To Estonia, To Poland, curated by Lukás Pribyl). TCM viewers can take heart in knowing that SDFF also has a Special Programs section, which is where the repertory titles reside. In honor of its 50th Anniversary, I had the pleasure of revisiting John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven on a stunning 35mm archive print that is reserved for reel-to-reel projectors. READ MORE

The welcome unveiling of Flicker Alley’s superb CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE set offers me an opportunity to get up on a particular soapbox.  I’ve always admired KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE as a vital entry in Chaplin’s CV, but that has put me at odds with the vast majority of Chaplin fans and scholars who are content to gloss over its extraordinary charms.  Simply put, KID AUTO RACES don’t get no respect.

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I’m all kinds of excited about the new AMC miniseries THE WALKING DEAD, adapted by Frank Darabont from the Image Comics graphic novel first published in 2003.  Yeah, I know that through overexposure zombies are rapidly approaching the complexity of vanilla but it’s a wonderful game when it’s played well and THE WALKING DEAD has (if the Halloween premiere episode is any indication) a winning combination of heart, suspense and some surprisingly nasty gore and violence for TV.  The title might confuse some folks, who may remember Sean Penn’s Oscar-nominated turn as a Death Row convict in Tim Robbins’ DEAD MAN WALKING (1995).  (That title had been used previously, for a 1988 Wings Hauser post-apocalypse caper costarring a bug-eyed Brion James.)  That same year, there was also a Vietnam War drama called THE WALKING DEAD, which focused on black soldiers in country and featured Allen Payne, Eddie Griffin, Joe Morton and the late Bernie Mac; and who can forget Umberto Lenzi’s classic 1980 zombies-on-the-run movie NIGHTMARE CITY, which was released on VHS in this country as CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD?  If you’re an old MonsterKid like me, though, the title THE WALKING DEAD will take you somewhere else entirely.

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It’s hard to believe that Alain Delon has aged at all but on November 8th my favorite French actor will be celebrating his 75th birthday. His impossible beauty, quiet intensity and powerful magnetism have been immortalized on screen so he remains ageless in my mind. Like a modern day Dorian Gray, Alain Delon retains his youth in countless films shown at revival screenings, on television and available on DVD where we’ve been given the opportunity to see him as the ambitious boxer in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), the scheming social climber in Purple Noon (1960), the seductive banker in L’Eclisse (1962), the dashing Tancredi in The Leopard (1963), the petty criminal in Joy House (1964), the cold-blooded killer in Le samouraï (1967), the jealous lover in The Swimming Pool (1969) and as the paranoid art dealer in Mr. Klein (1976), among other memorable roles.

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Flicker Alley has just released a monstrously funny box set of all extant shorts that Charles Chaplin made at the Keystone Film Studios. It is poetically titled CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE, and is now available for your perusal. The sketches housed therein are mean-spirited little scenarios of controlled chaos. Chaplin swats down the elderly and the teething with equal aplomb, playing drunks, con-men and resentful working class joes. Bricks are the weapon of choice, available in suspiciously convenient abundance. There is plenty of interest for those looking for evidence of his artistic development, from his control of narrative to the introduction of pathos to his work, but the real joys here are tumbles down stairs and unexpected blows to the face. The Keystones were the JACKASSes of their time.

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Tonight begins TCM’s original documentary series Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, a seven-part series that will air every Monday till December 13, with each episode repeating on the following Wednesday. An ambitious, meticulously crafted interpretation of the history of American film, Moguls & Movie Stars focuses on the famous (movie stars) and the infamous (the moguls) as the threads that tie this history together.

While I have been anxiously awaiting the series since I first heard about it months ago, I feel especially eager because I have already seen the first two episodes, and I know the quality and level of detail to expect. At the Telluride Film Festival, director John Wilkman presented Episode 1: “The Peepshow Pioneers” and Episode 2: “The Birth of Hollywood.” Another reason I am excited about Moguls & Movie Stars is because I got to contribute in a small way to the terrific-looking website that supports the series. I wrote four of the site’s biographies of the legendary moguls: Sam Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Jesse L. Lasky, and Irving Thalberg. I urge everyone to peruse the website for the wealth of historical information it provides. However, I can’t help but wonder if the other writers experienced the same difficulty that I did in paring down the anecdotes and stories about the moguls into just a few paragraphs. Some of the information and insight I uncovered but discounted will pop up in the program’s interviews with the moguls’ relatives and offspring, including Carla Laemmle, Daniel Selznick, and Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. But much information I came across will be left out. I thought it might be fun and enlightening to offer a few extra facts and details on these larger-than-life moguls who, for better or worse, shaped the Hollywood industry.

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