My father-in-law, Jim, is in his eighties.  He doesn’t shop very often, go to new restaurants or buy movie tickets with any regularity.  As a result, his idea of what things should cost is lodged in a crack somewhere between 1968 and 1983.  This leads to many amusing incidents in public when presented with a perfectly normal price for an everyday item, say a sandwich at a deli.  Now, depending on the deli, this could run you anywhere from four or five bucks on the low end to ten or twelve on the high end.  For Jim though, any price anywhere in this range, between four and twelve, will elicit a “Whoa!  That’s a little pricey!”  He says this loudly and often.  Then he’ll reveal what it should cost and rarely does the price exceed a dollar.  “Jim,” I tell him, “you’ve got to get out more.”   

But the thing is, I’m totally on his side.  I’m already starting to think everything in the world costs too much and since I don’t go out as much, I’ve noticed my idea of what things should cost is settling into the timezone somewhere between the late nineties and the early aughts.    And, in a roundabout way, the same thing is happening with events in my life.   To wit, when I say something happened “around ten years ago,” chances are, if I double-check, it probably happened around twenty or thirty years ago.  And popular culture is in the same boat.  When I think of the movies of my childhood, I think of them as movies I saw for the first time just a few years ago.  So when I go to Netflix and click on “Classics” and see The Conversation, I think, “What the hell are you talking about?!  That came out, like, ten years ago.”   Oh, it’s so very sad, is it not?

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A baboon and Santa Claus are witnesses to man’s descent into savagery. In Sands of the Kalahari (1965, out on DVD today from Olive Films), a charter plane crashes in the African desert, and its passengers battle each other (and some observant simians) for survival. Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976, a recent Raro Video DVD release)  finds a couple of pretty boy Dirty Harries gunning down suspects before they have time to commit crimes. Poor Old St. Nick can only grin and bear these assaults on individual freedom. Both films display the brutalizing depths wisecracking civilized types can descend to when they feel above or outside the law.

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At the turn of the 20th century, a woman could be reprimanded by her husband for appearing in public without a hat, which was considered an essential article of clothing. According to the website Fashion Era, a woman once embarrassed her family because she left her house without her hat even though she was merely posting a letter in a box a few feet from her garden gate. Men wore hats for both practical and business purposes. Because hats draw attention to the head, the right hat could elevate one’s circumstances, at least according to social standards of the day: An old saying goes, “If you want to get ahead and get noticed, then get a hat.” While traditions and conventions of hat-wearing began to break down after World War I, particularly after women got the right to vote, mainstream Americans continued to wear hats for several decades. Today, however, hats are rarely worn by the general public, and when they are, it is usually for informal, leisure-time activities. Consequently, various traditions, conventions, and lore about hats, caps, and head gear have been lost to us.

Hats are ubiquitous in classic films released prior to 1960. Hat fashions were not only reflected in Hollywood films, they were also influenced and inspired by them. Costuming tends to be taken for granted by audiences, who think of clothing, set design, and props as mere indicators of time and place. Too often authenticity is the only criteria for evaluating these essential parts of a film’s visual design. Yet, costumes can be important vehicles of information. They can serve as keys to unlock the layers of meaning behind a character. With that idea in mind, I went in search of famous movie hats, hoping to find some examples that I could analyze for their symbolism. It was more difficult than I thought, but I did uncover some interesting facts, some striking hat fashions, and a newfound respect for an article of clothing I knew little about.

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