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What we have lost
Truly our culture is, as the inelegant saying goes, in the toilet. That thought is triggered by a headline I saw tonight at the Drudge Report: “NY critics name United 93 as best picture.” United 93, as I discussed last spring, is a wretched mess of a movie. The thought of its being picked as best picture is appalling. But—the next depressing thought—what is its competition, after all? Are there any good pictures to choose from? Fortunately, if you are interested in seeing good movies with a positive vision of life instead of shapeless movies with a vision of despair and meaninglessness, there is an endless supply of cinematic treasures in video and DVD from the Hollywood Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, extending, though the stream of quality greatly dwindles, right up to about 1990, when our culture definitively turned south and became anti-cultural and anti-human. Just tonight I saw a very satisfying 1937 movie, San Quentin. It stars Pat O’Brien as a firm but fair prison warden who is trying to reform punkish first-time offender Humphrey Bogart, who happens to be the brother of O’Brien’s love interest, Ann Sheridan. In this movie there is a social order, represented by O’Brien, and Bogart’s willingness to turn straight depends on his belief in its goodness, or rather O’Brien’s goodness. But a misunderstanding leads him to disbelieve in O’Brien, resulting in tragedy.
I’m not saying this is a great picture, but it is altogether solid, and, indeed, despite having been made by the liberal-leaning Warner Brothers studio, is quite traditional in its moral vision. For example, the O’Brien character, though a kind of do-gooder, clearly states that most of his prisoners are unregenerate criminals and that only a minority have any hope of being salvaged. San Quentin shows how even what we would think of as an average movie of that era presented a moral framework, a sense of life, a sense of manhood, a sense of humanity (without a single reference to anyone’s “human rights”) that make our entire culture of today look like, well, a toilet. Email entry |