The Talkies / Presumed Innocence
Bowman, James
Presumed Innocence by James Bowman 0 ver the reviews of Robert Redford's new film, Quiz Show, headlines in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek all made reference to the "age...
...For one thing, the movie is rigged too...
...The closeness of the relationship between Mark Van Doren (Mr...
...He is merely a way around Hollywood's problem of how to present goodness in the movies of our hip, cynical, knowing postmodern era...
...Whence comes this journalistic commonplace, this idea that the 1950s were a time of "innocence...
...It's the Age of Innocence again—so long as you forget that Jim and Tammy Bakker were a phenomenon of the 1980s...
...The difficulties of black and white romance, like other difficulties, fade from view when bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia—which is a good reason to mistrust this sort of self-indulgence...
...This character is rather what Bill Clinton meant when he said that he grew up loving "the military" because of John Wayne movies...
...I'm glad it's so easy for you to destroy a man's life," he says...
...No doubt hoping it would go away, I thought this too slight a piece to write about...
...There is an inescapable artificiality to the film's sense of moral purpose...
...Compared to the innocence of the world a decade later, when overgrown children were convinced that life was about cleaving firmly to what feels good and that "love is all you need," 1959 seems an "age" of maturity and sophistication...
...But this is artistically confusing...
...wonder if the same may be said for the makers of Quiz Show which, faute de mieux, I am forced to proclaim Movie of the Month...
...If Van Doren's fault is meant to be seen as worse because, as he himself says, "everything came too easily" to him, is not the quiz show scandal almost an irrelevancy in view of the more serious moral problem of class division...
...There is a keyhole mounting feature on the back...
...It is the Eden of their memory still on celluloid, whether they suppose it was the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War or Watergate that finally put an end to it...
...He means to resurrect the old hippie chestnut that "violence is as American as apple pie" by presenting us with an age-of-innocence sitcom family that is nothing but a mask for spousal and sexual abuse...
...Eight letters on one line are included in the price, additional letters $5 each...
...Instead, he is pursuing the chimera of the age of innocence...
...It is only at the end that Redford allows the film to adopt as its own a class consciousness like that of Mrs...
...10 HANDCARVED SIGN Researched for authentic colonial details, this heirloom quality sign is handcarved in one inch solid mahogany...
...This sense that somehow wealth and gadgetry have corrupted a primal American innocence still seems not very convincing, but at least we may be pleasantly surprised that it does not interfere too much with the moving human story of the loss of Charles Van Doren's innocence...
...It is only a slight jump from such simple psychological certainties to the moral imbecility of Oliver Stone, who has lived most of his life in the shadow of the "age of innocence" myth (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK were all versions of it...
...A gentle Jewish widower (the horribly miscast Ray Liotta) hires a black nanny (Whoopi Goldberg) to look after his daughter (Tina Majorino) and eventually falls in love with her...
...He merely accepts the artistic challenge of turning on the stream of gore without allowing it to become boring and monotonous...
...This he does by inserting some wild camera-work, cartoon segments that look like druggie flashbacks or even—in the case of a real flashback to the childhood of Harrelson's beanpole girlfriend, Mallory (Juliette Lewis)—a TV sitcom, complete with theme music for "I Love Mallory" and laugh track...
...Scofield) and his son, and his loyalty to him in his trouble are touchingly portrayed...
...Sign to say: Color: Black Dk Green Dk Blue Maroon Name: Street: City: State ZIP Send check, M/O for $79 + 5.50 S&H to: ( NC deliveries add 6% sales tax ) SlgnStudio 19 105 Castle Cove Lane Castle Hayne, NC 28429 OR: Visa, M/C 1-800-887-7286 The American Spectator November 1994 69...
...Most importantly, there are the undertones of class...
...Are we meant to be outraged at the deception itself or at the fact that it was practiced by a scion of privilege...
...But Stone's real moral outrage is reserved for tabloid television...
...How important was it that a television quiz show back in 1959 was shown to have been rigged...
...That is why the film culture, dominated as it is by baby-boomers, is so fond of movies set in the 1950s...
...Fiennes...
...The mass murderers, in his view, are entitled to look down with moral contempt on Robert Downey, Jr.'s sleazy reporter, whom they describe as "not even a person but a media person...
...It starts out as Madame Bovary Joins the Army, but any interestingly human elements are swiftly jettisoned in favor of politics...
...One of these is Forrest Gump...
...Richard Goodwin was not the investigator who uncovered the scandal and never met Charles Van Doren until well after he had ceased tobe a contestant on "Twenty-One...
...The film-makers are really much more interested in nostalgia for the music, the clothes, the TV shows ("Queen for a Day," "Name that Tune," "The Shari Lewis Show"), the fads (Zorro costumes, hula hoops, pogo sticks, drive-in restaurants) and the cars of the period...
...Orders before Dec...
...It is true that a sympathetic portrayal of patriotism, chivalry, decency, and sexual restraint is so rare in the movies that it is tempting to seize on James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement such a portrait as a conservative icon...
...Forrest Gump is the sixties generation's retrospective view of those beloved old John Wayne movies...
...But man is the worst of the lot for thinking he is something better...
...Goodwin is allowed a tart reply when his wife (Mira Sorvino) accuses him of being "the Uncle Tom of the Jews" for "bending over backward" not to expose Van Doren...
...When the murderer-hero (Woody Harrelson) tells an interviewer that he is "naturally born bad," it is meant to signify that he recognizes what the rest of us are too blind to see...
...All God's creatures do it," says Tommy Lee Jones (again) as a manic prison warden: "Look in the forests...
...It seems to take us back to the opening scene in a car-dealer's showroom where Goodwin sits admiringly behind the wheel of a luxurious 1958 Chrysler 300 convertible and says: "It used to be the man who drove the car...
...limit two lines...
...Van Doren's self-inculpation before a congressional committee, in which he cites his own privileged background, has a Maoist look to it...
...But, of course, what the headline writers mean is that it was their age of innocence...
...Forrest Gump is their fantasy of doing just that...
...5th delivered by Christmas...
...What was so innocent about it...
...It is an ugly moment from which Redford does not dissociate himself...
...For another thing, there is a repellent tone of condescension for those poor, 1950s-era innocents in their funny clothes and hats who were schmucks enough to believe that what they saw on TV was what it appeared to be...
...Redford half-intends for us to share in the class envy of Turturro's Herb Stempel for the golden boy, Charles Van Doren (Mr...
...We are meant to feel, as the gallery does, a little thrill that this upper class toff has been brought low...
...Redford himself, like his hero, is ultimately seduced by the charm and attractiveness of the Van Dorens' world of good manners, genteel amusements, and intellectual accomplishments...
...But now it has become a box-office smash and various conservatives (led by Pat Buchanan) have tried to claim that it is a kind of immaculate conception: a conservative movie miraculously sprung from the decadent liberalism of the Hollywood culture...
...It certainly contains some splendid acting from Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro, Paul Scofield, and Rob Morrow, among others, and is never less than absorbing...
...Suitable for exterior or interior use, it is painted in high pigment signpainter's gloss enamel...
...The events it recounts took place over three years, not one...
...But that is certainly not what the filmmakers intended Forrest Gump to be...
...now the car drives the man...
...Goodwin or Stempel...
...But they are in no danger of supposing—as regrettably the right seems to be doing—that he has anything to do with reality...
...I'll have to keep that in mind...
...Tommy Lee Jones and Jessica Lange are a 1950s couple who, like the radiation-contaminated cowboys Tommy Lee risks his career to save, don't know how sick they are...
...It makes them feel like a kid again...
...These are questions that the movie cannot resolve and that linger in the mind to its detriment...
...Use for a name, or an address, or date plaque...
...Gump is able to carry those famously innocent 1950s with him into the 1990s because he is a moron...
...You will be glad to know that they find it out and, by means of enlightened attitudes about nuclear weapons and the hopeless corruption of the U.S...
...Army and political establishment, go on to the sunlit uplands of love and personal fulfillment...
...Presumed Innocence by James Bowman 0 ver the reviews of Robert Redford's new film, Quiz Show, headlines in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek all made reference to the "age of innocence" (1959) in which the film is set...
...The truth is that television is going to 'get' us...
...But the success of the film is a measure of the hunger of audiences to see any kind of goodness...
...But I kept asking myself: Why was this film made...
...Makes a wonderful special gift, just a little out of the ordinary...
...The cove border is also 23 karat goldleaf...
...I am afraid I cannot agree with them...
...It is the intellectual ornaments of the condescending left who will always tell you with a rueful shake of the head that if only they could unsophisticate themselves and return to those same attractive but childish simplicities, they would be right-wingers too...
...And the impulse of his inquisitors to compliment him on his frankness is cut short by a congressman's disgusted insistence that he doesn't see why "a man of your intelligence should be commended merely for telling the truth...
...Stone puts the opening 68 The American Spectator November 1994 credits over a background of nature shots of animal predators doing their thing in order to suggest that nature is simply a matter of indiscriminate slaughter...
...His new film, Natural Born Killers, has moved on to the more sophisticated view that there never was any real innocence...
...Morrow) and Charles Van Doren...
...Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but only man is vile enough to titillate his fellows' prurient curiosity in order to get a bump in the ratings...
...Oval measures 9 inches high by 12 inches wide...
...When one of Goodwin's colleagues congratulates him on "getting" Van Doren, he says wearily: "I thought we were going to 'get' television...
...In fact, industry in Stone's view is a lot worse than murder, about which he is as blasé as only our latter-thy Hollywood fantasists can be...
...There are the usual problems withprejudice—which could express itself more openly in those days and so is easier to treat dramatically—but surprisingly few of them, as it turns out...
...The handcarved letters are finished in 23 karat goldleaf using a French technique for lasting gold luster...
...The answer is to make it laughable but lovable at the same time...
...All of these things prevent the film from being quite soured by the issue of class...
...Well, we've always known that Oliver inhabits a curious moral universe...
...Nevertheless, there is an unexpected subtlety about the portrayal of the relationship between Richard Goodwin (Mr...
...In fact, it is the people who believe most strongly in the innocence of the 1950s who are most likely to be innocents themselves: nostalgic hippies who never seem to tire of making pictures that use the 1950s to symbolize innocence...
...What does this mean...
...n Corrina, Corrina by Jessie Nelson, the 1950s are once again meant to stand for that piquant state of guilty innocence when people were racists or sexists or militarists but didn't yet know enough to be ashamed of it...
...Blood guilt is bred in the bone...
...To aging hippies its hero is intellectually vacant but boldly drawn, funny in a vaguely campy way, and a means to provide them with a guilty wallow in the forbidden pleasures of right-wing simplicities...
...The galleries erupt in applause as Van Doren exits the stage with bowed head to the news that he has been fired from his job as NBC "Special Cultural Correspondent" and even from his teaching post at Columbia...
...Blue Sky by Tony Richardson, which was made three years ago but got caught up in the Orion bankruptcy, is a much more classic "age of innocence" flick...
...Nicely boxed, gift card if you'd like...
...We just call it industry, not murder...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
