TELEVISION
Hurley, Nell P.
TELEVISION Movies on TV and for TV have been with us for some 20 years now. For almost the same length of time, however, TV has become a part of movie plots. Old Hollywood movies first began to...
...Dejected, she cries in her pillow...
...Walter Lang's Desk Set starred Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn as employees of a major TV network...
...Take one of the earliest films which referred to TV, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), which starred Gregory Peck as a corporate executive with a conscience...
...With brimming confidence, the thief takes time out to watch the program...
...In Harry and Tonto (1974) we have an instance of TV as filling the intervals of a long journey...
...in The Candidate, however, Robert Redford's photogenic virtues qualify him as a glamour candidate who relies almost exclusively on TV to defeat the incumbent, a less attractive personality...
...It is difficult to underestimate the power of TV...
...In 1957 two major motion pictures were released which were centered on the inner workings of the TV broadcasting industry...
...This passivity is also noticeable in TV viewers...
...In The French Connection II, Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), frustrated at not being able to talk with the natives in Marseille, France, turns on TV in his hotel room...
...We hear Nixon's promise to unite a divided nation and Agnew's references to the spiritual strength of the country...
...The set is still on...
...In his motel room, Art Carney's Harry turns off the TV receiver to go to bed...
...TV as a link with politics as well as with sex is amply demonstrated in Hal Ashby's Shampoo, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie...
...Shampoo refers only lightly to the cosmetic nature of television politics...
...As a predominantly middle-class means of mass communication, American movies do not adequately reflect the inordinate role TV plays in the culture of poverty...
...scrupulous people to use TV to exploit the mass audience for commercial and political purposes...
...The average moviegoer sees the surveillance cameras in The Towering Inferno as a sound technological precaution to identify trouble areas in the multi-storied building...
...Old Hollywood movies first began to appear on television in the mid-fifties following the merger of ABC with the Paramount Theatre Corp...
...In an unusual twist on TV and love-making, the movie Loving has a scene in which an alienated married draughtsman (George Segal) finds himself in a playpen with a party guest, unmindful that the TV monitor is transmitting his erotic frolicking to another room where his wife and the other guests are unbidden intruders to his private escapade...
...This recalls Haskell Wechsler's Medium Cool with its live TV footage about the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago...
...In Ken Russell's musical, Tommy, we see a torrent of muck pour out of Ann Margret's TV set, depositing on the white rug of her bedroom floor a foot-deep layer of sludge...
...Since he has a teen-age hitchhiking companion, he does not need the full company of TV or what someone called "chewing gum for the eyes...
...These televised allusions to corruption in high places (remember that Shampoo is a post-Watergate film) act as a counterpoint to the venality and infidelity of the Hollywood scene as mirrored in the frenetic life of George the Beverly Hills hairdresser (played by Warren Beatty...
...If science fiction movies can be considered as a "distant early warning" signal of what is ahead, then there are some disturbing apocalyptic alarms given in 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Space Odyssey: 2001, and Sleeper...
...That TV is not necessarily an aphrodisiac is evident from Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore...
...She dives headfirst into the pool of filth and frolics in it as if it were perfumed bathwater...
...In The Resurrection of Peter Proud, the reincarnated protagonist and his daughter visit his mother in a rest home for the aged...
...The movie shows that charismatic political types attract "groupies" just as do the widely known and often televised rock'n'roll idols featured in A Hard Day's Night, Privilege and Wild in the Streets...
...Throughout the film we are treated to glimpses of the victorious faces of Richard M. Nixon, Spiro Agnew and the members of the newly appointed cabinet as they appear after the 1968 election on the TV news reports...
...The image is stunning in its suggestiveness for it links the need for "instant sex" with that for instant vicarious experience...
...In John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Glenda Jackson is seen in bed with her lover while the "telly" shows the clergyman "signing off' the day's TV schedule with a sermonette...
...Television is very much a nighttime form of escape and many people watch the "small screen" through their toes, as Johnny Carson would say...
...Not being able to understand anything, he at least has the satisfaction of being able to mock the speakers without offending anyone, thus working off his obvious aggressions...
...These same cameras can further the purposes of a negative Utopia such as suggested in the British version of Orwell's 1984...
...Just as we are aware of movies on TV so it would be highly instructive if we became attuned to the growing presence of TV on our movie screens...
...One touching scene shows his two children in their pajamas on the floor watching TV as their father peers at them from the doorway behind...
...A surrealistic scene, to be sure, but nevertheless one which forces us to ponder the full spectrum of consequences, intended and unintended, of the most powerful communications medium in the history of the species...
...The most cynical use of TV for anti-human ends was depicted in Germo Pietri's The Tenth Victim in which the state licenses people to kill for sport...
...He shrugs her away...
...Not only is TV a "baby-sitter" but it is a "time-killer," acting as an obliging companion for the aged, the lonely and the weary traveler...
...For these the weekly policy was not to go to see a movie but rather to go to see any movie...
...He jokingly observed that the next generation would be born with four eyes and no tongue...
...Fred Allen, the late radio comedian, was apprehensive about TV \and what it would do to mass tastes...
...During such a manhunt, a seductive woman (Ursula Andress) plots to kill her intended victim (Marcello Mastroianni) on a television program during a commercial for Ming tea...
...A cursory review of movies in which TV plays even a fleeting role casts considerable light on how and why it is used...
...The audiences laughed loudly at this film but did not reflect on the deeper implications of introducing a device into the home which, by the mere twist of a dial, set up a pitchman's table for all the family to see...
...Consequently, any clues which help us to understand better its capacity to shape our minds and imaginations, both singly and collectively, should be welcome...
...Living in a suburban "dormitory" town and commuting to his job in Manhattan, Peck's gray-flan-neled businessman has very little time for his family...
...Elia Kazan directed Budd Schulberg's Face in the Crowd, an expose of the power of un...
...At the beginning of the picture, Ellen Burstyn as Alice snuggles up to her truckdriver husband, Donald, as he watches TV in bed...
...In The Last Tango in Paris, the mother-in-law of Marlon Brando's Paul watches TV till the end of the program day in order to distract herself from the suicide of her daughter, Rosa...
...In several movies, TV is depicted as a prelude to or a substitute for sex...
...In the community lounge, some infirm patients watch daytime TV programs, confirming the observation that in hospitals, prisons and welfare institutions TV serves as a "semi-narcotic...
...In Hotel (1967), a burglar (Karl Maiden) tiptoes into the room of a resident who has fallen asleep watching TV...
...Recall Carl Reiner's romantic farce, The Thrill of It All (1963) in which Doris Day becomes involved in making commercials for TV at the peril of her marriage...
...The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit foreshadows this state of affairs...
...In the Golden Age of Hollywood in the thirties over one hundred million Americans had the "movie habit...
...NEIL P. HURLEY...
...It is not surprising that movies would feature allusions to an industry which has become so prosperous and so pervasive in its influence over the public...
...He had little idea how soon his fears would materialize...
...In Antonioni's The Passenger, we have another traveler-Jack Nicholson's ennui-ridden documentary filmmaker-who finds distaste in seeing a news telecast which reminds him of his own complicity in "making" news and not merely reporting it objectively...
...Even more than the "big screen," the "small screen" is inside us in ways of which we are scarcely aware...
...The lovers laugh irreverently as the tube darkens...
...Formerly it was an open window onto the street and across courtyards into the uncurtained windows of neighboring apartments...
...Earlier the same Schlesinger provided comic-relief in Midnight Cowboy when the Texas hustler (Jon Voigt) tussels in bed with an impassioned client (Brenda Vaccaro), while triggering sporadically the remote control device which frantically changes the channels...
...One wonders whether James Stewart's voyeuristic photographer, confined to a wheelchair in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), is not a representative of that large group of curious and bored people who must watch something compulsively...
...Not only did NBC and CBS initiate policies of featuring movies on TV, but moviemakers began to reflect the growing importance of the new medium in their scenarios...
...today it is TV's "open window" onto the boundless universe of vicarious experience...
...There are some critical lessons contained in movies about how this remarkable piece of technology called television affects our lives...
...The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) had a brief scene in which two British working-class youths turned off the sound on the TV and mocked the gestures of a pompous speaker...
...In these films TV is used in dehumanizing ways-to increase political control, to inhibit interpersonal communications, to dull the critical sense, and, in general, to induce social conformity and acceptance of the status quo...
...Those of us who saw the original version of this film hardly suspected that twenty years later audience surveys would reveal that the average pre-school child sees a total of almost 4,000 hours of TV and that a great number of children spend more time with TV than with their father...
Vol. 103 • June 1976 • No. 13
