THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
CUPS JOINT THE SCREEN America at the Movies is a reprise of clips from about eighty American movie classics made over the last sixty-five years. It's the American Film Institute's "birthday gift"...
...In each of the sections, the manifest destiny being demonstrated is made to seem a kind of cycle, a film loop in which the country's history keeps going merrily round and round...
...Smith goes to Washington...
...The Cities" is about social and economic immigration, about the upward mobility of Edward O. Robinson in Little Caesar and Harlow and Beery in Dinner at Eight...
...America at the Movies takes the most popular American art form of this century, and reduces it to a couple of hours worth of propaganda...
...Like the sequencing of "The Land," this movement from Busby Berkeley to West Side Story preserves a status quo...
...Of course, her parents haven't been so encouraging as Oaudette's were, but America at the Movies leaves that part out in the interests of keeping the family together...
...The Families" is about temporal and emotional immigration across the generation gap and through the rites de passage...
...Having begun with the land rush into Oklahoma, we now end with a later generation being pushed out again...
...Then, as in "The Land," the new cycle begins with a scene that only finds its analogue at the very end of the section...
...It's the American Film Institute's "birthday gift" to the nation on its bicentennial, a souvenir program from a performance of history itself...
...Misrepresen-tative as it is, however, such free association only does a random violence of history...
...Louis, the film cuts next to the waltz of the space stations in 2001...
...Those bopping Puerto Ricans from the slums in West Side Story are really no worse off than the cafe society in Berkeley's film...
...Wrong...
...They have just as much fun, don't they...
...In this case the scene is a dance sequence from a Busby Berkeley musical of the thirties, with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler cooing in evening clothes at a table next to the dance floor...
...As "The Wars" shows by beginning when Henry Fonda leaves for one war and ending when Van Johnson returns from another, 200 years later, it's really all the same war too...
...Between land rush and exodus, America at the Movies abuses a good deal of our history...
...At the end of this section, here comes Katherine Ross, veil still flying as she also runs out on her wedding in The Graduate...
...In each of the sections after "The Land," the cycle repeats itself...
...But as the clip is made to end with Steinbeck's family setting out for California, any historical irony is brushed aside...
...The Cities" begins like "The Land" with a couple of transitional passages...
...Louis...
...Like everything else we have seen, then, it must be for the best...
...Having just gotten air-borne in The Spirit of St...
...My country, right or wrong...
...That's what counts, isn't it...
...Both are scenes of arrival at Ellis Island, and the theme of immigration that they suggest shapes the film...
...Gunfight scenes from a whole series of Westerns have no real connection with the theme of the land, but they are put just before another series of scenes from films like Shane and The Searchers, where the issue really is the land...
...Life can be beautiful...
...A penny saved is a penny earned, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, et al...
...The mate this scene finds at the end is in the "America" number from West Side Story with Rita Moreno...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Right...
...Since this section began with the immigrants' final landing on Manhattan in America, America, a penultimate scene where Kubrick's space stations do "The Blue Danube" reassures us as well that America's conquest of the whole universe is just another of her endless immigrations...
...The more things change, the more they stay the same...
...It takes the BIG moments from some of our best movies and makes them fall out of their original contexts to line up here for a parade, a Fourth-of-July parade with nineteen hundred and seventy-six trombones...
...Most of the clips in this section are of the contest between man and nature, from Keaton's stand-off with a hurricane in Way Out West to Stewart's take-off in The Spirit of St...
...The implication is that all those gunfights were actually in the service of sodbusters like Van Heflin...
...The only trouble is that the parade is in truth a forced march and the homage it would pay is fake...
...As these two examples suggest, the general drift of this content is always toward conquest...
...Like an official policy of genocide, they are what assure that no one escapes...
...After a couple of transitional clips at the beginning of "The Land," a perfect union for these two themes is found in the scene from Cim-arron (1960 version) where Glenn Ford joins the Oklahoma land rush...
...The implication is that Americans are just pioneers by nature, born immigrants moving ever onward to a better life...
...This utterly falsifies the history of both America, and the movies, and it typifies the sort of disrespect this movie has for the films to which it pretends to pay tribute...
...The theme of immigration and cyclical patterning of the sequences provide the more programmatic chance to rewrite the past...
...In "The Land," for instance, the film's cyclical view of both our history and our movies relieves the clash we might expect between the themes of immigration and possession, between the images of moving on and those of settling down...
...It makes us see as comparable two historical situations and two casts of characters that are different...
...The message is that all the old values still apply...
...What that propaganda message is in the film's five arbitrary sections-"The Land," "The Cities," "The Families," "The Wars" and "The Spirit"-4s telegraphed by a prologue of one scene each from Elia Kazan's America, America and Coppola's The Godfather, II...
...That Stanley Kubrick didn't think so is, to the people who made America at the Movies, completely beside the point...
...The rural and westward migration in "The Land" is reversed as Schles-inger's midnight cowboy arrives in New York and Capra's Mr...
...At the beginning of "The Families" Claudette Colbert's father advises her to skip out on her own wedding in It Happened One Night, and off she goes running across the lawn with veil flying...
...In "The Wars" we see them immigrate again, across American history this time, leaving home for the French and Indian War in an opening scene from Ford's Drums along the Mohawk, and about-facing in the last scene to return home once more after World War II in Welhnan's Battleground...
...The spirit referred to in the title of the film's final section is the one that has animated all these immigrations in the other sections-the spirit of Progress...
...In "The Land," people literally immigrate across the country to settle the West...
...The ideal of Progress, we are reassured, will remain valid in the future...
...This is how all conflict is avoided in the film and anything that might be disagreeable is effaced...
...From here "The Land" wanders off on a tangent about the Western, but it returns to the subject of the land at the end with the dispossession scene from The Grapes of Wrath...
Vol. 103 • October 1976 • No. 22
