On Screen

...To a greater extent than any other art-form, the film medium confounds the differences between "inner" and "outer," the night's world and the day's...

...On those precious afternoons, nice children, we believed, all had the same preoccupations we had, so our fantasies unreeled more easily than at home: The responsibility for them was shared...

...At the same time, they made us aware that nobody else in the world perceived anything exactly as we did...

...Rather, the dream must be dreamed in full color, and afterward we can be told that little rich girls are really poor and that crime doesn't pay...

...For instance: Americans are more concerned about success than Europeans, more sure it's up for grabs and not out of reach regardless of personal merit or effort...

...And a crucial task of the critic is to disenchant, to remind us that only some flattery is art, that not all illusions are grand...

...Wood's thesis is that virtually any U.S...

...Doubtless my generation paid a price for its passionate gullibility-sitting in the dark and learning, we thought, about what it is to be a man or a woman, about love and sex and violence, about getting what you want and not getting it...

...As children, of course, we thought the eyes and ears of the world were upon us, taking everything in-which is why we hid whenever the Movietone News, camera swinging slowly into focus, came on the screen...

...Nor is this the end of our anxiety about making it: With a continent full of contenders willing to commit murder for the title, "the fastest gun in the West" knows he must die...

...In any case, films, with their semblance of motion, are better at conveying the apprehension of a stillness about to be violated or death in the midst of life...

...There is, unhappily, a weakness in this approach...

...In fact, they were so profoundly confused that after we grew up and came, like our more cynical friends, to associate "Hollywood" with gorgeous exaggeration, lies about the state of the American union, moral caricature and absurd dialogue, we continued to find practically every film from the Golden Age interesting...

...feature made between 1940 and the early '60s can be used as a text of "the back of the American mind," that is, of those beliefs both too preoccupying and too conflict-ridden for us either to ignore or to confront head-on...

...We should think of movies, Wood argues, as works motivated by the same psychological urgencies as dreams, and thus as exempt from moral and logical integrity...

...A film critic must be seduceable...

...Nonetheless, we looked at movies as movies, not as extensions of Madison Avenue...

...We were left to ourselves...

...Saturday afternoons guaranteed a bit of uninterrupted privacy...

...Advertisements on television are enemies of Hollywood, for they magnify the ways it, too, is a big sell...

...Movies offered a delicious sense of secrecy because the theater was perhaps the single place where we felt we were not being observed by parents or parental surrogates...

...Most of us, however, discovered films long before we discovered art museums...

...Consequently, a lack of success is cause for shame...

...On Screen GROWING UP WITH THE MOVIES BY MARCIA CAVELL AUFHAUSER Those of us who were movie-going kids in the '40s had the advantage not only of experiencing Hollywood's finest moments as they happened, but also of getting them before television and Madison Avenue did...

...We were fascinated, in addition, by the various ways movies shuttled back and forth between a private and a public reality...

...This is the reason a lot of canny, television-era kids realize early that movies are a sham...

...We were the watchbirds...

...It is these confusions, this interest, that Michael Wood explores in America in the Movies (Basic Books, 206 pp., $10.00), a comfortably written book by a man who must have frequently emerged from a film agreeing with his friends' criticisms of it, and in spite of those faults, feeling he had had a terrific experience...

...While the people on the screen were usually selling something, their messages were confused...

...anyone incapable of losing his head for a couple of hours at a mediocre flick is too old for the game...

...On the other hand, coming out on top is considered an indictment of character...

...He discovers texture and ambiguity where a classical esthetic would see only objects for censure...

...Still, for a couple of hours in the darkness, out of ordinary space and time, nobody interrupted us by saying we had to do something or that it was rude to stare...

...Life was suspended...

...Alone though not lonely, we were comforted that others were witnessing what we were witnessing...

...Since learning to cope with these relationships is a central problem of growing up, children are undoubtedly the most receptive moviegoers...

...Movies assuage the discomforts of blurred minds," he writes, "but they also maintain the blur...

...Movies also affirmed our private selves by catching moods we thought we were morbid to suffer-the eerieness of midafternoon quiet or the fearfulness of city shadows when the light is cold...

...Or victory can be awarded momentarily to a hero who has the talent to win but not the will, and who therefore keeps his virtue by rejecting the crown and its hazards-a convoluted scenario that is common, Wood shows, to a number of movies...

...The strength of Wood's method is that in taking confusion seriously, he makes sense of many films that moved us beyond reason, that is, beyond what the script or the characters seemed to justify...

...Certainly not by pretending that winning doesn't matter...

...Rationalists have long dismissed dreams, fairy-tales and myths as unworthy of adult attention, whereas readers less spoiled by "maturity" have found the very stories that are untrue to the various orders of Aristotle's Poetics may thereby be truer to their inner lives...

...But not if a film is fragmented into a series of eight-minute clips...

...Indeed, we could, if we chose, subject the advertising industry to a mythological analysis...

...His book, then, reveals most Hollywood films as ingenious, probably only half-conscious, solutions to very complex problems...

...Comic books or country & western lyrics can be valued in the same way...

...Secretly we understand that "nice guys finish last," that goodness is the price of earthly glory...

...They seemed to gratify our desire for omnipresence by often allowing us to witness more than their heroes and heroines...

...Paintings do this as well: Edward Hopper, for one, has captured the melancholy of Sunday mornings and sunny street-scapes...

...Nevertheless, movies are not dreamed, they're made...

...Hollywood movies, he maintains, had a quasimythological function: to glance at our muddles, our peculiarly American muddles, without seeming to do so...

...Ingrid Bergman is more beautiful than most of the women pushing soap or cereal, yet sandwiched between Brillo and Wheaties even her magic becomes tainted...

...But one of our means for distinguishing a good film from a bad, opera from soap opera, art from kitsch, and tragedy from melodrama, is measuring the degree to which a work suggests a genuine, and often painful, resolution to a conflict, not simply a compromise that muzzies it...

...Wood's claim that the function of movies is "to preserve our moral slumber" as dreams preserve sleep indicates an appreciation for the child's sense of film, yet it implies that The Postman Always Rings Twice is a greater accomplishment than Children of Paradise...

...The Saturday Evening Post, for example, used to feature a little superego called "The Watchbird,' who in each issue made note of some new sin of manners or morals that, invariably, we had committed...

...How can a movie handle the theme of success so as to treat all these contradictions...