Goodbye to Olivia Hussey.

"Olivia Hussey, star of 1968 Romeo and Juliet film, dies aged 73/Golden Globe-winning actor 'lived a life full of passion, love and dedication to the arts,' says family in statement" (The Guardian).

So many of us were profoundly affected by this movie. I don't know how old you were, but realize that you are seeing a 15-year-old girl:

ADDED: In 2019, I blogged about this movie as part of a project of rewatching movies that I had watched when they came out and had not rewatched since:

Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s.

I have what I called my "imaginary movie project, " but it's been stalled since 2019. It began in 2019. The idea was to see how I react to these things today and try to remember and relate it to how I felt at the time. I began with the year 1960, when I was 9, and I got up to 1968, with the last of the movies I saw when I was in high school. Oh, how I cried! 

Now, my son John is doing a movie blog project, where he identifies his favorite movie of every year beginning with 1920, reaching a new year each day. He got up to the point where I left off, and his 1968 movie just happens to be the same as mine. Then one of his 1969 movies is the movie I watched for 1969. I watched it, but I didn't blog about it. And then I've also watched my movie for 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1973 — my college years! — all without blogging. 

So now there's a horrible disconnect between watching and writing, but let me solve the problem by writing about all 5 movies right now. Here they are — in their ghoulish, gouldish glory:

1969 — "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"

1970 — "MASH"

1971 — "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"

1972 — "Play It Again, Sam"

1973 — "The Long Goodbye"

1. That's a lot of Elliott Gould! He was Ted in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," one of the doctors in "MASH," and Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye." And he could just as well have been the bumbling fool played by Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam" or the bumbling fool played by Warren Beatty in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller."

2. Whatever was happening to American manhood in the early 70s, it was embodied in Elliott Gould. Let me pick one scene to help you contemplate this issue. It's this, the beginning of "The Long Goodbye":

3. We might understand early 70s American manhood through what it is not. It is not Humphrey Bogart. In "The Long Goodbye," Elliott Gould plays Philip Marlowe, the character Humphrey Bogart famously played in the 1940s, but he's 70s Marlowe, and there's a big difference. We're tasked to remember Bogart and compare, but in "Play It Again, Sam," Humphrey Bogart appears— an actor impersonates him — and advises the Woody Allen character on manly behavior. Allen tries repeatedly to follow the advice, fails ludicrously, but ultimately finds a way to incorporate some of the advice into his own version of a man. 

4. Why was I absorbing so much movie material about the struggles of the 1970s man? What about me, a woman? There were some women in these movies. The great Julie Christie bested Warren Beatty in the wild West whorehouse business in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." Diane Keaton was a fine match for Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam." Sally Kellerman embodied order in "MASH" — where the yin and yang are reversed and then men are the chaos. 

5. The movie with the most substance was "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." Here's something I wrote to John when he had just watched and loved that movie: "You didn’t live through the period when adults were doing those things, so what they were satirizing wasn’t really available to you. I saw it when I was 18 and that’s what the generation just ahead of me was doing. They seemed quite awful to me so it was easy to laugh at them and feel not at risk to be anything like them. I was half the age you are now when I saw that. Adulthood, even (or especially) among the supposedly hip people, looked sad and clueless."

6. Things? What things? — you may be asking. There's an Esalen-type retreat, training Bob & Carol in how to be progressive in their sexual relationship, and that challenges the more conservative Ted & Alice. 

7. Three of those 5 movies were directed by Robert Altman. Oh, my, was he a big deal. I thought "MASH" was excellent at the time (and I never watched the TV show "MASH" because I didn't want to see different actors and different stories). But "MASH" didn't mean as much to me this time. My favorite at the time was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," and I felt about the same this time. "The Long Goodbye" annoyed me at the time, but I thought it was great on rewatch. When I got to the end this time, I went back to the beginning and watched it again. 

8. I could have said a lot more about these movies if I'd written about them one by one as I did my rewatchings. What held me back? 

9. Something about college? We watched so many older movies in those years as Cinema Guild — right across the street from our dorm — served up 2 classics every day. So many decades of great old films to see — nightly double features for 50¢. Why go to the regular movie theater and pay $2, just because something's new? There was the lure of the old. All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave. We were hungry for movies, but we had half a century of great stuff to catch up on. And, of course, back then, you had to see a film when it was playing or it would be gone and maybe you'd never get a chance to see it again. Here's "Ikiru" or "Design for Living" or whatever. Better get over to Cinema Guild or you'll regret it — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

10. I might be that what held me back from writing about those movies is that it's too personal. 1969 to 1973 — those were the years when I met and married the man who was my first husband, and those movies had so much to do with our relationship. Writing is an invasion of your own privacy and the privacy of others, but the writer is always deciding where and how far to invade.

The best movies of 1968.

I don't blog about it every day, but my son John has a blog — that he adds to every day — that goes year by year from 1920 to 2020 and gives his favorite movie (or movies) from each year. For some years, he isolates a single movie, but for other years, he lists a runner-up or 2 or 3.  He hit 1968 today, and this is a year with 4 movies. 

The top choice is "Monterey Pop":

 

Truly amazing. And you can watch it at home on 4K now (with the right streaming channels, about which John will always inform you). 

The second choice is something I watched recently, Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet." I watched it as part of a project — my imaginary movie project — that I began in 2019 and stalled on in 2019. I was rewatching movies that I'd seen when they came out, beginning with 1960 and only getting up to 1968. My 1968 movie was "Romeo and Juliet," and I wrote about it here. I've watched the movies for the next 5 years, but somehow I never got around to blogging about them. How, when I blog every day, do a watch a whole movie, specifically meaning to write a post about it, but then I don't?! Maybe I expect myself to say so much that I end up saying nothing at all.

Anyway... John's third choice is the Ingmar Bergman movie "Shame," which I saw when I was in college, when I had so many Ingmar Bergman movies loaded into my brain.

John's fourth choice is something I haven't seen — Frederick Wiseman's documentary "High School." I'm so impressed by the approach of using nothing but film, with no voiceover or text explanations:

The 1968 movie in my "imaginary movie project" — "Romeo and Juliet."

I saw Franco Zeffirelli's version of the Shakespeare play when I was 17. Olivia Hussey (Juliet) was born in 1951, like me. She was 16 when the movie was made. Leonard Whiting (Romeo) was only one year older. We're told quite clearly in the text of the play that Juliet is 13. These are young kids indeed. They fall madly in love one night, get married the very next day, everything suddenly goes to hell, and on the fourth day, they're both dead.

The sense of of teenagers in love is incredibly strong and real...



Oh! How I cried when Romeo kills himself and Juliet immediately awakens from her fake death and finds him freshly dead...



So emotional! But what was it like watching it again half a century later? Beautifully fresh and alive. The story is so fast moving and the teenagers get so overheated — with lots of love and crazy streetfighting — but that's the story and I got caught up in the wildness and the extremely painful sadness in the end — in 1968 and in 2019.

Look, here are Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting talking about the movie in 2018. They are old, and I am just as old:



So lovely and sweet!

Don't let it be forgot/That once — in 1967 — there was a spot/For one brief shining moment/That was known as that ridiculous movie I saw back then and rewatched now, "Camelot."

Camelot! Camelot!/I know it sounds a bit bizarre/But in Camelot — Camelot! — King Arthur is a clueless hippie and Guenevere is Vanessa Redgrave, a groupie in search of a rock star — That's how conditions are.

Well, I learned my lesson rewatching "Dr. Zhivago" (the 1965 entry in my "imaginary movie project"): A beauteous movie-star woman in a dramatic geographic location is just necessarily going to have hot sex with the best-looking man.

It doesn't matter that Guenevere is married to the king, and he's pretty nice and means well and all and he's not horrible looking (though what's up with the eyeliner?)...



Franco Nero comes to town...



... and sex must be had with that guy. Not just flirting and teasing, as you might think as things crank up in the first hour of this 3-hour monstrosity, when hordes of extras are cavorting and frolicking about how it's "the lusty month of May... when everyone goes blissfully astray" and "tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear" and "When every maiden prays that her lad will be a cad"...

With all the talk about The Russians!!!! these last few years, it was fun to watch "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!"...

... the 1966 entry in my "imaginary movie project." (As you may have noticed already, I watch a movie for each year, beginning in 1960, that I saw in the theater at the time it came out.)

This is a big long sprawling comedy, with a lot of people getting crazy and driving around, so it's an awful lot like "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," my 1963 movie, blogged here, where I observed that the theme was:

Order or chaos. Society or a raw state of nature. Driving according to the rules of the road or speeding and veering and sailing off a cliff. They must decide!

It's a comedy, so they keep choosing chaos. They only come back to order — let's work together — now and then to create a new opportunity for crazy chaos.

Well, "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" is also a comedy, and there's also a struggle between order and chaos, but though the people do keep freaking out and running amok — because they think the Russians are invading — they keep coming back to order. They even find harmony with the Russians — who are climbing onto an American island because their submarine ran aground — simply by experiencing their common humanity. It's sort of like in that 1985 Sting song...

In "Dr. Zhivago," one line stands out — starkly — and reveals the meaning of the long, stately sequence of images.

Ah, I know I could not understand it in 1965 when I was 14, and I could barely understand movies at all. I hadn't yet accustomed myself to cinematic storytelling. I was continually confused. Why are they going there? Is that the same guy? It took me a while to face the fact that it was my job to pick up the clues and put things together. If you're drifting along waiting for things to make sense, wondering what you're looking at that and why are they doing that, a 3-hour-and-39-minute movie is an awful slog.

And it was a slog the second time around too. Even with better understanding of the grammar of film, I wasn't patient with the filmmaker's approach to storytelling, the long lingering on images — branches of trees waving in the wind, a corpse inside a grave, the gray sky, the balalaika, the expanses of snow, the frosted-up windows, the lovers' eyes. It was only thinking about it the next day that it occurred to me that all those shots represented the poetry that formed inside the head of Dr. Zhivago. We were told time and again that he was a great poet, but not one word of his poetry was ever heard. Instead, we got the poetry of the filmmaker (David Lean). I don't believe his shots were wonderful enough to stand in for great poetry, but then, if we'd heard the words, they probably wouldn't have sounded so great either. So let the big brown gazing eyes of Omar Sharif represent ART!

The line that reveals the meaning of the movie is: "The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it." The revolution has taken place and Zhivago is confronted by the Bolshevik commander Strelnikov (Pasha Antipov):

Pasha: I used to admire your poetry.
Zhivago: Thank you.
Pasha: I shouldn't admire it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don't you agree? Feelings, insights, affections... it's suddenly trivial now. You don't agree; you're wrong. The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it. 

I had trouble in 1965 — and I had trouble in 2019 — understanding why I should care about Dr. Zhivago's romantic life. He has a wife, and she's perfectly fine (Tonya, played by Geraldine Chaplin), but he's fixated on another woman (Lara, played by Julie Christie), and we're supposed to root for Lara, apparently because her eyes are fakely lighted up and a balalaika tune plays every time Zhivago feels drawn to her.

In 1964, when I was 13, I went to the movies to see "A Hard Day's Night," and it was a double feature.

The other movie — the movie I've chosen for 1964 in my "imaginary movie project" — was "For Those Who Think Young."



That poster says it's "The swingin'est young people's picture of the year," and I saw it immediately after that other "young people's picture," "A Hard Day's Night." Two entirely different visions of "young."

Compare Pamela Tiffin (who was was 22 in 1964) with Pattie Boyd (who was 20):



I made both of those screen grabs, and I can tell you Tiffin was done up like that for a day at the beach. Tiffin oozed maturity. Movies like this were called "beach party" movies, but her character was a college student who was continually attending to her studies and she was insistent that her boyfriend, the rich kid (James Darren), treat her with complete respect. Boyd played a schoolgirl whose role was to gawp at the Beatles and say her one line, "Prisoners?!"

Why didn't I pick "A Hard Day's Night" for my project? It fits the requirement that I need to have seen it in the theater when it came out. But I'd already rewatched "A Hard Day's Night" a time or 2, and I want to compare my original response with what I feel now, so... too much static. And there's something specific I remember about seeing "For Those Who Think Young" when I was 13: I enjoyed it more than "A Hard Day's Night."

But why? That's a mystery to solve. First, I loved Bob Denver. The show "Gilligan's Island" debuted in the fall of that year, but I knew him from my favorite TV show, "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," which was on from 1959 to 1963. I had a 8"x10" glossy photo — I'd sent in for it — of Denver as Maynard G. Krebs. I loved the beatnik character who questioned all of society's conventions — especially work.

Let me show you about 10 minutes of "For Those Who Think Young," beginning with the Bob Denver character. He's meditating, and this is 4 years before The Beatles took up Transcendental Meditation. This segment continues with some Tiffin/Darren interplay and reaches a peak with Bob Denver buried in the sand using his mouth in a way that I found gut-bustingly hilarious in 1964. And don't miss Nancy Sinatra:



Did you see that early #MeToo wokeness? Nancy hits Bob for kissing her in an entirely nonphysical way. The meditation is so strong.

The Bob Denver character, Kelp, is employed as Darren's assistant, and we see him running over to serve him and Tiffin some drinks in tall glasses. Before running off, Kelp then slips one of those glasses into his swimsuit pocket, where it bulges like an erection I didn't notice in '64.

The Oxford English Dictionary "Word of the Day" is "Dylanesque."

The (unlinkable) OED defines "Dylanesque":

Resembling or reminiscent of Bob Dylan or his work, esp. his songs or records, which are characterized by poetic, often enigmatic, lyrics, a distinctive, abrasive vocal delivery, and music rooted in traditional American styles, such as folk, blues, and country; (sometimes) spec. typical or redolent of the folk music of his early records, which combined lyrics of social protest with acoustic guitar and harmonica playing.

I read that definition out loud to Meade and — saying I thought "poetic, often enigmatic, lyrics" got to the heart of it — asked him to dredge up a "Dylanesque" line from the junkpile of his memories. He said:

And she buttoned her boot
And straightened her suit
Then she said, “Don’t get cute”

That's "Fourth Time Around."

I said the first thing that came to my mind was:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon

But I knew I only thought that because I remember Bob on "60 Minutes" saying:

I don’t know how I got to write those songs.... All those early songs were almost magically written. Ah… “Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon…” Well, try to sit down and write something like that.

If I'd really consulted the junkpile of my memories, I'd have said:

You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine

So you can see how Meade and I go together — he's got the suit getting straightened and I've got the leopard-skin pillbox hat balancing on the head. There is order over chaos in the midst of the poetic, often enigmatic.

By the way, I'm working on writing up my post for the 1964 entry in my "imaginary music project," and by chance it contains a ridiculous Dylan lyric:

Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp...
You always responded when I needed your help

Is that Dylanesque? It's not enigmatic. It's just a very ordinary statement about a relationship —  "You always responded when I needed your help" — and daring to put the least possible effort into finding a rhyme for "help."

The best advice re song lyrics and "help" — which only has 2 other rhymes ("whelp" and "yelp") — is don't put it at the end of a line. When The Beatles wrote a whole song "Help," they kept it at the beginning of lines, and made the words at the ends of lines all easy to rhyme ("down," "way," "ways," "insecure").

Do The Beatles have their own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary? Yes, but it's just "Beatle" — "Applied attributively to the hair-style or other characteristics of ‘The Beatles’ or of their imitators." The examples — all from the mid-60s — are about things other than poetry: "the Beatle cut," "Beatle fans," "Beatle wallpapers," "Beatle wigs."

And that sends me back to the enigmatic junkpile of Dylan lyrics. Dylan has 5 song lyrics with "wig" (and if you can name all 5 you get a Bob Dylan merit badge):

1 & 2 (the same line is in 2 different songs): "... they’re beatin’ the devil out of a guy/Who’s wearing a powder-blue wig..."

3. "... Jezebel the nun she violently knits/A bald wig for Jack the Ripper..."

4. "I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind/I’m no pig without a wig/I hope you treat me kind..."

5. "She took off her wheel, took off her bell/Took off her wig, said, 'How do I smell?'"

I wish I knew, but I've got this anosmia/I wish I could wake up and smell the cosmea...

IN THE COMMENTS: khematite remembers a 6th Bob Dylan "wig" lyric (which was obscured from my search because it's "wig-hat" (and I've always found that a funny expression, because a wig is a kind of hat, isn't it?))?

I sat with my high-heeled sneakers on
Waiting to play tennis in the noonday sun
I had my white shorts rolled up past my waist
And my wig-hat was falling in my face
But they wouldn’t let me on the tennis court

Hey! Man in shorts! Bob Dylan in shorts. Has that ever even happened?

I'm going to say no.

The 1962 movie in my "imaginary movie project" is the film version of a great Broadway play, "The Music Man."

The #1 thing I remember about my reaction to this movie when I saw it in the theater at the age of 11 is that I was horrified by the talk of tarring and feathering the main character, the con man, Harold Hill (Robert Preston). I did not know exactly what tarring and feathering was, and back then, there was no way to pause the movie and research the question on a smart phone. I should have understood entertainment well enough to know that in a peppy, chirpy movie about the foibles of small-town Iowa folk, things would not take such a dark turn that the protagonist would be tortured to death before our eyes. But I wasn't sure enough not to feel horrible.

And did Hill deserve to die for what he'd done? I felt very intense empathy for this character, who I thought might be facing the death penalty. He's hunted down by a mob — these nice people are stirred up into a mob. They're even carrying torches at night as they track him down. We see a makeshift trial. It's so unfair... as a legal matter. But narratively, it is fair, because he came to town, where the people had no problems other than their own dullness and conventionality, and he stirred them all up (just to trick them into giving him money for musical instruments and uniforms for the boy's band that was supposed to solve the problems they didn't have):



That's the best thing in the movie. "Ya Got Trouble." Ha ha. I couldn't help thinking of Donald Trump. The charisma, the effect on the crowd. He made them think he was putting into words problems that they knew they had.

"I'd like to think that sometime, maybe 10 or 20 years from now... there'd be something I could laugh at... anything."

Said Spencer Tracy, as the thoroughly disgraced Captain T. G. Culpepper, encased in a body cast, at the end of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," which I watched — all 2 hours and 39 minutes of it — as the 1963 entry in my imaginary movie project. This is a movie I saw in the theater when it came out. I was 12, and I didn't know much about gigantic epic comedy chase movies. In fact, I still don't. It's been more than 50 years since then, and I've found any number of things to laugh at along my way, but I can't say I laughed much rewatching this sprawling, raucous monster. I wasn't in a theater full of people who'd assembled to enjoy the hell out of themselves, as I was back in 1963. I'm sure I laughed a lot back then, but I only half-laughed twice in the present-day rewatch.

Tracy, musing about ever laughing again, in fact gets to laugh almost immediately. Buddy Hackett (also in a full body cast) peels a banana, throws the peel on the floor, and Ethel Merman, who's been yelling at everyone throughout the film, comes strutting in, yelling at everyone, and she slips on the banana peel and falls hard on her ass. Do we really want to see a woman get hurt? Yes, in this case, we've been conditioned to wish harm on her, because she's been the loud-mouth mother-in-law visiting aural pain on all the men (except her beloved son Dick Shawn) for the entirety of the movie.

I get it. And yet, I do not get it. And I did not get it the first time around. Yes, I understand the old comic convention of The Mother-in-Law — specifically the mother-in-law to a man. She's got her daughter's devotion and she's going after the daughter's husband, crushing his masculine pride at every turn. You don't ask why these people are like this. They just are. They're characters. They're assigned these positions. Do not pause to reflect or all is lost. That is, nothing is funny. It's just loud. And — oh! — Ethel Merman is loud. Did you know her original last name is Zimmerman — just like Bob Dylan? She lopped off the "Zim." Why not lop off the "man" — it would be more castrating-y — and be Zimmer?

From 1961, in my "imaginary movie project," it's "The Absent-Minded Professor."

As you may remember, I am rewatching movies — one for each year beginning in 1960 — that I saw in the theater when they originally came out — for fun and to compare my present-day reaction to what I can remember feeling when I was young. For 1961, when I was 10 years old, I watched "The Absent-Minded Professor."



1. The professor, played by Fred MacMurray, was really only "absent-minded" about one thing: the woman he was supposed to marry. As the movie begins, he is forgetting to attend his own wedding after already missing 2 attempted weddings — not weddings to different women. There's just one woman and he can't seem to remember to show up to get married to her, and she's about ready to give up. Of course, it's obvious that in the end he will marry her, but I'm sure I worried a lot more about this problem when I was 10. These days, I'm just a little annoyed that the woman's role is to be the long-suffering but perfectly nice match for the man who's the only interesting person here.

2. You'd think a professor would have a professional lab and assistants, but the professor putters around in a shed in his backyard assisted only by a cute dog who listens to his narration. The professor creates "Flubber" (flying rubber) through some freewheeling experimentation that blows up the place. With no regard to public or personal safety, the professor puts the Flubber in his Model T Ford and goes flying about the town.

3. As a kid, I didn't understand much about how the world works, so I must have been open-minded about the flying car and the use of it to bounce on top of road-bound cars driven by people the professor needed to harass. I accepted it when Flubber was smeared on basketball shoes so that the professor's home team could win a basketball game by bouncing over their opponents. To me now, the behavior with the car was a criminal assault and the intervention in the basketball game was cheating.

"Death will come soon to hush us along/Sweeter than honey and bitter as gall..."

Goodbye to Franco Zeffirelli, hushed along at age 96.

Here's the NYT obituary, "Franco Zeffirelli, Italian Director With Taste for Excess, Dies at 96."

His interest in Shakespeare was awakened by an older British woman, Mary O’Neill, who tutored him in English as a child and imbued him with ethical values that foiled the Fascist curriculum served up at school.

“She kept injecting in me the cult of freedom of democracy that remained in my DNA for the rest of my life,” Mr. Zeffirelli told Opera News....

He went on to study architecture at the University of Florence, until the onset of World War II interrupted his education. He joined Communist partisan forces, first fighting Mussolini’s Fascists and then the occupying Nazis. Captured by the Fascists, he was saved from the firing squad when his interrogator miraculously turned out to be a half brother whom he had never known. The half brother arranged his release....

In the late 1940s, the director Luchino Visconti spotted Mr. Zeffirelli, blond and blue-eyed, working as a stagehand in Florence.... A smitten Mr. Visconti gave him his big break in 1949, making him his personal assistant and set designer .... The two became romantically involved and lived together for three years. In his autobiography, published in 2006, Mr. Zeffirelli wrote that he considered himself “homosexual,” disliking the term “gay” as inelegant....

"Romeo and Juliet" is the 1968 movie in my "imaginary film project." What an impact that had on me when I was 17! My high school "outing club" "arts society" took the bus into Manhattan to see it.

The lyrics quoted in the post title are from the song "What Is a Youth" that you hear in the beautiful film clip embedded above. The words do not appear in the text of "Romeo and Juliet." The song lyrics were gathered (by Eugene Walter) "from songs in other Shakespearean plays, particularly Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice." The composer is the great Nino Rota.

I told you about my "imaginary movie project."

Here.

And I even watched the first movie, from the first year, 1960, and wrote a post about it, here.

Since then, I've watched the next 2 movies. Remember, the idea is to rewatch a movie that I originally saw in the theater in the year that it came out, one movie for each year. I'm choosing movies that I think will be fun to watch now and to see how my present-day reaction compares to what I thought and felt at the time. And I want to be inspired to blog about it.

But I didn't blog about the 1961 movie when I watched it a week ago, and now that I've watched the 1962 movie, I have a backlog — a blog backlog. That's uncharacteristic of me, so maybe I'm telling myself: Don't do it! Or maybe I just need you to encourage me. You saw what I did with the 1960 movie, "Please Don't Eat the Daisies."

I'll reveal the titles of the 1961 and the 1962 movies, in case you want to take that into account in encouraging me: "The Absent-Minded Professor" and "The Music Man." And I'll just say that these movies are both, in my 2019 view, essentially entirely about overcoming sexual inhibition. There will be more sex than you could possibly imagine, or, I mean, there was more sex than I could possibly imagine when I was 10 and 11, as I was in 1961 and 1962.

Next up, for 1963: "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World."

Last night, I watched the first movie in my "imaginary movie project"...

... described here. I don't know if I'm really doing the project, but I did watch the movie that would be the first movie, the 1960 Doris Day movie, "Please Don't Eat the Daisies." In 1960, I was 9 and I was taken to see this movie in the theater, I suppose by my mother, who must have liked Doris Day. I know she loved the Doris Day recording, "Sentimental Journey," and maybe she looked a little like Doris Day, especially around 1960, when she'd bleached her dark hair blonde. I remembered how I reacted to the movie when I was 9: I couldn't understand it, had no idea what was going on. Watching the movie last night, it was plain to see that the movie was incomprehensible to a 9 year old.

Though it had kids in it — Doris Day's 4 unruly sons — it was the story of a married couple with a disagreement about how to live — city or country? — that got the husband — David Niven — into a position to be sorely tempted to commit adultery. The husband and wife also kept approaching but not having sex, as those unruly sons would inevitably interrupt them (in a manner that I can now understand must have been funny to adults in 1960s even though it still doesn't make me laugh). Sexual frustration is expressed in the lyrics to the song "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" — "Here I am waitin' and anticipatin'... I'm so romantic but I'm gettin' frantic" — which is inexplicably sung by Doris while dancing in a circle with a couple dozen schoolchildren.

The husband is a New York City theater critic, and much of the story depends on fathoming what this job is and the sort of ethical issues that arise within it — should you pan a play written by your friend? — and the dynamic at cocktail parties and how success as a critic might warp a man's personality. None of that was accessible to me when I was 9!

Niven wants to live in NYC and go to literary parties. Doris wants a house in the country:

Imaginary movie project.

It's possible I'll actually do this. If I do, it will be because I've completely gotten out of the habit of seeing movies. I haven't gone out to see a movie since last summer (when I saw one documentary and considered it worth looking at on television, but not worth putting up with in one long, paid-for sitting), and I can't remember the last time I watched a whole movie on TV (though we joined "Dr. Strangelove" in progress recently and watched it to the end). Maybe the last time I watched a whole movie on TV (other than a documentary) was back in February 2017.

Sometimes I think I should get back to watching fiction movies. I got back to reading fiction books after many years of reading almost only nonfiction. And I've been enjoying that (perhaps in part because it's become harder to believe that nonfiction is nonfiction and with outright fiction I'm choosing the best writing). But it's hard for me to find any new movies that interest me at all (for reasons that I won't elaborate here).

But I had the idea for how I might like to watch some movies. These would all be movies that I've seen before, that I remember reacting to at the time, and where I'm curious about what effect they might have on me now. The idea occurred to me as I was thinking about one particular movie. I want one movie from each year, beginning with 1960, when I was 9. And it has to be a movie I saw when it came out. I'm picking things that I think will be fun to rewatch in part because I'll be able to remember my reaction.

I got this idea as I was out walking and listening to an audiobook that had a passage that reminded me of a particular movie that I'd watched back in 1993:

When we first met, she told me she was studying pantomime. Oh, really, I’d said, not altogether surprised. Young women are all into something these days. Plus, she didn’t look like your die-cast polish-your-skills-in-dead-earnest type. Then she “peeled a mandarin orange.” Literally, that’s what she did....

That made me think of "Bennie and Joon":



I can only vaguely remember how that movie made me feel a quarter century ago and can't know whether watching it again will make me remember much more and whether new contrasting feelings will arise and affect me in an interesting (bloggable) enough way to justify actually doing this project, but I did go through many lists of movies and come up with movies from the 60s through the 90s, which is much easier to do than to sit through all these things. It shouldn't be a chore. Maybe what I liked doing was thinking about the project and doing the intense work of list-making. Actually sitting in a chair staring into the screen for 100 hours... that another matter altogether. Reading fiction is something I do (for the most part) while walking around outdoors. Watching fiction... I don't know.