The Greener Grass of "Then" Versus "Now"

Not long ago I was talking to a writer about a movie they wanted to write. The idea was a good one, with a nice solid Friday night at the movies hook. But in the course of pitching, this writer went on to say “I see it as an allegory for school shootings.”

Well…

I must’ve made a face like I suspected I’d just stepped in dog shit because the writer stopped and asked, “what?” I wrinkled my nose and said “yeah, don’t do that…” The writer thought about it for a minute and said “you’re right, people want to be entertained right now, don’t they?”

With that (successful, I believe) battlefield conversion in mind, and with current events seeming so bleak and life-or-death these days, let’s take a moment to have some fun with something I saw in the “news” recently.

Because after all…

All work and no play makes George a dull boy.

All work and no play makes George a dull boy.

All work and no play makes George a dull boy.

All work and no play makes George a dull boy.

The further back in time difficult events recede, the harder it can be to remember exactly what it was that was so bad about them. This is probably some kind of evolutionary adaptation, and I think it at least partially explains the following: Pew Research recently released a poll that indicated a clear majority of Amercians, something like 58%, believe life in America today is worse than it was 50 years ago.

It’s certainly a shocking result, but what does it really mean? Probably not very much. Beyond the evolutionary adaptation angle, I think the explanation is primarily a function of perspective, time and experience yes, but also a question of how a given individual defines the word “better.”

As for me… one of the reasons I love to rewatch the great urban movies of the 1970’s is that once you know the story, you can pay less attention to the plot points and sort of peek around the edges to get a feel for what life was really like for average Americans living in the cities of the period. And of course it helps that the filmmaking style of the 1970’s was one of gritty realism. This style, or technique if you prefer, helps turn these films into something like time capsules to which we can return again and again.

Think about the New York City of “And Justice For All”, “Dog Day Afternoon”, “Serpico”, “The Taking of Pelham 123”, “Taxi Driver” and “Death Wish”. Or the San Francisco of “Dirty Harry”, “Bullitt” and “The Conversation”. Everything is dark and dingy, dirty and depressing. Yes, it’s true that those movies are primarily movies about crime, but the filmmakers of that period (Pollack, Scorcese, Pakula, Jewison, Lumet, Hill, Siegel, Friedkin, Winner) tried hard to capture the way real people lived in the urban centers of the 70’s because they wanted their stories, and their characters, to feel “real.” In this regard, watching the urban movies of the 70’s is a wholly different experience from watching the movies that are released today, most of which seem to take place entirely within computer generated fantasy lands.

“Three Days of the Condor”, “Serpico”, “Klute”, “The French Connection”, “Wait Until Dark”… any of those movies make the 70’s seem “better” to you? Every apartment that Serpico lives in is cramped, dark, ugly and looks expensive to heat. The windows are few and far between. Those that do exist are small and filmy. They are high up on the walls, drafty and let in almost no light. The paint peels and the water, when it works, comes out brown. Ditto Faye Dunaway’s dark subterranean flat in “Condor” and Donald Sutherland’s rented room in “Klute.” Anybody want to spend a month living in any of the locations Popeye Doyle barges into over the course of his investigation into heroin trafficking in New York City? How about the locations “The Warriors” visit on their desperate run across the city? Even the “luxury” apartment where Audrey Hepburn lives in “Wait Until Dark” with her fancy photographer husband… it’s comparatively big, sure, but is Vanity Fair going to do a double page retrospective on its iconic style and elegance any time soon? Somehow, I doubt it.

Imagine the horrified Tik Tok videos young attractive Gen Z influencers might make while taking a “renter’s tour” of the depressing little apartment/dorm room where Father Karras lives in “The Exorcist.” Hell, Ellen Burstyn plays a giant movie star in that film and even her home, while nice, is nothing to write home about… certainly not for a Member in Good Standing of the Artistic 1%. Have you seen the houses our modern-day celebrities live in? The Kardashians drain the entire California aquifer every time their gardener turns on the lawn sprinklers.

What about Martin Balsam’s sad little efficiency at the end of “Pelham 123.” His cot masquerading as a bed is in his living room and his living room is in his kitchen. He doesn’t have a Nespresso machine or a 70-inch TV… if he’s lucky he’s got a glass jar of Folger’s crystals under the sink and a coiled piece of metal you had to plug in and dunk in your coffee mug to heat the water… and if you were stupid and forgot to unplug it, maybe it burned your whole building down.

It’s all bad, folks. All of it. Kids right out of college with minimum wage jobs, no family money and 250K in student loans from Columbia Pre-WhatHaveYou live better in the New York of 2024.

“But George, I would’ve lived in the country.” Yeah OK… that wasn’t so easy to do in 1974, though. If you wanted to “make it” in the America of 1974, you had to be in the cities… that’s where all the action was. Nowadays you can live in a Unabomber shack with no plumbing and a little wooden room outside with a half-moon carved into the door and still make millions of dollars remotely, as long as your WiFi is good enough.

Besides… nobody wants to live in Boorman’s “Deliverance” or Walter Hill’s “Southern Comfort”, either.

Advantage 2024, I would say.

And while we’re on the subject of “The Exorcist”, let’s talk about something else near and dear to my heart… the relative availability of really good booze in 1974, versus today. Here in 2024, I can walk into my local Ralph’s grocery store and choose from a dozen small batch craft bourbons… this was most decidedly not the case in 1974. In the movies of the 70’s, Americans seemed satisfied with a disturbingly inferior selection of booze options.

Right in the middle of “The Exorcist” (1973), Father Karras is depressed after the death of his mother and his mentor Father Dyer comes by to cheer him up with a “fancy” bottle of booze. The actual “fancy” bottle? Chivas Regal. Karras actually says the words “where’d you get the money for the Chivas Regal, the poor box?”… like it’s a $350 bottle of Redbreast 21. Look, there’s nothing wrong with Chivas… but in 2024, if you’re telling a story about the time your best friend brought over an expensive bottle of whiskey to cheer you up, that story had better start with the word “Pappy.”

(Above: Henry Gondorff gives gin the greatest backhanded compliment of all time)

Even the wealthy art thief Thomas Crowne (Steve McQueen) has a luxurious home bar stocked mostly with middlebrow stuff… like Cinzano, J&B and Glenlivet. In “The Omega Man”, Charlton Heston has the entire city of New York’s booze supply available to him. Literally anything he wants… and yet what is it that he pours himself after a long day of zombie killing?

Cutty Sark.

Thankfully, things would start to get incrementally better as the 80’s rolled into the 90’s and beyond. In the very mediocre 1991 sequel to “F/X” (subtitled The Deadly Art of Illusion), P.I. Leo McCarthy (the incomparable Brian Dennehy) asks his close D.A. friend for a bolt of Scotch, specifying for the record that he prefers a “single malt”, a phrase that would’ve sounded quite exotic to audiences of the time. What he gets is two fingers of The Glenlivet… which is fine, I guess, as far as it goes.

Flash forward to 1993 and “The Fugitive.” After Harrison Ford’s daring escape from a prison bus, the Chicago Police Captain makes the alarmingly unspecific promise to personally donate a bottle of “scotch” to “whoever puts the collar on that scumbag Kimble.” These days, the first question he’d get from the gaggle of assembled beat cops would probably be “what kind of scotch, Captain, and how old?”

By 2004 things were continuing to get better, but we were still over-valuing bottles that fell shy of the word “great.” Remember, when it comes right down to it, movies are supposed to be about wish fullfillment.

In “The Day After Tomorrow”, Ian Holm declares a bottle of Balvenie 12-year-old too valuable to be wasted, even to save their own lives. I dunno about using it to power the last genny above the Arctic Circle, but 20 years later, I can walk into a Trader Joe’s and buy a blended whiskey from a small family-owned distillery, of a quality not too far off from Balvenie, and for about a quarter of the price.

A lot can change, even in as little as 20 years.

But sure… keep trying to tell me that things were better 50 years ago… in 1974.

Are there things about living in America’s cities in 2024 that suck? Undoubtedly, yes. But the Big City denizens of 2024 are living in apartments that are comparatively bright, spacious and airy… that are filled with high-tech devices and high-quality coffee… and they probably have at least one really good bottle of booze sitting on their home bar, one that the average New Yorker could’ve only dreamed of drinking back in 1974.

As for all the violent crime… well that’s about the same.

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