Like many in my senior cohort, kicked back in a McMansion maybe, in Beverly Hills, what I like to do with my time is check out the long arc of history as seen through the filmmaker's lense. That includes, but is not limited to, the Hollywood movie makers. They didn't used to have so much competition as they have today.
Likewise I believe my Lazy-boy chair peers are glad for the Criterion Collection, which in the rabbinical tradition glosses the films with lots of behind the scenes peeks, along with scholarly commentary, to provide more context. Context matters.
I grabbed The Roaring 20s off the Noir shelf at MMU, along with I. The Jury which I needed to swap for a regular DVD version as I don't have a 4K player yet. The film was well timed given I've been thinking retrospectively about my Uncle Bill Lightfoot, who was born the year The Great Gatsby was published. Bill lived through a pretty long arc.
I grabbed The Roaring 20s off the Noir shelf at MMU, along with I. The Jury which I needed to swap for a regular DVD version as I don't have a 4K player yet. The film was well timed given I've been thinking retrospectively about my Uncle Bill Lightfoot, who was born the year The Great Gatsby was published. Bill lived through a pretty long arc.
The theme of the evolving roles for good guys and bad guys, star heroes and villains, with supporting characters, is especially pronounced when the film is self consciously doing a "great sweep of history" angle.
They were all good guys in WW1, sharing the same foxhole. But in returning to civilian life, they'd gravitate to different scenarios based on luck and character. Bogart plays an especially villainous dude. Cagney is the more likable, but too full of himself to realize how clueless he is with respect to women.
I learned a lot listening to the followup analysis, including from the director himself from the 1970s. I'll be weaving what I've learned into my own internalized tapestry of world history; something we should all be working on. If you need an excuse to pay people (so they don't starve or turn to criminal activities), pay them to improve their internalized world models.
Don't let them turn out like those RAND Corporation or Brookings people: pathetic when it comes to understanding how the world moves on (the original title for this film).
