Film Noir

Time sure changes everything. Nothing is immune from that. We're constrained by our own limits so it's not unnatural for us to overlook-or even reject the notion that whatever is set in stone will eventually be dust blown away.

These days I get queazy when I watch violence and gore and horror on television. I don't want to wait for the next scene and I switch over to something else or I turn the set off. I'm a wimp. I've noticed small children, six year olds or eight year olds, picking slasher flicks for their parents to rent at the videotape rental stores. No Disney or Barney or Rebecca of Sunneybrook Farm for them.

There are a lot of titles in the Horror section of video stores. Special effects artists do extraordinary work and it's hard to distinguish illusion from honest recording when human bodies are being ripped apart. What was once disgusting is entertainment.

When I was a kid horror in film was rare. Explicit depictions of gore were generally avoided. Maybe that was because The Hays Office (censors) prohibited it. Maybe the public was weak-stomached and people fainting in theaters wasn't good for business. The special effects people weren't as good as they are now. Their work was subject to the laws of supply and demand. Those factors kept inspiration from getting out of control.

Our tastes in film were influenced by people more clever than us. They were rewarded by their efforts, and they lived on great estates that were their rewards for giving us an hour and a half story on the silver screen. They got us in the mood to watch cowboys, or musicals, or cops and robbers, or mushy romantic sagas, or the histories of the world with a lot of license, or costume drama, or war stories, or comedy and now and then a horror show.

There were a lot of cowboys and romantic leads, both men and women: matinee idols, the industry said. A very small stable of horror film stars had a monopoly in their portion of the trade. Bela Lugosi, Charles Pratt (Boris Karloff) and Lon Chaney(Junior) treated moviegoers to their occasional films that were as uncommon as Halloween — and as exciting.

Maybe that's what made some of the films so good and so scary to us. We'll have a little Halloween in May.

Horror films were like romantic films : not too graphic and the fade-out got us thinking about what we wanted to believe was happening. Monsters and vampires and zombies moved menacingly toward victims who screamed or swooned or froze in their tracks and it was enough that we knew their fates when the lights went out. So it was when the camera got shy as lovers embraced or just made longing glances through bedroom eyes. We knew.

I wonder what kind of world this would be without entertainment? Dull, I'm sure. Like anything else it's a matter of degrees. If we ate food like we savor our amusement we'd all balloon out to about four hundred pounds and then explode.

A long time ago Lon Chaney Junior starred in a film called "The Wolf Man." Later critics have hailed this movie as perhaps the best of all the old horror pictures and they might be right. Dracula and Frankenstein and King Kong were a little earlier, pioneers, who if they suffered at all, had some lines read badly by some of their actors but weren't diminished in the effect they had on audiences. I didn't see Kong when I was a kid because it appeared before my time and movies weren't re-released out of habit. I was over twenty-one when it was revived.

When "The Wolf Man" arrived at the Rialto Jimmy Evans and I got seats down front. The moon was full and Jimmy didn't have any Wolf bane and he disappeared under his seat. He wasn't sure he wanted to see anything on the screen. "What's happening now?" If I was witty I might have said Tom Mix replaced the Wolf Man. Jimmy would pop up in time to see the latest metamorphic change-over and then turn on me and beat me under the seat.

Scary movies might have awed me but they didn't scare me. There was one exception: "Zombies on Broadway." A pair of nitwits who made a successful living in a play, "Hellzapoppin'," translated their antics to film. To adults, "Zombies" was comedy but the walking dead scared me so badly I couldn't laugh at Olson and Johnson. Madcap antics faded to black; madness haunted me and I looked under my bed and kept checking the closet. I needed Jimmy Evans, I guess, but I was in Wildwood and went to the theater alone.

Things change. When I was little I saw "The Jungle Book" and was impressed. I remember a talking snake guarded hidden treasure and Sabu was the hero. He was a little boy raised by wolves. Sabu was also a baritone but I didn't notice that when I was a little boy. When I was fifty-eight I bought the videotape of Kipling's classic and I didn't like it very much. Sabu gave me a headache. I don't know how old Sabu was when he made "Book" but if he liked beer, bartenders would guess him to be twenty-one or twenty-five.