It used to be that film snobs and PBS totebaggers used to bemoan the (alleged) horrible state of current cinema by pointing to 1939 as the Last Great Year for movies--admittedly, an impressive annum that gave us "Gone With The Wind", "It's A Wonderful Life", and "The Wizard Of Oz", although no one seems to remember that same year offered up less-fondly-regarded sequels to "Andy Hardy", "Blondie", "Bulldog Drummond", "Charlie Chan", "The Cisco Kid", "Frankenstein", "Mr. Moto", "Sherlock Holmes, "Tarzan", "The Thin Man", and "Topper" (more sequels than we'll see for the entire release schedule of 2006). Then Peter Biskind had to go write this (otherwise comprehensive and highly readable) account of Vietnam-era filmmaking called "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls", and suddenly, everyone was lamenting the end of the 1970s as the last great Golden Age of American filmmaking, before, as lore would have it, Spielberg and Lucas came along to ruin it all for a once-discriminating moviegoing public that just couldn't get enough of "Brewster McCloud",or "A Woman Under The Influence", and "The Conformist". Well, I've always regarded this as lazy thinking and a huge load--movies today are no better or worse than they've ever been and nostalgia is selective at best, and intolerant of the present at its worst. Finally, someone else seems to agree with me, so maybe I'll stop being ostracized in conversations. Consider John Hartl's debunking of the myth in "The Golden Age Of Movies? Never Happened" at MSNBC.
