sewhite2000

Here it is: "Amazingly, there were still those who thought that rock & roll was nothing but a momentary craze, something the teens would grow out of, like the Davy Crockett fad that had swept the nation in 1955 ... During the life of the fad, which was about six months, there were literally millions of dollars pouring into the stores to buy Davy Crockett trappings. "But there were others who continued to see rock & roll as an ominous symptom of decay. "Even Life magazine devoted a few pages - albeit not as many as to the Davy Crockett fad - to the latest bit of teenage craziness ... 'Rock & roll', the text said, 'is both music and dance ... The dance combines the Lindy and Charleston and almost anything else. In performing it, hollering helps, and a boot banging on the floor makes it even better. The overall result frequently is frenzy.' "Frenzy, yes - there had been a bit of that. Life had reported on a new movie, The Blackboard Jungle, that had been based on a novel by Evan Hunter, in which a new teacher in a high school in a 'bad' section of town is taunted and abused by group of his students ... "This movie and others addressed to the insatiable teenage audience fed public fears of 'juvenile delinquency', the disease that had teens committing senseless crimes, indulging in alcohol and cigarettes and premarital sex, riding motorcycles or driving hopped-up cars and listening to rock & roll. First there had been The Wild One in 1953, in which Marlon Brando and a gang of thugs on motorcycles terrorized a town, something that really happened in the mountains above San Bernardino, California, where a group of war veterans who had formed a motorcycle club named after a war movie, Hell's Angels, had just taken over for a weekend. At least the Blackboard Jungle kids were from the slums, so there was an excuse for their behavior. But the 1955 Rebel Without a Cause, based on real case history from California psychiatrist Robert Lindler, featured teen idol James Dean sympathetically portraying a screwed-up kid who just didn't seem to care, no matter how much his parents tried to steer him right. The film seemed to be blasphemously placing the blame for Dean's antisocial behavior on his parents and on society at large! It was a stretched-out exposition of Brando's famous line from The Wild One, when he is asked what he is rebelling against. 'Whaddya got?' he replies. And teens were eating up these movies, seeing them literally dozens of times. It did no good to explain to parents that teenagers like Brando and Dean were a distinct minority, or as President Eisenhower put it, 'Teenagers are like airplanes: you only hear about the ones that crash.'"

Okay, I found it. This is from Rock of Ages: the Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll, published in 1986, an indispensable work about the genre, IMO, one I've read many times. Specifically, these passages from Section One: the '50s and Before by Ed Ward, which I also recently cited in the thread about Little Richard. I don't feel like quoting whole paragraphs, so I'm going to use a lot of ellipses: "If America was forging a new kind of music, it was also seeing a change in the makeup of the audience that consumed it. Before the coming of automation, families had two kinds of people in them: infants and adults ... Boys worked with their fathers, girls with their mothers, and it was the rare child indeed who broke the mold of this way of life. "When industrialization became part of the life of towns, things changed somewhat. Boys and girls rarely worked in the mines or the mills until they were at least ten years old or so, which meant that the period of infancy for working-class children was extended by several years. The middle classes, whose work was of a different kind, and who came into prominence during the Industrial Revolution, used their children as showpieces for their affluence, dressing and educating them in the finest style they could afford. In the reformist atmosphere of the nineteenth century, public education and child-labor laws extended infancy into the teen years. "The child was, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the object of rather romanticized idealism. Children were innocent, possessors of a wisdom adults would never know again, in touch with the truest perceptions humans were ever vouchsafed during their time on Earth. This, for instance, was the thinking behind Lewis Carroll's Alice books and so much other late-Victorian children's literature, as well as the educational philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, whose Waldorf Schools continue to be a popular type of alternative education ... High school graduation came to be a milestone of maturity, the point at which a child was, finally and irrevocably, on its way to becoming an adult. "Traces of this can be seen in the popular culture of the 1920s and the 1930s. Harold Teen was a comic strip character whose life was supposed to echo middle-class white kids' experiences, and it is illuminating to note that while his creators chose to use the word teen, his behavior was that of an older child. He had his pals, but any dating or interaction with the opposite sex was reserved for his older sister. At least this was the case early in his career, but because situations of that sort made for funny reading, Harold was sent to college, where a freshman was expected to behave with the gawkiness and fear of girls that is the hallmark of much younger children today. Similarly, Henry Aldrich, a character who walked out of a successful 1938 Broadway play, What a Life, into his own radio series, a series of movies and later a television series, was a character who was probably a high school senior. Although he had a girlfriend, she was just as much a member of the gang as she was the object of courtship or sexual objectification ... Kids were "teens" right through their college years, and the sociological limbo they inhabited, neither child nor adult, neither mature nor kidlike, was not really recognized as such by anyone other than the teens themselves. What was really dawning - although it wouldn't really arrive until the 1950s - was a separate sense of teenage identity, with teen idols, like Frank Sinatra, and teen fads, like writing silly slogans on the outside of a beat-up car. "World War II wrought a lot of these changes in teenagers' daily lives. To begin with, as in the early Industrial Revolution, they were integrated back into the workforce, but with the crucial distinction that they were being educated at the same time ... They found themselves being taken seriously as people, their opinions solicited and heeded - valuable to adults, probably for the first time in their lives. When the war was over, there was for the first time a cohesion to teenage life and society. "Postwar prosperity kept the momentum going ... The entire teenage market was estimated to be a $10 billion pool of consumers. Considering that General Motors took in only $9 billion in 1959, that figure was impressive. According to figures compiled by Sigana Earle, an editor at Seventeen magazine, in a talk at Michigan State University in 1960, young women had $4.5 billion to spend, with $20 million going to lipstick, $25 million going to deodorants and $9 million to home permanents ... "Once teenagers realized they constituted a bloc, and that the money they were spending could change the goods made available to them, they began influencing the marketplace heavily ... Earle estimated that in the sixty-day "back-to-school" period, girls spent $889 million on clothes each year. "It should be noted these figures overwhelmingly apply to the middle classes, especially the children of the Baby Boom, growing up in the newly developed suburbs where their parents had purchased homes with GI loans. But youth would become the message of the advertisers, edging out that old standby, sophistication. Pepsi would be 'for those who think young', and after the first wave of adults gave up smoking for fear of reports linking cigarettes and lung cancer, tobacco advertising began squarely being aimed at youth, causing a huge upsurge in teenage smoking ... "Teens certainly had an impact on music ... As for the music they liked, swing and jazz were out, and mambo and square dancing - as a result of the folk craze that was sweeping the cities and bringing success to artists like Burl Ives and the Weavers - were in. "But that was in the East. Elsewhere, the picture was changing. Throughout the South, for example, the radio reflected the postwar boom in minority music." Okay, after that, it veers away from teenagers specifically and back into the evolution of the music that is the focus of the book. There's another passage specifically about juvenile delinquincy, which I will post later.

I read a good book some years ago on the evolution of the whole concept of the teenager, thought I don't remember the title and don't have it anymore (Typically, I end up selling virtually all of my books to Half-Price Books). Consequently, I'm not going to remember many of its specific details, but it echoed many of the ideas presented in the above posts. Laws about compulsory education certainly weren't uniform among the states, especially the ones that wanted to hurry up and add more members to the workforce. And the number of required years were usually fewer for girls, if they existed at all, so that they could go ahead and get about performing their primary duty in life, as it was perceived back then, hence all those disturbingly young ages of consent. There were children and adults. The concept of an in-between stage - not so much. I did think of another book I might still have that also addresses this issue. If I can find it (I've got lots of time on my hands), I may insert some relevant passages in a follow-up post.

You'd have to ask someone besides me, but I've seen a lot of negative comments about her on here over the years. Or at least a lot of people purporting to be completely unimpressed by her.

I would definitely have Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty in my Top 15 actors. She's really hated around here, but I would probably put Meryl Streep on the actresses list. I like almost all of your pics.

Some sort of public contrition seems to be helpful in these cases. I don't really ever recall any from Gibson. I personally wouldn't call it a witch hunt. At some point you have to be responsible for your own actions, right? The guy made a point of showing Satan standing right in the middle of the Jews in his movie, and then when he got arrested for drunk driving, he let loose with some more anti-Semitic ramblings.

So YOU'RE the reason there's no flour on the grocery store shelves! 🙂

Probably not, but I think that speaks to social progress and not something we should all forlorn about. They both made idiotic, racist comments, but Wayne was in a time where you could do it and get away with it and Gibson wasn't. That doesn't mean we should be sad it isn't the way it was in Wayne's time anymore.

I don't think I've seen any of those, but I wouldn't dislike them because they made the casts more multicultural. I might dislike them because I'm not a big fan of remakes in general.

Mine is a 17-inch RCA model from 1989. I was under some financial stress early last year and ended up going four months without cable TV or internet, which I got from the same provider. When I finally got matters rectified, I found out I had to get all-new equipment. They were grandfathering my old account on the standard def box I had, but this was considered a brand new account, and they weren't issuing that obsolete equipment anymore. They didn't want the old box back, either. I've still got it in my closet.

I don't love '70s and '80s movies for that reason.

I think it's safe to assume she would be happy to address these issues if they came up or that she thinks she's covering them all under one umbrella.

I found this example of Classics Illustrated #6, which you can digitally turn through page by page. As you can see, it was done in traditional comic book style. https://archive.org/details/ClassicsIllustrated006ATaleOfTwoCities/mode/2up

I also still have an analog TV! So, I don't do any of this"casting" either, a term I still don't fully grasp (like casting a spell?). But I have taken to occasionally watching some streamed movies on my laptop. I understand your issues with doing this, but I guess it hasn't bothered me enough to keep me from doing it once in a while. I don't think I've ever watched a movie on my phone.

Tonight, it's part of the Asian-Americans in Hollywood theme of the month. And then all the Noir Alleys get double showings.

I had to Google "what is a longeur". I guess TCM autocorrect has never heard of it either, because I get red line under it. And autocorrect. And TCM, ironically. Edit: spellcheck, I should probably say, instead of autocorrect. I do too much typing on my phone.

According to moviecollectoroh's database, TCM has shown The Accused five times, but the last time was October, 2002.

That's the real point. It certainly wasn't that nobody cared. It's that the people who cared didn't have any power to stop it. And as txfilm fan just pointed out, Hollywood was afraid of offending racists in the South. The internet and social media have democratized that process. Now everyone's voice can be heard.

Well, you'll fit right in around here! 😀 Seriously, I don't know how most actors feel about such roles once they reach a certain age, maybe especially female actors, for whom such limited opportunities historically have tended to begin earlier. It appears Ms. Knight continued to do stage work she might have found more rewarding practically right up to the end. Maybe she saw such small roles in dumb comedies as a means to an end. George Clooney once said Batman and Robin ensured he'd never again have to do a movie he didn't want to do. I remember seeing Faye Dunnaway in one scene in some terrible jump-scare horror movie aimed at the high school/college crowd within the last handful of years and having a similar reaction to yours. I mean, you can just vanish like Gene Hackman has done or you can take the roles you can get. Personally, it makes me smile when an actor from their generation suddenly turns up in a movie I've gone to see, and I'm momentarily happy to know they're still around and still able to work. I might spend the next couple of scenes reminiscing on their careers rather than focusing on the movie I'm currently watching, especially if it isn't so great.

Two movies I've championed on here multiple times are Ishtar and Heaven's Gate, both of which are routinely slammed in all accounts of the '80s as the worst disasters ever of that time. I don't have the strength to resume the fight for Heaven's Gate. So many posters on here have beaten me into submission with utter, unrelenting contempt for it. I'll just have to quietly accept privately that I love it. But I finally found after all these years, if not an unqualified praise, at least a defense of Ishtar. https://film.avclub.com/ishtar-the-ultimate-hollywood-punchline-is-actually-p-1843345655

Ha ha ha, the mule who could kick field goals was totally believable.

No, it meant in the Dire Straits song what it's always meant. I personally am not going to miss the deletion of hate words used in a hateful or casual, extraneous context. There are certainly more important to things to be upset about. Restrictions always force writers to be more creative or subtle, which is why, I think, there are so many great movies from the Hays Code era that convey more meaning than they can explicitly show. Writers will be able to work around this, as well.

I WILL NOT LIVE IN A HOUSE WITH INFESTATION!

I'm sure I've seen The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety on TCM. There have probably been others. I seriously doubt Life Stinks will ever be an Essential, being one of Brooks' least-successful films commercially and probably least-remembered. Maybe it will get a more conventional airing during a Brooks spotlight in the future.

The first account I ever read of the dirty original lyrics to "Tutti Frutti" was in Rock of Ages: the Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll published in 1986 in the section on "The '50s and Before" by Ed Ward. It was restated as fact in yesterday's obit by the AV Club. I was unaware there was any debate about it until reading your post.