Books, Arts & Manners: Thinking Small

Americans are not good at making small movies. Almost from the very beginning, it was the big movie that made history. Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, not Broken Blossoms and Way Down East. I am not speaking of comedians’ films, an American specialty all the way from the silent-screen comics to Woody Allen before he became the American Bergman. Nor am I speaking of genre films— Westerns, gangster movies, musicals, etc.—which, however successful, depend on formulas rather than individual contributions. The only true exception to this sad rule is the screwball comedy, in which originality could and often did have a merry new time of it. But the characters in screwball comedies were picked for their oddness and overindulged in madcap activities; what seems to be so very hard for American filmmakers is to handle basic everyday situations without sentimentalizing them—a syndrome of which Frank Capra is the most glorious and glaring example.

Why should this be so? Somehow Americans do not deal in subtle effects; they specialize in primary colors where plot is concerned, and in black and white for matters of morality. Not for them the inconspicuous details of behavior, the more intricate ambiguities of right and wrong. It is an armor of innocence that girds the loins and ossifies the brain. There have, accordingly, never been American equivalents to such films as, say, The White Sheik, Tokyo Story, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, The Blue Angel, Intimate Lighting, Smiles of a Summer Night, L’avventura, Brief Encounter, The Fire Within, Umberto D., For bidden Games, Ikiru—to name a random dozen in which, regardless of type or form, delicacies of every kind proliferate. The nearest we can get to this sort of thing is Badlands, Handle with Care (Citizens’ Band), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? or Smile, but even such films, good as they are,. tend to resort to special situations, extreme behavior, unlikely plot twists. American ordinariness must always edge toward the extraordinary.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

Americans are not good at making small movies. Almost from the very beginning, it was the big movie that made history. Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, not Broken Blossoms and Way Down East. I am not speaking of comedians’ films, an American specialty all the way from the silent-screen comics to Woody Allen before he became the American Bergman. Nor am I speaking of genre films— Westerns, gangster movies, musicals, etc.—which, however successful, depend on formulas rather than individual contributions. The only true exception to this sad rule is the screwball comedy, in which originality could and often did have a merry new time of it. But the characters in screwball comedies were picked for their oddness and overindulged in madcap activities; what seems to be so very hard for American filmmakers is to handle basic everyday situations without sentimentalizing them—a syndrome of which Frank Capra is the most glorious and glaring example.

Why should this be so? Somehow Americans do not deal in subtle effects; they specialize in primary colors where plot is concerned, and in black and white for matters of morality. Not for them the inconspicuous details of behavior, the more intricate ambiguities of right and wrong. It is an armor of innocence that girds the loins and ossifies the brain. There have, accordingly, never been American equivalents to such films as, say, The White Sheik, Tokyo Story, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, The Blue Angel, Intimate Lighting, Smiles of a Summer Night, L’avventura, Brief Encounter, The Fire Within, Umberto D., For bidden Games, Ikiru—to name a random dozen in which, regardless of type or form, delicacies of every kind proliferate. The nearest we can get to this sort of thing is Badlands, Handle with Care (Citizens’ Band), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? or Smile, but even such films, good as they are,. tend to resort to special situations, extreme behavior, unlikely plot twists. American ordinariness must always edge toward the extraordinary.