Watching the Movies in Bits and Pieces

Tonight on TCM, the great 1946 noir, The Postman Always Rings Twice, airs and it’s one of the best movies of the decade.  It’s also a movie I have seen a few times, like so many other movies I call favorites.  In fact, my early film watching life often involved seeing a movie twice while it still ran in the theater and then watching it a third time on cable a few months later.  As the home video era came into being, I found myself taping movies off of cable, or outright buying them, and watching them again and again.  Then, just recently, in the last five years or so, all of that changed.  Technology stepped in and my movie watching has never been the same. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Like many of us, I first starting seeing classic movies by way of PBS and the late movie on local stations.  Staying up until two in the morning to watch the classic movies at midnight was the only thing you could do back then.  There was no taping them to watch the next day.  Once that happened, it became a little easier but still nothing like it is today.  Today, with some exceptions, I can find almost everything I want whenever I want it.  I may have to pay to rent it online if it’s not included with Netflix or Amazon Prime, but it’s there for the viewing.  Add to that convenience the fact that you can scroll through the movie on your tv, or computer if you so fancy, and things really get convenient.  You see, even when I first had tapes available to me, finding that scene you wanted to watch again wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do.  You would fast forward, stop, check.  Wrong place.  Fast forward some more, stop, check.  Went too far.  Rewind, stop, check.  Wrong place.  Repeat five more times and you finally get to the part you wanted to see.  Now you scroll along and see thumbnail images of every moment of the movie.  In mere seconds I can be at the scene I want to watch.  And that’s exactly what I do. Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not doing this with a movie I’ve never seen.  I’m talking about old favorites, movies with moments that fascinate me, or just good old fashioned comfort movies on rainy days.  Even movies I enjoy watching in their entirety many times over still contain scenes I simply want to watch as stand alone mini movies whenever I can.  And when I watch a movie in bits and pieces, as I call it, I watch… The Popsicle scene at the radio station in American Graffiti.  It’s my favorite scene in the movie, the scene where Richard Dreyfuss wanders into the radio station and talks to Wolfman Jack not realizing who he is.  Wolfman has a bunch of melting Popsicles he’s trying to finish and offers some to Dreyfuss whose main concern is connecting with the mysterious blonde (Suzanne Somers) in the Thunderbird.  When Dreyfuss leaves and hears Wolfman’s voice come over the air, he looks back and realizes he was just talking to the Wolfman without knowing it.  Best scene in the movie. The Buddy Holly Story.  There’s a moment in this 1978 biopic that’s pretty great in my book.  In an otherwise unspectacular movie, the moment when Buddy Holly and the Crickets make their way to the stage of the Apollo stands out.  One of the early uses of Steadicam, the camera moves in front of them, looking back, as they quietly make their way out of the dressing room, across a corridor, down three flights of stairs, through another hallway, and finally to the backstage area where they watch as Sam Cooke finishes up his rendition of You Send Me, which has been slowly increasing in volume on the soundtrack as they get closer and closer.  It’s the perfect song because that moment sends me every time. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.   Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.   Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. It’s New Year’s Eve.  Shirley MacLaine sits at a Tiki bar with Fred MacMurray trying to convince herself that this doomed relationship is the one for her.  Then she stops trying.  When Fred turns around after looking over his shoulder, she’s gone, running to the apartment where the real relationship awaits.  Shut up and deal. I’ve written about The Birds more than a few times and most notably here, a couple of years ago, where I extolled its virtues in one particular post.  If I could only have one part of that movie to watch over and over, it would be the scene I always skip to when I want to see only the one scene: The diner, the bird expert, the arguing, the man at the gas station across the street, the feeling that hope is about to fly out the window, for good.  It’s a great scene and, for my money, one of the best scenes Alfred Hitchcock ever directed.  A lot of people still think The Birds is about an island under siege by our feathery friends.  It’s not.  It’s about the end of the human run world.  And that scene is when the characters start to figure that out. The amazing and tragic montage as Lowell Sherman takes his life in What Price Hollywood? The moment in Lost Horizon when they walk out of the bitter cold and into Shangri-La. The dance of the dead in The Devil and Daniel Webster. The opening scenes of friendly banter in The Thing from Another World.  Seriously, I love the whole movie but there’s something about the first few scenes at the research station that just make me feel good. The attack scene in Forbidden Planet when the monster from the id makes his first visible appearance, courtesy of some amazing animation from Disney studios. If you go to the one hour and five minute mark of The Magnificent Ambersons and watch for the next eight minutes, you will see one of the most extraordinary sequences of the death of a family’s soul ever put before a camera. Isabel Amberson Minafer is on her deathbed and her old lover, Eugene Morgan has stopped by to see her, only to be sent away by her family.  Her son, George, does so out of spite but George’s aunt and uncle do so out of concern for Isabel in her condition.  This is followed by Isabel speaking to George just before she dies.  She tells him she would have liked to have seen Eugene one last time.  Then we cut to her father, sitting silent, staring blankly ahead.  Suddenly he gets up and runs to her room while Aunt Fanny tells George that his mother loved him.  Then we cut to her father again, Major Amberson, rambling to himself as the light of a flickering fire illuminates his face.  The estate is bankrupt and with Isabel, the title holder of the house, gone, all hope is gone too.  As his babbling continues, director Orson Welles fades the shot out with no resolution, leading us to a train station where George’s uncle Jack says his goodbyes as he leaves to go and try to make money for the family now that the estate is ruined.   I believe it’s better than anything in Citizen Kane and watching that sequence of scenes, again and again, only convinces me more each time that this movie, despite its high praise, remains underrated. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. The disquieting and unsettling scene between Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan in Bad Day at Black Rock when Ryan as Smith and Tracy as MacReedy talk about the Japanese-American man, Komoko, that MacReedy came to see.  He’s dead now and MacReedy wants to know why and how.  The conversation veers into this disturbing moment: MACREEDY: What makes you mad, Mr. Smith?

SMITH:  Me? Nothing in particular.

MACREEDY:  I see. You’re a big man, too. Only, the Japanese make you mad…

SMITH:  That’s different. After the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, after Bataan.

MACREEDY:  …and Komako made you mad.

SMITH:  It’s the same thing.  Loyal Japanese-Americans — that’s a
laugh. They’re mad dogs. Look at Corregidor, the death march.

MACREEDY: What did Komako have to do with Corregidor?

SMITH: Wasn’t he a Jap? At that point, MacReedy has his answer.  He knows what happened to Komoko and what will likely happen to him next if he doesn’t get out of Black Rock fast. I could list a million more, quite frankly, and maybe I will from time to time when I feel like talking about the bits and pieces of movies that move me to watch them from time to time.  Technology has given us all the ability to watch our favorite moments and scenes in isolation, as if in our own personal film class, to study and enjoy on their own.  And learn from them.  And make us want to watch the whole movie in its entirety all over again.