How often have we decided to watch or not watch a movie based on nothing more than a feeling? This movie or that movie may have gotten excellent reviews or recommendations from trusted companions that it’s incredibly fun and entertaining but we decide we’d rather watch this tried and true personal favorite instead. This has happened to me dozens of times. I forsake the viewing of an unknown quantity with the viewing of a known quantity, and a personal favorite at that. Now, how many times has actual history, as in the history you study in school and read about in large volumes written by scholars and historians, influenced the decision? If you’re me, the answer is still “dozens of times.” Some movies I will watch in an instant if it involves some kind of historical recreation that fascinates me. Others, I won’t even bother.
Today on TCM, one such historically based movie airs, Anastasia, the 1956 Oscar winner with Ingrid Bergman, Helen Hayes, and Yul Brynner. Despite loving Ingrid Bergman since dreamily laying eyes upon her in Casablanca when I was a young teen, and loving Yul Brynner for everything from The Ten Commandments to West World, I put off watching Anastasia as long as I could. Why? I have very little interest in the Russian history behind the story. The Russian Revolution and the stories both from it and inspired by it, like Doctor Zhivago, has occupied a place of minimal interest in my mind for years. Oh, I eventually saw Anastasia, and thought it very good, but the history involved didn’t hold any immediate interest for me so I put it off for years. Same with the aforementioned Doctor Zhivago. After seeing most of David Lean’s movies, from Great Expectations all the way through A Passage to India, several times, I still hadn’t seen Doctor Zhivago. Again, it had nothing to do with how good or bad I thought the movie might be and everything to do with the historical subject matter collapsing at the doorstep of my brain dead on arrival. Yet Alexander Nevsky, based on much older Russian history, had me fascinated from the start. It was one of the first movies I actively sought out when the convenience of video stores finally arrived on the scene in the early eighties. Why? Because the Middle Ages (Nevsky was in the High Middle Ages) does fascinate me. That kind of deep history portrayed on film has always fascinated me, whether it be legendary figures like King Arthur (Early Middle Ages) or artists/scientists like Leonardo da Vinci (Late Middle Ages).
The thing is, I couldn’t tell you why.
It becomes more clear when we shift to war films. If it’s a World War II movie, I’m interested. World War I, probably not. Civil War, yes. Vietnam, not really. It doesn’t mean I won’t see and fully appreciate any movie on those subjects, whether it be All Quiet on the Western Front or Full Metal Jacket, it just means if given the choice between WWII and Vietnam, I’m going with the World War II movie. There are two things that connect me to that war in particular. The first, and most important, is that my uncle Joseph, my dad’s brother, was a Marine who fought right from the start of the war until he was killed in action at the Battle of Iwo Jima. As such, I’ve always been fascinated with the war, specifically the war in the Pacific. The second thing comes my father’s work at the Charleston Naval Base, back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, where they serviced nuclear powered subs carrying nuclear warheads. As a result of that, he had several books on the Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer, all of which I read before getting some of my own. And then any movie centered around that, from the earliest ones like The Beginning or the End, to later ones like Fat Man and Little Boy, I had to see. The best of them all is still the made for tv movie Day One, based on the superbly written and researched book by Peter Wyden, a book I have read three times. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and Brotherhood of the Bomb by Gregg Herken are probably better but Day One has always been my favorite.
So what about the Civil War? Well, I was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina and now live in Maryland, just a 70 minute drive from Gettysburg. My wife and I used to drive up to Monocacy, a short hop, skip, and jump from here, to take walks around the battlefield. The Civil War, and its history, is all around me. And it won’t take a lot to get me to watch a movie during that period, even if that part is only a vanishingly small detail of the story, as in Gangs of New York. The Revolutionary War is also of fascination to me but the period hasn’t produced as many great movies as other periods in American history, though I did very much love HBO’s miniseries John Adams with Paul Giamatti.
Actually, the whole of the 18th century, and much of the 19th century, works for me. I really love that era portrayed on film, whether in countless retellings of The Mutiny on the Bounty to fictional portrayals of one composer (Salieri) poisoning another (Mozart). Seriously, movies taking place in this period, despite subject matter, usually work for me. Barry Lyndon, Amadeus, Rob Roy, Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans, Marie Anoinette, Danton, Madness of King George, The Scarlett Empress, Billy Budd, and on and on and on. And I haven’t even gotten to any film dealing in the feudal history of Japan. It was probably Shogun, the made for tv miniseries, that got me to watch Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, as much as anything else.
It’s interesting how as much as we love movies in the abstract, specific interests in one particular area or some particular time period will curate what we watch as much as director and cast. Of course, I do love watching movies, period, and often find that a movie I avoided because I thought it wouldn’t be interesting to me ended up being an instant favorite. Still, no matter how hard we try to dis-enthrall ourselves, our personal experiences, our likes and dislikes, from the movies we want to watch, we cannot. We are intimately connected, we and the cinema, and our long history together is too hard to ignore.