Ty Burr - The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together

TY BURR

THE BEST
OLD MOVIES FOR FAMILIES

Ty Burr is a film critic for The Boston Globe. For eleven years prior, he worked for Entertainment Weekly as the magazines chief video critic and also covered movies, books, theater, music, and the Internet. He began his career at Home Box Office as an in-house film evaluator. While at Entertainment Weekly, Burr wrote The Hundred Greatest Movies of All Time and coauthored The Hundred Greatest Stars of All Time (with Alison Gwinn). He has also written about film and other subjects for The New York Times, Spin, the Boston Phoenix, and other publications. A member of the National Society of Film Critics and the Boston Society of Film Critics, Burr lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife and two daughters.

The Hundred Greatest Movies of All Time

The Hundred Greatest Stars of All Time

(with Alison Gwinn)

AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2007

Copyright 2007 by Ty Burr

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burr, Ty.
The best old movies for families: a guide to watching together / by Ty Burr.1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48216-7
1. Motion pictures for childrenCatalogs.
2. Motion pictures and children. I. Title.
PN1998. B84 2007
791.4375083dc22 2006023525

www.anchorbooks.com

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MARJORIE JANE TICE

I KNEW WE had passed some twisted point of no return when Eliza announced that she wanted to have a Katharine Hepburn party. With a screening of Bringing Up Baby. For her ninth birthday.

My wife, Lori, and I tried to dissuade her. Maybe our daughter could gladly sit through a fifth viewing of the screwball comedy classic, but how many of her schoolmates would make it through their first, conditioned as they were to color, brightness, Shrek? Eliza was unmoved: It was her birthday, and she argued convincingly for the constitutional right to choose her own party theme.

So out the invitations went, featuring a photo of Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story that Eliza personally cut out and pasted on. And in came the phone calls from the parents. To my chagrin, most of them were convinced that her father the fancy-pants movie critic had put her up to it (on a stack of the collected works of Wong Kar-Wai, I did no such thing), but their more pressing concern, which we shared, was that their child would get bored, wander off, play with knives. My wife and I assured them we were laying out a table next to the screening room, filled with books and pencil-based activities to divert those kids oppressed by the very notion of black-and-white cinematography.

The books were never opened, the pencils never used. We took a half-hour intermission for cake, but when I asked if the group was ready to restart the movie, there was a unanimous roar of assent, and we picked up again with that marvelous forest-of-Arden sequence where Kate, playing flibbertigibbet heiress Susan Vance, leads Cary Grants nerd zoologist David Huxley through the nighttime wilds of Greenwich, Connecticut. At one point Susan breaks a high heel and teeters up and down, burbling in delight, Look, David, I was born on a hill. I was born on the side of a hill, and the moment feels so spontaneous, so magically free, it can make your hair stand on end. (In fact, the bit was mischievously improvised by Hepburn after the 1938 equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction.) The kids had never seen anything like it: It felt more unscripted, more real than anything twenty-first-century kid culture feeds them, up to and including reality TV.

When the parents showed up to collect their children, five minutes remainedGrant was still stuck in the jail cell with Hepburn dragging the wild leopard through the doorand eighteen kids sat mesmerized and giggling. The moms and dads were astounded. They shouldnt have been, nor should Lori or I.

Great filmmaking trumps all other considerations. This is even more true if youre nine and every movie still feels like the first youve ever seen.

Some backtracking may be necessary. I work as a film critic for a major metropolitan daily newspaper. Before that, I spent over a decade writing about movies for a national entertainment magazine. Before that, I screened and recommended films for the acquisitions department of a pay-cable movie network. Before that, I was a cinema studies major, ran a college film society, and wrote long, impenetrable reviews in the student newspaper. Before that, I was a pale teenage movie ghost who wondered why taking a girl to a double bill of Sam Fuller films never got me anywhere.

This is simply a way of saying that I have seen many, many, many movies. When asked how many, I hazard the guess that I average a movie a day, and, since Ive been watching seriously for thirty years, the total comes to something on the order of 10,680 films. On a good day, I remember seven thousand of them. On a bad day, maybe five.

I am also now a father to two girls, currently nine and eleven. As any parent understands, this changes everything. I once viewed childrens films with indulgence, even nostalgia. Today I look at the movie offerings afforded my kids and am stunned into depression at the pandering narrowness. The animation industry has given itself over to the seductions of CGI; live-action kid films have prostrated themselves on the altar of cross-marketing. If youre a girl, the choices are thin: Shall we take in the Lindsay Lohan tweener comedy or the Amanda Bynes tweener comedy or the Hilary Duff tweener comedy? Better to go for the Anne Hathaway tweener comedy; that one costars Julie Andrews, at least. (Oh, wait, Anne Hathaway took her shirt off in a movie about gay cowboys, so I guess shes all grown up now.)

Or maybe we should just head to the video store and choose among the racks of Mary-Kate and Ashley midget consumer fantasies that continue to proliferate like head lice on the shelves. Failing that, there are untold Disney films and imitations thereof, from the pinnacles of Snow White and Beauty and the Beast to the barely acceptable tedium of Chicken Little and The Wild. Its worse if youre a boy: Then the choice is between bad American animation, bad Japanese animation, and