"Land Before Time" and the Wiseman Connection

3 year-old Caroline insisted that we watch "Land Before Time" about six or seven times, so I'm well-prepared to do an in-depth visual analysis, but I really want to comment on something that struck me about 10 minutes into the first viewing, and that's the narration. The story is basically a re-telling of "Bambi" (1942) set in the late Jurassic era, so there's a certain amount of science that's nice to know: earthquakes and volcanoes are inconvenient for living things, and there were quite a few inconvenient things in the time of the dinosaurs. That's about it. The rest is plot contrivance: the animals travel west (to California?) in search of a better life and along the way they overcome their segregationist tendencies in the name of survival.


I thought the narrator would be killed off at the beginning, perhaps struck by a meteor, but the white guy with the deep voice just kept going on, describing character's thoughts and desires and generally telling us things we already knew. My memory is hazy, but I do not remember "Bambi" having a narrator, and I'm sure this movie would have been quite a bit better without one.


Woody Allen movies run the gamut in narration from good to bad to ugly, and I'll admit to being mystified: sometimes he appears to know what he's doing and sometimes I think everyone's too scared of him to tell him when to let it go...


But the most important point regarding narration has already been made by Frederick Wiseman, the documentary filmmaker whose movies have never included narration and never will. My favorites are "Titticut Follies" (1967) and "Primate" (1974) but you can pick any one to get the point, and everyone, regardless of whether they "like" documentaries or not, should watch a Wiseman documentary, so he can show you how it should be done.

A first list: American Culture

I must make a quick start to this, then come back and make changes:
I hate lists, but there's something about movies that drives otherwise astute people to make them.
This list is a short one. It's a list of movies you have to watch if you're an American. Either because of the illustration of American culture, or the sheer weight of cultural references. I thought of this a lot when I was teaching ESL, but never got to act on it.

Here's the list:

The Wizard of Oz
It's a Wonderful Life

That's it. The list of runner-ups is very long and says more about my taste, but I cannot defend these 100%:
Greed (Eric von Stroheim), The Kid (Charlie Chaplin), The General (Buster Keaton), High Noon, Shane, Stagecoach, The Godfather.

I know someone younger than I am would include Star Wars and Forrest Gump...
I'm leaving room here for mistakes: (I can't believe I forgot about...)

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

It's hard to be kind to a movie that was made in the comfort of Hollywood while Rossellini was working on a shoestring in the rubble of Italy inventing neo-realist cinema. Criterion has just released a new DVD set of Rossellini's war trilogy, so Italian movies of the 40's have been talked about a lot recently.

For the record, the war trilogy is "Open City" (1945), "Paisan" (1946), and "Germany Year Zero" (1948). The old prints (especially the subtitles) of these films are famously bad, so I plan to hold off seeing them again until Netflix offers the new ones.

I'll stress the positive: you can be impressed with Gregg Toland's work in 1946 only if you haven't seen "Citizen Kane" (1941). Frederick March comes home from the war and his children greet him at the door and there's Myrna Loy, his wife, in deep-focus in the background, as witness. I think Gregg Toland allowed William Wyler to look like a better director. It's sad to think that Toland would die only two years later, in 1948.

Hoagy Carmichael is really good as Uncle Butch: the scene with the other non-actor in the cast, the disabled sailer, where Hoagy gives advice while playing piano, is especially good - he plays the only real music in the movie. Hoagy's children reported that he took his on-screen persona very seriously: he played the same easy-going musician in film after film, and that casualness required an astounding amount of rehearsal.

Other films of 1946: Hitchcock's "Notorious", "The Big Sleep", and "It's a Wonderful Life", but my favorite of the year is Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast.": soft-core surrealism in a children's story, a really haunting film that will really make you forget that Walt Disney ever existed.