INFANTILE REGRESSION IN DOLBY SOUND

The Hollywood turkey farm (James Bowman, The Spectator, January 7th, 2006)

The American papers have lately been filled with stories about the heartbreak in Hollywood over the great box-office slump. There were 6 per cent fewer cinema-goers in 2005 than in 2004. More worrying to the studios is the fact that this is the third consecutive year of decline. There are lots of proposed explanations for this state of affairs, but it’s hard for me to believe that there is not some connection between the shrinking audience for and the deteriorating quality of films. If you want an illustration of what’s happened, you cannot do better than compare the original version of Yours, Mine and Ours, made in 1968, and the remake, which came out in America at the end of last year. Both are bad, even awful movies, but they are bad in very different ways. The original stars Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball as widower and widow, he with ten children, she with eight, who marry and amalgamate their families. The stars are both at least 15 years too old for their parts —in the closing passages Miss Ball, who was 57 at the time, is supposed to be having another baby —and have zero plausibility as a couple. The memoir by Helen North Beardsley on which the film was based obviously belongs to the philoprogenitive era that reached its peak in 1964, the year of its publication, and its climax consists of Mr Fonda’s lecture to his oldest stepdaughter as he is escorting her mother to the maternity ward about the dangers of teenage sex and the mature joys of family life. The world of youthful rebellion and free love associated with the year 1968 is glanced at but disdainfully dismissed.

Like Mrs Beardsley’s memoir, the film-makers belonged to the immediate post-war era when movie audiences were still largely grown-up and middle class and expected to have their bourgeois ‘values’ confirmed and their appetite for sentiment and a bit of titillation satisfied. Say what you like about the cynicism with which the Hollywood establishment set out to gratify its audience’s expectations, or the relentlessly upbeat and unbelievable way in which suitable morals were tacked on to inappropriate material, but their films inhabited the same moral universe that ordinary people did. Now, instead of a troubled audience of grown-ups looking for reassurance about uncertain moral principles, the audience for the remake of Yours, Mine and Ours are children looking to see the parental authority figures in their lives get a thorough pummelling before learning to put the kids’ wishes ahead of their own. There is pandering in both the 1968 version and the 2005 version, but the former panders to parents who were worried about doing the right thing, while the latter panders to kids worried that their parents might make them do something they don’t want to do.

This thoughtful piece (free registration required) also has some trenchant insights into the childish anti-patriotism of Hollywood with respect to the war on terror.