I
just finished watching an old 1947 western called Heaven Only
Knows, starring Bob Cummings. I know – most of you can’t
begin to relate to 1947 (I was 2 years old), and you probably have no
idea who Robert Cummings was (used to be a very handsome and popular
actor). But old movies and old actors aren’t the point of this
blog. The point of this blog is “hokey” movies and how many of
them touched our hearts.
“Back
in the day” movies were made almost specifically to teach lessons
about good and bad, and to make people laugh or cry. They were full
of dripping-sweet drama, and you almost always knew how they would
end, yet you watched anyway.
The
only reason I watched Heaven Only Knows is because I was
getting ready to shut off the TV and was going to scan through
up-coming movies on Turner Classic Movies. (EVERYONE should
have this channel and EVERYONE should watch it – so much to learn
about America and what life used to be like and what attitudes used
to be like and how people had manners and dressed well and had a lot
of pride in their country. Someone let all of that change, but that’s
a subject for a different blog.)
I
brought up TCM on the TV and Heaven Only Knows was already
playing and over half over, yet I found myself watching – at first
thinking what a hokey western it was, with the typical “staged”
and silly gunfight, the usual drama of an old movie and all of that –
until I realized Bob Cummings was playing the part of an angel, sent
to change the life of the “bad guy with a good heart” – my
favorite kind of hero. The movie is in B&W of course, and it
included an old man who steals your heart, and a little boy who
totally breaks your heart – and the classic heroine who loves the
bad guy but won’t put up with his “bad guy” ways. He has to
change first, and of course Bob Cummings is there to do that. No one
knows he’s an angel until the very end when one woman (the little
boy’s mother) realizes the truth and also realizes Cummings has
come to town to take her son (who has an illness) to Heaven – think
“Tiny Tim” in A CHRISTMAS CAROL.
I
knew how this movie would end, and I hadn’t even watched the first
part – but I couldn’t stop watching. And yes – I cried at the
end when the “angel” rides off with the little boy in a
stagecoach pulled by six white horses.
Silly?
Yes. Hokey? Yes. Ridiculously dramatic and impossible? Yes. But I
watched anyway, just like I would watch any Shirley Temple movie
again and again, or Gone With The Wind, or Casablanca,
or It’s a Wonderful Life, or A Christmas Carol, or
Miracle on 34th Street, or The
Ox-Bow Incident, or High Noon, or The Searchers, or
Old Yeller, or The Yearling – and more modern movies
– The Boy In The Striped Pajamas (OMG – the ending of that
one is almost too much for someone with high blood pressure to watch)
– and the two movies that make me need a box of Kleenex each
because the actors die – and they really DID die not long after
making the movie – Ghost, with Patrick Swayze (if that movie
doesn’t make you cry, you have no heart) – and The Shootist
with John Wayne. Yes, John Wayne made a lot of hokey westerns in
which he was a bit “too” macho – but that’s what westerns
were like then, and that’s what John Wayne was like – HOWEVER, in
The Shootist, he plays a gunfighter dying from cancer – and
in real life he WAS dying from cancer. It’s almost more than the
heart can take because - how fitting was it for John Wayne’s last
film to be a western about a gunfighter who is dying? To me that
movie depicted the end of an era – the era of western movies and
stars like John Wayne. And the best movie that actually depicts
the end of the cowboy era is Monte Walsh, starring Tom
Selleck. The cowboy life will never be like that again.
The
last couple of movies mentioned aren’t really “hokey” like some
of those old black and whites, but nonetheless, they touch your heart
and make you cry. I miss those truly dramatic, “good vs. bad,”
“teach a life lesson” movies. Today they try to bring that kind
of drama, but something is missing in most of today’s movies –
partly that there is no more “black and white” to life itself. I
am sick of modern movies that show people doing drugs as though it’s
no worse than drinking a glass of wine - and as though you can’t
party anymore without everyone sniffing that white crap up their
noses. No, thanks. I’ve had too much heartbreak of my own over a
loved one who has allowed the Devil’s Drug to destroy his life. I
don’t need to watch it in a movie. But that, too, is for a
different blog.
I
prefer the old movies, and I hope they never stop showing them, hokey
or not. I love the drama and I love wishing life could be that way
again. Where today’s movies are going – Heaven Only Knows.
Coming in June:
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