Introduction : Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 4)

I guess you could lock them in the attic. A better solution might be to vary their media diet, and one way to do that is with old movies. I don't mean Grease or Star Wars. I mean old movies. The kind in black and white or Crayola-surreal Technicolor; the ones that feature stars who were in the grave before Keira Knightley was a zygote. Movies like The Wizard of Oz and Singin' in the Rain, yes-but also Some Like It Hot and Rebecca and Modern Times and The Searchers and All About Eve and I Know Where I'm Going! and The Day the Earth Stood Still and To Kill a Mockingbird. Movies that open a door out of modern Hollywood's hall of mirrors onto endless variations in style, behavior, morals. There is so much out there if you have the least idea where to look. If you don't, maybe this book can help.

The first obstacle you'll face is that, in all likelihood, your kids will give you the Blank Stare of Death when you float this idea past them.Why wouldn't they? To parents, old movies represent the recent past, but to a modern child, they're relics from the Dark Ages, mixed up in a vague chronology that sees 45 records, rotary telephones, and granny glasses as so much weird eBay effluvia. The great flicks of the studio days, from the 1930s through the 1950s, are ghettoized on Turner Classic Movies, while other movie channels play "classics" that are fifteen years old-mere babies, with none of the timeless splendor of the real stuff.

How, then, do you get kids into the real stuff? It isn't easy, and the older they get, the harder it becomes. The best and simplest advice, then, is: Start when they're young. Am I advocating screening The Gold Rush while your children are still in the cradle? No, because that's when they should be watching the world. Am I saying throw it on as occasional background when they're toddlers, or as part of the eventual kid-TV mix in your house, whatever that may be? Yes.

If a child can watch Barney, a child can watch Charlie Chaplin, and in fact, he or she might be better off. As they get older, you can gradually take them to the next level: screwball comedies and women's weepies, war films and issue dramas. They'll follow because they'll have learned that "old" does not necessarily mean "next channel, please."

If you're bringing children between the ages of, say, seven and eleven to classic movies for the first time, you need to pick more carefully, or you'll sour them on the form for good. And if you're hoping to start watching black-and-white films with teenagers, I'm afraid to inform you that the horses have left the barn, gone to Lost, MySpace, YouTube, and Ryan Reynolds comedies. And they're not coming back until they find these films on their own.

Which doesn't mean you can't try: This book suggests which old movies retain the power to make even a deeply suspicious adolescent snap his or her head back and say, "Whoa." Scientists call this Going Keanu.

Here's where I should perhaps offer my own test case as proof; I'll let you decide whether it's a brilliant approach that gives you the go-ahead to break out the Bogart or a horrific Skinner-box exploitation of an author's own children.

I introduced Eliza to old movies with Singin' in the Rain when she was about three. What's not to like there? It's in color, it's tuneful, Donald O'Connor is a clown for the ages, and even a child can see what makes Gene Kelly such a beautiful ham. She warbled the title song for a good couple of weeks, with strange toddler variations, and then I decided to throw a few more 1950s musicals at her. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Funny Face. An American in Paris. Kiss Me Kate. She loved them all, even when she had no idea what was going on.

With Meet Me in St. Louis she figured out what was going on and cherished the film all the more-and in Margaret O'Brien she discovered the first real child she had ever seen in a movie. When I took her to a revival-theater screening of It's Always Fair Weather in New York City, one of the scary old-movie guys in the row behind me leaned forward and whispered, "Is she into Comden and Green?" The funny part is that by then she was, even if she had no idea that Betty Comden and Adolph Green were the ace screenwriters and lyricists behind so many of the movies she was enjoying.

As Eliza got older and her younger sister Natalie grew out of the spud phase and started walking and talking, I began to throw different sorts of old movies at them. I tried silent comedies, seeking some inchoate connection between my children and my own dad, who died when I was young and who was known for his love of slapstick: Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd. I tried other silents, too-early sci-fi like Metropolis and seminal horror like The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney. The girls were understandably wary but got sucked in time and again, and the silent-movie format was part of the appeal: those evanescent shadows, the title cards that Dad had to read, the larger-than-life pantomime, all the more dreamlike for not talking.

I tried talkies too, of course: melodramas, comedies, even foreign films. To a few of my acquaintances I am still known as The Man Who Showed The Seven Samurai to His Kids. And They Liked It. Some of the movies went over incredibly well. Some tanked. The dirty little secret about classics is that a lot of them have aged poorly and others weren't very good to start with. Still, my daughters came to understand that a DVD with the name Alfred Hitchcock or Frank Capra attached was probably a good deal. They discovered that Harpo Marx could make them laugh as deliriously as SpongeBob. And they found films that scared them pleasurably instead of silly.

They still want to see the latest studio kid flicks and buy the sound tracks and form their generational tastes, and that's as it should be. But classic movies are a regular part of the mix now, and for Eliza, they've become something more-a way into an older America that she finds soul-satisfying on any number of levels.Watching the 1933 version of Little Women was for her a revelation that female empowerment doesn't have to come dressed in a belly shirt; discovering Kate Hepburn gave her a role model that will shape her into adolescence and beyond.

Copyright © 2007 by Ty Burr.

About the Author

Ty Burr is a film critic for The Boston Globe. For eleven years prior, he worked for Entertainment Weekly as the magazine's chief video critic and also covered movies, books, theater, music, and the Internet.