No wonder

It's been a very bad year

Several months ago, I got an offputting phone message from a West Coast publicist asking me whether I wished to be part of the Wonder Boys reissue campaign. Huh? The last time I looked, I was a film critic, which means I'm not supposed to be a PR recruit for any official movie publicity. But Wonder Boys? It's a symptom of how pathetic Hollywood pictures are this year that this tepid Michael Douglas vehicle, which opened and faltered in the spring, has been re-released this late fall with grandiose hopes of Academy Award nominations.

How woeful is 2000? How about: the worst in the 85-year history of Hollywood. Through the first 10 and a half months of the year, there has not been a single studio movie that I would classify as "very good," the Phoenix equivalent of ***1/2. As for long-lasting classics -- is there any Hollywood movie from 2000 that will be watched with great enjoyment 50 years hence, like such classy, popular entertainments from 1950 as Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, Vincent Minnelli's Father of the Bride, and George Cukor's Born Yesterday? Or is there a single quirky cult item to be culled from homogenized Hollywood 2000? Film freaks still find excitement in these peculiar, original studio works from 1950: John Ford's Wagonmaster and Rio Grande, Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends, Anthony Mann's Winchester 73 and The Furies, Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, Jules Dassin's Night and the City.

Pardon my laborious listmaking, but these are just a few titles out of several dozen meritorious Hollywood pictures from 1950. Half a century later, these films remain compelling entertainments, each more wonderful than Wonder Boys.

A footnote: several weeks ago, the Globe's Jay Carr and I both spoke at a screening of the Iranian film A Time for Drunken Horses. Although we obviously see movies quite differently, Jay and I agreed that this year's crop of low-budget films from severely censored Iran (at the Museum of Fine Arts through December 2 -- see last week's Phoenix Arts section) more than challenges the multi-million-dollar product out of Hollywood, Land of the Free. Explain that.

I HAVE A SOFT SPOT for all documentaries about radical history, so I can't help raising a fist for Helen Garvy's Rebels with a Cause (at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend, November 17-19), a partisan history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that is, unfortunately, almost all talking heads (though interesting talking heads) and too-familiar stock footage from other 1960s nonfiction works about the civil-rights and anti-war movements. This era predated the Age of Ubiquitous Video, so 16mm cameras were not rolling at Port Huron, Michigan, in 1962, when several dozen idealistic college students drafted the legendary Port Huron Statement, an amazing blueprint call for an egalitarian, anti-racist, anti-militarist utopia, a kind of neo-Declaration of Independence for American youth. Or at the SDS conference of 1969, when the organization unraveled in the harsh battle between those who favored continued non-violence in combatting the War in Vietnam and the small cadre of militants who decided to bring the war home with a second front, an armed struggle in the streets of the USA?

In between SDS had its best years, organizing the poor in a half-dozen American cities, combatting the draft, bringing thousands to Washington for the first march against the Vietnam War, and, in the process, growing to 100,000 members on a hundred campuses. The SDS years are discussed with vigor and humor and still-adhering political conviction by a dozen or so SDS veterans who are probably now in their mid 50s, Radical Hall of Famers: Tom Hayden, later California legislator and famously entwined with Jane Fonda; the brilliant writer Todd Gitlin; one Carl Oglesby, a one-time Bostonian and probably the most extraordinary political orator I've ever heard; and Bernardine Dohrn, in her fiery, monogamy-smashing Weather Underground days the closest the American far left has ever come to having a poster girl.

Filmmaker Helen Garvy (who'll be at the HFA this weekend) is an SDS vet also, and she appears on camera, still bursting with energy and left-wing fervor, though she's as white-haired as Barbara Bush. She's a walking message for her message: SDS's '60s legacy marches on.

RIP. Ring Lardner Jr., 85, Hollywood screenwriter, whose sterling credits include Woman of the Year (1942), M*A*S*H (1970), and the underrated The Greatest (1977), the bio of Muhammad Ali. He spent nine courageous months in jail in 1950 for refusing to testify before HUAC, as one of the so-called Hollywood Ten. The nice one, as many of that group of studio leftists were, post-prison, notoriously abrasive. I can testify to Lardner's gentlemanliness: when we visited a Cuban beach during the Havana Film Festival years ago, he patiently taught me to snorkle.

---

The Film Culture archive

---