Sorry to interrupt this thread, but I wanted to make sure that all you movie-lovers know that this week's issue of The New Yorker (the October 20 issue) is called "Making Movies," and has lots of good movie-related articles.
I haven't had time to read everything in the issue yet, but I really like Roger Angell's "Talk of the Town" piece about his movie-going childhood in the 1930's. I'll quote an excerpt from it, to give you a taste of it, and then post a link to the whole thing, for those who want to read more.
Here's the excerpt:
I began sneaking off to movies just when the successive earthquakes of the Depression and the Second World War were coming along, and there was a yearning for a broader and more sophisticated set of attitudes in this country. The movies did it for us; they were just the ticket. The great cresting tide of late-thirties and early-forties Hollywood—an Augustan era, when the studios were cranking out five hundred films each year—swept over us and changed us forever: Astaire and Rogers, Bogart, Judy Garland, Olivier, Cary Grant (wrestling with Irene Dunne’s fox terrier, which has his—well, not his, it turns out—derby in its mouth); Gable and Tracy; the Joads and Rupert of Hentzau and Aunt Pittypat; Miss Froy’s name drawn on the fogged train window, and David Niven in his Spad, wiping a spray of engine oil from his aviator goggles. Grant and Hepburn step into a waltz as the old year dies, von Stroheim snips his geranium, and spoiled heiress Bette Davis has this brain tumor that brings a brief, strange happiness with her doctor husband George Brent.
If that whets your appetite for the whole article, you can read it at:
"Movie Struck," by Roger Angell (from The New Yorker issue of October 20, 2003)
