That's an exaggeration of course, but sometimes I am reminded of just how sparse my viewings of older movies are.
On Monday night I was determined to rewatch a classic that I like, since if watching older movies a first time is something I do less often than I should, then rewatching them is, logically, something I do even less.
But when I got on Kanopy -- my surest bet among streamers to find movies of a certain vintage -- I couldn't find something that exactly suited my mood or felt like a reasonable length to tackle starting at 9:45. So I ended up going with an old movie I hadn't seen, Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire from 1941, in part because it's the next movie they're discussing on Filmspotting in their Barbara Stanwyck marathon. (They actually discussed it weeks ago, but I haven't gotten to the episode yet as I continue to catch up.) I really like what I've seen from Stanwyck (such as The Lady Eve from the same year), so I threw it on -- even if at an hour and 54 minutes, it was probably too long for my starting time. (I finished at almost 1 after multiple short naps on my couch.)
I enjoyed Ball of Fire. I might have enjoyed it even more if I hadn't missed the reason Stanwyck's character was hiding out among eight nerdy professors writing an encyclopedia, led by Gary Cooper, but in reading the Wikipedia synopsis afterward, it wasn't all that important to the story. What was important was inserting this fish out of its water and watching the nerdy professors stumble over each other with a sassy, beautiful woman in their midst. It was a lot of fun.
As I was adding the movie to my Word document devoted to keeping track of all the movies I've seen that were released in 1941, I noticed I'd seen only seven other such movies, which are:
Citizen Kane
Dumbo
How Green Was My Valley
The Lady Eve
The Maltese Falcon
Sullivan's Travels
Suspicion
So if you're counting, that's two Stanwyck movies and also two Preston Sturges movies from that year, which I saw when I caught up with Sturges as part of my Getting Acquainted series on this blog ten years ago.
Before Monday night, that's the last time I had seen any movie from 1941.
When I open these Word documents, particularly of older movie years, I always notice the date the file was last updated, which shows in the explorer menu. In this case, it was 2012. (I'd give you the month and day, but since I've already updated the file by adding Ball of Fire, I have now lost that information.)
When you consider the number of movies I have seen since 2012 -- thousands -- it seems crazy to see that none of them were from 1941. I just quickly worked it out -- it was 2,757 movies ago that I saw Sullivan's Travels on February 24, 2012, which I guess also gives us our answer about when the file was last updated.
Now of course, there's a random aspect to watching old movies. I might not have seen any movies from 1941 since 2012, but I might have seen ten from 1942. That's not a real example -- I've also only seen eight movies from 1942, and none since 2020. But you get the idea.
Still, it says something about my general lack of older movie watching that that's two straight years with only eight viewings, regardless of when they last occurred. And it's not like these are the outliers, with all the other movie years around them having a lot higher representation. The great movie year of 1939 is only just in double digits with ten, followed by ten again in 1940. But 1943 drops way off the table, with -- get this -- only four viewings total, and none in that same ten-year span. (My most recent 1943 viewing, Day of Wrath, was also from the Getting Acquainted series, later in the year when I first watched some of the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, who has since become a personal favorite.)
So until last night, I had not seen any movies from either 1941 or 1943 since I've lived in Australia.
I don't know that I am consciously going to go about correcting this. Certainly not at this time of year, when my attention usually shifts to movies from the current year in preparation for my year-end rankings. But it's something to consider as I settle on an idea for my 2023 monthly viewing series. Then again, I did just watch film noirs, which also date back to this era, in 2021, so it's not like I've really been neglecting it either.
Free access is part of the challenge. I mentioned that Kanopy was the only service where I was sure to find a good collection of movies from this time period. They are interspersed here and there on other streamers, but you kind of have to know which movie you want and search for it. Of course you can pay for them via iTunes rentals, but again, that usually entails a specific reason to choose a specific movie for a specific occasion.
I shouldn't beat myself up about this too much. Among non-cinephiles, the coverage of this era is certainly a lot lower, especially the younger you get. The other 48-year-olds might have watched more of these movies when they were growing up, when they would play on one of four TV stations you got in your house. But the younger kids today, they're lucky if they've seen five movies made before the year 2000.
It's a good reminder, though, that watching movies remains an ongoing education, and will until the day we die. Before I die, I want to watch a lot more of these movies than I have -- and will continue to do so when I have the chance.
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