THE LATE SHOW AS HISTORY

THIS week in the U.S. of 1968, a Negro waiter will shuffle off, mumbling: "Yassuh, I'se hurrin' fas' as I know how." An angry Indian will vow: "Many white eyes will die!" A Marine sergeant will cry: "Come on, let's get the yellowbellies!"

Such quaint language endures in the movies from the '30s and '40s that unreel on television with the steady persistence of an arterial throb. Ranging back to the baby talkies, late-show films represent what Jean Cocteau called the "petrified fountain of thought." Ghosts of America's past, they evoke the naivete, exuberance--and problems of a simpler society. To middle-aged Americans, they can also be embarrassments with commercials. Did the public truly love those painful Blondie pictures so much that Hollywood made 28 of them? How did Turhan Bey ever become a star? Did anyone really take Errol Flynn seriously in Desperate Journey, after he sabotaged German munitions plants, hijacked a Nazi bomber and shouted: "Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs!"?

Says Producer Billy Wilder: "A bad play folds, and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says: 'My father is an idiot.' "

Most children are not related to film directors, however, and to them movies on TV are an integral part of their epoch; they are growing up with a borrowed nostalgia for a time they never knew. The once-irretrievable past has become as salable as a personality poster, as audible as a Fred Astaire LP. The late show is ransacked for trivia questions and recherche cliches (see Box).

Children to Cheer

With more than 13,000 films waiting to be rerun on television, old movies have become America's National Museum of Pop Art, the biggest repository of cultural artifacts outside the Smithsonian Institution. On TV, of course, the movies are tiny, like warriors who have become trophies of a head-shrinking tribe. Despite this diminution--despite faded prints and commercials perforating climactic scenes--old flicks remain more compelling than most of the shows that surround them. Films may go in one era and out the other, but even the flattest Tarzan epic or the corniest war saga offers a series of clues to history. Like a paleontologist reconstructing a Brontosaurus from a vertebra and two teeth, the patient late-show viewer can reconstruct some of the main currents of American thought.

The old movies almost always portrayed U.S. dreams--and thus, indirectly, realities. Just as the peasant tales retold by the Grimm brothers spoke of common maidens who could spin gold from straw, Hollywood created its own folk stories from the yearnings of 1930s audiences. If I Had a Million, for example, tells of a quirky financier who sends million-dollar checks to strangers. A colorless clerk played by Charles Laughton receives his check in the mail, goes to the president of his company, sticks out his tongue and delivers a loud Bronx cheer. Blackout. In those precarious years, the vicarious thrill of giving a razz to the boss was irresistible--to say nothing of the complex moral that a nobody can suddenly acquire the money that can't buy happiness.

With a celebrated conscience that writhed with guilt beside the swimming pool, Hollywood writers sang a song-of social significance. The loner of the '30s film--Gary Cooper, Gary Grant, Jimmy Stewart--always triumphed against Big Money, amid settings of dreamlike luxury, cluttered with butlers, white pianos and canopied beds. Like animated editorial cartoons, their opposition was always a vested--and usually watch-chained--interest on the order of Edward Arnold. The heroine--Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur--spoke with a catch in her throat that accented her vulnerability. But she had a whim of iron, and when she urged John Doe or Mr. Smith to Washington, the nation's laws were rewritten on the spot. As the Girl Friday, she was the flip, half-emancipated helpmeet to the strong but bumbling American Male.

In those films, passion was expressed with a kiss or a cheek-to-cheek dance. Yet, in retrospect, they often seem sexier than some of today's celebrated shockers. What made Mae West's double-entendres titillating was that they really had double meanings; current cinematic sex jokes have but one unmistakable point.

Today, children constitute one of the most militant majorities in America. And since a threat cannot be cute, the late-show screen child seems like a kid who has stayed up past his bedtime. During the Depression parents somehow found their children easier to get along with --perhaps because they had a sense of sharing a common crisis. Children seemed comforting, or at least cheering. Hollywood fostered Jackie Cooper, Frankie Darro, Mickey Rooney, Our Gang and the apotheosis of innocence, Shirley Temple. "I class myself with Rin-Tin-Tin," she later said, referring to such films as Bright Eyes and Curly Top. "At the end of the Depression, people were perhaps looking for something to cheer them up. They fell in love with a dog and a little girl--it won't happen again."

That love was not universal. Only a changed America could drive the Temple from the money changers, but even in the '30s a bulbous misanthrope named W. C. Fields declared that "no man who hates small dogs and children can be all bad." Fields had a following that identified with his constant character, the put-upon male who could neither support nor desert his yapping family. This original style of explosive comedy arose from humanity under pressure--a kind of pressure that affluence has released, perhaps forever. The Marx Brothers, for example, remain as inseparable from the '30s and '40s as F.D.R. More than any other stars, they bridge vaudeville, the silents, the talkies and TV itself. But Fields, who always blew his cool, exerts an appeal rivaled only by Bogart, who never blew his. Both men nurse a surly integrity and loathing for any Establishment except the neighborhood bar--attitudes that delight today's young cynical idealists.

If the late show has a single classic hero, it is the outlaw with the gun. Bonnie and Clyde has its obvious origins in the old gangster films--there were 50 in 1931 alone. Little Caesar, Scarface and Smart Money mirror the hostile hustle of Prohibition years and parody Horatio Alger by putting the happy ending in the middle, then massacring the criminal-hero in the end. The private eye too was a fixture of the time. Alone, armed only with a wisecrack and a .38, he faced the forces of evil and escaped intact. Today, the hero has joined the organization; like everyone else, 007 has an employee number.

Long Journey

Nor is that the only alteration. Today, the word anti precedes such terms as hero and war. In the '40s, those words stood naked and unembarrassed as Hollywood took the entire American melting pot and put it into uniform: "Here are the volunteers, sir--Jorgenson, O'Brien. Goldberg, Van Jones, Milwitzski . . ."A generation of war heroes seemed to be Xeroxed from the recruiting posters: Alan Ladd, Gregory Peck, Van Johnson, William Hoiden. Not until the late '50s were leading men, like Rod Steiger, allowed to act humanly scared again.

The war also simplified villains even more than heroes. Before Pearl Harbor, the heavy was a foxy seducer, a neurotic thug or a fastidious mastermind ("I despise violence, but my assistant Hugo . . ."). The wartime villain was a wicked, witless German or a Japanese with Coke-bottle lenses on his sinister glasses. All this continued through the cold-war '50s, with their Slavic bad guys. Now the dominant heavies are a polyglot crew, their lunacy more important than their lineage.

Probably the most striking changes in American attitudes are reflected in the film progression of the teenager and the Negro. Before James Dean met Freud in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), adolescence in the movies was the period between acne and marriage. To modern teenagers, Henry Aldrich seems as remote as Henry VIII. In a day when, in certain quarters at least, student is synonymous with riot, nothing is more anachronistic than a conference in Dad's study or the dutiful screech, "Coming, Mother!" It seems inconceivable that Louis B. Mayer's fondest memories were of the Andy Hardy films. "In one," he recalled, "Andy's mother was dying--and they showed him standing outside the door. Standing. I told them: 'Don't you know that an American boy like that will get down on his knees and pray?' They listened--the biggest thing in the picture."

Just about the only benefit today's Negroes can trace to the standard Hollywood product is the current Black Power slogan, "Ungawa!"--a fake African chant from a Tarzan picture. Even in 1950 reruns, Negroes are chuckleheaded or criminal. In mystery pictures, it is a Negro who discovers the corpse and scampers away shouting "Feets do yo' stuff!" Says the comic: "I don't want any dark innuendoes." Chirps the chauffeur: "Anybody call me?" Even such all-black musicals as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky patronized as they provided employment. "It's been a long journey to this moment," said Sidney Poitier when he received his Oscar for Lilies of the Field in 1963. But his was only the last lap. The first million miles were traveled by Eddie Anderson, Stepin' Fetchit, Willie Best, Butterfly McQueen and other gifted actors whose long ride in the back of the bus can be seen again every week on television.

With the new liberalities of the current cinema, such antique prejudices seem laughable--almost as laughable as the '60s movies will be to late-show fans of the '70s and '80s. Then as now, viewers equipped with 20/20 hindsight will perceive the depressed, desolated land that bled through the '30s films, the hunger for absolutes and the shrill patriotism that surrounded the war and cold war of the '40s. They will recognize the erosion of supposedly permanent mores and attitudes that characterized the late '50s and early '60s. They will survey the cliches of this period--the alienation bit, the under-30 thing, the unromantic sex kick--and will realize that no matter how laughable, these stereotypes, too, reflect a troubled reality. The hippie scene and the identity crisis will no doubt someday assume an air of innocence and cherished worth along with the Front Porch, the Soda Fountain and the Family, which now warm the nostalgia of late-night retrospection. Hollywood, which liked to see itself as Everyman's Scheherazade, has also been his Cassandra--the two roles are inseparable.

FILM FOSSILS

Perhaps the foremost collector of film trivia is Harry Purvis, a Canadian writer whose catalogue which appears irregularly in TV Guide, includes the following:

"Must you always think like a marshal? Can't you think like a human being just this once?" Dorothy Malone to Ronald Reagan in Law and Order.

"Why me? You have the pick of my brother's harem." Lucille Ball to Raymond Burr in The Magic Carpet.

"How long do you think I could hold on to my job if it got out that I had a transparent offspring?" Philip Abbott to Diane Brewster in The Invisible Boy.

"So, a low-born blacksmith is the famous Desert Hawk." Yvonne De Carlo to Richard Greene in The Desert Hawk.

"You're wasting your time on the major. He's a fighting machine, a soldier's soldier, with no time for weakness." Bing Russell to Jewell Lain in Suicide Battalion.

"This girl's of a different race, of a different world. You've got your friends, your position." C. Aubrey Smith to Leslie Howard in Never the Twain Shall Meet.

"As a psychologist, as well as a zoo keeper, I believe it is better to face an emotion than to lock it up inside you." Karl Maiden to Patricia Medina in Phantom of the Rue Morgue.

"You don't belong to any man now--you belong to Broadway." Adolphe Menjou to Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory.

"I wonder what you'd look like dressed . . ." Maureen O'Sullivan to Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan the Ape Man.

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