Sunday, July 26, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 92
[92nd of 100]. There will always be resistance to films like this. Some of my favorite writers and critics dismissed it when it opened in 1965 and became a box office behemoth. For
Vogue, Joan Didion wrote: “[It was] more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people ... Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind." Famously for
McCall’s, Pauline Kael wrote: "Whom could it offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how self-indulgent and cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel.” Even its male lead, Christopher Plummer, had more than just reservations for its popularity, calling it "The Sound of Mucus," and why? "Because it was so awful and sentimental and gooey," he said -- although in recent years, he has had a change of heart, accepting finally and unreservedly the place of this film in the hearts of many people across so many generations. I'm one of those people -- and I will note that my love for movies began because I fell in love with this film when I was ten years old. In 1985, the film was celebrating its 20th anniversary, and 20th Century Fox decided to rerelease it in theaters worldwide. I was in the third grade, I'd heard older people around me wax ecstatic about it. You must understand this: in those pre-Internet and pre-cable days, once a film left the theaters, it left for good, recollected only in the memories of those who were lucky enough to catch it. Home video in Betamax format was fairly new in the mid-1980s, and only families with means could afford a machine, and even if they had one, there were no video shops to rent from. Films in Betamax were sent in by family members who lived abroad, and so we got used to visiting with fair regularity rich neighbors with home video, and also got used to watching the same titles over and over again. And so, when the filmmed version of this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was rereleased in 1985, it felt like an event for people in Dumaguete [and elsewhere] who wanted very much to see the film that so enchanted them twenty years before. Some enterprising teachers in my public school got into the act, booking one screening for a fundraiser, and sold tickets to all the students. I remember buying mine for the small fortune of ten pesos [regular tickets sold for five] and on the appointed screening time I trooped to the orchestra section of Park Theater, had to settle for an SRO crowd, and basked in the musical delights of Maria, Captain Von Trapp, and their seven children. It was the stuff of pure magic -- and one has to commend Rodgers and Hammerstein for creating a whole body of music that was intensely singable. For days, my classmates and I talked of nothing else except this movie. We acted scenes out, we sang the songs with butchered lyrics. Soon one of us brandished a cassette of the movie's entire score, and that girl was instantly everyone's best friend. We listened to the songs ad infinitum, and I believe every single bit of them is now part of my DNA. Much later, after the EDSA revolution of 1986, public television would come to Dumaguete in the form of PTV 10, and finally the static of those who owned TV would have broadcast images to go with their set -- and because PTV 10's local programming was scarce [only the local news, with the very young Alex Pal as anchor], the channel turned to broadcasting movies [I believe in bootlegged capacity] with tapes they happened to have around. It was a hodge podge of titles, some were good, most were bad, and then there was the heavy rotation of James Bond titles. [I remember this was how I first saw Stephen Frear's
My Beautiful Laundrette. Imagine seeing that film on public television!] We watched these movies on PTV 10, which really became our pre-cable HBO, and as the months passed by you could feel everyone's collective wish: "When are they going to show that Julie Andrews musical?" When it finally did air, all of Dumaguete rejoiced! Some years ago, when I was already a working adult, my old barkada and I would find ourselves doing a day trip to Bais, and for some reason, all of us in the car just started singing "I Have Confidence," Maria's anthem of moving forward and having an adventure. We remembered every word, which surprised us, and by the end of that spirited and impromptu sing-along, we were laughing so hard. That would become one of my cherished memories with friends. When I was ten, this film introduced me to magic, which evolved into an enduring love for film -- perhaps a preoccupation to recapture the thrill of that initial encounter. I'm glad I was young when I first saw it, untouched by the jaded cares of adulthood -- and it does happen: in my turn, I've hated films other people have loved, like
Life is Beautiful or
Patch Adams, finding their emotionality dreadful. We do learn as we mature more to resist the happy and the sentimental, calling endeavors of the type as saccharine, over-indulgent, false in its undisturbed positivity. But I can never think of this 1965 musical that way. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: dumaguete, film, life, memories, music
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