Over this long holiday week, I've managed to catch up with some stuff that I had saved up in the DVR (on the DVR?). I watched the last four episodes of Mad Men (genius show) and saw the entire seasons of Life on Mars (interesting stuff so far) and The Starter Wife (so funny and with Hart Bochner as the love interest). I've also managed to watch a few old movies that are not at all related to the Oscar Project on the other blog. Two of them were TV movies from the 1970s: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.
Some of you may need a reminder that ABC, CBS, and NBC used to be in the business of producing movies. This was, after all, B.C. (before cable) when you probably had only three channels to watch (two if you lived in the hill country of Mississippi), and if the president came on to address the nation, you were pretty much screwed for the night. Nowadays, TV movies seem to be almost exclusively the domain of HBO and Showtime and Lifetime and a few other cable channels. However, in the 1970s, there were some spectacular films being made just for television viewers.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman stars Cicely Tyson as a 110-year-old woman who has lived from the pre-Civil War era to the heyday of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She's basically telling her life story to a magazine reporter (played by a very young Michael Murphy). She recounts life on the plantations before and during the Civil War, she discusses the Reconstruction era and the Ku Klux Klan, she even mentions the "Back to Africa" movement: hardly any event involving African Americans has passed her notice in a long, full life. Tyson is a remarkable actress, and I don't think she was ever finer than she is in the TV movie (and that's saying a lot considering the staggering number of good performances she has given over the years).
The best scene of the film is at the end. After a younger black woman has been arrested for trying to drink from the "whites only" water fountain in town, Jane decides that she will be the next person to take a chance. The walk from the truck to the fountain is slow and measured, just the way a 110-year-old woman would walk. The look on her face defying the redneck sheriff and his deputies to stop her is priceless. She takes her drink and walks slowly back to the truck to leave town and return home. I hadn't seen this film in at least thirty years, but I remembered that moment clearly, and it holds up on repeated viewing.
I also remembered strong details about Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, particularly the blue chiffon dress Maureen Stapleton wears on the night of the competition to name the queen. Stapleton plays a widow who starts attending the ballroom upon the advice of a friend and begins a romance with a mailman played by Charles Durning. She seems to come alive for the first time after she begins seeing him. She has her hair dyed a bright red and starts wearing make-up and colorful clothes, much to the dismay of her daughter. In fact, most members of her family seem to disapprove of the way she has begun living her life. When they find out that Durning's character is already married, that just cements their fears that Stapleton's Bea has started to go crazy.
I did forget one thing about this film in the thirty years since I last saw it. It's a musical. I know I should have remembered that, but go figure. Stapleton sings most of the songs, and while she's not a great singer, the songs remain a highlight. They are most frequently comments upon Bea's state of mind. Durning gets a song as well, "Suddenly, There's You," to reveal his growing affection for Bea. My favorite song in the movie is "Who Gave You Permission?" It's a feminist song for women who might have been considered too old to be feminists in the early 1970s. I can see just how easily this movie could be adapted into the Broadway musical Ballroom with the addition of just a few more songs.
Both of these movies were on the movie channel Flix last year. I'm hoping that someone there will dig up more of the TV movies from that era to show in the future. I love revisiting my childhood like this. I, of course, didn't appreciate all of the complex subject matter when I first watched them; I was only 11 or 12, after all, and not as precocious as you might imagine. It's good to become reacquainted with "old friends" once you're old enough to appreciate them more fully.
No comments:
Post a Comment