This is pure gold: a dance montage featuring the heartbreakingly lovely Rita Hayworth, set to a familiar soundtrack. How vulgar our modern “culture” seems in comparison to the artistry, elegance, and allure on display here.
It would have been even better with the original music, but what a treat nevertheless. Have a look.
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Seriously? You think that these dance numbers on Hollywood sound stages are artistic, elegant, and alluring, while contemporary dance and art are vulgar and inelegant by comparison?
A certain mindset will assert that the past is typified by Katherine Hepburn, while the present is typified by Snooki. A different mindset will assert that the past is typified by Mr. Ed and My Mother the Car, while the present is typified by the Sopranos and West Wing. (Although I really did like My Favorite Martian, especially the way he made those antennae go up. And Don Adams talking into a shoe: great stuff. But still.)
Those halcyon days of yore aren’t as halcyon as they’re cracked up to be – there was plenty of garbage along with the works of Hitchcock and Cukor, and there’s lots of great stuff coming out now. To quote the callipygian Carly Simon: these are the good old days.
I dunno: Rita Hayworth could set the audience on fire just by slowly peeling off a long black glove.
Madonna, on the other hand, feels it necessary while on stage to yank out her 53-year-old tit. I wish I could unsee that.
But I know you disagree with me about this, Peter; you raised the same sort of objection in last year’s post about cultural neoteny.
Let me put it another way: it’s not that the ceiling was so much higher then; it’s that the floor seems so much lower now.
Perhaps that is because the best works of bygone eras survived, while the dross has long since been forgotten.
Not many people devote their leisure hours to attending Charlie Chan film festivals, grooving to the beat of In the Year 2525 and God Didn’t Make Little Green Apples, or any of the other myriad examples of popular culture whose obscurity is richly deserved.
I will grant that popular culture is much more vulgar now than in the past, although perhaps burlesque shows were just as shocking back then as wardrobe malfunctions are today. I’m not here to bang a drum for popular culture – most of it stinks – but it’s fair to say that most of popular culture always stinks, with those few examples of true art outliving the stinkers. To quote the Nice: ars longa vita brevis.
It’s also because access to media was far more difficult back then: there were fewer forms of public media, and the content was managed by a (more or less) cultured elite.
But now that any braying jackass (such as your humble correspondent) can compete on level terms for audience share, we find ourselves in a “race to the bottom”, with the coarsest elements of popular culture given the loudest voices.
But that’s just democracy in action, I suppose.
We saw Leon Spinks defeat Ali at Nina’s mother’s apartment, and then we watched Woody Allen’s Sleeper. You remarked at the time that this was what television was supposed to do: entertain.
Of course, those were the days before big screen television sets took over the living room. I still maintain that even a man who only has a nineteen inch set can have a perfectly satisfactory viewing life, as long as he knows how to use his equipment properly.
No man can be held responsible for what he says in his mother-in-law’s home.
True, although this was before Nina’s mother was Malcolm’s mother-in-law.