Pass the Popcorn: Movies from where I Sit

I don't know how many times we've watched "Laura", the noir thriller from the 1940's, but it's not just the haunting melody, but the tightness of the editing, the cinematography, and the perfect casting that make it great.  Gene Tierney is beautiful beyond belief and at the same time a girl you might know.  Clifton Webb is perfection as Addison, her mentor, who is in love with her and jealous of her youth and beauty.  Dana Andrews is just right as the detective, Mark, and Vincent Price and Judith Anderson make their parts unforgettable.  The conceit that the detective is in love with a dead girl who suddenly comes to life is engaging, but we believe, from the beginning, that he is her mate, and not just because he is young and handsome, but he is a hero, brave and modest.  Laura has been surrounded by syncophants and people who gravitate to her looks and hard work.  Mark is a real person, unswayed by fame or money.  She, in the end, is a small town girl looking for the boy next door.  He's not threatened by her success or even interested.  He falls in love with her portrait, and he already knows her secrets, as he has read her diaries and letters.

If I had to say what this film addresses, I'd say aging and longing for youth, in a culture that has made such obsessions a sickness.  But in metaphorical language, the young, beautiful America has triumphed over Europe and Nazism and culture and breeding.  In the US of A, you can love anyone and have them as long as you are true blue and full of moxie.  Both Laura and Mark are moxie personified, and post World War II, that gumption would carry us far for a few decades.  Addison is the old world, snobbish and stuffy, and Price and Anderson play aristocrats, one down on his luck the other with too much money and no self respect.  Their world is over.  It is Laura and Mark's world now, and looking back from the future, we are sad seeing their hopes and dreams and knowing they would turn sour, as our parents and grandparents dreams did.  It's a fine romance represented in the film, and we watch with longing all the illusions and simplifications that will shortly be muddied up by the Cold War and our own greed, until today America has the biggest discrepancy in income between rich and poor of every other country except Chile.  It is a new world but neither brave nor better.