Old movies fill some of today's screens as big as ever, returning yesterday's movie idols to the size that made them stars in the first place.
Coming soon to big screens in Little Rock and elsewhere in Arkansas: Roman rabble-rouser Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (1960), shark-hunters Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws (1975), and Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941).
• First up, Spartacus will be at 7 p.m. Feb. 9 at the Riverdale 10 VIP Cinema in Little Rock, introduced by radio talk show host Dave Elswick of KHTE-FM, 96.5, "The Answer."
Riverdale theater owner Matt Smith recounts his 16-year commitment to showing a classic every month -- first at the Market Street movie house, and now at the Riverdale with it's newly-installed recliner seats.
The Riverdale is "hyper-local and super-independent," Smith says, and his strategy includes that the classics belong in the same venue as Hollywood's latest special effects-driven blockbusters.
The idea is to show these [classic] films the way they were intended, Smith says. "It's a community thing," he says: the crowd, the popcorn, the big screen, and "everybody in the mood for the same thing."
In recent months, the series has found a crowd in the mood for Horror of Dracula (1958), White Christmas (1954) and the wide stretch of Arizona mountains and cactus on display in Rio Bravo (1959).
Old movies turn up as treasures on-screen like the falcon statuette that Sam Spade wants to find: "the stuff dreams are made of." Once relegated to the lonesomest hours of late-night television, they have survived not only time, but also technology.
Movies in the Riverdale's classics series -- the second Tuesday each month -- generally can be found as well on television, on home video, on Netflix. They can be "consumed," as today's media is said to be, on laptops, iPads, even smartphones.
But Smith holds out that a movie belongs on a movie screen the way that Lawrence of Arabia belongs in the big-screen desert, not in some high-tech sandbox.
"Nobody who makes a motion picture," he says, "not the stars, the director on down to the key grip, is doing that so you can watch it on a phone."
• Jaws, giant shark and all, will be 7 p.m. Feb. 18 at the Ron Robinson Theater, part of the Central Arkansas Library System in downtown Little Rock.
"Classic movies are some of the programs that generated the top attendance figures last year," library system spokesman Susan Gele says of a lineup that included The Last Picture Show (1971).
"Films were chosen in different categories to appeal to different categories of people, but classic films were consistently attended by the most diverse audience," she says.
• The Maltese Falcon will show at 2 and 7 p.m. Feb. 21 and 24 as part of the TCM Big Screens Classic series.
The cable television channel Turner Classic Movies partners with Fathom Events for this year-long series of screenings at theaters nationwide, including theaters in Little Rock, Benton, Conway, Texarkana and Fort Smith.
GOLDEN OLDIES
What makes a movie a classic? How old it is, how great it is -- what? The answer depends on who says so.
The idea of "classic" film goes back a classically long time. When MGM's The Wizard of Oz came out in 1939, for example, The New York Daily News gave it a positive review that compared Dorothy's adventures to Walt Disney's animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
The Wizard of Oz was "a delightful fantasy," the review read, but the merely 2-year-old Disney picture was something more -- "a classic of the screen."
Disney marketing has run with the "classic" idea practically ever since, self-proclaiming each new Disney and Pixar animated feature an "instant classic," right up to Frozen (2013) and Inside Out (2015).
Classically speaking, though, a classic comes gilded with age.
Hollywood's Golden Age was approximately from the 1920s to the 1960s, or from the end of the silent years to the end of the studio system. Film histories sometimes narrow the designation to the 1930s and '40s, or from the Great Depression into World War II, or to the emergence of television, or anything at least 50 years old. In any case: the era of classics.
In the "Golden Age," a few big studios controlled what movies were made, and the studios ruled over which of their contracted players got to be a movie star. Americans lined up by the millions-upon-millions to see a new movie every week.
See it or miss it, that is. Once a picture left the screen in a week or two, there was little chance of seeing it ever again. The home video of that time was an 8mm film projector and a fold-up movie screen in the closet.
Television took hold in the 1950s, but movies weren't shown on TV as revered classics. Television squeezed old movies into odd hours of nothing else to show, chopped to fit, fractured with commercials, and relegated to scratchy black-and-white.
Still, the best films endure like Citizen Kane (1941), a box-office dud the first go-round, but one so revered in time that it makes everything else worth a second look.
"The first hundred years of movies possess treasures that the last few years can't touch," film critic Richard Corliss wrote in Time magazine, in praise of the cable TV channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM).
Maybe it's because the old studios knew best how to mint genuine movie stars the indelible likes of Bogart, James Stewart and Marilyn Monroe. The old stars, as Smith says, were their own best special effects.
Or maybe it's because new movies are based on old movies, but old movies more often were based on the well-written word -- novels and even short stories, and the old stories were better.
Stagecoach (1939), for example: The Western starring John Wayne came from a short story, "The Stage to Lordsburg" by Ernest Haycox, in Collier's magazine. Stagecoach is a classic according to American History Magazine, but the general-interest magazines that once published a torrent of stories like Haycox's to a national audience are long gone.
Maybe it's because old movies were made to be seen on a big, sparkly screen. Old movies are loaded with landscapes too big to appreciate, and details too small to see, any other way.
"Seeing anything on the big screen in the midst of an audience is a different experience" from viewing it at home alone, Gele says. "You can see so much more and draw energy from other people sharing the same experience."
After february
• The TCM Big Screen Classics series continues with The Ten Commandments (1956), March 20 and 23; On the Waterfront (1954), April 24 and 27, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), May 15 and 18.
And in months to come: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Planet of the Apes, The King and I, Dr. Strangelove, The Shining, Breakfast at Tiffany's, From Here to Eternity.
Venues include the Colonel Glenn 18 and Breckenridge Stadium 12 theaters in Little Rock, and Tinseltown in Benton.
Tickets and more information are available at fathomevents.com, and more information about TCM is available at tcm.com.
• Ron Robinson Theater's classics lineup continues with Alien on March 11 and Jurassic Park, March 24.
More information is available at ronrobinsontheater.org, or by calling (501) 320-5709.
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is next in the Riverdale 10's classics series, March 8.
More information is available at riverdale10.com, or by calling (501) 296-9955.
Style on 02/02/2016