Well, I hope my title isn’t too misleading–it is the truth but as is usually the case with titles, not the whole truth. I’ll not be able to tell you the whole truth, of course, but I’ll take a swing at getting close to it.

About a week or so ago TCM had one of its 1930’s movie days. Being, sort of, a fan of movies of that era I noted what was on. At a quick glance, I concluded that they were going with the early ’30s and when I saw an unfamiliar but interesting looking title, “The Spellbinder,” I decided to give it a try. I assumed it was from 1932 or thereabouts. Directed By Jack Hively and written by Thomas Lennon and Joseph Fields, none of who I’d ever heard of as far as I remember, I assumed it would be a typical rushed, badly edited and not too coherent story without much meaning(Yes, I recognize certain flaws to a lot of early ’30’s movies even if I’m fascinated by them).

At the beginning I felt pretty confident of my expectations and thought I might not even watch all of it. The star, Lee Tracy(he made a lot of moves but was not a box office match for Gable and Bogart) played a lawyer named Jed Marlowe(no connection to Phillip Marlowe intended, I would guess)who seemed a typical early 30’s movie bad guy. He pulled fast ones in court, lied as necessary and took bribes from not-very-nice people. OK, I thought, big deal.

But about 15 minutes into it a I got a pleasant surprise. This apparent bummer of an old ,movie, though smoother and ,more professionally done than I had expected, was about as I had anticipated otherwise at the beginning. Then the surprise–Atty Marlowe had a daughter, about 20, whom he loved, and he had a better side than that which we’d seen so far.

He gets involved in a complicated case involving a potential murderer who hires Marlowe and then tells him about a murder for profit he’s going to commit, assuming that the lawyer-client privilege will mean Marlow can’t tell the police. I personally doubt that this is a serious interpretation of that privilege, but it serves here as the launching pad for a good story.

It so happens that the potential murderer is handsome, suave and charming and he and the daughter, predictably, fall in love. They plan marriage. Now he’s going to be Marlowe’s son-in-law. One more complication.

How this works out It won’t tell you–it might be on TCM or something else again. But what does happen is that Marlow goes from being an apparently immoral or amoral(I get the two confused)person to a caring father and a decent and ethical lawyer. He struggles to find a moral and legal way out of this mess and puts himself through self questioning which reminded me a bit of “Manhattan Melodrama”(admittedly a definitely better picture!) and wins over the viewer’s sympathy as he struggles.

How and to what extent he gets out of this, I will leave to you to discover should you get a chance to view it. I hope you will and will take advantage of it.

Oh, yes-one other thing which explains at least partly why this movie exceeded my expectations so much. I had assumed early 30’s release for no very good reason. I was wrong. It was a 1939 movie–Americans had learned to do good things with editing and story-telling by then.

Now you may be wondering what is the comparison I’m going to draw between these two movies. Well, its not anything very exciting, but here it is–for different reasons I disliked both at first and turned into a fan as the movie went along. In the second case I learned that I was not as hide-bound in my opinions as I thought I might be.

“Is This Thing On?’ is directed by Bradley Cooper, and stars Will Arnett as Alex and Laura Dern as his wife, Tess. They have been married for 20 years and have two kids and based on some observations seem to have a pretty good life, maybe easier and more interesting than most., But they are bumping up against the restraints and reminders of early middle age and they both want more.

The film is short on explaining two things. I never got a clear idea of what he(or they) did to earn money most of the time and I never felt their issues with each other were clearly explained. But you know what? I’ve decided that only half of that is important. What they did for a living before is not of any great interest or import. What their issues with each other are is an important matter. BUT–we can never know exactly what other peoples’, particularly other couples’ lives are like and always have to guess at some things. So in a way, Cooper got this part right.

He got a lot of other things right too, though he came close to loosing me at first. As with “The Spellbinder” it took me maybe a quarter hour or a little bit more, to get into it. I think the issue is this, and pardon me since I know I’ve talked about this before–well, I’m going to do it again, but briefly.

There has been a serious change in movie making from early films to contemporary films. There are many aspects to this but I wish to dwell on only one now–story telling. Earlier films tended to be more straightforward in their telling—you got a hint at least of who and where the characters are, what’s going on in their lives and a sense of passage of time and events. In other words there was MORE STRUCTURE and the films were easier to follow.

They tended to show transitions from one scene to another and give you a sense of how much this meant one time to another. Also, the geographic locations were more clear, though I don’t regard that as usually a big one. This began to change a long time ago and dates back at least to the French New Wave, the Italian films of the Fellini era and the bleak Scandinavian films of Ingmar Bergman. Now things didn’t always make so much sense. Now you had to think a little more about the plot and concentrate a bit more on character and motivation. There is NOTHING wrong with this and I applauded it for awhile. It added a fascination and sometimes a sort of mystery to films that they had lacked before.

But the old “movie movie” of the first generation of American film-making began to fade. It has never gone away entirely and likely won’t, but it has been relegated, justifiably or not, to the ash heap of aesthetic history. In more recent years, this has proceeded apace until we have reached a point where it is almost unusual for a leading American film to have a straightforward story. Now this is OK with me(though I think there’s room for both styles) or would be if all of the “modern” films were as good as “This Thing.” Unfortunately they’re not and I think this is largely due to another change or maybe it would be more accurate to say an addition to the radicalness of the change in recent years. And by “recent” I mean exactly that, this stuff has happened in less than a decade.

In a way it’s not a big deal, but American(and some other)directors have expanded and pushed the earlier change to new extremes, particularly the not defining things part. This may of course, be partly due to my aging and getting more conservative in my tastes, but I think this is hardly the whole story and that you would find a lot of agreement from younger fans if you asked. There has been a tendency not only to leave out the transition scenes but to jump ever more quickly from one scene to another without explanation or , for many of us, understanding of what’s going on.

I noticed this early in “This Thing” and it bothered me. But I was patient and paid attention to each scene in detail and it paid off. While I still more or less am for the old kind of story telling, this one can work if it is clear what’s happening NOW in the movie and if, as in the case of this film, the characters are so well drawn and well played as to engage you. These are and it worked.

Alex apparently had a background in comedy. Anyway, as part of his personal/marital crisis he starts such an act, bluffing his way into a club he can’t afford by passing himself off as a performer and then becoming one in the next few minutes. This leads to lifestyle changes, including a lot of loud parties(see below). The people at them were not necessarily charming in my opinion. But it did occur to me that they were just possibly representative of what is going on in our society today. This would be particularly the part of it that connects to the East Coast arts scene, but some of that would be based on or have incorporated other aspects of US society, and so be to some extent representative.

So it is what it is, and I did not worry about it. I concentrated on the people, particularly the troubled married couple. This meant that I got to watch them flip and flop on issues and personal feelings. I also got to see them almost break up, get disappointed again, rally again, etc. And this sort of thing goes on more or less to the end of the movie.

Director Cooper tells this story with verve and a kind of closely focused attention that brings these people into your existence and makes you feel they are part of yours. You get to like them so much that you root for them to work things out and get their lives back on track, as Alex rises in the stand-up comedy world but sometimes flounders in the real(?)one.

Early on there was a lot of scene-shifting and parties going on and the parties were nearly always loud and disorganized(nothing like a party from a Kauffman & Hart story). A lot of the people were unidentified and many were not people I would care to party with. But I was also able to assimilate that and do much the same as I suggested above. It’s part of reality today, it’s the world these two people live in. So accept it as real and get on with liking them and wishing them well. They both manage to survive in this world and maybe so can we.

Anyway, congratulations to Cooper, Arnett, and Dern for giving us one of the funnier and more moving films of the year, perhaps the first one so far to combine those elements so successfully. Perhaps they’ll start a trend(but don’t bet the ranch on it).