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When Bad Times Make Good Movies

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Where are you, Fred and Ginger, now that we need you?

Back in the darkest days of the Great Depression, the brightest lights of the silver screen sang, danced, quipped and smooched to keep America's mind off its woes, if only for a couple of hours at a time. These days our economic prospects may not be as bleak -- at least that's the ardent hope. But there's plenty of grim stuff out there to be distracted from, and big-screen entertainments possess a singular power to take us out of ourselves.

The question is whether, and how, movies can rise to the occasion.

Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers in 'Top Hat'; Dev Patel and Freida Pinto in 'Slumdog Millionaire' You can bet the farm, if it hasn't been foreclosed, on a strong uptick in what Variety likes to call laffers. A number of producers, writers and filmmakers I talked to for this article said the same about feelgood films, which will grow in number, if not in quality, should audiences feel worse. And action spectaculars -- the so-called tentpoles that are meant to support the whole circus tent of studio production -- will always be in demand, along with inventive animation, romance and fantasy. (I can see it now, next year's fantasy sensation: Miley Cyrus in “Hannah Montana: Dow Hits 15,000.")

Thus far, however, no genre or style has been foreclosed by the studios or distributors. “Nobody has said we only have to have rosy projects," said Mark Johnson, one of Hollywood's most prolific producers. Michael Barker, the co-chairman of Sony Pictures Classics, noted that audiences embraced the dark family drama “In the Bedroom" only a few months after Sept. 11: “I don't see filmmakers changing their philosophies. In difficult times people love those tentpoles, but they're also open to real dramatic engagement. What's important, especially because of the economic situation, is that they don't feel ripped off."

Since this past September's economic meltdown, moviegoers have continued to support challenging films. An instructive example of Mr. Barker's notion is his company's surprise success “Rachel Getting Married." The inexpensive indie production has done brisk business, despite being steeped in family dysfunction, because audiences are engaged by Anne Hathaway's stunning performance. Other recent successes that bode well for the immediate future of offbeat fare include “Milk," “Frost/Nixon," “The Wrestler," “I've Loved You So Long," “Tell No One," “Waltz With Bashir" and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

The most curious -- and instructive -- case in recent weeks is a surprise hit with a classic Depression-era plot: poor boy meets poor girl, love blossoms, boy loses girl, boy gets rich, boy finds girl and they live happily ever. Preston Sturges recycled? A remake of some Frank Capra fable? No, “Slumdog Millionaire," a tough-minded, sweet-spirited prodigy of energy and inventiveness that's custom-tailored for these troubled times, even though the tailoring was done by Brits and Indians in Mumbai well before the trouble set in. “Slumdog" is feelgood filmmaking with a 21st-century feel. People love the intensity, but also the generosity. Far from feeling ripped off, they come out dazzled and fulfilled.

Still, “Slumdog" isn't likely to spawn Slumpuppies anytime soon. No one saw this movie coming, and no one will catch its inimitable magic while it's here. Which is all to the good, because slavish imitations won't do the trick as Hollywood slowly turns its supertanker fleet -- an image often invoked in an industry that can take two or three years to bring a product to market -- and independent filmmakers take new tacks in flotillas of skiffs. Those endearingly elegant Astaire-Rogers musicals were tailored for their times, not for ours; those screwball comedies with Hepburn or Grant, Gable or Colbert, sparkled with fast, ironic dialogue that's not quite music to our ears. Still, the past always offers clues to the future, and so it does for escapist entertainment.

I use the term escapist advisedly, since it doesn't do justice to the past, any more than it hints at what present-day moviegoers might come to embrace. The best Depression-era films were not just exercises in escape; they were potent fantasies that spoke to audiences in a universal language with an emotional grammar that hasn't much changed over eight decades. The point was made eloquently by a screenwriter -- a young screenwriter, as it happens -- named Dan Chariton. “Then, as now, the challenge was about coping gracefully with adversity and profound uncertainty. Fred and Ginger may have moved in wealthy circles, but their characters were often hungry hoofers, living essentially hand-to- mouth. They're not of the moneyed world, and they invariably poke fun at its emptiness and rigidity, just as the Marx Brothers and Preston Sturges did. They showed that one can live richly, even in the Depression, by virtue of one's wits and talent. If you've got an optimistic, go-with-the-flow attitude, then life will somehow sort itself out."

As for the era's screwball comedies, they got their laughs with virtuoso performances and plots of sometimes daunting complexity: “Bringing Up Baby," a manic farce involving a dinosaur bone, a dog and two leopards, exists in an antic universe almost as remote from the normal life of the 1930s as from our own. Yet the subtext of that film, like other Depression comedies from “Platinum Blonde" through “Holiday," was a yearning for personal freedom. Fast-talking heroes and heroines of the day wanted to break free from the chase for the almighty dollar -- that was a reliable theme, since most Americans saw so few dollars to chase -- but also from marital mistakes in the making, from the expectations of others, from much the same assortment of bewildering fears and existential anxieties that plague us in our present plight.

It's too early to know how our plight will be addressed by today's dream merchants -- a term from the distant past that now describes vast entertainment conglomerates making movies for a global audience. Just as each era has its tone, each has its archetypes and story-telling modes. And Hollywood itself is plagued by systemic problems that predate the current slowdown -- spiraling costs, declining star power, a production glut in the process of being rolled back, and, most conspicuously, a proliferation of entertainment choices undreamed of during the Depression, when the only way to see movies was to go out to a movie theater.

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