Something has gone wrong.

A terrible thing happened to me the other day, during a late night coffee shop conversation with one of my friends. She's my best friend, actually, an Audrey Hepburn fan, a friend I have taken for granted all these years as being at least reasonably educated in the weird and wonderful realm of old Hollywood. Yet here I was, me with the latte froth mustache, looking shocked into the eyes of my befuddled friend. 

I had made reference in the conversation to someone I knew as having "Bette Davis" eyes, and my Audrey Friend said the unthinkable.

"Who?"
"What do you mean who?" 
"Bette Davis. I haven't heard that name before. She a model?" 
"Are you kidding? Margo Channing, Jezebel, Baby Jane for cryin' out loud?!"

Nope.


What happened? When did Big Mama's Road House Adventure take the place of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? Why are people my age ok with this?!


In the words of Sally Field's Mama Gump, "There must be somethin' can be done." Surely if young people, and even some quick-to-forget-nostalgia adults, watched these amazing movies, they would realize what they were missing. The great directing and superb acting isn't gone, we've just forgotten about it, hypnotized by in-your-face 3D and computer generated explosions. Those "improvements" in entertainment progress are really serving to distract us from the lack of story that we don't even come to expect anymore. 


Well you know what? I don't like that! I like a story that makes me think, I like actors to look like they're putting some work into it, not just living a regular life while a camera follows them around. I like soundtracks and costumes and set designs and lighting done by experts that know what they're doing and show off  a little bit. Don't you? 


Let's give these old movies some lovin'. They're every bit as good now as they were sixty or seventy years ago, let's make them our standard by which we judge good movies. That's what this blog is going to be about, remembering and appreciating quality so that maybe we won't be so willing to expect today's tripe as the best studios can do. 


So to get us started off, here's some of the best movies ever made, in a film compilation shown at the end of the Great Movie Ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios. This is the good stuff folk. That's all.