Cereal At Midnight

A friend of mine, Chicago film critic Patrick Bromley , is known for saying "it's black and white, so it must be good." It's mostly a joke, but there's something to it. This phrase means two things to me: first, my generation grew up in the shadow of monochrome. For our formative years, most of the "important" movies were all in black and white. Second, as we began to explore the cinema of the distant past, we discovered that there was a basic competency, efficiency, and overall magical quality to The Golden Age of Hollywood and the films made during the studio system era. The lighting, the acting, the camera angles, the music, even the distinct dialogue, delivered through transatlantic accents all work together to create something that is uniquely cinematic and altogether artificial. The sixties and seventies would do much to deliberately destroy that gauzy, otherworldly reality, but we continue to discover these antiquities with a mix of awe and fascin...