I’ve been thinking about old movies (and new ones) that matter to me.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1964 (showing Mary Poppins)
I spent my 1950s childhood living within blocks of perhaps ten movie theaters between Bronson and La Brea Avenues on Hollywood Boulevard. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, my friends and I knew how to sneak into most of them for free, and often spent a lazy Saturday afternoon watching two movies plus newsreels and Looney Tunes cartoons. In high school, going to the movies is what we did for dates. Becky and I saw Psycho in 1960 at a drive-in theater, so riveted to the screen with terror that we actually watched the movie; the next year we saw Natalie Wood in West Side Story when it opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on the Boulevard.
For years we rented old films from Netflix, our source for movies we’d seen early in our lives and wanted to watch years later to see if they held up. We only stopped this when Netflix ended the service a few years ago. Before COVID-19, we went to a movie at least every other Saturday, a practice we’ve now resumed since the theaters are open again. For the sixty years of our marriage, hundreds of dates meant watching movies together.
Of the hundreds of films I’ve seen, a few stand out as important because they help to define different seasons of my life.
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Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront (1954) | Photo: Everett Collection via Vanity Fair
On the Waterfront (1954), in which Marlon Brando re-invented acting and won an Academy Award for Best Actor, is about the shadowy working-class world my father slid in and out of. It was peopled with bookies and bettors, fixers of boxing matches like the ones he took me to in the 1950s at the Hollywood Legion Stadium near our home, union thugs who once beat my uncle and forced him, his head bleeding, to escape to our home near Warner Brothers’ Studio in Burbank where he’d dared to cross a picket line. This great film reminds me of a rough world I come from; I’ve watched it a dozen times.
Robert Redford & Dustin Hoffman, All The President’s Men (1976) | Photo: Warner Bros. via The Hollywood Reporter
My grandfather was a liberal Democrat in Los Angeles when Richard Nixon first ran for Congress in 1950 against my grandfather’s candidate, Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon’s campaign printed adds against her on pink paper in that decade’s highly charged anti-Communist environment. Nixon won, forever cementing for my grandfather and for me my grandfather’s new nickname for him: not Richard Milhous Nixon but Richard Outhouse Nixon. All the President’s Men (1976) came out near the conclusion of the early years of my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and a decade of protesting the war in Vietnam. This film catalogued the political and moral collapse of this man I’ve always despised and is a constant reminder of the commitment to justice that so immersed me in public issues. In uncertain times like the present, when the possibility seems faint in the corruption of politics, All the President’s Men is a reminder that sometimes the good guys win.
West entrance to what is now the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital (2023)
Thirteen years before the film came out, I read Ken Kesey’s raucous novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), while I was in a nine-month pastoral-counseling training program at Trenton State Mental Hospital in 1968-69. We did rounds every day in wards of patients from the temporarily hospitalized to severely ill and permanently institutionalized men, women, and children. Late one morning, my seven colleagues and I were clustered with Ken, our supervisor, across a large room from a dozen men, each stretched out on a gurney preparing for electro-shock therapy to relieve their profound depression. An aide moved down the row applying gel to the temples of each man where the wires would be attached and handing them a small plastic disc to put in their mouths during the treatment so they wouldn’t lacerate their tongues when the shock hit.
When the doctor applied the shock to the first man, his body stiffened and shook, the same aide held him down – and across the room, I collapsed, fainting for the first and only time in my life. I was unconscious only for seconds; my friends lifted me and sat me on a nearby empty gurney. From across the room, I heard the untreated men laughing and one of them yelled, Hey Doc, roll him over here and put him in line with the rest of us.
Kesey somehow turned life in a ward in a psych hospital like Trenton’s into moments of hilarity in the midst of mental health tragedy and created a small mockup of the cultural conflict between authority and creativity, between those who make and enforce the rules (Nurse Ratched, who supervised the ward) and those who try to sneak through the narrow gaps in that repressive structure (Randle P. McMurphy, her irrepressible yet ultimately lobotomized nemesis).
Louise Fletcher & Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Photo: Getty Images via Vanity Fair
When the film appeared in 1975, I was entering therapy for the first time, trying to figure out why the disparities between my moral and intellectual convictions and my behavior made me feel like I was going crazy. Like the book, but with the visuals and sounds and movement that books cannot replicate, Cuckoo’s Nest glides easily from hilarity to tragedy, from glimpses of liberation to the conquest of repression. I think of the movie as flawless, and I’m not alone; it is one of only three films to win all five major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Director, and Screenplay.
In 1964, during my second year at Princeton Theological Seminary, we lived in the garage apartment on Mr. and Mrs. Henry’s eighty-acre estate. One of my jobs for the Henrys was to pick up their mail at the post office every day on my way home from classes, often filling their golf-bag sized canvas mail pouch. One spring afternoon, dressed like a California graduate student in faded jeans, a wrinkled white tee shirt and battered loafers held together with masking tape, I walked into their home to place the mail on Mr. Henry’s desk, heard him chatting, and paused.
Rick, is that you?
Yes, Mr. Henry, I’ve got the mail but don’t want to disturb you; I can leave it in the kitchen.
No, no. Please come in. I’d like to introduce you to someone.
I stepped around the corner and immediately recognized his already-famous guest: the penetrating eyes, the sharply angled face, the pipe.
Rick, this is our friend, Robert Oppenheimer. Mr. Oppenheimer, this is Rick Thyne.
L: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer (2023); R: Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer on the test ground for the atomic bomb near Alamogordo, N.M., on Sept. 9, 1945 | Photo via San Diego Union Tribune
I went to see this year’s film that bears his name with this lifetime memory of its protagonist. I’ve been an anti-war activist since college and in the 1980s chaired the board of The Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race, an organization in Los Angeles that developed strategies to disempower Dr. Oppenheimer’s monster. Still, when watching the film, I got caught up in the scientists’ adventure of creating the weapon and (please don’t tell members of the board I once chaired) cheered with the rest of the audience when the experiment succeeded, sending deadly waves across the now more-arid desert, a prelude to a still-potential nuclear winter.
Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction (2023) | Photo via Palm Springs International Film Festival
The first forty-five minutes of American Fiction is a brilliant probing of the conflict between personal integrity and social acceptance. A serious Black writer, whose books are intellectually challenging and morally rigorous, is enticed into writing something that will sell more copies than his demanding books do. So he gives in to what he believes the public, Black and white, wants as depictions of Black culture: criminals, hookers, drugs, and every form of violence. We watch as his new-found fame leads him into turmoil with himself and with those he’s closest to, knowing he’s sold his soul but in many ways reveling in his new-found best-seller success.
It’s a conflict I listen to every day as a therapist, and witness every day in the culture around me. As I try to frame it for my clients and myself, Are you living from the inside out or from the outside in? In every personal relationship and in each of our significant social circumstances, we make accommodations. We can adapt to the sensitivities and strengths of our friends, even those who differ with us, without losing our sense of who we are. It's still an issue I struggle with myself, walking the line between flexibility and the loss of my integrity. It's one of the many reasons I'm grateful for exceptional films: they help ground me in a sense of who I am and why I'm here.
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