Walking by the theater in the student union today I noticed a double feature is being promoted: "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger." Now, I realize I'm really telling my age, but a peculiar thought swept through my mind. OK. I know, it's just a crazily misdirected brain fart, but it went through my mind.
"Dr. No" was released in 1962. That's at least 25 years before this crop of college students was born. Forty-six years ago for me. Wow! That's almost a lifetime. So, my mind immediately thought, if I go back 46 years before 1962, what was going on?
Well, for those of you who might be a little more challenged than I am mathematically, that takes us back to 1918.
That was a big year for the United States. World War I ended after the Doughboys whipped the Hun over there. But Americans were also just beginning to appreciate a somewhat new medium--the movies.
In 1918 we could watch the first film stud, Elmo Lincoln--Elmo! Lincoln!--you shout. Who the heck is that? Well, Elmo was our first movie Tarzan. The movie was made just four years after Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the first Tarzan book.
Other treats included Tom Mix in "A Child of the Prarie." Tom Mix was our first cowboy star. Mary Pickford starred in "Stella Maris" (I wonder if Stella was related to Roger?), and Gloria Swanson starred in "Shifting Sands."
Other than the Tarzan movie I can't tell you much about the movies above, except that Tom Mix created a genre, the Western, that dominated American movies for the next half century. Mary Pickford later married Douglas Fairbanks (Senior, not Junior) and started a movie studio with several of her fellow actors. She was our first SUPER STAR. And, Gloria Swanson, well her last film was "Airport 1975" which was released in 1974.
All of those movies in 1918 were silent films. So, those 92 years have seen us go from crude black and white films to color films, from silent movies to talkies, to Doby sound systems, to digital mastering and projection.
Now, you notice I have nothing to say about quality. Those films were state of the art for their day. The actors have survived in our memories because of the images we have of them from film. And what about "Dr. NO"? Well, that one started another successful genre, the spy story and in particular the James Bond series. I've lost track of how many men have played James Bond. But in that 1962 classic, it was Sean Connery. Let's see if I can remember: Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and now Daniel Craig. Oh, and let's not forget Barry Nelson who played the first James Bond in a TV version of "Casino Royale," or David Niven, Woody Allen and all the others who were Bond in the first movie version of "Casino Royale." It's enough to make your head spin, almost as much as trying to remember all the men who played Tarzan over the years, all basically playing the same character created by Elmo Lincoln in that 1918 film.
