So we'd often hear at the dinner table on a Friday or Saturday evening that a particularly good movie was going to be played later on. Movies like Lawrence of Arabia, How the West was Won, Gone with the Wind, War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, Anna and the King of Siam (not to be confused with The King and I), The Lion in Winter, Bridge over the River Kwai...I could go on. These were always opportunities for us to stay up late to watch the movie until the end.
Now that I am living in a francophone environment, I realize that many people didn't have this same experience. So I am introducing my boyfriend to all these classics. We laughed last night when we noticed that at the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, they play a musical overture to welcome the audience into the theatre...isn't that a much more pleasant introduction to the movie than the numerous commercials and trailers that they make you sit through today before you get to see the movie you actually paid to watch?
And then I got to thinking this morning: what a great way to embellish an education (yours or maybe your children's)! Of course, as the Arab tribes were fighting through Turkish-occupied territory on their way to Damascus, we pulled out the atlas to position ourselves in that part of the world. Right, there was the Nefud desert that T.E. Lawrence passed through the first time, then Sinai where he lost his compass and finally the route north. We also tried to remember the small amount of WWI history we had learned...unfortunately this was never part of my high school training; I guess I would have to take a university-level 20th century geopolitical history course to fill in the gaps.
The point is that you do learn a lot watching these movies. Things that allow you to put today's global events in perspective. And they inspire you to do more learning, maybe grab the atlas or a history book, or check out certain details on Wikipedia or some other web resource. Perhaps if we understood more about the topics that are the backdrop for these classic movies, we'd be in a better position to form opinions about today's current events.
So, if you are looking for something to fill a cold wintry evening, get a few friends together and rent one of these old classics. Make a point of pausing every once in a while to discuss what can be learned from what you've been watching. Oh, and don't forget to listen to the music!
