Book review: Old Films, Young Eyes by Simone O. Elias

I was sixteen when I started writing about old films in this blog. I had started to watch them a few months before, influenced by my grandparents, but old movies were already on my radar by then, as I wrote HERE. When I began writing, and when I published my book on movies at age 18, most people were surprised with such a young person interested in that topic. I’m not so young anymore, but there are still young people watching old movies. And, like me, they use the Internet to talk about their passion. One of them is Simone O. Elias, author of “Old Films, Young Eyes”.

The foreword is written by teenage podcaster Eliana Singer, from the new-to-me podcast Teenage Golden Age. Her first contact with classic cinema was through “It Happened One Night”, and here comes a surprise: it was this same movie that made ME transform my almost inactive blog into a classic film blog!

At age 15, Simone O. Elias is already multi-hyphenated. Like most teenagers, she’s entitled and has no filter - things that are not exactly negative. She confesses that she has a hard time entering the world of the classic film she’s watching, but once it happens, she has a blast. All of that is completely normal. As a teenager, I disliked musicals and silent movies - me, that would go on to win the 2021 Collegium Prize at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto! In a sense, Simone reminds me of my younger self. I only hope she won’t look at her articles in this book in shame when the future comes.

Simone says that she has learned more about the past by watching it in classic movies than she has ever learned in History classes. As a historian myself, I see the value of using movies to immerse in the past in a pleasant way. I firmly believe that movies should be used in the classroom to further explore topics and figures not only in History classes, but in all subjects.

The book goes backwards, starting with the 1960s and the Beach Movies and going all the way to silent movies. In the in-between, the author talks about film noir (her least favorite genre), housewives and working women, mental health/illness in classic film and female filmmakers.

Like it happened on many other occasions, my watchlist grew as I was reading the book. I now want to check out movies such as “The Horror of Party Beach” and “What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?”. Also added to my watchlist “When Were You Born”, a B-movie about astrology starring Anna May Wong. I imagine that, without this book, I’d remain ignorant about these titles that sound so interesting.

Simone uses a chapter to make the point for the number one rule of classic film: do not watch colorized movies. I only do this when I can’t find another copy, but I have an interesting story to tell. Some eleven years ago, I watched Fritz Lang’s “The Woman in the Window” (1944) and it was colorized. The issue was that I watched it on the cult channel on my cable TV. They had only the colorized version in their catalogue! The colors didn’t distract me and I thought the film was that “naturally”, only later seeing some stills I found out the truth.

My eyes are burning!

There are some mistakes, such as when Simone writes “[Hitchcock] entered the film industry as a title card designer in 1919—he designed the cards that would display the title and the credits.”. Title cards, in silent cinema, weren’t only displayed in the beginning and the end of the movies, and didn’t bring only credits. They were cards presented throughout the movie to set the tone, describe the action and some dialogue, depending on the movie. Also, she is condescending when she says the 1910s were “a fairly boring decade” for Hollywood, when in reality the features were starting to dominate the scene without erasing the short films.

I found it weird that the author put the second wave of feminism under the “social problems” umbrella, but it can be considered “good trouble” as Gloria Steinem said. Also, all the time Simone advocates for teenagers and the power that lies in them. But this power often becomes conformity. There is a song in Brazil that says “we’re still the same and we live like our parents”, in an answer to all the potential wasted when teenagers become adults.

Even though I disagree that “Harrison Ford is (today’s) Humphrey Bogart”, I had a great time reading the book. I see a bright future for Simone Elias in Hollywood, no matter which career - or careers, in the plural - she chooses to pursue.