Reel Beach: Some classic films have not aged well

By BERNIE FLETCHER

Movies are a product of the era in which they were created and reflect what’s going on in society at the time.

Gone with the Wind (1939) portrayed a romanticized antebellum South of slavery. The Black actors in the film were not even allowed to attend the premiere in Atlanta. Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award, but she was not seated with her white cast members.

McDaniel also had a role in Song of the South (1946), but the offensive stereotypes in that film are so problematic that it is locked in the Disney vault. We won’t be singing along with the Oscar-winning Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is marred by a racist caricature of Mr. Yunioshi played by Mickey Rooney. Similar Asian stereotypes are played for laughs at a Chinese restaurant (actually Batifole on Gerrard Street East) in A Christmas Story (1983).

Filmed mostly in Toronto, A Christmas Story is set in the 1940s when fathers were called “the old man” and mothers were usually “housewives”, not to mention that a child wants a B.B. rifle as a present. Gun toys were popular at a time when kids emulated their Western movie heroes like John Wayne and played “cowboys and Indians.”

One of the first, big Hollywood movies filmed in Toronto was Silver Streak (1976), an action comedy starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in their first pairing. The film is set aboard a Los Angeles to Chicago train, but filmed mostly in Alberta and Toronto with a spectacular crash at our Union Station. You can even spot signs for GO Transit and CFTO-TV.

The director was Arthur Hiller who knew Toronto well having attended the University of Toronto. There is one train scene filmed on the CPR tracks at Locust Hill near Rouge Park with a CPR 4070 locomotive built in 1952 in London, Ontario. No American railway wanted anything to do with the film because of the train crash.

Who doesn’t love a good train movie? One of the earliest surviving motion pictures is Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895). Some audience members were terrified by the approaching train. Narrative cinema was introduced in 1903 with The Great Train Robbery.

Silver Streak was very popular with audiences. Gene Wilder said he wanted to be like Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Wilder received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor.

However, there is one scene that will go down in history, but not in a good way. In the Union Station washroom, Wilder dons black shoe polish as a disguise and pretends to be a jive talker. Cringe!

You can catch some local actors in smaller roles in Silver Streak. Steve Weston was a familiar face on television in the 1970s (The Trouble with Tracy) until his 1985 death in a fall from the roof of his home in the Beach. He played a conventioneer along with Henry Beckman and Harvey Atkin. Len Birman played the FBI Chief; Jack Mather the conductor and Ed McNamara portrayed Benny.

June 6th will mark the 80th anniversary of the 1944 D-Day Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. Henry Beckman was one of the 14,000 brave Canadian soldiers who landed on Juno Beach in Normandy that fateful day. Beckman earned more than 200 film and television credits, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Times, attitudes and social mores change. Today you rarely see smoking on television. In the golden days of Hollywood men and women smoked like chimneys and drank like fish, but couldn’t sleep in the same bed.

Walt Disney was a chain-smoker who died of lung cancer at the age of 65. Stars like Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner and Nat King Cole found out too late that heavy smoking would cause cancer.

William B. Davis is known as the cigarette smoking man on The X-Files. Davis was born in Toronto and liked to attend the Woodbine Racetrack in the Beach as a teen. He is actually a non-smoker who became a spokesman for the Canadian Cancer Society.

Freedom of expression is a controversial topic these days. What is “offensive” in your mind? Richard Pryor pushed the boundaries of comedy in his stand-up act. There is a fine line between humour and scenes that offend.

The next time you watch a classic film, think about the culture and attitudes of the day.