Hollywood manoeuvres

Movies don’t matter, they say, but they do. During the Second World War, when Hollywood could move faster, studios set A-list talent to producing morale-boosting pictures, propaganda to take audience’s minds off the uncertainty, blood and dirt. The war movies produced, at least at first, were less concerned with interrogating conflict than with flag-waving and noble heroes battling inhuman villainy. Then there came morale-boosting escape: more sweet and busy musicals than previously, sweeping romances and bright, sharp comedies like those driven by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby - blithe and inspirational, sunny movies from a sunny world.

This was the daylight front; it produced some masterpieces, and it mattered. But at the same time, down in B-movie basements, where lack of money to build sets meant directors threw darkness around, the trouble percolated down and Film Noir was born, a cinema of cynicism, paranoia and unease that produced some of the greatest of all Hollywood movies.

US cinema’s next brief golden age did not dawn until the early 1970s, and that seemed like a reaction to the upheaval of the 1960s: a new paranoia born out of assassination, the unrest of civil rights and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, a violent generational gap, a Cold War and, in the shape of Watergate, the revelation of high-level political corruption.

It’s still far too early to see how the films Hollywood makes are going to be affected by 11 September 2000 and its aftermath, but there are already clues. We can look at how existing schedules have been massaged recently. Take the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Collateral Damage, that has been on hold since September, a pumped-up thriller about a terrorist attack on a skyscraper. It is due to open in March, but with new scares abroad likely, don’t be surprised if it, and movies like it, are just swept delicately back under the carpet for the time being.

Meanwhile, a couple of films taking modern warfare as their theme, and eerily catching the mood of the States, have had their release dates bumped in other ways. Already playing in the US, and opening here tomorrow, is Behind Enemy Lines, about an American soldier trapped in enemy territory in Bosnia, and efforts to get him out. A fairly straightforward actioner, but blessed with the maverick presences of Owen Wilson and Gene Hackman, this had been sitting on a studio shelf for a while before it was quietly rushed out a few weeks ago in America.

Similarly, the factually based Black Hawk Down - this time about American soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in Somalia, and the efforts to get them out - has had its release date brought forward by three months, only partly in order to qualify for the Oscars. Directed by Ridley Scott and, therefore, almost guaranteed to be one of the most profitable movies of the year, this is somewhat more complex than Behind Enemy Lines. Still, both concentrate in the main on brave acts by American soldiers.

At the same time, though, you wonder if the more skeptical cinema born of unease and war is ever going to be allowed in Hollywood again. The studios are more watchful now, controlled by their marketing divisions. It’s unlikely there will be a Dr Strangelove or a Paths of Glory made about the war on terror, or a Third Man made about charming black marketeers preying on sick kids in Kabul. It is difficult to imagine someone ever being allowed make a movie about marines in the unimagined landscape of Afghanistan in quite the way that, two years ago, David O Russell made his savage, cynical and blackly funny film, Three Kings, about dim, bored, greedy, decent and confused US soldiers in Iraq.

The legacy of 11 September will not be clear until further in the future, though. The vast majority of the films we will be seeing across 2002 still come from the world before that and follow other trends. For one thing, as technology gets increasingly whizzo, there continues the abhorrent rise of the remix movie. The next example comes in March, with the release of Steven Spielberg’s E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial - The 20th Anniversary, all digitally sanitized. Dialogue has been changed, scenes have been tweaked and, it would seem, a lot of life has been airbrushed from what was a classic. For example: the guns of government agents have been erased in scenes where Feds share screen space with kids (of course, the same technology was used post-11 September to erase the World Trade Center towers from any forthcoming movies). Expect to see the non-smoking Casablanca any day now.

But 2002! If it catches you by surprise, it still sounds like some Buck Rogers-like date of the future. What exciting, unimaginable sorts of movies might be waiting in that brave new world? Eh, well, a lot of sequels. And remakes. And adaptations of old books and comics …