ANYONE who claims to be educated, or interested in education, but dismisses Hollywood films made between the 1920s and 60s, or worse, all those made in black & white photography (still generally agreed to comprise the best films ever made) as irrelevant or obsolete could be considered not really educated or interested in education.

A dismissal of such films is no different than condemning or ignoring the literature of the world’s great creative writers, from BC to the 19th Century, as written by Plato, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer, Virgil, Horace, Suetonius, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, Fielding, Rousseau, Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Dumas, Dostoyevesky, Chekov, Turgenev, Whitman, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, and so on.

Definition
The definition of frivolous popular entertainment attached to cinema since its early 20th Century debut, when it was a marvelous new mobile photographic invention flocked to by masses of people in barns and under tents, has survived among those who are unable to see or understand a profound addition to the Arts and the Humanities made by the progressive development of movies.
Of course, those University students, in the USA and Europe especially, pursuing Degrees and Doctorates in Film Studies know different. Today, TCM helps to expose the layman and a new young generation to the exciting history of American/Hollywood classic film production. In doing this, it reveals itself to be nothing short of an educational TV channel, revealing the shocking wealth of cinematic creative styles, containing critical logic and social morality, some of the finest film companies, producers, directors, cinematographers, actors and actresses have laboured to leave us, especially during those five decades between the 1920s and 60s.

Classic Film history
One way of receiving the full benefits of cinematic art is to treat film directors, actors and actresses the same way we treat other artists whose works we are introduced and like, which is to say: We want to know and experience all, or most, of their other works.
Indeed, it is the shared knowledge of films and their makers that create social discussion of an intelligent and analytical nature, and which in turn leads to the development of shared cultural values and freedom which enriches society by the cultivation of a civilized manner of living attached to the genteel molding of character.
Because Classic Cinema provides an enormous compilation of films, directors, and stars no longer with us, but whose works are in no way diminished by their natural (and everyone’s) passing life span, we are now able to enrich our personal, social, national, and even international relations via the ‘theatrical’ problems, pains, and pleasures their films have permanently left us to learn from in the vital lessons of art.
In fact, today, we are in a more fortunate position to know and access these cinematic artists’ works via the Internet and Google, where we can find the complete list of their works and dates, and recognize when they are programmed on TCM, or seek out their DVDs for private viewing, or better still form social Film Clubs which will encourage social interaction with an intelligent focus.
The specific difference today is that even when cinemas exist, they no longer provide big-screen viewing of these Classic Films from the 1920s to the 60s. The responsibility is therefore on us, today’s citizens, old and young, to maintain their normal everyday presence.

John Huston films
Take the example of John Huston, one of Hollywood’s and America’s most frankly honest and touching film directors, whose best films from 1941 (his beginning) to 1964, if seen in succession, would no doubt open our eyes wider, and stimulate our conscience stronger to the egotistical lapses in the criminal and would-be criminal mind to the indifference of social changes in passing time, to the pleasures of sensitive unconventionality, to the self-destructiveness of greed and jealousy, and to the cruel absurdities of racism. Here is a selected sample of Huston’s films: ‘THE MALTESE FALCON’ (1941); ‘IN THIS OUR LIFE’ (1942); ‘THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE’ (1948); ‘WE WERE STRANGERS’ (1949); ‘THE ASPHALT JUNGLE’ (1950); ‘HEAVEN KNOWS MISTER ALLISON’ (1957); ‘THE UNFORGIVEN’ and ‘THE MISFITS’ (1960); and ‘THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA’ (1964).
A few months ago, TCM showed Huston’s second film: ‘In This Our Life’, in which Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis are two sisters of contrasting temperaments. De Havilland is quiet, cautious, and thoughtful, while Davis is attractively impetuous, demanding, and egotistic.
What happens in this film can be said to create cinematic history, since at the time it was made, most Afro-Americans were stereotyped in poor servile movie roles; but ‘In This Our Life’ is bold and unique in several ways, one of which is that a black youth is a Law student who works as the secretary to a lawyer, Davis’s love interest, while his mother is the maid of the Davis/de Havilland well-off white household.
One day, Davis asks the black youth to take her car to be washed, but suddenly cancels her request in order to drive herself somewhere hurriedly instead. On her way there, she accidentally hits and kills a child, but refuses to stop. When the story breaks, and evidence leads to her house, she uses her initial request for the youth to drive her car to be washed as evidence that he was the hit-and-run driver.
Obviously, the boy’s pleas of innocence are dismissed in the American social environment’s rampant racial bias of that time. What isolates this Huston film as a powerful perennial human lesson relevant anywhere in the world, is the fact that de Havilland, Davis’s sister, their white family, and the lawyer perceive the truth, despite every obstacle, and go against their family prestige, their racial or blood ties, to identify their family member as the one guilty, surrendering her to the law.
Similarly in Huston’s ‘The Asphalt Jungle’, easily one of Hollywood’s greatest classic films, which TCM showed a while back as well, the central theme is how a less financially reliant rural lifestyle of agricultural farming in the countryside, when abandoned for urban social climbing and competition without the necessary skills, can lead to an adjustment to crime.
The lesson of ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ (adapted from the brilliant W.R Burnett novel) remains relevant far beyond North America, because its topic of loss of rural innocence and stress of urban pressure was first explored by such a popular art form as classic American/Hollywood cinema seven decades ago.