FINALLY, the 20th Century time-span of the TCM classic film programme shows us how much the classic cinematic art-form relied on a precise and finely tuned combination of creative writing, visual image, voice, and structural editing.

This combined focus produced many masterpieces involving memory, self-consciousness, and true pictures of our world. The lessons of this combination have set the pace for advanced visual writing as literature, relevant to the rapid electronic modern lifestyle sweeping the world, and changing it since the late 19th Century. It is a literature and camera-style not based on bland academic jargon, but rather pleasurable innovative creative form, inseparable from its initial popular entertaining intentions, yet involving  new waves of critical artistic consciousness applied to a reformulated morality based on non-biased civilized opposition to social barbarity in all forms, totalitarian and uneducated social designs, irresponsibility in face of the fragile eco-system of planet earth, and, most of all, the evasion of human solidarity and love.

Ever-fresh
A few months ago, the Film Forum Cinema in New York City had an amazing rerun of 66 films made in 1933, the same year Franklin. D. Roosevelt was elected President, and, according to Geoffrey O’Brien writing on the Film Forum festival in ‘The New York Review of Books’, some of the unforgettable 1933 films like ‘GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933’, and ‘FOOTLIGHT PARADE’ actually paid tribute to FDR’s optimistic New Deal policy for the social and artistic transformation of post-Depression America.
A certain style made these films outstanding in the entire history of cinema, and O’Brien mentions their basic overall quality as ”Keyed up, ready to start on a dime.” That is indeed one key to their preserved contemporary freshness, which involves those vital qualities such as no restrictions on exuberance, frankness, and carefully chosen scene-changes that speak distinctly, with no time to lose, since these films, luckily, were made and influenced by a stringent budget in hard times which called for artists who knew how to say something creatively in their works without any adherence to stifling academic procedures. Thankfully, cinema at that time was too new to be the official creation of institutions and schools.

Harlow’s style
We can look at the example of two stars who exemplified this type of film direction: Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Harlow’s vivacious roles in films like ‘PLATINUM BLONDE’ (1931),  ‘RED DUST’ (1932), ‘RED-HEADED WOMAN’ (1932), ‘DINNER AT EIGHT’ (1933), ‘RECKLESS’ (1933), ‘CHINA SEAS’ (1935), ‘WIFE VS SECRETARY’ (1936), ‘SUZY’ (1936), ‘LIBELED LADY’ (1936), ‘PERSONAL PROPERTY’ (1937), and ‘RIFFRAFF’ (1946) are not just about a type of loose sensual woman, but a style of acting, an artistry that makes every scene count linguistically and visually.
This is the reason Harlow has no equivalent today among contemporary actresses (minus one or two), because her creative urgency and down-to-earth gregarious social attitude seems unasked for in today’s scripts and productions.
Contrary to opinions prejudiced against classic films of the 30s, it is the all-round originality of those Harlow film-roles listed here which preserve her films as refreshing excitement for obsessive fans today. Harlow is an outstanding classic film star.

Gable, forever
Gable is a similar actor/star. He gives us something useful and precious in his roles. It is a brisk style of acting which affects us with its sincerity, as if the film delivering it is not a film at all, but the art of life and living. We get this impression in classic films Gable left behind, like ‘RED DUST’ (1932), ‘IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT’ (1934), ‘CALL OF THE WILD’ (1935), ‘BOOMTOWN’ (1940), ‘HONKY TONK’ (1941), ‘THE HUCKSTERS’ (1947), ‘ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY’ (1949), ‘Across The Wide Missouri’ (1951), ‘Mogambo’ (1953), ‘The Tall Men’ (1955), ‘BAND OF ANGELS’ (1957), and ‘THE MISFITS’ (1961), among others.

Howard Hawks
The idea of artistic style, as it pertains to film, has motivated classic Hollywood’s best directors. For example, Howard Hawks, one of America’s most original and stylish homegrown film directors, whose name is excluded (to no effect) from several academic books on the history of American cinema, including the ‘Penguin Film’ series anthology.
Just as well! Since Howard Hawks is so brilliantly creative in turning his films into truly interesting and exciting works of art, that he elevates entertainment to a higher level.
Hawks left his personal stamp on his films by writing all their scripts, or collaborating only with brilliant writers like William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler, who helped with the script of ‘THE BIG SLEEP’ of 1946, one of Hawks’ gems. Funnily, no critic, to date, could make sense of the plot of Hawks’ ‘The Big Sleep’, yet everyone loves it and knows it is a Hollywood classic and masterpiece.
The ‘meaning’ of Hawks’ films exist in their visual style; their touching unique scenes, which keep the film in our affection forever. Style in Hawks is when librarian, Dorothy Malone flirts with Bogart in ‘The Big Sleep’; when Rosalind Russell hikes her skirt while running down a New York street and plunges to capture a running man by his feet in ‘HIS GIRL FRIDAY’ (1949). Style is when John Wayne, in that silent awesome scene in ‘RED RIVER’ (1948), where, leaning on a corral, he looks at his cattle gathered beneath the vast sky of moving cumulus, then tells Monty Clift: “Take em to Missouri, Matt!” and the big cattle drive begins; style is when Barbara Stanwyck dances the Cha Cha Cha with a bunch of old academics in ‘BALL OF FIRE’ (1941), and, better yet, when Ginger Rogers dances to Swing Jazz down a corridor in ‘MONKEY BUSINESS’ (1952). Style is John Wayne, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, Ricky Nelson and John Russell in ‘RIO BRAVO’ in (1959), and Wayne again with Elsa Martinelli in ‘HATARI’ (1962).

Elia Kazan
Director Elia Kazan, a Greek, born in Istanbul, immigrated to America with his parents, and rose to become one of America’s greatest filmmakers, and a good novelist as well. This, despite being one of those American Communistic party members, like so many other Hollywood film stars, directors, etc in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, before they became disillusioned with politics in the Cold War era and faced prosecution in a 1950s federal witch-hunt.
Kazan really was an artist first and foremost, and this is why despite his shameful identification of colleagues during trial, cleared his name as a great Hollywood-American film stylist, whose theme is the critical exposure of the exploitation of workers and non-whites, social corruption, class prejudice, racial and family bigotry, dictatorial attitudes, and forbidden love, in must-see film classics such as ‘GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT’ (1947); ‘PINKY’ (1949);  ‘A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE’ (1952); ‘VIVA ZAPATA’ (1952); ‘ON THE WATERFRONT’ (1954); ‘EAST OF EDEN’ (1955); ‘WILD RIVER’ (1960); ‘SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS’ (1961); and ‘AMERICA AMERICA’ (1963), among other films.
If we can single out one of Kazan’s films which no one should miss in trying to identify an example of cinematic excellence, both in dialogue and images, it is ‘Wild River’.
If one wants to know what is a film classic of stunning beauty and social truth, relevant far beyond North America, ‘Wild River’ is a film to see. TCM exists to refresh our taste in such classic film-making.