Ten Movies That Shook Wanniski
Memo To Website browsers, fans & clients >From Jude Wanniski http://www.polyconomics.com Re #7 "A Night at the Opera"
Continuing with the "movie list," here is number seven of the ten films that most shaped my life. These are not my favorite films. They are the movies I've seen that have had the greatest influence on my thinking, my character, my life. Some are favorites that I enjoy watching over and over again, which you can tell as you read each entry. Try to think of your own experiences with films and how they influenced the course of your life. It makes life more interesting to be aware, as you live it, to know how things such as books and films and magazine articles alter your path in significant ways. Sometime last year the Sunday NYTimes "Arts and Leisure" section had a piece on how difficult it is to think of a movie that may have changed history. The only movie they could think of was a silent film by D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, which had a scene about the KuKluxKlan that the author believes changed national thinking about the KKK. How silly. Each of the ten films listed here changed my history, and if I had not seen them, I would not have helped change history in the ways that I have. Films don't move masses. They move individuals who move masses.
7. "A Night at the Opera" (1935) This Marx Brothers picture was made the year before I was born, but I discovered it via my Uncle Vince, my mother's younger brother, the same fellow who introduced me to baseball, chess, classical music and a lot to do with politics. He was a left-winger who never quite forgave me for becoming a Republican. In my teenage years, the humor of the Marx Brothers absolutely convulsed me. I could not get enough of it after seeing this first of several the boys produced. My closest friend, Leslie Nathanson, and I would get the NYTimes to see where in the city a theater was playing a Marx Brothers film. I remember trekking from Borough Park in Brooklyn to 96th Street in Manhattan one Saturday, and literally rolling in the aisle with laughter. I've seen all the films a dozen times, but the "Night at the Opera" -- with Harpo suddenly selling peanuts and popcorn down the aisle of the Met, while the orchestra broke out into "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" -- was the craziest of all. Bob Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal, once told me I had taught him "the art of the outrageous" in presenting editorials traditionally written with lofty pomposity. It was Groucho, Chico and Harpo who taught me.
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