Remember when movies were “fun?”  They weren’t film, they weren’t cinema.  They were movies.  They weren’t trying to change your life — to quote an old movie mogul, Jack Warner, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”  Movies were willing to give a shot at changing your moments, like about 90 minutes worth of them.  And if you happened to see a really good movie, more than likely you walked away with a big, goofy grin on your face.

For the geekigentsa, the 60s and early 70s were a golden age of “film.”  The young turks were taking it to the Man and the System.  The Godfather.  Bonnie and Clyde. Midnight Cowboy.  All of them were films that took cinema to new levels of realism in terms of sex and violence (real and emotional).

Then there were “B-movies.”  Popular, mass entertainment.  Motorcycles, babes, drugs …anything that could be made on the cheap that might turn a buck, and a lot of which was  shoveled into the Drive-In theatres that still clung to the American landscape.  It was “product” and any appreciation of it as folk art would only come later.

(READ MORE at Pajama’s Media, where it was originally published…)