Through the past decades, subjects that mattered to Americans were often reflected in the movies they saw-or didn’t see.
Unsurprisingly, social issues were examined in the ’30s, with such entries as “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” and in the ’40s anti-Semitism was the topic in “Crossfire” and “Gentleman’s Agreement” (both 1947).
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In the ’50s and ’60s, Stanley Kramer was one producer-director who sent messages loud and clear. “The Men” (1950), starring Marlon Brando, concerned ex-GIs in wheelchairs trying to readjust to civilian life (a theme also handled four years earlier by William Wyler in “The Best Years of Our Lives”). Kramer’s “The Defiant Ones” (1958) and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) both explored black-white relationships, with the latter’s theme of mixed marriage preceded three years earlier by Larry Peerce’s “One Potato, Two Potato.” Kramer also created the end-of-the-world drama, “On the Beach” (1959), with anti-war themes headed by Stanley Kubrick’s exemplary “Paths of Glory” (1957).
Drug abuse has been the focus of movies like the legendary “Reefer Madness” (1936), and, less hysterically, in “The Panic in Needle Park” (1971), and censorship and Communism were paired in the likes of “Storm Center” (1956), “The Front” (1976) and “Guilty by Suspicion” (1991). The danger of nuclear meltdown was the timely subject of “The China Syndrome” (1979), and American complicity in Latin American politics was treated in “Missing” (1982).
Of more recent interest, the environment was the theme in “Earth and the American Dream,” a prize-winner at January’s Sundance Film Festival, and last year’s “Fern Gully . . . The Last Rainforest” (an animated work for children in which animals are threatened when invading human beings threaten to set loose an evil spirit). These were foreshadowed 20 years ago by “Soylent Green,” set in the year 2022 in a hellacious, overcrowded Manhattan (no remarks, please).
The current “Lorenzo’s Oil” deals with parents of a seriously ill child becoming their own medical advocates, and Jonathan Demme will focus on AIDS in his “Philadelphia,” scheduled for release later this year. Director Oliver Stone nailed down another of his certified points of view-all-out conspiracy-in “JFK” (1991), tackled the greediness of the ’80s in “Wall Street” (1987), and will return to the scene of his “Platoon” (1986) later this year with the release of “Heaven and Earth,” the story of a Vietnamese woman before, during and after the Vietnam war. Never one to dodge controversy, Spike Lee has turned his cameras on such subjects as race relations (“Do the Right Thing”) and interracial romance (“Jungle Fever”).
Other films in the last few years have come along to fortify the feminist movement-the bonding fugitives in “Thelma & Louise” (1991), the ambitious secretary in “Working Girl” (1988)-but as long as two decades ago Martin Scorsese featured Ellen Burstyn as a woman searching for herself after the death of her husband in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974) and, four years before that, Carrie Snodgress conducted her own search in “Diary of a Mad Housewife.”