My Dad was a movie buff. As a child, he was forced to use crutches due to a bad bout of TB, so while his peers were playing football on the streets of inner-city Dublin, he was either in the library or at the cinema. So I grew up on an intoxicating cocktail of MGM musicals, Film Noir, Ealing comedies and Hitchcock thrillers. I was introduced early on to comedy legends like Jack Lemmon and Alec Guinness, Femme Fatales such as Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck, feminist icons including Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, and dashing leading men like Lawrence Olivier and Sidney Poitier.

I was enthralled by the costumes, surprised by the wit, shocked by the darkness and impressed by the smartness of what, at first glance, looked like “old-fashioned” films with archaic manners and antiquated language.

I was fortunate that classic films were part of my upbringing, but many modern audiences perceive old movies to be culturally outdated and thematically unsophisticated. However, the forties, fifties and sixties yielded a treasure trove of film that document a powerful picture of sexual, social and political attitudes, and thematically are as relevant today as they were in the first half of the 21st century. Without any of the hocus pocus involved in modern-day movie-making, these films caused audiences to laugh and cry while also forcing them to think. As sugary as some of them look, each offers a distinct aftertaste.

Gangsters, rapists, sex-workers and drug dealers are characters we recognise from modern movies such as Hustlers and L.A. Confidential, The Irishman and The Accused, but the glossy facade of Hollywood technicolour was also often permeated by the murkiest of subject matter.

In Mervyn LeRoy’s 1962 film Gypsy, the exquisite Natalie Wood plays the ignored sibling of her talented younger sister whose thrice-married, hard-as-nails stage mother (Rosalind Russell), desperate for fame and fortune, pushes the shy teenager into the world of burlesque. Wood finds her strength and personality by selling her sexuality and becomes wildly successful. Behind the splashy jazz-hands, routines and crowd-pleasing musical performances of this vaudeville-style blockbuster are contemporary themes of cut-throat ambition (a woman’s no less), child neglect, failure, and sex as a commodity.

The latter is also elegantly explored in Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The peppy charm of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, the splendour of the Givenchy-designed costumes and the enchanting scenes of New York City in the sixties almost disguise the fact that the main character is, in fact, a sex worker. A young girl from a small-town background, Golightly embodies the naive optimism and hopefulness young women still feel today when they make their first move to a big city. Decades before Carrie Bradshaw showed us what single life and sexual freedom looked like, Holly Golightly was getting out of taxis in the early hours of the morning wearing fabulous gowns and ogling expensive items in luxury store windows.

Leading ladies of this era often presented a kind of fragile beauty that conformed to society’s expectations but which belied a guttural strength of character. Lana Turner in the 1959 film Imitation Of Life is one such example, and the film an exploration of themes that are as relevant to American society (and our own) today as they were then: materialism, The American Dream and the racial tensions that exist around both. When single mother and aspiring actress Lana Turner employs black single mother Juanita Moore, they forge a lifelong friendship during which time Turner achieves fame and fortune, while Moore counts her blessings to remain in the employment of “Miss Lora”. Meanwhile, Moore’s daughter, who is light-skinned, refuses to identify as black and rails against her mother’s wish that she become a teacher in a coloured school and marry a local coloured boy. She runs away to New York in an effort to embrace the privileges that being white in pre-Civil Rights America afforded. This is my mother’s favourite film and if the final scene doesn’t make you cry, nothing will.

Imitation of Life is also a visually lush production, and if you’re a fashion fan like me, Lana Turner’s wardrobe, which cost well over $1 million dollars - making it one of the most expensive in cinema history at the time - will leave you spellbound. But the movie’s tender examination of race relations in the US explored through the intimate friendship of two hardworking women has more relevance today than we might ever have thought 60 years ago as we watch America go up in flames in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.

So too does Norman Jewison’s In The Heat Of The Night, starring Sidney Potier as top homicide detective Virgil Tibbs from Philadelphia who is randomly arrested at a train station in Mississippi for murder by redneck sheriff, Rod Steiger, simply because he is black. Ironically, the two wind up working together to solve the crime and the film boasts one of the best-loved movie quotes of all time. When the sheriff mockingly asks Poitier what they call him where he comes from, Poitier responds, “They call me Mister Tibbs!”

While race is deftly handled in Imitation of Life, and more explicitly in In The Heat Of The Night; class is the thorny subject of the 1954 British film An Inspector Calls with the terrific Alastair Sims, who plays the enigmatic inspector. The suicide of a young working-class girl, whose tragic death is linked to each member of the bourgeoise Birling family, provides the framework for this brilliant psychological drama. Eva’s tragic demise begins when she is sacked from her job at a mill, owned by the head of the Birling family, for suggesting that her wages aren’t enough to live on; after securing a position in a clothing store, a well-to-do lady, who it turns out is Birling’s daughter, complains of Eva’s rudeness and forces her dismissal; she is then left pregnant and alone by Sheila’s brother; and eventually refused financial assistance from a charity organisation headed by Mr Birling’s wife, because Eva refuses to name the “ne'er-do-well” who fathered her child, who unbeknownst to Mrs Birling is her very own son.

The themes of social responsibility and human empathy pervade the film, and although it was released more than 60 years ago, it could just as easily be a modern-day cautionary tale. Simply swap out the working-class Eva for a refugee in direct provision and it becomes an even more uncomfortable and meaningful watch.

There are of course plenty of classic movies worth watching just for the laughs - Some Like It Hot, Pillow Talk, The Lavender Hill Mob, High Society; others for the sheer suspense - Dial M For Murder, Strangers On A Train, Rebecca, Footsteps In The Fog; and some for their unapologetic romance; Brief Encounter, An Affair To Remember and Casablanca.

During a recent interview with Joe Duffy on Liveline, Irish actor Brendan Gleeson implored RTÉ to air more classic movies so that they wouldn’t be lost to the next generation. Yes to that. There’s a limited offering on streaming platforms, and although Sony Classic and Talking Pictures are two great resources for old movies, there’s a wealth of superb films I fear will be forgotten. With a bit of luck, RTÉ will heed Gleeson’s plea, and then perhaps this year, for the first time in years, Harry Potter won’t steal Christmas.

Marie Kelly, June 2020.