The Cult of Black and White

On the Films of the Golden Age

Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday, 1940, Getty Images

While my peers listened to the Beatles, and Richard Nixon was on the verge of being impeached, and the war raged on in Vietnam, my mother and I watched black-and-white films together in our one-bedroom apartment in Yorkville.

She would see, in the New York Times TV section, that a classic such as His Girl Friday was on Million Dollar Movie, and the evening would be arranged in order to watch it. It was my first study in contrasts, as life looked so different in the 1940s compared with my gritty New York 1970s childhood.

In the ’40s there was glamor (think Bogie and Bacall). In the ’70s? Polyester (think The Brady Bunch). In the ’40s fabrics flowed. In the ’70s everything was stiff, including the hair (see the Dry Look). And the colors . . . somehow, I could never get excited about avocado green or harvest gold. Better to simply get rid of them and go back to elegant black and white. No one looked better in it than Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, with Rosalind Russell, whose wisecracking, caustic Hildy Johnson churns out top-notch newspaper features for ex-husband Walter Burns while dressed in stunning suits made up of diagonals and stripes. Other well-dressed notables of the era include Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire, Lucille Ball in The Dark Corner, and the stunning Gene Tierney in Laura.

If I go back to my favorite Hollywood era, that of the 1930s, it is hard for me to maintain any sense of critical judgment. Most of it was simply delightful. Take Swing Time for example, where Fred Astaire plays a gambler and Ginger Rogers his dance teacher. The plot is classic boy-meets-girl, with the ensuing business of twists, snappy repartee, and costuming perfection. I would give anything to own Ginger’s black day dress, in which she gives Fred his first lesson and lands on her bottom. Or take The Gay Divorcee, when Fred sings “Night and Day” to Ginger, set against a shimmering oceanic and Art Deco background as her white dress floats behind her like a cloud in the silvery gray sky. And what of the exquisite song “The Continental”? This 14-minute dance extravaganza, as only Depression-era Hollywood could do it — it even has the chorus girls dressed in gowns that are half black, half white — won the first Oscar for Best Original Song.

In the ’30s there were no jeans or T-shirts. Men wore suits; women wore dresses. Their hair was done and they wore lipstick. And there were always cigarettes and hats. If I get started on the exquisite coupling of William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man, or any of the inky film noirs I love, we will be here for a long time. Suffice to say, the glorious Carole Lombard of My Man Godfrey never ran around the corner to get milk in sweats and flip-flops.

There is one color film of the 1950s that possessed me: North by Northwest. Alfred Hitchcock’s stunning take on identity theft, in which Cary Grant is chased by a crop duster through the cornfields of Indiana, starts out in Midtown Manhattan. Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a Madison Avenue adman who makes the mistake of having drinks with colleagues at the Plaza and ends up captive in a car that whisks him to the leafy Long Island estate of the sinister Phillip Vandamm, played with suave perfection by James Mason. I think my mother felt a strange kinship with this Cold War story, as one scene takes place at the United Nations, where she worked for many years as a typist, and another is set in Glen Cove, one town away from where her parents settled after the war and which was home to many Eastern European immigrants at the time.

As an adult, I see how I was taken by the look and feel of classic films as a child. It was, however, more than simply the visuals. In time, I came to realize that there were two important characteristics of these films. First, they lured me out of my confusing world with my mother into an alter-cinematic universe where we didn’t have to talk to each other. Second, classic films helped me understand the Depression- and World War II-era existence that my parents grew up in. Not that my world was bad; it wasn’t. There was a lot, though, that made no sense. I didn’t understand my mother and I certainly don’t think she understood me. How could she? Her childhood and adolescence were spent fleeing Stalin and Hitler. My childhood was charmed compared with hers. We certainly didn’t have the same relationship my friends had with their mothers.

My mother went back to work when I was 4, and as I got older I became the classic latchkey kid, coming home to an empty apartment after school. After grabbing a snack from the kitchen, I would settle down with The 4:30 Movie (it should be noted that in my world classic films came before homework). When my friends and I were able to go out on our own, one of our favorite activities was to go see black-and-white films at revival houses in the city. There was the Thalia on 95^th Street, the Bleecker Street Cinema, the Theatre 80 St. Mark’s, and the Regency. We would go see Bogie and Bacall double features such as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep or Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn in masterpieces like Pat and Mike or Desk Set. One great memory I have is of looking over and seeing my best friend, Andrea, wearing her glasses as we watched Dial M for Murder in 3D at the 8th Street Playhouse (also the site of many a Rocky Horror screening).

If you met someone at the time who understood the black-and-white film, you immediately entered into a subterranean culture; you spoke the same language. I remember meeting my friend Stephanie in college, and her admission that she loved Astaire and Rogers films; we’ve been friends ever since. Our bond was simply cemented when I spied the Top Hat LP by her stereo the first time I went to her house in Greenwich Village. We even dressed the parts, shopping at one of the many vintage stores that were all over Manhattan at the time, such as Unique Clothing on lower Broadway and Church Street Surplus off the corner of Canal. Andrea’s father ran a prominent theatre, and for one opening that I was invited to, I wore a rich blue evening dress covered with almost invisible rhinestones and wine-colored pumps. I must have mistaken myself for a young Joan Crawford. Or was it my mother? I have a black-and-white picture of her sitting in a small boat on a lake; she must be in her mid-20s. It is most likely taken at Ammersee or Starnberg, near Munich, where she lived with her first husband, Noel. I looked at this picture recently and realized I had inadvertently bought the same sunglasses she is wearing.

My mother rarely talked about her experiences in World War II, and when she did, the stories came out of nowhere and were disjointed. I’d be making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and suddenly I would hear her talking about a distant cousin who died in the war. I wanted her to sit down and tell me these stories. When I was in my 20s, I vowed I would get her to do so. One day I announced that I was coming over, pen and notebook in hand, and that we would start writing them down. When I got there, though, she reneged. “I’ll tell them when I am ready.” That day never came.

There is one film that I have seen multiple times in my life that truly captures the feeling that must result from being trapped in an occupied country: Casablanca. As a child, I only saw the glamor and romance of the Bogart-Bergman-Henreid triangle; when I saw it recently, all I could see was the desperation of the refugee plight and Ingrid Bergman not knowing where to turn next. She didn’t need to utter a word of dialogue; her face said it all.

Perhaps the act of watching black-and-white films has been more than just a cinematic obsession; it is my way of understanding a distant mother I barely knew, one who tried to do her best, but whose toolkit had been all but depleted by Stalin and Hitler. All children want their parents to be happy; maybe my escape into these films is my attempt at giving my mother a second chance. I didn’t want to see her aging in gritty, graffiti-covered 1970s New York but rather as a glamorous young woman boating on a lake in the late 1940s.

I suppose I have also completely demented my own children with my black-and-white obsession. My younger child called from college recently, saying she really wanted to watch a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film again. She missed them. And a viewing of Desk Set with my older child requires a certain level of intestinal fortitude, as they have memorized every scene between Katherine Hepburn and Joan Blondell, conjuring the experience of a 1950s Rocky Horror Picture Show. Among my many regrets is that I once offended my older child’s high school friend because she hadn’t seen a black-and-white gem, The Philadelphia Story. It took some time for her to confront me on the matter, but when she finally did, she was blunt: “You sucked in your breath and gasped. I felt so badly. It wasn’t my fault.” I felt badly, too, because I realized then that I had turned into my mother, who would suck in her breath when some poor soul made the colossal mistake of revealing that they had not seen a certain film. Ever since, my children have put me on watch: “Mom, you have to control yourself; don’t suck in your breath if someone hasn’t seen North by Northwest! You can do it.”

These days I practice as much self-discipline as I can muster when confronted with anyone who does not speak the language of the black-and-white film; after all, I have to remind myself, it’s not their fault. They weren’t indoctrinated into this cult as young children.

I simply take a deep breath, hand them my carefully culled list of 50 must-see classic films, and tell them I’m available for viewing anytime they’d like.

Anita Bushell is the author of One Way to Whitefish (2024) and Object Essays: A Collection (2022). Her work appears in multiple publications online. Find her at anitabushell.com.