This slick documentary is too focused on Hollywood to justify the title ‘The Movies’

The Movies ★★

The Movies is the title, but it’s a misnomer. This documentary miniseries produced for CNN by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone and made up of six feature-length episodes is actually just about Hollywood. A few films made elsewhere earn a mention, visually speaking: Nazi Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (by way of introduction to Chaplin’s The Great Dictator), Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla (by way of introduction to Hollywood plagiarising it for 1956’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters!), Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (by way of introduction to the influence of the French New Wave on American filmmakers), Lawrence of Arabia (a British film that won seven Academy Awards), and The Piano (a New Zealand film that also did OK at Oscar time). But blink and you’d miss ’em.

The hundreds of other movies that get a mention in this slick 474-minute package – plus the ads that SBS keeps inflicting on us, which are sometimes indistinguishable from it – are all American. Most were made in Hollywood, which is a neighbourhood in Los Angeles but has become shorthand for the American film business. Surveying the scene from what it justifiably calls “The Golden Age” (from the silent era to the 1950s) through to “The 2000s to Today” (which is 2019 when it was made), the series gathers together a whole lot of film clips, filmmakers, film critics and film academics, along with a few extracts from old news bulletins and TV interviews, and skims across more than a century of filmmaking in the US. About two minutes are given to the silent era, effectively removing the great Buster Keaton from proceedings.

The approach is best described as hype, reminiscent in tone of the press kits that critics receive when they gather to pass sentence at previews. Most of it is promotional gush (like the interviews stars and directors generally do because of their contracts when they go on tour with a movie). The producers of the series (no directors are acknowledged) have managed to find somebody to love every movie they’ve chosen to include.

Affable director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood) proves especially useful in this light, bubbling over with Bono-like enthusiasms, most of them justified. “There are ensemble movies and there are ensemble movies, and then there’s Nashville,” he pronounces. Writer-director Cameron Crowe assesses Billy Wilder’s The Apartment as “the deepest romantic comedy ever made”, adding that without it Jerry Maguire would never have been. Actor Bill Hader regards Annie Hall as “the best relationship movie ever made”. Director Ridley Scott adjudges 2001: A Space Odyssey to be “a masterpiece, magnificent (and) majestic”. Billy Crystal takes a different tack, confessing, “I’m the dope who turned down Toy Story.” And so on. Their opinions are reasonable, but before they can say anything more, we’re whisked away elsewhere.

All that said, as with those press kits, occasionally useful information or insightful commentary sneaks in. Author and critic Joseph McBride proclaims John Ford’s elegiac Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “one of America’s great political films”. And he lends credence to that estimation by noting that the film’s chief concern is “how we rewrite history to fit our mythical needs”, an attached extract illustrating the point.

Film historian Neil Gabler is astute and economical in his description of how, over the years, Hollywood went from being industry-driven, to director-driven, to star-driven. And now: “The new stardom is the brand. No movie star has ever come close to being as big as Marvel is today.”