Someone asked me to list the films I knew by heart. Boy, that's a long list. I calculated last year that I've seen over 3,000 films in the theater. I can't even guess at the number I've seen on television. And television dramas - often better storytelling than many of the films I've seen - just add to that.
My first list: Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, Help!, Rio Bravo, Jaws. Someone asked me about the difference between that last film and the book.
The significant difference I remember (and that was a long time ago) is Matt's affair with Brody's wife Ellen. It would have been distracting in what's essentially a horror film with a happy-ish ending. More to the point, Matt would have probably been killed by the shark; moral lapses are what drives horror films. Instead, Matt, Brody and even Quint are all redeemed from their excruciatingly slow slide into irrelevance.
I could add to the list rather easily: Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Maltese Falcon (Bogie made everything memorable), Gone With the Wind, The Searchers, Clockwork Orange, Lolita, Barry Lyndon (everything Kubrick did was memorable), Fritz the Cat, The Greatest Show on Earth, Frankenstein, Die Hard, Clint's spaghetti westerns, High Noon (which, I think, is overrated), What's New, Pussycat?, Manhattan, Annie Hall, Them!, Psycho, Goldfinger, and two hundred more. (All older films, btw. Modern films may or may not be memorable in some way, but few have great dialogue. It's not important, marketing-wise.)
So. Yes, I've read thousands of books, watched thousands of films. But I was never a couch person; I've traveled a million miles, too. My blog de plume is Traveling Man for a reason. I heard that song from Ricky Nelson when I was 10, and it was embedded in my consciousness. Or I was simply born with the itch to see what was down the road, and found that song meaningful.
Either way. Fifty years later, I can say: it was the best of times.
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