MOVIES TOOK us AWAY. We left home to see movies. In movies we saw open spaces and big cities, foreign coun-tries and other times. We saw the crowd and the close-up. We met strangers and crooks and cops and prostitutes.We saw rich guys and poor women. They often married each other. Movies were about mobility, spatial and social.The cultural historian Warren Susman has noted that the chase was the central motif in movies. Men chasing men;cowboys after Indians; white men after black; Anglos pursuing ethnic mobsters; cops hunting robbers; menpursuing women--on horseback, on trains, under open skies, and in dark cities.
展开▼
