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Advice & More March 2016

Silver Screen, Golden Years

Easter: Secular, Commercial, and Nostalgic

By Jacqueline T. Lynch

On the other hand, despite this drive to seek the future, there was a kind of fatigue after the horrors of war and a yearning to turn back the mind, if not the clock, to a happier time and place. That's generally called nostalgia, and it's usually mostly made up.

With Easter approaching this month we look at two classic films that depict the holiday as something secular and commercial, but also poignantly nostalgic in a post-war world moving farther away from the past.

Movies have not grasped this holiday and wrung it to bits the way they've commandeered Christmas, but Easter Parade (1948) and My Dream is Yours (1949) show both celebration and sentiment. The post-war years when these films were made had a strange duality to them. On the one hand, the GI Bill of Rights provided the resources for a generation of young men to pursue education, business, and a suburban tract home. On the other hand, despite this drive to seek the future, there was a kind of fatigue after the horrors of war and a yearning to turn back the mind, if not the clock, to a happier time and place. That's generally called nostalgia, and it's usually mostly made up.

There was the bewildered realization that after victory in the war and especially with the invention of the atom bomb, America was now the most powerful nation on earth, an aspect of our lives with which Americans still struggle. Yet, there was a naivete‚ about our power and our bomb that led Doris Day, in My Dream Is Yours to sing a novelty tune called "The Geiger Counter Song" with a "tick-tick-tick" syncopation to "give me a radioactive kick."

Easter Parade eschewed the modern times and sent us back to 1911-1912, where modernity was represented in large plumed hats and ragtime, a more comfortable spot for us to be, evidently. The film was intended to be a showcase for a variety of Irving Berlin tunes from Tin Pan Alley. Ironically, the song "Easter Parade" was not from this era; Mr. Berlin wrote it for the musical review As Thousands Cheer in 1932. It's a product of the Great Depression. It's always been hard to film a movie about the past and not get slapped in the head by unruly anachronisms. That is because we want the past to be what we want it to be, and not what it was.

Easter in the old movies comes to us in fashion, flowers, and songs. Easter Parade and My Dream is Yours give us plenty of these, along with colors of the rainbow like so much Easter egg dye.

Unlike religious epics that Hollywood sometimes tackled, Easter was usually presented in its most secular clothing. But Hollywood did not create this new Easter, it merely exploited it.
As far back as the mid-1800s, Easter began a new secular role when New York City's Fifth Avenue became the site of the so-called Easter Parade, when the wealthy classes strolled home from church in the latest European fashions, watched with fascination by the working class people who hovered on the edges of society. This is the world that Judy Garland observes as a young, awkward hoofer in Easter Parade.

As the 20th century dawned, other cities picked up this craze, and after World War I, when the boom of the 1920s put more money in the working man's pockets, the idea of springtime fashions became possible for everyone. Amid the frenzied commercial cult of the 1920s, new clothes were requisite for the entire family. Milliners were as important to life then as the milkman. One didn't leave home without a hat, and if a holiday required new clothes, then it also required new hats. The Easter bonnet was born.

The holiday spending spread to candy, flowers, and small toys in the shape of rabbits and chicks. In some cities, the biggest shopping day of the year, right through the Depression, was not the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, as it is now, but Holy Saturday.

The song Fred Astaire sings while chapeau shopping in Easter Parade is called "Happy Easter," and on his radio show on April 17, 1949, Easter Sunday, Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone sing this song while they take their listeners on an imaginary Easter parade up Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, touting the movie. The following year, 1950, Gene Autry released his hit, "Here Comes Peter Cottontail," and the American suburban Easter was firmly in place, planted by Hollywood. The "bunny trail" was the backyard.

The whole family may not get new Easter clothes or hats anymore, but the candy makers still do a brisk business, and these two movies remain to tell us a lot about how things used to be.

 

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star., available online at Amazon, from CreateSpace and the author. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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