This Quarter in Film History

Because the shortsighted Hollywood film industry did not want anything to do with the new invention called television in the mid-1940s, the radio industry took over the burgeoning medium. New York became the dominant center for the first decade of TV, as the radio studios were located in Manhattan.

In many American homes in the early 20th century hung a framed poem by Rudyard Kipling, If, which begins with “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…” and ends with “You’ll be a Man, my son.”

Where were you in ’62?” was the tagline for American Graffiti when it was released 39 years ago, in August 1973.

Mae West has become a folklore icon as well as a movie star. Anecdotes abound about her on- and off-screen behavior, and her quips fill an entire page in most books of famous quotations. But she has never really been accepted as a serious cultural figure.

There are no shortage of Huds in high places in our society today.

From Here to Eternity (1953) is a transitional film in the American motion picture industry. It is probably the first major Hollywood release to express anti-establishment themes and the new morality.

The early silent film Traffic in Souls (1913) remains just as timely as when it was released 100 years ago. The sex slave trade today operates with the same methodology as depicted in this exposé of forced prostitution based on the Rockefeller White Slavery Report of 1910.