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Nick Clooney discusses movies that changed us
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
WARREN
Nick Clooney is a man of many accomplishments, but he knows how most will remember him.
At his lecture at Packard Music Hall on Wednesday, he told the 600 or so assembled what his obituary will read:
“Nick Clooney ... comma ... brother of singer Rosemary Cloney ... comma ... and father of Oscar-winning actor George Clooney ... comma ... died.”
It was a hilarious start to a warm speech.
Clooney has been a broadcast and print journalist, an educator, actor and author. Most recently, he has become known as a human-rights activist who traveled to Darfur, Sudan, with his son in 2006 to make a documentary about the troubled African nation.
George Clooney is continuing the cause. The actor, in fact, returned Tuesday from another mission to Sudan. He appeared on NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday morning and testified before a congressional committee later in the day.
Nick Clooney is a movie expert, and he focused on the films that have had a lasting effect on society in his Packard speech, which was part of the Trumbull Town Hall series. He used his 2002 book “The Movies that Changed Us: Reflections on the Screen” as a guide, punctuating his address with film clips and some humorous anecdotes.
He recalled 1930s filmmaker Leo McCarey, who told him over dinner that his film “Make Way for Tomorrow” was the impetus for the creation of Social Security. The film depicted an elderly couple who had to sell everything and part company because of their poverty. Clooney believed him until he discovered that the film was released in 1937 — two years after Social Security was created.
One movie that did change America, but not for the better, was D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist-but-epic 1915 silent drama that glorified Southern white Ku Klux Klansmen. Griffith’s genius was in making films that moved people, but he set back race relations by at least a generation, said Clooney.
Many of the films Clooney discussed were from the 1930s, a time of ground-breaking portrayals of women that soon would be squelched. He showed a clip of “Morocco” (1930), in which German actress Marlene Dietrich, dressed in a tuxedo, takes a flower from a woman and then passionately kisses her. “That’s a scene that you wouldn’t see again for decades, until Madonna and Britney Spears,” said Clooney.
What is Clooney’s favorite film of all time? “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946). Samuel Goldwyn’s post-World War II film looked at soldiers coming home as damaged men in a changed country. It realistically reflected what was happening at that moment in time.