What hadn’t changed was the fairly sexless notion of marriage. Even as grounded a couple as Rob and Laura Petrie slept in separate beds. Without a doubt, the most amorous couple on television was Gomez and Morticia Addams (those sublime canoodlers, John Astin and Carolyn Jones). The makers of that underrated sitcom (whose first season has just come out on DVD) seemed to realize that, in the context of the TV of its time, the fact that Gomez and Morticia were a married couple still turned on by one another was considered as freaky as the rest of their home sweet horror show.

You had to take romance where you got it in 60’s TV. The Diana Rigg–Patrick Macnee seasons of The Avengers were one long duet of sophisticated sublimation. But for the whole megillah—love at first sight to making whoopee to washing dishes and baby clothes—you have to turn to Get Smart.

Luckily, you can turn to it in an absolutely gorgeous new DVD set that collects all five seasons, from 1965 to 1970, on 25 discs. The set is available only from the Time-Life Web site until next fall, when it will be available in retail. At nearly 200 bucks, it’s an investment. It’s also a model of how to do a reissue. A Get Smart collection should feel like a sleek gadget, and the handsome presentation, bounteous extras and crisp remastering accomplish just that.

Created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, Get Smart was a parody of the spy craze generated by the James Bond movies and the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. On Get Smart, the suaveness of spies was filtered through Mad magazine parody and borscht-belt shtick. Its hero is Maxwell Smart, Control Agent 86 (the peerless Don Adams), an everyputz trying to be the hero we all fantasize being. Manny Farber memorably wrote that Adams’ performance was “at once lower (the voice of a canary spieler), faster (the razzing one-liner of the night-clubs), and higher (originally geared to fewer people) than anything except the more inspired ad-libs of the Allen-Paar-Carson-Griffin variety shows.” It’s no wonder that Adams’ overly articulated, pinging nasality spawned more catchphrases than perhaps any other show of its era.

Part of the genius of Get Smart was that the spy biz was just as quotidian as any other 9-to-5 job. The good-guy (read: U.S.) spy organization Control is a world of time clocks, insurance plans, even a lame orchestra that plays company do’s. And Max’s co-workers are played by an ingratiating group of second bananas—Dave Ketchum, his head popping out of sofas and lockers, as Agent 13; Robert Karvelas as the glum-faced schlep Larabee. The blandness of these nut-brain wage slaves is its own form of eccentricity. Even the most unusual among them, Dick Gautier’s Hymie the Robot, is really just a nice Jewish cyber-sapien. And presiding over them all was Ed Platt’s weary Chief, a baggy-eyed bloodhound of a boss who looks like he could do with equal doses of Geritol and Tums.

But beyond a crew that makes you suspect Langley has become part of the Catskills, beyond the villains with groaningly hilarious names like Abe Fu Yung, beyond the catchphrases and gadgets, like Max’s shoe phone and the Cone of Silence, the five seasons of Get Smart are the extended story of Max’s wooing, winning and marrying Barbara Feldon’s 99.

There are no accurate numbers for how many American men fell in love with Barbara Feldon watching Get Smart (a blissful epidemic memorably spoofed on an episode of Mad About You). And those of us who are crazy for her find her appeal so self-evident that it’s likely never been articulated.

Of course, with those big, bashful eyes and ripe, rounded cheekbones, Ms. Feldon was gorgeous (still is, as you can see from Don Adams’ 2005 memorial service, included here). She’s one of those rare performers who is at her funniest when she is at her most beautiful. Ms. Feldon’s purr marks her as an American cousin to Joan Greenwood. But where Greenwood’s voice betrayed every scheme she was hatching, Ms. Feldon’s tones are that of an eager innocent: 99 sees Max’s every bit of bonehead confidence, every instance of his bumbling, and still adores him.

We have gotten so used to hearing about the male gaze that we have neglected the power of the female gaze. Over the five seasons of the show, Ms. Feldon’s gaze told a story of someone who looks at her mate and loves him for what he is, and who is also able to let him look at her and see himself loved as the man he wants to be. (And when he comes close to losing her, Adams reveals just how much he needs her gaze.) No one has ever made adoration funny and sweet in the way that Ms. Feldon did. She recorded voice introductions for every single episode on this set, every extra. And what you hear is the gratitude of someone who was part of something that has made so many people think of her so fondly. It’s we who should be grateful to her.

Huston’s film of Carson McCullers’ 1941 novella was shot, by cinematographer Aldo Tonti, in an almost-sepia tinting that added a golden wash to the film. Warners allowed the film to be shown that way for one week in 50 first-run theaters before those prints were pulled and straight Technicolor ones substituted. The film hasn’t been seen in that form since, though, as Huston made clear in his autobiography, An Open Book, he always hoped it would be.

There’s really no reason for the tinting beyond pure aesthetics, a visual play on the title. It looks beautiful, but it adds to the already distanced effect of the movie. The setting is a Georgia Army base a year or two after the Second World War. A late scene of soldiers attending a base boxing match is a shock: Up until that moment, it seems there’s been barely more than half a dozen people in the picture.

Reflections in a Golden Eye feels abstracted (both dramatically and narratively) and only fitfully alive. What carries the film is Huston’s intelligence and craftsmanship and the willingness of the actors to kick against the mainstream, to do something not just unexpected but downright strange. Reflections has a whiff of the excitement that can happen when a group of artists are walking, sometimes precariously, on the edge.

The adaptation, by the Scottish novelist Chapman Mortimer and Huston’s frequent collaborator Gladys Hill, Freudianizes McCullers’ Southern Gothic so that we can draw lines from the characters’ most bizarre behavior to its root causes. When we find out that Alison Langdon (Julie Harris), the emotionally fragile wife of Lt. Col. Morris Langdon (Brian Keith), cut off her nipples with garden shears, we’re meant to see it as the manifestation of her breakdown after the death of her infant daughter. (She destroys the symbol of her motherhood, the part of her that nourished her child, and so on.) Marlon Brando’s closeted homosexual, Major Weldon Penderton, is used as an emblem of the repression that leads to psychosis and violence.

In contrast, his wife Leonora, played by Elizabeth Taylor, is meant to be in touch with her sexuality (she’s having an affair with Langdon). There are also private fetish objects, a whipping, voyeurism, the Langdons’ flamboyantly gay Filipino house boy (Zorro David), even nude horseback riding—the whole picture sometimes seems conceived as a catalog balancing healthy (i.e., open) sexuality with unhealthy (i.e., closeted) sexuality.

Reduced to those explanations, Reflections in a Golden Eye is ample proof of the infantilizing effect that Freud had on American movies: the neat belief that everything can be reduced to a plausible explanation. It’s no wonder that Hollywood embraced Freud in the 50’s: He allowed mainstream movies to seem adult while avoiding any of the ambiguity that the studios discouraged.

And yet for all that, there is a basic strangeness here, probably rooted in McCullers’ Southern Gothic approach, that Chapman and Hill’s adaptation cannot dissipate. As in Huston’s film of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, the director doesn’t try to make a grotesque world any less grotesque than it is. This may be the Williams-Capote South of the late 50’s and 60’s, a kind of antebellum Hubert’s Flea Circus of the bizarre and repressed, but it’s not a put-on, and Huston, whether on purpose or because he hadn’t sorted it out in his own head, keeps its meanings teasingly out of reach.

You can’t say that Huston, a director who both reveled in and explored the madness of masculinity, understands homosexuality. As in Bertolucci’s The Conformist three years later, Reflections uses repressed homosexuality as a symbol of incipient tyranny and violence, and the idea is a wheeze. But you don’t have to buy that equation to make the destructiveness of sexual repression dramatically believable, and no director hidebound by traditional concepts of masculinity would have given Brando the free hand he has here.

It may seem strange talking of Brando’s free hand when he’s playing a character so tightly wound and brutally reined in. Brando immerses himself so completely in Major Penderton that he closes down some of his own resources as an actor. You never see all the way into this man. But when Brando’s Penderton preens before a mirror, or shows us his ungainly backside bobbing up and down on a horse, or sits with a kind of grotesque coquetry in his darkened bedroom awaiting a visit from a young soldier he’s infatuated with (a nearly mute Robert Forster, in his movie debut), you’re seeing an actor for whom vanity is an utterly alien concept, and one for whom taking a risk is simply a matter of what being an actor is about.

It’s worth remembering as you watch this amazing performance that in 1967, the vulgar spectacle of publicity passing as critical judgment—a phenomenon that by now has almost completely overtaken arts journalism in America—had deemed Brando washed up, a caricature of his former greatness. His triumphs in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris (for my money, the greatest performance ever put on film) were only four and five years away. For all the attempts to sell Elizabeth Taylor as the most elegant of stars, she has always seemed most herself as a bawd. She faked that in the gussied-up bitchery of that crummy “classic” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and dove into it whole hog in the Edna O’Brien–scripted X, Y & Zee. She’s far from the beautiful child of National Velvet here, but she wins you over in a different way. Everything about her Leonora, from the voluptuous build to the voluptuous laugh, conveys sensuality and impolite appetite. In some ways, she has never seemed as at ease with herself as she does here.

The best performance in the movie, and still an unheralded one, is Brian Keith, who is so casual, so relaxed that he seems one of those rare actors incapable of forcing a thing. His Lt. Col. Langdon is a straightforward man doing his best to keep his head in a situation outside anything he’s experienced. And though he’s physically suited to Leonora, he loves his wife, and grieves for the way she has mentally gone away from him. Keith’s performance is so clear, his emotions so genuine in a movie that, even at its best, feels willfully oblique, the audience forms a special bond with him. He reminds you of just how deep the tragedy of an ordinary man can go.

Huston’s film of Carson McCullers’ 1941 novella was shot, by cinematographer Aldo Tonti, in an almost-sepia tinting that added a golden wash to the film. Warners allowed the film to be shown that way for one week in 50 first-run theaters before those prints were pulled and straight Technicolor ones substituted. The film hasn’t been seen in that form since, though, as Huston made clear in his autobiography, An Open Book, he always hoped it would be.

There’s really no reason for the tinting beyond pure aesthetics, a visual play on the title. It looks beautiful, but it adds to the already distanced effect of the movie. The setting is a Georgia Army base a year or two after the Second World War. A late scene of soldiers attending a base boxing match is a shock: Up until that moment, it seems there’s been barely more than half a dozen people in the picture.

Reflections in a Golden Eye feels abstracted (both dramatically and narratively) and only fitfully alive. What carries the film is Huston’s intelligence and craftsmanship and the willingness of the actors to kick against the mainstream, to do something not just unexpected but downright strange. Reflections has a whiff of the excitement that can happen when a group of artists are walking, sometimes precariously, on the edge.

The adaptation, by the Scottish novelist Chapman Mortimer and Huston’s frequent collaborator Gladys Hill, Freudianizes McCullers’ Southern Gothic so that we can draw lines from the characters’ most bizarre behavior to its root causes. When we find out that Alison Langdon (Julie Harris), the emotionally fragile wife of Lt. Col. Morris Langdon (Brian Keith), cut off her nipples with garden shears, we’re meant to see it as the manifestation of her breakdown after the death of her infant daughter. (She destroys the symbol of her motherhood, the part of her that nourished her child, and so on.) Marlon Brando’s closeted homosexual, Major Weldon Penderton, is used as an emblem of the repression that leads to psychosis and violence.

In contrast, his wife Leonora, played by Elizabeth Taylor, is meant to be in touch with her sexuality (she’s having an affair with Langdon). There are also private fetish objects, a whipping, voyeurism, the Langdons’ flamboyantly gay Filipino house boy (Zorro David), even nude horseback riding—the whole picture sometimes seems conceived as a catalog balancing healthy (i.e., open) sexuality with unhealthy (i.e., closeted) sexuality.

Reduced to those explanations, Reflections in a Golden Eye is ample proof of the infantilizing effect that Freud had on American movies: the neat belief that everything can be reduced to a plausible explanation. It’s no wonder that Hollywood embraced Freud in the 50’s: He allowed mainstream movies to seem adult while avoiding any of the ambiguity that the studios discouraged.

And yet for all that, there is a basic strangeness here, probably rooted in McCullers’ Southern Gothic approach, that Chapman and Hill’s adaptation cannot dissipate. As in Huston’s film of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, the director doesn’t try to make a grotesque world any less grotesque than it is. This may be the Williams-Capote South of the late 50’s and 60’s, a kind of antebellum Hubert’s Flea Circus of the bizarre and repressed, but it’s not a put-on, and Huston, whether on purpose or because he hadn’t sorted it out in his own head, keeps its meanings teasingly out of reach.

You can’t say that Huston, a director who both reveled in and explored the madness of masculinity, understands homosexuality. As in Bertolucci’s The Conformist three years later, Reflections uses repressed homosexuality as a symbol of incipient tyranny and violence, and the idea is a wheeze. But you don’t have to buy that equation to make the destructiveness of sexual repression dramatically believable, and no director hidebound by traditional concepts of masculinity would have given Brando the free hand he has here.

It may seem strange talking of Brando’s free hand when he’s playing a character so tightly wound and brutally reined in. Brando immerses himself so completely in Major Penderton that he closes down some of his own resources as an actor. You never see all the way into this man. But when Brando’s Penderton preens before a mirror, or shows us his ungainly backside bobbing up and down on a horse, or sits with a kind of grotesque coquetry in his darkened bedroom awaiting a visit from a young soldier he’s infatuated with (a nearly mute Robert Forster, in his movie debut), you’re seeing an actor for whom vanity is an utterly alien concept, and one for whom taking a risk is simply a matter of what being an actor is about.

It’s worth remembering as you watch this amazing performance that in 1967, the vulgar spectacle of publicity passing as critical judgment—a phenomenon that by now has almost completely overtaken arts journalism in America—had deemed Brando washed up, a caricature of his former greatness. His triumphs in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris (for my money, the greatest performance ever put on film) were only four and five years away. For all the attempts to sell Elizabeth Taylor as the most elegant of stars, she has always seemed most herself as a bawd. She faked that in the gussied-up bitchery of that crummy “classic” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and dove into it whole hog in the Edna O’Brien–scripted X, Y & Zee. She’s far from the beautiful child of National Velvet here, but she wins you over in a different way. Everything about her Leonora, from the voluptuous build to the voluptuous laugh, conveys sensuality and impolite appetite. In some ways, she has never seemed as at ease with herself as she does here.

The best performance in the movie, and still an unheralded one, is Brian Keith, who is so casual, so relaxed that he seems one of those rare actors incapable of forcing a thing. His Lt. Col. Langdon is a straightforward man doing his best to keep his head in a situation outside anything he’s experienced. And though he’s physically suited to Leonora, he loves his wife, and grieves for the way she has mentally gone away from him. Keith’s performance is so clear, his emotions so genuine in a movie that, even at its best, feels willfully oblique, the audience forms a special bond with him. He reminds you of just how deep the tragedy of an ordinary man can go.

Mr. Beatty spent more than a decade trying to bring the story of John Reed (1887-1920) to the screen. Born and raised comfortably in Portland, Ore., and educated at Harvard, Reed was gradually radicalized while searching for thrills in Europe and Greenwich Village. He reported on the Paterson strike of 1913 for The Masses, a socialist monthly, and the more mainstream Metropolitan sent him to cover the Mexican Revolution (he wore a new yellow corduroy suit). None of this seemed to interest Mr. Beatty, who begins his story in 1915 with Reed’s first encounter—a frenzied discussion about U.S. involvement in World War I—with Louise Bryant, a married Portland dilettante with journalistic aspirations and burgeoning leftist ideals.

Mr. Beatty plays the part as if Reed was, well, a Warren Beatty character: a little dumbstruck yet determined, used to having things (and women) come his way but striving for the things (and women) that won’t. There’s some bumbling light slapstick as Reed prepares to move on Bryant, and the sociological dogma has the laughable sound of something Cary Grant would spout in Bringing Up Baby. Diane Keaton brings something more than vulnerable beauty and palpable intelligence to Louise Bryant—she brings the ghost of Annie Hall, another free spirit whose charm, insecurities and career ambition both seduced and flummoxed the man in her life.

Bryant follows Reed to New York City, determined to make her mark as an intellectual and a liberated woman. But she feels adrift and unappreciated amidst the Greenwich Village gang—and who wouldn’t when it’s Eugene O’Neill (a remarkably understated Jack Nicholson), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, in an Oscar-winning role), Max Eastman, Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz and Sherwood Anderson at the dinner parties? So Reed takes her away to Provincetown, but it’s the same story there, with nicer beaches. This is where Ms. Keaton’s thwarted expressions break your heart: All the men want Bryant to be their muse, and she wants to be a New Woman, taken seriously as she chews over social theories and poses for nude portraits.

They marry, move to Croton-on-Hudson; he travels around the world, covering labor disputes, and wears out his one kidney. If the soothing score that accompanies their home life is any indication, monogamy comes naturally. But the two nonetheless pursue infidelities, seemingly out of some vestigial sense of duty toward progressivism. Along with Bryant’s journalistic struggles—she’d just as soon write about the Armory Show of 1913 as about striking workers—their clumsy free-love experiments are an early sign that the conflicts between ideals and instincts are going to pile up. They go to Russia just in time for the October Revolution, where Reed would gather material for Ten Days That Shook the World, the book that would make his career. There’s a jolt of excitement in seeing the couple at the center of such a kairotic moment, bounding up the steps of the Winter Palace, sitting with Lenin. But even this is subordinate to their romance—Saint Petersburg burns bright with candles, the couple marches huddled together wrapped in coats and ushankas, and “The Internationale” takes on the feel of a Christmas carol. It’s as if the couple’s marriage will flourish as the masses ascend.

The second half of Reds dashes that idea, as Reed and Bryant challenge each other’s priorities and find increasingly scarce triumphs only in bedrooms and at typewriters—stolen moments on the smallest of scales. Reed returns alone to Russia and finds the country’s dream of a socialist utopia turned sour, but doesn’t know when to fold his cards. “If you walk out on it now, what’s your whole life meant?” he asks Emma Goldberg, who would go on to write My Disillusionment in Russia.

Soon the Russian bureaucracy is too much even for Reed. He’s jailed while trying to cross the border, and Bryant sets out to find him. When cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s camera finally opens up to outdoor vistas, it’s not to convey the breathless, widescreen majesties of Lawrence of Arabia but the damning plains of snow and ice that separate the lovers.

If Mr. Beatty’s reputedly leftist Reds is a voice of dissent, it is—surprisingly—dissent from the idea that personal travails are secondary to collective struggles. Reds chronicles personal lives being trampled not only by ideals, but by ideals that will be betrayed. This double tragedy is, by the end, drawn on the faces of Ms. Keaton and Mr. Beatty—most notably when Bryant, visiting the dying Reed in a Russian hospital, looks into the face of a young child and is reminded of the family they never got around to having.

The postscript—unmentioned by the film—is grimmer still. Bryant collapsed at Reed’s funeral (“I heard the first shovel of earth go rolling down and then something snapped in my brain”) and then was plagued by alcoholism and mental illness. She died alone in Paris in January 1936, eight months before Stalin instituted the Great Purge and took absolute control of Russia.

Mr. Beatty spent more than a decade trying to bring the story of John Reed (1887-1920) to the screen. Born and raised comfortably in Portland, Ore., and educated at Harvard, Reed was gradually radicalized while searching for thrills in Europe and Greenwich Village. He reported on the Paterson strike of 1913 for The Masses, a socialist monthly, and the more mainstream Metropolitan sent him to cover the Mexican Revolution (he wore a new yellow corduroy suit). None of this seemed to interest Mr. Beatty, who begins his story in 1915 with Reed’s first encounter—a frenzied discussion about U.S. involvement in World War I—with Louise Bryant, a married Portland dilettante with journalistic aspirations and burgeoning leftist ideals.

Mr. Beatty plays the part as if Reed was, well, a Warren Beatty character: a little dumbstruck yet determined, used to having things (and women) come his way but striving for the things (and women) that won’t. There’s some bumbling light slapstick as Reed prepares to move on Bryant, and the sociological dogma has the laughable sound of something Cary Grant would spout in Bringing Up Baby. Diane Keaton brings something more than vulnerable beauty and palpable intelligence to Louise Bryant—she brings the ghost of Annie Hall, another free spirit whose charm, insecurities and career ambition both seduced and flummoxed the man in her life.

Bryant follows Reed to New York City, determined to make her mark as an intellectual and a liberated woman. But she feels adrift and unappreciated amidst the Greenwich Village gang—and who wouldn’t when it’s Eugene O’Neill (a remarkably understated Jack Nicholson), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, in an Oscar-winning role), Max Eastman, Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz and Sherwood Anderson at the dinner parties? So Reed takes her away to Provincetown, but it’s the same story there, with nicer beaches. This is where Ms. Keaton’s thwarted expressions break your heart: All the men want Bryant to be their muse, and she wants to be a New Woman, taken seriously as she chews over social theories and poses for nude portraits.

They marry, move to Croton-on-Hudson; he travels around the world, covering labor disputes, and wears out his one kidney. If the soothing score that accompanies their home life is any indication, monogamy comes naturally. But the two nonetheless pursue infidelities, seemingly out of some vestigial sense of duty toward progressivism. Along with Bryant’s journalistic struggles—she’d just as soon write about the Armory Show of 1913 as about striking workers—their clumsy free-love experiments are an early sign that the conflicts between ideals and instincts are going to pile up. They go to Russia just in time for the October Revolution, where Reed would gather material for Ten Days That Shook the World, the book that would make his career. There’s a jolt of excitement in seeing the couple at the center of such a kairotic moment, bounding up the steps of the Winter Palace, sitting with Lenin. But even this is subordinate to their romance—Saint Petersburg burns bright with candles, the couple marches huddled together wrapped in coats and ushankas, and “The Internationale” takes on the feel of a Christmas carol. It’s as if the couple’s marriage will flourish as the masses ascend.

The second half of Reds dashes that idea, as Reed and Bryant challenge each other’s priorities and find increasingly scarce triumphs only in bedrooms and at typewriters—stolen moments on the smallest of scales. Reed returns alone to Russia and finds the country’s dream of a socialist utopia turned sour, but doesn’t know when to fold his cards. “If you walk out on it now, what’s your whole life meant?” he asks Emma Goldberg, who would go on to write My Disillusionment in Russia.

Soon the Russian bureaucracy is too much even for Reed. He’s jailed while trying to cross the border, and Bryant sets out to find him. When cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s camera finally opens up to outdoor vistas, it’s not to convey the breathless, widescreen majesties of Lawrence of Arabia but the damning plains of snow and ice that separate the lovers.

If Mr. Beatty’s reputedly leftist Reds is a voice of dissent, it is—surprisingly—dissent from the idea that personal travails are secondary to collective struggles. Reds chronicles personal lives being trampled not only by ideals, but by ideals that will be betrayed. This double tragedy is, by the end, drawn on the faces of Ms. Keaton and Mr. Beatty—most notably when Bryant, visiting the dying Reed in a Russian hospital, looks into the face of a young child and is reminded of the family they never got around to having.

The postscript—unmentioned by the film—is grimmer still. Bryant collapsed at Reed’s funeral (“I heard the first shovel of earth go rolling down and then something snapped in my brain”) and then was plagued by alcoholism and mental illness. She died alone in Paris in January 1936, eight months before Stalin instituted the Great Purge and took absolute control of Russia.

“We saw the Fellini film,” he begins, and forget the blather about La Strada being a great film for its use of “negative imagery” (whatever that is). The cineaste showboat’s complaints about self-indulgence, about the lack of a cohesive structure, about Fellini not knowing what he wants to say, sums up much of the director’s career.

There are few great filmmakers—and Fellini certainly was one—who went so wrong so resolutely. Through Nights of Cabiria in 1957, Fellini built on the neorealism that Vittorio De Sica had brought to Italian cinema, mixing it with a lyrical and sometimes whimsical strain that never devolved into sentimentality or into the ickiness of what’s come to be called magic realism.

It all changed with 1960’s La Dolce Vita, one of those enormous critical and commercial successes that, as 2001 did with Stanley Kubrick, set a director on a path that negates everything that had been good about his work. Everyone remembers the pleasure of watching Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg gambol in the Trevi Fountain. Unfortunately, that interlude is surrounded by three hours of moralizing about the spiritual emptiness of modern life—as if we should be shocked that the rich indulge in casual sex and shallow luxury. As with the decadence that Antonioni would show in Blow-Up, what we’re meant to view as bad actually looks like a lot of fun. (If rolling around with a naked, teenage Jane Birkin is the path to hell, I know a lot of us who are going to be stocking up on sunblock.) In Pietro Germi’s great 1961 comedy Divorce, Italian Style, the inhabitants of a rural Italian town flock to a showing of La Dolce Vita and, as Germi shows us their shocked and envious faces taking in all this moral corruption, he speaks the truth about Fellini’s opus: It’s a movie for hicks.

La Dolce Vita is the type of success that kills a director. After it, Fellini was a ringmaster collecting his grotesques, the very lack of structure and discipline in his movies acclaimed by his adherents as the fulfillment of a phantasmagoric vision. The empty-headedness, as in 8 1¼2, could be fun to let wash over you. Hardened into habit, whimsy becomes leaden, and that makes later films like City of Women and Ginger and Fred nearly unwatchable.

Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord, just released by Criterion on one of its typical—i.e., immaculately restored—DVD’s, has many of the same problems other Fellini films do: The picture is populated by caricatures instead of characters; there’s that damn controlling metaphor of life as a carnival; the episodes are strung together without any sense of dramatic structure or pacing. If you took away the “Felliniesque” touches, what you’d be left with would be terribly sentimental. Inevitably, the argument has been made that Fellini’s usual mishegas is here a way of emphasizing how imagination affects memory. It’s not; it’s habit. But in Amarcord, for once, Fellini’s self-indulgence doesn’t overtake the movie, doesn’t wear you out. You can see everything that’s wrong with the picture and it remains a pleasure to watch.

The title, a neologism invented by Fellini, according to Sam Rohdie’s accompanying essay, translates roughly as “I Remember.” Based on Fellini’s reminiscences of growing up in Rimini, Amarcord follows a year in the life of a seaside town, from spring to spring, in the late 30’s, when Mussolini was in power and Italy had made common cause with Germany. The poster for the movie showed the characters in tableaux staring out at the viewer. Watching it is like seeing them step out of tableaux for an episode, then fade into the background.

Some of the more promising characters—like the fat schoolboy hopelessly in love with a lithe, pampered classmate, or the mama’s boy who, in his teens, already has the dark circles under his eyes of a haggard middle-aged man—don’t get enough screen time. And there’s far too much of others, like the town idiot who spins endless tall tales. Although his big episode, a story of sneaking into a sultan’s harem for the night, is at least visually amusing: As the idiot plays his flute, the concubines rise from their bed one by one in what looks like Busby Berkley directing The Arabian Nights.

Some characters immediately call up the worst in Fellini, like Volpina, the town nympho, who licks her lips and leers into the camera. Fellini didn’t do great by women. There’s the inevitable huge-breasted woman who bares them to the camera. Magali Noël has the role of Gradisca, the town beauty, and her twitching backside gets as much screen time as the rest of her.

Perhaps Amarcord works because, in mining his memories of growing up, Fellini connects with the adolescent impulse to make fun of everything, to jeer at authority. The town lawyer, a friendly, pleasant fellow, turns up to relate the town’s ancient history to us—and gets a raspberry or a snowball in the head for his troubles. Those missiles represent the best timing in the film, a schoolboy’s response to the endless crap our teachers always bored us with. And what should be a groaningly loud section—a family dinner that erupts into chaos—instead plays as explosively funny, with the father (Armando Brancia) essaying the type of slow burn we might have enjoyed had Edgar Kennedy been Italian.

It all blows away as easily as the dandelion puffballs that float through the air at the beginning and end of the movie. Fellini’s stand-in (Bruno Zanin) has no more weight than any other character, and he certainly shows nothing of the artist in utero. And though individual scenes are touching—as in the tender solicitude of a wife caring for her husband after an interrogation by the local Fascists—Fellini’s decision to treat the Fascists as no more than clowns just seems part of his inability to get outside his own head. (Even clowns can cause destruction and terror.)

Finally, though, the picture’s good nature wins you over. It’s like spending time with a wearisome old relative who, for once, recovers the charm that used to make his stories a pleasure instead of a trial. Fellini may have left the church behind decades before Amarcord, but this time out, he earned an indulgence.

“We saw the Fellini film,” he begins, and forget the blather about La Strada being a great film for its use of “negative imagery” (whatever that is). The cineaste showboat’s complaints about self-indulgence, about the lack of a cohesive structure, about Fellini not knowing what he wants to say, sums up much of the director’s career.

There are few great filmmakers—and Fellini certainly was one—who went so wrong so resolutely. Through Nights of Cabiria in 1957, Fellini built on the neorealism that Vittorio De Sica had brought to Italian cinema, mixing it with a lyrical and sometimes whimsical strain that never devolved into sentimentality or into the ickiness of what’s come to be called magic realism.

It all changed with 1960’s La Dolce Vita, one of those enormous critical and commercial successes that, as 2001 did with Stanley Kubrick, set a director on a path that negates everything that had been good about his work. Everyone remembers the pleasure of watching Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg gambol in the Trevi Fountain. Unfortunately, that interlude is surrounded by three hours of moralizing about the spiritual emptiness of modern life—as if we should be shocked that the rich indulge in casual sex and shallow luxury. As with the decadence that Antonioni would show in Blow-Up, what we’re meant to view as bad actually looks like a lot of fun. (If rolling around with a naked, teenage Jane Birkin is the path to hell, I know a lot of us who are going to be stocking up on sunblock.) In Pietro Germi’s great 1961 comedy Divorce, Italian Style, the inhabitants of a rural Italian town flock to a showing of La Dolce Vita and, as Germi shows us their shocked and envious faces taking in all this moral corruption, he speaks the truth about Fellini’s opus: It’s a movie for hicks.

La Dolce Vita is the type of success that kills a director. After it, Fellini was a ringmaster collecting his grotesques, the very lack of structure and discipline in his movies acclaimed by his adherents as the fulfillment of a phantasmagoric vision. The empty-headedness, as in 8 1¼2, could be fun to let wash over you. Hardened into habit, whimsy becomes leaden, and that makes later films like City of Women and Ginger and Fred nearly unwatchable.

Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord, just released by Criterion on one of its typical—i.e., immaculately restored—DVD’s, has many of the same problems other Fellini films do: The picture is populated by caricatures instead of characters; there’s that damn controlling metaphor of life as a carnival; the episodes are strung together without any sense of dramatic structure or pacing. If you took away the “Felliniesque” touches, what you’d be left with would be terribly sentimental. Inevitably, the argument has been made that Fellini’s usual mishegas is here a way of emphasizing how imagination affects memory. It’s not; it’s habit. But in Amarcord, for once, Fellini’s self-indulgence doesn’t overtake the movie, doesn’t wear you out. You can see everything that’s wrong with the picture and it remains a pleasure to watch.

The title, a neologism invented by Fellini, according to Sam Rohdie’s accompanying essay, translates roughly as “I Remember.” Based on Fellini’s reminiscences of growing up in Rimini, Amarcord follows a year in the life of a seaside town, from spring to spring, in the late 30’s, when Mussolini was in power and Italy had made common cause with Germany. The poster for the movie showed the characters in tableaux staring out at the viewer. Watching it is like seeing them step out of tableaux for an episode, then fade into the background.

Some of the more promising characters—like the fat schoolboy hopelessly in love with a lithe, pampered classmate, or the mama’s boy who, in his teens, already has the dark circles under his eyes of a haggard middle-aged man—don’t get enough screen time. And there’s far too much of others, like the town idiot who spins endless tall tales. Although his big episode, a story of sneaking into a sultan’s harem for the night, is at least visually amusing: As the idiot plays his flute, the concubines rise from their bed one by one in what looks like Busby Berkley directing The Arabian Nights.

Some characters immediately call up the worst in Fellini, like Volpina, the town nympho, who licks her lips and leers into the camera. Fellini didn’t do great by women. There’s the inevitable huge-breasted woman who bares them to the camera. Magali Noël has the role of Gradisca, the town beauty, and her twitching backside gets as much screen time as the rest of her.

Perhaps Amarcord works because, in mining his memories of growing up, Fellini connects with the adolescent impulse to make fun of everything, to jeer at authority. The town lawyer, a friendly, pleasant fellow, turns up to relate the town’s ancient history to us—and gets a raspberry or a snowball in the head for his troubles. Those missiles represent the best timing in the film, a schoolboy’s response to the endless crap our teachers always bored us with. And what should be a groaningly loud section—a family dinner that erupts into chaos—instead plays as explosively funny, with the father (Armando Brancia) essaying the type of slow burn we might have enjoyed had Edgar Kennedy been Italian.

It all blows away as easily as the dandelion puffballs that float through the air at the beginning and end of the movie. Fellini’s stand-in (Bruno Zanin) has no more weight than any other character, and he certainly shows nothing of the artist in utero. And though individual scenes are touching—as in the tender solicitude of a wife caring for her husband after an interrogation by the local Fascists—Fellini’s decision to treat the Fascists as no more than clowns just seems part of his inability to get outside his own head. (Even clowns can cause destruction and terror.)

Finally, though, the picture’s good nature wins you over. It’s like spending time with a wearisome old relative who, for once, recovers the charm that used to make his stories a pleasure instead of a trial. Fellini may have left the church behind decades before Amarcord, but this time out, he earned an indulgence.

As femme fatales go, Stanwyck’s Phyllis isn’t a ravishment, like Ava Gardner in The Killers, and she doesn’t have the immaculate, serene composure that Jane Greer possesses in Out of the Past, the quality that makes Greer seem so totally evil she’s pure.

If you were going to compare Phyllis to any other character it might be Stella Dallas, whom Stanwyck played in the 1937 film of the same name. Phyllis is the nightmare version of Stella, Stella as she might be after realizing that kindheartedness and self-sacrifice weren’t going to get her anywhere, Stella with nothing left but the desire for a better life, and no way to achieve that except to be hard and grasping and mean. Phyllis even has a stepdaughter about the same age as the beloved daughter that Stella sacrifices everything for. But as the two sit playing Chinese checkers, each bored and despising the other, all it takes is one glance from Phyllis to tell you that she’d like nothing more than to choke the life out of the girl—if only she could be sure it wouldn’t chip her nails.

Phyllis’ attempts at middle-class respectability aren’t the flossy disasters that Stella’s are. But at the same time, she’s garish and tawdry, too contemptuous of that respectability to make more than a half-hearted stab at it. And when you see her cranky, boozing lump of a husband, you know why, and why she wants him dead.

As Phyllis, who hates her older husband and convinces Neff, an insurance agent with the policy that could make them both rich, to help her do away with him, Stanwyck gives the most modulated of all femme fatale performances. We’ve become used to thinking of femme fatales as smoldering sexpots, driven as much by lust as greed. But despite the lacquered platinum pageboy that Stanwyck wears, the anklet that adorns her killer gams (a come-on for the jewels waiting above), Phyllis is almost asexual. She uses sex to get what she wants, but she’s not turned on by it. She’s too intent on her endgame to give herself over to the abandon that sexual pleasure depends on. Besides, she doesn’t have any earthly use for other people.

Phyllis doesn’t stir the desire in us that she stirs in her fall guy. And possibly that’s because Stanwyck is too complex an actress to simply exude desirability. Whether she’s playing characters who give themselves over to sexuality, or characters who hold themselves back, Stanwyck enacts all the conflicting feelings that sexual desire stirs up. It’s as if she instinctively annotates each emotion as it passes through her. And so, in Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (probably his best picture), the helpless abandon that Stanwyck’s young missionary discovers in the pleasure dome of a Chinese warlord is as fully explored in all its contradictions as the regret that comes over the con woman she plays in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (the greatest of all American romantic comedies), when her sexual game-playing leaves her feeling as if she’d cheated herself.

As Stanwyck plays Phyllis, you can detect a sneer somewhere deep (and sometimes not so deep) beneath the surface of each expression of tenderness, each breathy come-hither snaking into Neff’s ear. She’s the deadliest of put-on artists, taking subterranean pleasure in hooking this poor fish.

Billy Wilder’s film of James M. Cain’s slim, nasty novel doesn’t have the obsessive quality you find in some of the greatest film noirs, like Out of the Past. It’s also blessedly lacking the cheapness that has sometimes been taken for a badge of noir integrity; ditto the macho phoniness trying to pass for a rat’s eye view of the world, the grimy truth that most people aren’t tough enough to face. Wilder has more in common with the brittle, black-comic approach that Stephen Frears took in The Grifters: He sees the artificiality of these characters, their tough-guy lingo, their easy cynicism, and the higher cynic in him is amused by them. But not condescendingly.

Wilder may not have been willing to concede that noir possessed a view big enough to contain more than a narrow slice of life, but he could certainly see it as an antidote to the forced cheer around him in 40’s Hollywood, the strained optimism that the studios felt was their contribution to the war effort. Double Indemnity has none of the treacly quality of too much 40’s entertainment, or the top-heaviness of “prestige” filmmaking. When people were being constantly reminded of what they owed their neighbors, their community, their nation, Double Indemnity must have seemed like a relief. It must have been wonderfully cheering to see a movie about people out for themselves and the hell with everyone else. Even Fred MacMurray’s nice-guy ordinariness carries a jolt here—he was never more likable than he is as Neff, the wise guy who wises up to the fact that he is, in fact, a schnook. Double Indemnity is just about perfectly paced, and its nastiness is genuinely sophisticated stuff, not the sentimentality passing for cynicism in much noir and hardboiled fiction.

We get a taste of that tradition in the screenplay by Raymond Chandler, with input from Wilder. They came up with a nifty device: Neff makes his confession into a Dictaphone which, in the form of Chandler’s stylized hardboiled prose, serves as the movie’s narration. The snap of Wilder’s direction clears out the moralizing that Chandler was sometimes prone to, and instead, the narration is a distillation of what gives you pleasure when you read him.

It may be that Hollywood let Wilder, Chandler and the cast get away with it because, in contrast to the illicit, homicidal lust that Neff feels for Phyllis, there exists a genuine love story: the love between Neff and Edward G. Robinson’s Barton Keyes, the insurance-claims investigator who can smell a fraud a mile away. As he watches Keyes piece the scheme together, Neff is torn between fear of being caught and sheer respect and admiration and amazement at the persistence of this dogged, gutsy little man. As Robinson plays him, it’s easy to fall in love with Keyes. This is among the most perfectly judged of all Hollywood supporting performances—seasoned without becoming “colorful,” endearing without becoming dear. Keyes’ life is nonstop worry and heartburn (he talks about having a “hunk of concrete” in his chest) and pursuit of the scrap of information that will prove his nagging suspicions. No wonder he’s the one Neff comes clean to. Wilder must have grinned at what he’d accomplished—a picture where the only generous act wins a one-way ticket to the gas chamber.

As femme fatales go, Stanwyck’s Phyllis isn’t a ravishment, like Ava Gardner in The Killers, and she doesn’t have the immaculate, serene composure that Jane Greer possesses in Out of the Past, the quality that makes Greer seem so totally evil she’s pure.

If you were going to compare Phyllis to any other character it might be Stella Dallas, whom Stanwyck played in the 1937 film of the same name. Phyllis is the nightmare version of Stella, Stella as she might be after realizing that kindheartedness and self-sacrifice weren’t going to get her anywhere, Stella with nothing left but the desire for a better life, and no way to achieve that except to be hard and grasping and mean. Phyllis even has a stepdaughter about the same age as the beloved daughter that Stella sacrifices everything for. But as the two sit playing Chinese checkers, each bored and despising the other, all it takes is one glance from Phyllis to tell you that she’d like nothing more than to choke the life out of the girl—if only she could be sure it wouldn’t chip her nails.

Phyllis’ attempts at middle-class respectability aren’t the flossy disasters that Stella’s are. But at the same time, she’s garish and tawdry, too contemptuous of that respectability to make more than a half-hearted stab at it. And when you see her cranky, boozing lump of a husband, you know why, and why she wants him dead.

As Phyllis, who hates her older husband and convinces Neff, an insurance agent with the policy that could make them both rich, to help her do away with him, Stanwyck gives the most modulated of all femme fatale performances. We’ve become used to thinking of femme fatales as smoldering sexpots, driven as much by lust as greed. But despite the lacquered platinum pageboy that Stanwyck wears, the anklet that adorns her killer gams (a come-on for the jewels waiting above), Phyllis is almost asexual. She uses sex to get what she wants, but she’s not turned on by it. She’s too intent on her endgame to give herself over to the abandon that sexual pleasure depends on. Besides, she doesn’t have any earthly use for other people.

Phyllis doesn’t stir the desire in us that she stirs in her fall guy. And possibly that’s because Stanwyck is too complex an actress to simply exude desirability. Whether she’s playing characters who give themselves over to sexuality, or characters who hold themselves back, Stanwyck enacts all the conflicting feelings that sexual desire stirs up. It’s as if she instinctively annotates each emotion as it passes through her. And so, in Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (probably his best picture), the helpless abandon that Stanwyck’s young missionary discovers in the pleasure dome of a Chinese warlord is as fully explored in all its contradictions as the regret that comes over the con woman she plays in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (the greatest of all American romantic comedies), when her sexual game-playing leaves her feeling as if she’d cheated herself.

As Stanwyck plays Phyllis, you can detect a sneer somewhere deep (and sometimes not so deep) beneath the surface of each expression of tenderness, each breathy come-hither snaking into Neff’s ear. She’s the deadliest of put-on artists, taking subterranean pleasure in hooking this poor fish.

Billy Wilder’s film of James M. Cain’s slim, nasty novel doesn’t have the obsessive quality you find in some of the greatest film noirs, like Out of the Past. It’s also blessedly lacking the cheapness that has sometimes been taken for a badge of noir integrity; ditto the macho phoniness trying to pass for a rat’s eye view of the world, the grimy truth that most people aren’t tough enough to face. Wilder has more in common with the brittle, black-comic approach that Stephen Frears took in The Grifters: He sees the artificiality of these characters, their tough-guy lingo, their easy cynicism, and the higher cynic in him is amused by them. But not condescendingly.

Wilder may not have been willing to concede that noir possessed a view big enough to contain more than a narrow slice of life, but he could certainly see it as an antidote to the forced cheer around him in 40’s Hollywood, the strained optimism that the studios felt was their contribution to the war effort. Double Indemnity has none of the treacly quality of too much 40’s entertainment, or the top-heaviness of “prestige” filmmaking. When people were being constantly reminded of what they owed their neighbors, their community, their nation, Double Indemnity must have seemed like a relief. It must have been wonderfully cheering to see a movie about people out for themselves and the hell with everyone else. Even Fred MacMurray’s nice-guy ordinariness carries a jolt here—he was never more likable than he is as Neff, the wise guy who wises up to the fact that he is, in fact, a schnook. Double Indemnity is just about perfectly paced, and its nastiness is genuinely sophisticated stuff, not the sentimentality passing for cynicism in much noir and hardboiled fiction.

We get a taste of that tradition in the screenplay by Raymond Chandler, with input from Wilder. They came up with a nifty device: Neff makes his confession into a Dictaphone which, in the form of Chandler’s stylized hardboiled prose, serves as the movie’s narration. The snap of Wilder’s direction clears out the moralizing that Chandler was sometimes prone to, and instead, the narration is a distillation of what gives you pleasure when you read him.

It may be that Hollywood let Wilder, Chandler and the cast get away with it because, in contrast to the illicit, homicidal lust that Neff feels for Phyllis, there exists a genuine love story: the love between Neff and Edward G. Robinson’s Barton Keyes, the insurance-claims investigator who can smell a fraud a mile away. As he watches Keyes piece the scheme together, Neff is torn between fear of being caught and sheer respect and admiration and amazement at the persistence of this dogged, gutsy little man. As Robinson plays him, it’s easy to fall in love with Keyes. This is among the most perfectly judged of all Hollywood supporting performances—seasoned without becoming “colorful,” endearing without becoming dear. Keyes’ life is nonstop worry and heartburn (he talks about having a “hunk of concrete” in his chest) and pursuit of the scrap of information that will prove his nagging suspicions. No wonder he’s the one Neff comes clean to. Wilder must have grinned at what he’d accomplished—a picture where the only generous act wins a one-way ticket to the gas chamber.

In Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Hughes essentially introduced the modern teenage hero: wise beyond one’s years, artistically inclined, hyper-articulate, romantic and hopelessly misunderstood. These characters weren’t so much role models—they were far too flawed—as they were imaginary friends for the audience, who empathized with every pang of adolescent longing. Within a couple of years, it seemed, every teen-movie protagonist had an Elvis Costello poster on his wall, and every real-life teen had a crush on Molly Ringwald.

And then, after launching the careers of a half-dozen young actors (and a half-dozen New Romantic bands), after introducing “neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie” and “poozer” and “eat my shorts” into the lexicon, John Hughes decided to leave the kids behind. While he prepared to direct Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Matthew Broderick’s nearly superhuman Ferris a fitting culmination of the steadily increasing confidence held by Mr. Hughes’ characters), he hammered out the script for Pretty in Pink and turned it over to rookie director Howard Deutch. Judging by Mr. Deutch’s commentary on Paramount’s new DVD edition, he was simply Mr. Hughes’ proxy and conceded in nearly every disagreement.

The result was the first in what would be a series of films written and produced, but not directed, by Mr. Hughes and superficially bearing his marks. But despite the familiar sans serif titles and NME-approved soundtracks, these films lacked his sharp visual sense and, most tragically, a handle on the rhythms of his dialogue.

Pretty in Pink is a hodgepodge of teen-romance archetypes. Working-class Andie (Molly Ringwald) falls for rich kid Blane (Andrew McCarthy). Super-rich slimeball Steff (James Spader), having been rejected by Andie, tries to convince Blane that she’s “trash.” Meanwhile, Andie’s best friend Duckie (Jon Cryer) pines for her, but she has no romantic feelings for him. Gee, maybe it’s the logorrhea? Or the mirrored round sunglasses? Or the way he practically stalks her?

If it’s hard to imagine dating Duckie, it’s even harder to swoon for the craven Blane, who reneges on taking Andie to the prom, then unconvincingly drops the L-bomb. The script originally called for Andie to wind up with Duckie, but test audiences balked and Mr. Deutch, to Mr. Hughes’ chagrin, reshot the ending. (The footage of the original ending promised on the DVD packaging is nowhere to be found.)

Everything that doesn’t hinge on the main plot works. Mr. Spader, with his Mitchum-heavy lids and dangling cigarettes, is the most magnetic—and, in fact, it’s the characters on the margins who are most interesting. Harry Dean Stanton lends weight to the role of Andie’s layabout single dad, while Annie Potts as Iona, the manager of the record store that Andie works at, fits the moody music she plays. And despite Duckie’s insufferability, Mr. Cryer gives a wonderful, brave performance, especially in his hold-nothing-back lip-synching of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.”

A year after Pretty in Pink, Mr. Hughes got the ending he wanted with Some Kind of Wonderful. Enter gender reversal: Eric Stoltz played the lower-class Keith (once again, the opening sequences reveal the poor kid to literally live on the other side of the tracks), with Mary Stuart Masterson as Watts, the best friend who’s in love with him, and Lea Thompson as Amanda, the girl for whom he pines. But Hardy (Craig Sheffer), Amanda’s rich ex-boyfriend, wants to quash it.

Mr. Hughes and Mr. Deutch wisely lay the groundwork of a first kiss between Keith and Watts, and their outcast friendship is less one-sided than that of Andie and Duckie, all of which points to an ending that improves on Pretty in Pink’s. But a bizarre third act has Keith unloading his college fund on a mega-date with Amanda, which includes squandering his savings on a pair of diamond earrings, a move that’s supposed to symbolize—well, it’s not really clear. And so John Ashton, as Keith’s apoplectic father, is the sole voice of reason in the final 20 minutes (presumably not the intent of the maniacally antiauthoritarian Mr. Hughes, who in interviews has scoffed about a college education); then the credits roll, and the Hughes teen oeuvre comes to an unsatisfying close. (The defeated filmmakers would soon collaborate on The Great Outdoors.)

And yet even these second-tier films, treating adolescence with gravity and sensitivity, mesmerized a nation of kids. The emotional moments in teenage life in which the heart races fastest—a first kiss, the seconds before a confession, the nausea of jealousy—should seem overblown to an adult viewer, but the films’ openheartedness is powerful enough to recall painful buried memories.

Ironically, it might be teens today who would scoff at such fumbling intensity. Fifteen minutes into Pretty in Pink, Blane predicts the future of teenage social life. From across the high-school library, he hijacks Andie’s computer screen with a simple message: “Do you want to talk?” Decades later, millions would follow in his footsteps with MySpace and instant-messaging, and a generation would know diaries as something to be shared.

What Pretty in Pink doesn’t predict so well is the future of the teen film. Though Mr. Hughes’ influence is apparent in commercial failures like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, the lure of today’s dramas has quickly moved from identification toward purely aspiration. The O.C. (tag line: “It’s nothing like where you live. And nothing like you imagine”) abandoned class issues early on in favor of debating the niceties of Chrismukkah; then Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County dispensed with authority figures altogether; while the Duff sisters play the Hilton sisters in Material Girls.

How can anyone possibly see his or her own life reflected in this? It’s only natural that we’d be flummoxed. The Pretty in Pink fans of 1986 are long past the teenage experience, decades older but not yet raising teenagers of their own. Better to just let it go. As Andie warns the 32-year-old Iona in Pretty in Pink, “You’re gonna OD on nostalgia.”