Paris Blues, Visited

Abstract

FOUR FACTS DETERMINE the kind of escapism I often seek: (1) I love cities; (2) I love films; (3) I often fantasize?and probably that is the right word?about living in an America less characterized by violent crime, a thing so common that it has come to seem less an outrage than a fine exacted for being too naive or careless; and (4) being black and, more important, possessing a grain or two of social awareness, I am sensitive to the ways in which different groups of people are portrayed in the media. The combination of these four apparently disconnected and possibly even contradictory phenomena sometimes leads me to watch certain films made circa 1960, particularly those set in large cities. For diversion-hunters of my persuasion, such films, among them Breakfast at Tiffany's, La Dolce Vita, and Sweet Smell of Success, have it all. They serve almost as strainers for the city in which I live, getting rid of the stray bullets and carjackings but leaving intact the cosmopolitan flavor; I feel that if I could but step past the screen and into one of these films, I would inhabit a world where it's possible to find a cup of coffee or listen to a jazz quartet at any hour of the night and then walk home, in the pleasantly cool night air of these films' eternal late spring, in safety. Forget a home where the buffalo roam: give me an apartment like the one in The Apartment, where Jack Lemmon paid $87 a month to live alone (on Manhattan's Upper West Side!) in a space big enough for a family of three. Better still, give me a city where the Jimmy Stewart character in Rope (okay, so it came out in '48) could attract the attention of the police by stepping onto the balcony and firing two or three shots into the air from a re volver. The civil rights movement had gained momentum by 1960 and was leaving its mark on everything, so that the black actors who (with admitted infrequency) appeared in these films were not called upon to shuffle, wear headrags, or grin until their cheeks hurt. And the begin nings of a modern sensibility were evident in another way: male/female relationships on the screen had come to resemble, at least somewhat, those in my own life. By 1960?three years, incidentally, before I was born,