Column: Classic films are still showing in my house

I’m an American film enthusiast.

As such, I take particular interest in movies released during a 20-year period from the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s.

A friend of mine once opined: “Jim, you enjoy watching dead people pretending to be alive.”

I’m a fan of such stars as Humphrey Bogart, Margaret Sullavan, Ingrid Bergman, John Wayne, Olivia de Havilland, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Spencer Tracy, Dana Andrews and Loretta Young.

Many were from my parents’ “Greatest Generation.”

Though they’ve been moldering in the grave for years now, they can be seen nightly at the apogee of their lives on a flat screen in my family room.

Ah, modern technology!

I’m guessing not a single actor in the group, while still alive, imagined he or she would have such public impact so many decades hence. Had they been more circumspect, however, they might have considered a different line of employment. I’m not sure I’d want time spent at my place of work in 1985 to decades later represent the apex of my life’s mission.

“Here’s looking at you kid” was uttered on a Hollywood soundstage in 1942 and 10 billion times thereafter.

What I see as I view films are snippets from the lives of actual people … preserved for posterity. Vignettes of these people were recorded while their “actual” lives were unfolding (or exploding!) and being buffeted by such trials as the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War.

In addition to memorizing lines, those actors had lots going on: back-stories, an episodic current life, career challenges and personal and professional aspirations. They became proficient at regurgitating others’ dialogue in artificial settings in front of whirring machines.

Not long ago, I watched William Holden and Jennifer Jones for the 50th time — give or take a dozen — in the 1955 classic, “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.”

My eldest daughter is named Jennifer, and that’s no coincidence. It demonstrates my lifelong appreciation of the star.

The film is based on Han Suyin’s 1949 novel (which I read in 1967).

A beautiful doctor of mixed Chinese and European background, Miss Jones falls in love with an American correspondent during China’s Communist revolution. Holden’s character, Mark Elliott, is sent to Korea to cover the Korean War where he is tragically killed.

But, we see at the end of the film that Jennifer Jones’ character is prepared to bravely face an uncertain future.

Though set in Hong Kong and Macau, the film was actually shot on soundstages 3 and 6 at 20th Century Fox Studios in Century City, barely an hour from where I grew up. Like the actors themselves, those locales assumed roles in the film. Some background footage was shot in Hong Kong.

At the time of production, Jones was a beautiful and talented 36-year-old rising star destined for Hollywood greatness. Did she foreshadow that with her performance? I think so. It earned her an Academy Award nomination.

She would go on to star in films for nearly 30 years, and retire to her Malibu home where she’d die at the ripe old age of 90.

Holden took a different path.

At the time of the filming he was 37. “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” would be one of his last films. He died at 63 in 1981 from injuries suffered in a fall. He slipped, hit his head on a table and bled to death. Heartbreaking.

He spent the last two decades of his life outside the film industry. Holden was co-owner of the Mount Kenya Safari Club, and divided his time between Africa and Switzerland.

From my family room perch in 2017, I look at his close-ups for hints of his coming demise. I feel prescient peering at him back in 1955 and knowing the eventual outcome. Had he been enlightened to that outcome – which now seems almost to have been predestined — he might have abandoned Hollywood and hitched a ride back to O’Fallon, Ill., his hometown.

Is there one, even now, who sees our future?

I believe there is.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.