Standing in the checkout line at the market last week, my eyes were immediatley drawn to the clerk's nametag. The word "Marlon" was printed in bold white letters. "Were you named after Marlon Brando?" I asked.

The young man, plastered with tattoos up and down his arms, looked at me in bewilderment. "I think I've heard of him," he responded.

I was stunned. Doesn’t everyone know Marlon Brando, one of the most legendary actors of all time? However, I must admit that upon hearing the name Brando, my mind immediately focuses on the aging Don Vito Corleone in the 1972 drama, The Godfather, as opposed to the sexy heartthrob of the 1950s. How quickly I forgot his image engulfing the screen in Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954). In a similar vein, I still remember as a child watching Barbara Stanwyck portray the matriarch in the long-running television western, The Big Valley, and then being shocked to see her as a femme fatale and cold-blooded murder accomplice in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). Her co-star, Fred MacMurray, who was a debonair leading actor for several decades, is most remembered by a later generation as the gentle, understanding single dad in the 1960’s television series, My Three Sons.

Are the movies and actors of the 1940s, '50s and '60s doomed to be forgotten? Maybe they should be. Do the films made then represent an unrealistic, naïve way of looking at life? Can the suspense and thrillers of the 1940s, and those even up to the 1980s compare with movies of today? Well, here's my answer: Janet Leigh’s chilling scream in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho still haunts me, as does the memory of her hands clenching the shower curtain in despair. And my heart actually pounced when a crazed Jack Nicholson startled me with "Heeere’s Johnny" in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)?  

Classic movies remind us of a past—sometimes ours, sometimes that of our parents. Does exploring the country with Wyatt and Billy in the 1969 classic Easy Rider give you a glimpse of the days that your father keeps bantering about? Even if we don’t look at these movies in a stand-alone context, it’s still intriguing to view them in the framework of their own time. How did WWII influence the great Film Noir of the mid-1940s and 1950s? Why were so many movies centered on alienation, obsession, or even paranoia, exhibiting the dark side of human nature?

Hopefully, films portraying issues of today will be of equal value to later generations. But I can’t help wondering if my grandchildren will stare at me in bewilderment someday as they ask “Forest who?” or “Kieferwhat?”

(Photo: The Godfather, © 1972, Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.)