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Christmas Moon: America in Winter
In December 1972, on the day when Apollo 17, the final Moon mission, left lunar orbit to return to Earth, their wake-up call was an evocative, soaring, and strangely somber love song, a major hit that year, “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face”, sung by Roberta Flack. “I thought the sun rose in your eyes…”
It was a proud but bittersweet moment for NASA and for the country. JFK’s challenge had been met, and then some. Only four years earlier, Apollo 8’s reading of a Bible verse while orbiting the Moon on Christmas Eve was a beloved worldwide television spectacular. Now we were leaving.
“And I knew our joy would fill the Earth.
And it would last ’til the end of time…”
“The First Time Ever I saw Your Face” was recorded in 1969 and went almost unnoticed when it was first released. The producer warned Flack that the song’s rhythm was too slow, but she stuck to the tempo she preferred. In 1970, she got a phone call from Clint Eastwood, the TV actor who’d become famous doing westerns in Italy and Spain. He wasn’t yet a megastar. He was directing his first film, Play Misty for Me, and wanted to buy the rights to use “The First Time.” Misty, a dark, timely thriller about a casual hookup and an obsessed stalker, was the Fatal Attraction of its day. Eastwood and Flack agreed on a price, $2000, and then Flack asked if she could re-record it. “It’s too slow”, she said, finally conceding the point. “No, it’s not”, insisted Clint. They used it as is, his judgment was perfect, the film brought the song back, and it became a major hit.
People were intrigued by the combination of Roberta Flack’s yearning voice with a melancholy, contemplative reserve. Maybe it fit the times. The country was wracked by rising rates of crime, street violence, and anger. The endless fountain of postwar prosperity was fading. Racial protests and student protests against the Vietnam war had been going on forever by then. Blacks didn’t feel much attachment to the space program, which most considered irrelevant to solving more important problems on Earth, problems that concerned them. We were no longer willing, in JFK’s words, “to bear any burden”, whether it be for Saigon or the Moon.
A tiny, poignant reminder of those times can sometimes be glimpsed in photos and films of the period, even Scorsese’s Mean Streets: a car window decal of the American flag, about three by four inches, with a photo of the Full Moon in place of the starfield. Distributed in the millions by the New York Daily News, then a conservative, blue-collar tabloid, it was proudly titled “Good Old U.S.A.—First on the Moon”. It was a nationalist sentiment, less popular on Central Park West than in outer-borough New York, where for a couple of years you saw the flag decal everywhere, on aircraft carrier-sized Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs, and Dodges. The bridge and tunnel crowd. My people. Perhaps, even if only metaphorically, your people too.
The tumult of 1968-‘71 was deeply, lastingly counterproductive for the American Left. They expected 1972 to be a pushover, yet they could see the country was slipping away. Everything they did boosted the poll numbers of the loathed, despised Nixon, who they felt had won 1968 on a fluke, backed by the country’s haters. The angry reaction of the middle class and blue-collar whites to pretty much everything, since riots and crime started spiking in the Sixties, was now too visible to ignore.
It was a time when audiences had grown impatient with Dragnet-style cops who politely followed the rules. We told the box office that we were ready for badasses who’d throw away the rulebook if that’s what it took to clean up the streets. Two months after Play Misty for Me opened, Clint Eastwood found the role that, more than any other, would define him with the public, “Dirty Harry” Callahan.
Another fall 1971 film captured the feeling of the era, America’s shock at how badly and how quickly things fell apart in the cities. The French Connection was the story of a pair of NYPD detectives who unravel a heroin delivery. The movie begins with a Christmastime drug raid on a local bar in a bleak, rundown Black neighborhood. But the injustices you see in the film aren’t all one-dimensional. It never stops comparing the posh hotels where the drug lords hang out with the freezing, dirty alleys where stakeouts keep the plainclothes detectives up all night. Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman’s memorably obsessed, flawed cop, became the bitter hero the filmmakers didn’t glamorize.
The French Connection was more than a big hit. It would influence the look and feel of police dramas for a generation. Like Play Misty for Me, French Connection would also create a memorable scene with the help of an overlooked 1969 tune that would become a belated hit recording two years later, when the movie came out.
“Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” was a tribute to the Apollo program written by Jimmy Webb, one of the most successful songsmiths of the time. On the surface, it’s a bold, bouncy affirmation of the jazzed-up national spirit and the bright optimism that the success of the space program brought out in most of the nation. In the film, it’s an onstage musical number at a Mafia-ridden New York nightclub, sung by a charismatic trio of Black women, The Three Degrees.
“Has to make you glad to be alive!
Has to make you glad to be ali-i-ive! Yea-ah! Yeahhh!”
But the effect is cooler, more ironic and detached, darker than the song itself. For a few riveting moments of dramatic contrast, while this joyous, soaring uplift is going on in the background, the image in the foreground is Popeye Doyle at the bar, his expression frozen with the realization that across the restaurant, he’s spotted known Mafiosi breaking bread with rich, crooked, politically connected lawyers. The song is all excitement and hope for the future, but the cynical ‘70s reality was, the cities were going to hell. That was also a major theme of the next megahit crime film, The Godfather, which opened in the spring of 1972.
That December, Bob Hope was in Vietnam in what was billed as his final overseas Christmas tour. We were leaving Vietnam, step by step. The boundless confidence of the foreign policy of the early ‘60s seemed like a long, long way back. The media weren’t paying much attention to Hope anymore, but his Vietnam shows had changed over the years, recognizing that there was a slightly different mix of young American soldiers now. The 1972 Christmas show featured the racy humor of Redd Foxx and the racy curves of Lola Falana. Black country singer Charley Pride was aboard, as was stunning model Jayne Kennedy.
G.I. audiences grew more cynical over the nine years of Hope’s Vietnam tours, but they rose to their feet to cheer a most special guest, astronaut Alan Shepard, American’s first man in space, and commander of the Apollo 14 landing mission. He carried personal greetings from President Nixon. In less than two years, Nixon would be gone. In less than three, South Vietnam fell. But that was in the future while a man who’d walked on the Moon walked among our men in uniform.
238,000 miles away, Roberta Flack’s voice woke the Apollo 17 astronauts. They pressed the button to fire the rockets, and begin America’s final ride home from the Moon. It seemed hard to believe, then and now, after all that we’d done, so recently and so passionately, to get there.
“And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the endless skies, my love/ To the dark and the endless skies…”
We knew it would be a long time before we went back. Nobody had any idea just how long. Half a century later, we still don’t.
Published in General
I’ve read it a couple of times myself now. It came in two volumes(“ I , Claudius” and “ Claudius, the G-d” IIRC). If you watch the series, you may be a little distracted. The series was made WAY before HDTV, and when I saw it on HDTV , it seemed like the actors’ makeup was more noticeable than I remember from my first viewing.
It was made on videotape, not film, so standards of detail were lower. That included sets, make up, and costumes. British television at the time scanned a picture with 625 lines (actual IRL 567 lines) and ours was 525 (an honest 480), so quality took a hit converting downwards to American TV, then this somewhat degraded picture gets blown up to HDTV (720 or 1080 lines), so it’s like seeing a photocopy of a photostat. If it had been made on film, the original negative could have been used to make an immaculate 1080 line transfer. The production crew would have been more careful about tiny details that would show up on 35mm film, but not on pre-HD television.
Thanks for the explanation!🙂🙂🙂
Bah! I had to walk seven miles barefoot through the snow uphill both ways to see the original on a 21″ screen to watch the original on PBS. And I liked it!
Buncha hoity-toity video aesthetes. Bah, I say!
One of my dad’s “favorite” facts:
We built Hoover dam in the middle of the depression, in the middle of a desert where we had to also build a city to house and feed the workers. It took abut three years.
In the 1980s the effort to build a new visitor center for the dam took more than decade.
21 inch screen? You pampered kids! Here’s a TV, a mere 92 years ago….
EPSON MFP image
Coolidge called him “wonder boy”. Silent Cal was not fooled.
Yeah, but if memory serves, there was a lot of smashmouth politics on the way to getting the Hoover Dam built. And it got worse when Roosevelt became president and took credit for all of what was accomplished.
I watched the 1982 World Series on a 13-inch Black and White Portable in my rented room off-campus in Eau Claire.
in 1984 I inherited my grandmothers 19″ color set.
In 1987 I bought a 27 inch Sony. It was so big that it gave me headaches for the first few weeks that I used it.
In 1996 I bought a 61″ Toshiba rear projection set. This was pre-HD, pre widescreen aspect ratio (and 61″ was *really* big then – the picture in picture screen was bigger than my 27″ TV). For the first couple years I used it almost entirely for sports and movies – watching “regular” tv shows/sitcoms could get really uncomfortable. Peoples heads were just too big to seem natural.
When I moved in 2004 I had to leave that set behind. I’d built it into the wall of the old house in a home theater room in the basement. So I bought a 65″ Mitsubshi rear-projection with HD. Those were the big giant box models that weighed about 350 pounds.
About 7 or 8 years ago we replaced that with an 82″ Rear-projection Mitsubishi (My wife talked me up from the 73″ model) that took up a lot less floor space in the family room. Much more streamlined – if it wasn’t just so awkward, I can pick it up by myself. That was the last model year of Rear Projection TVs before Mitsubishi got out of the business, and as far as know they were the last ones making them.
I’ve been giving thought to replacing it with something I can wall mount. But unless you go with a projector and screen, it looks like 85″ is about the max screen size you’ll find now, at least at a reasonable cost, and I’m not sure the cost justifies the slight increase in size. Especially since even with the wall mount, we’d still need a place for all the boxes that attach to it.
As the screens have gotten bigger and sharper, the quality of the programming has descended lower and lower. I am reduced to sports events and old movies, and lately I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with the crowd noise. It was bad enough when there were actual crowds. Now that everything is being played in empty venues, they are playing canned crowd noise.
It’s a small step from fake news to fake crowds.
When I was kid I had to walk 9 feet through 7 inches of shag carpeting to change the channel.
The French Connection in my opinion is one of the greatest police procedural movies to hit the big screen. When my wife and I lived in pre-Giuliana Queens in 1975, the 1971 French Connection was affirmed as a realistic look at NYC.
Gene Hackman was a great actor, and did an excellent job portraying a street wise cop.
Uphill both ways, in the static….
The producer, Phil D’ Antoni, also produced Bullitt, so he wanted to top his own car chase. Initially, he didn’t want to work with William Friedkin. The Night They Raided Minsky’s and The Boys in the Band didn’t look like promising credentials for a gritty action picture. Friedkin, in turn, didn’t want Gene Hackman; his first choice for Popeye Doyle would have been liberal newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, a then-semi-famous NYC personality. Then it turned out that Breslin couldn’t drive. The film was shot over the winter of 1970-71 and looks it, with grey skies, visible puffs of breath, and low sun angles.
I’m thinking of doing a post on faking it; I don’t mean politically, (well, not exactly) but about how much better, more convincing augmented reality has become. In their Eighties day, Zelig and the JFK scenes in The Right Stuff were pretty impressive stuff.
The most annoying thing about the crowd noise is that the differential between that and the volume of the announcers is too low, particularly for my mom, who is hard-of-hearing and thus keeps the volume turned way up.
They are playing canned sizzle for the steak, except it’s chuck steak and everybody knows it.
True. But a political party and many local (& state) governments didn’t openly support the violent left wing groups, as they do now.
We also didn’t have quite the level of censorship and speech control that we have now, though it was talked about a lot back in those days.
I see no image. I am using an Amazon Fire tablet.
Yeah. I use the “it’s not heavy, just awkward” all the time, too.