* ' "Klaatu barada nikto" is a phrase originating from the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).'

I am team teaching (with a very bright young colleague in our terrific department of religion) an undergraduate course on science and film. We start right off with Jurassic Park, and by eight o'clock next Wednesday night will be deep into discussion not just about the scientific feasibility of getting DNA from insects in amber, but about the portrait of science being given when everyone knows that the mad scientist is the same chap who played the hated Newman the postie in Seinfeld. 

I am terrifically excited and incredibly lucky. Not only do I have a job at 69, but I am putting on a new course and cannot wait to get at it. I am a refugee from compulsory retirement laws in Ontario, and try not to be too smug toward a colleague who is exactly my age and who stayed behind and believed the administration when they said they would make it OK for him. A month after he was forced into retirement, the law changed.  Too late for him.  He is now allowed to teach on a sessional basis but not allowed to supervise doctoral dissertations because he is no longer graduate faculty.

But I am not writing now about these things, although I will certainly be getting back to the retirement issue. Rather, as part of my attempt to let you know who I am and so on and so forth, I use the film course as a hook to pick up again on my autobiography. Several posts ago, I left myself back in 1949, at about the age of nine, firmly anti-American, or at least snooty about Americans, as any self-respecting Brit of that time was likely to be. And yet by 19, in 1959, when I left school and went off to university, I had started a love affair -- and I use that term deliberately to give the true impression of a kind of romantic warm glow -- that I still have at 69, on this the last day of 2009. 

What brought about the change? Well, it sure as hell wasn't Dwight Eisenhower. I have never played golf in my life, and -- like eating sheep's eyes -- it is one of those experiences I hope to get through life without ever attempting. Although at 69 I am starting to think that there might be something in the obviously sexually energizing powers of hitting a small ball around a field. Also, to be fair, with hindsight we can now see that Eisenhower was a pretty safe pair of hands in which to entrust the fate of the world in the depths of the Cold War. Imagine if Dick Cheney had been our leader.

In one word, I fell in love because of the movies. Or as I called them in those days, the flicks. There were some terrific English movies. The comedies of Alec Guinness for example. Or those war movies starring Kenneth More and the recently departed Richard Todd. But nothing compared to what was coming out of Hollywood. I am not sure what was the first American film I ever saw, but I think it might have been the terribly non-politically correct Song of the South (released in 1946). I just loved Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox and all of that. And when the little boy, played as I remember by Bobby Driscoll, got gored by the bull, I cried like everyone else in the cinema. Not as much mark you as when Bambi's mother was killed by hunters. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of the Second Amendment for all time.

There was just a terrific succession of great movies right through the 1950s. I still love the original The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and will be showing it in my science and film course. Fascinating stuff there about the status and authority of the scientist in the Atomic Age. We went around for days saying the magic words that calmed down Gort, the robot. We even tried it on our physics master. It didn't work; but for once we got a rather grim smile, which was an achievement with a man who was far more terrifying than anything from outer space.

My particular loves were the cowboy movies. I still think that Shane (1953) is the greatest American movie ever made. Far better than that Rosebud nonsense. I believe my opinion is shared by Woody Allen, or at least he agrees that it ranks right up there. Someday, when I don't want to fill up my blog with whining about the U.S. Senate -- that won't happen for a while, I am afraid -- I will explain and defend my choice. But I should say that apart from the most magnificent baddie in the history of film -- had he not been filled full of lead, the Jack Palance character was clearly headed for a major role in the U.S. banking system -- there are really deep existential questions about what defines a person.  ("A man's got to do what a man's got to do.")

Second to the oaters come the Hitchcock movies. These days everyone puts Vertigo (1958) at the top. Well, I am not about to knock anything with Kim Novak, and the Jimmy Stewart character -- an ex-cop obsessed with a supposedly dead woman -- shows a creepy side to his nature that only emerges in glimpses in earlier Stewart movies. But my favorite was and still is Rear Window (1954).  There is the Grace Kelly factor of course. She was painfully beautiful -- as incidentally was Elizabeth Taylor in Ivanhoe (1952), still a terrific adventure film. (That wonderful moment when Ivanhoe, played by Robert Taylor, strikes all of the shields of the would-be combatants at the tournament.) Rear Window is a great suspense movie, but in addition is a lot more complex than appears on the surface -- as Hitchcock movies tend to be. A man murders his nagging wife, so we know that not all male-female relationships are comfortable. Starting with the Stewart-Kelly relationship, Hitchcock suggests that no such relationships are comfortable, and that gives a real sense of unease right through the story.

I will not go on. Goodness, I even liked Pillow Talk (1959), with Rock Hudson and Doris Day! Don't tell me how idealized was my vision of America. I know that. Much of it quite literally was in Technicolor.  That's what falling in love is all about. And sometimes these things last. Happy New Year!