Movie Quotes:Cutting Room Clips of a Generation

Being born in 1958 meant being blissfully unaware of the turbulent 1960's and cognitively awakening with the dysfunctional 70's. Our generation felt the sorrows and greatness of the WWII veterans, the confusion of the Korean War conflict and the debacle and turbulence of the 1960s begun by the death of a President, marked by the struggles and death of a Civil Rights Leader and epitomized by a wasteland called Vietnam. We tried to regain the loss of innocence that uprooted America's economic roots in the world but seemed unable to regain the height of Man's first walk on the Moon in 1969. Adrift between memories of Valley's of Death of endless death and the seas of internal strife, we used movie quotes to reach out to the vistas born at strife's end before technologies birth.

Perhaps my fondness for the movie quotes from the words and songs of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid stemmed from the fact that there were so few films in my impoverished youth. Our monetary issues stemmed from my father's battle with a heart that had survived bullets and battles overseas in WWII but was now failing amidst the stress of daily life. He barely lived through the first year of my time and the film's subtle mix of humor and implied tragedy that lay somewhere between a Western and a musical marked the end of an era in it's own time and the beginning of our time. "I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals".

We were desperately trying to leave behind the legacies of WWII, the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam Debacle. America's place in the world was no longer assured and we were struggling to gain new economic footholds with emerging economies born from past adversaries. Watching films and reciting movie quotes helped us to focus and rebuild our way. 2001: A Space Odyssey was released at the end of the 1960's but the need to understand where we were heading before disaster loomed too close kicked off the movie quotes of the 1970's. "I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it," cried HAL as darkness overtook his system.