A teacher had us watch Shane, enthusiastically telling us to look for a moment in which there’s an image of a cross superimposed over that of Alan Ladd as he rides somewhere. The teacher made a big deal about it being a subliminal message, which had most of us intrigued, but I didn’t see that detail when the time came. I don’t remember if anyone else noticed anything, but I’ve watched the film a couple of times since then and still have no idea what that teacher was referring to.
The three I remember seeing include the Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet (which I thought was notable for the leads being at least close to the ages of the characters), The Red Balloon (an odd, almost silent French short film about a young boy and his only friend made of latex) and The Cowboys, a John Wayne film in which he’s a trail boss who needs to get a herd to the railroad, but all of the actual cowboys are off somewhere (gold rush, maybe?) so he hires a bunch of actual boys instead.
Well of course you didn’t. It was subliminal
In what class did you see The Cowboys? It’s a great movie, but I can’t imagine it being shown at my school(s).
Perhaps English class? Perhaps social studies? Really, I can’t remember this far later.
I came in to mention The Lottery and Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, but was a little late to the party. Both moving short films.
Does anybody remember a short film about a highschooler seducing and impregnating a female classmate (I think her name was Julie)? I realize this was a common theme, but in the movie I’m thinking of (a) the guy flashed his turn signal after he scored and (b) the girl telling him “They said you’d do this to me!” when she confronted him with the news.
It actually ended on a hopeful note with him telephoning her later and saying “Hi, Julie…?” implying they’d work things out somehow.
Right. It was supposed to something we could see as the film played, so subliminal isn’t the right word.
Well, it wasn’t in IMDB trivia, and you know they pick movies over with a nit comb
We had some flaky teachers. He may have been one of them, and he may have made it up or confused it with another film.
They showed a similar film to us girls in gym class. I think it was called Girls Beware. When the boy went to pick up the girl, he was actually driving a pick-up, which made us all laugh hysterically and made the teacher very grumpy. It was a bad choice because it was probably 15 years out of date which is a lifetime to a teenager.
The Wave was the first movie that came to mind for me. Watched it during first semester of junior year of high school in Oregon. Then I moved to California. My new history teacher showed it just a week after I arrived. I walked in on it late because I was in the office doing paperwork. I yelled out, “The Wave!” and did the fist salute thing.
This?
There’s a pick up truck near the end (and a dead daughter near the beginning)
ETA, there’s also a Boys, Beware. In this one, they’re teaching boys about the dangers of homosexuals. Homosexuality being, of course, a contagious sickness of the mind.
I had a teacher for 10th grade American History, who, if he was not a Nazi, he was a sympathizer. He showed us movies about Nazi-ism. One was called “The Twisted Cross,” which was actually an NBC documentary that included footage from “Triumph of the Will.” It was anti-Nazi, of course, but he had a particular glee about talking about Hitler. He had an obvious German surname and often remarked about how proud he was to be a “Kraut.”
Get this, though. With the exception of World War II, no mention of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was ever made in his class. When asked why we were skipping over FDR and the New Deal, he replied that he didn’t like FDR or the New Deal and that if we wanted to learn about that to take another teacher’s class. A four-term president and one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of this country, but as far as he was concerned, it didn’t happen.
I recall him including as a question on a test who we would we vote for for president, Nixon or Humphrey. Several students thought that was none of his damn business and refused to answer. Predictably, they were all marked down.
What kind of class was it?
I don’t remember. I think it was in my first year of high school, and it must have been some iteration of “English” or “social studies.”
We watched that movie every year in elementary school. Even as a kid, I thought the movie was kind of odd.
I don’t have a cite, but my understanding is that The Red Balloon was included with the purchase of a certain brand of projector, and that is why every school had at least one copy.
I could understand if it was English LIterature since my class read “Shane” during my Sophomore year. We didn’t get to see the movie though despite the fact VCRs were everywhere by then.
Your experience watching the movie Shane in class with your teacher telling you about subliminal images of crosses around Alan Ladd made me think this was an Introduction to Film Studies class which would be kind of cool for a high school to have as part of their curriculum.
Yeah, that would have been great, but there wasn’t anything like that at my high school. Aside from a small, stable core of teachers, the rest came and went often enough for me to think (now) that they probably weren’t well paid. As I recall, my only contact with that teacher was that day of class and maybe another, he was young and seemed overly enthusiastic, so he might not have had his facts straight. If there’s nothing like that in Shane, my guess is that he imagined it or saw something similar in another film. Cool Hand Luke ends with a similarly suggestive scene, with an iconic zoom-out over a crossroads.