I recently told my five-year-old that she could no longer watch her favorite Adam Sandler trilogy, which she discovered on an international flight when parental inhibitions were low, because, as I put it, “Our ‘Hotel Transylvania’ subscription ran out.” She accepted this response with stoic grace and utter faith in my trustworthiness. Now, though, we are entering our second week of quarantine, with many more likely to come, and I suspect that boredom, discomfort, and screen temptation will lower the bar in the manner of, say, an international flight that lasts sixty days.
In order to minimize the odds that sheltering in place will drive us to renew our subscriptions to “PAW Patrol,” “PJ Masks,” and any number of other infernal children’s entertainments, I’ve been pulling together a list of movies that are kid-friendly by happenstance rather than by design. The criteria are loose and can stretch or contract depending on your kid’s age and preferences. But the basics are that the movies be live-action, fun and somewhat intellectually engaging for grownups to watch, and lack as much as possible what Tipper Gore might call “explicit content.”
We can start chronologically, with Buster Keaton. When I asked on Twitter for recommendations of stealth kids’ movies, Dana Stevens, the film critic and Keaton biographer, vouched for “any Keaton two-reeler, really,” and we’ve been snacking on them ever since: “Cops,” “One Week,” “The Electric House,” and also “The Cameraman” and “Sherlock Jr.” I’ve always noticed that my kids respond differently to silent or near-silent animation—Aardman’s “Shaun the Sheep,” the first forty-five minutes of Pixar’s “Wall-E,” long stretches of Studio Ghibli’s “My Neighbor Totoro”—and the same is true when my daughter watches Keaton go about the business of inventing screen comedy: she’s absorbed and full of questions, and she finds much of it “weird” (high praise), but she never glazes over. The lack of dialogue leaves imaginative space for her to interact with the work, much as she does with her favorite picture books. Bonus: the intertitles are good for beginning and intermediate readers who have suddenly found themselves out of school.
My daughter has logged a lot of hours on the sofa watching Turner Classic Movies at my parents’ house, a fun zone to which she is barred entry for the foreseeable future. The little apartment where she is now trapped lacks a yard, basic cable, and many other grandparental amenities, but it does have access to Katharine Hepburn, whose plummy lockjaw and angular grace have always held a special appeal for her. She can sort of follow the plot of “The Philadelphia Story,” but the slam dunk is Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby,” a profoundly goofball movie that has everything the kids love: Hepburn as a daffy heiress, a musical leopard, a pivotal dinosaur skeleton, and Cary Grant in a nightie.
Golden Age movies almost default to family-friendliness, owing to the moralistic Hays Code, which banned profanity and flagrant hints of sex from Hollywood productions. There were no such constraints on the murderer’s row of American directors who emerged in the nineteen-seventies, and this is where the budding auteurist’s self-education must become extremely selective: “Hugo,” for Martin Scorsese; “The Straight Story,” for David Lynch; “Paper Moon” for Peter Bogdanovich. (It’s amazing, given everything we now know about Ryan and Tatum O’Neal’s relationship, that the frazzled sweetness of their famous, single-take “We’ll just have to keep on veerin’ ” scene in “Paper Moon” remains unconquerably intact.) There’s also Robert Altman’s “Popeye,” a movie I watched dozens of times as a kid and that I now find borderline incompetent and almost unwatchably odd—and all the more fascinating for it.
“Popeye” is a musical, nominally, and magnificent song and dance is the hardiest material for unlimited wear and tear, especially if your child’s favorite performers are Gene Kelly and “Judy Garden.” Throughout the years, our standbys have included “Singin’ in the Rain” (obviously), “An American in Paris,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “For Me and My Gal,” “On the Town” (but fast-forward past the horrific sequence set in the Museum of Natural History), “Anchors Aweigh,” and “Ziegfeld Follies.” For some twenty-first-century energy, throw in “School of Rock” and “Josie and the Pussycats.”
My three-year-old son requests “Singin’ in the Rain,” an homage to the last silents and early talkies, by saying, “I want to watch memories.” This is astute in ways that neither of my kids can understand: the astonishing old movie that everyone loves is itself a tribute to a lost era. If my kids retain any memories of this strange, terrifying time, I hope they remember these movies, too.
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