The 1968 movie that traumatised Angelina Jolie: “I was very young”
Everyone has that one film from their childhood that absolutely traumatised them.
For some people, it might be a vaguely spooky yet age-appropriate movie, like Return to Oz or The Witches, but for many of us with parents who didn’t take age certifications too seriously, it’s probably a film we should not have been watching at that tender age (thank you, nanny, for watching Halloween in the same room as me when I was four).
For Angelina Jolie, one of her earliest memories of the movies was watching John Frankenheimer’s The Fixer in the cinema with her mother. Needless to say, a film about an anti-Semitic ploy to wrongly accuse an innocent Jewish man of the gruesome murder of a ‘gentile’ child, pretty much traumatised the future actor.
“I remember The Fixer with Alan Bates,” Jolie told Yahoo, “which is not a movie anyone should’ve taken a child to”.
To make things worse, the poor child wasn’t even traumatised for important reasons like the film’s political message or Frankenheimer’s cinematography. “I was taken when I was very young because my mom had a crush on him,” Jolie explained further, when she was asked about her earliest memories of film. All of that for a crush, and it wasn’t even Frankenheimer’s best work. Although Bates did win the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’.
Frankenheimer’s re-telling of the grisly Beilis Affair, in which Russian Jew Menahem Mendel Beilis was wrongfully accused of the ritual murder of a 13-year-old Christian boy would surely be even more traumatising than a fake, paranormal masked murderer But thankfully, The Fixer wasn’t the only childhood memory Jolie had of cinema, and there were more regular child-friendly flicks like Calamity Jane and Dog Day Afternoon, of course.
The former, Calamity Jane, was probably an obscure old film a lot of people experienced early in their childhood (did anyone else’s mother try to convince them to like sarsaparilla?), what with its Technicolour female frontier adventures. But Dog Day Afternoon doesn’t usually score highly on the childhood favourites list.
It’s certainly no The Fixer, but Dog Day Afternoon’s story of a bank robbery gone wrong isn’t your usual talking animals and fairy princesses affair. However, being born to two actors probably means your childhood is a little different to other kids. “I kinda grew up on Sidney Lumet films,” Jolie said.
Once again, her mother’s penchant for certain actors was a huge influence on her introduction to the movies, as she added, “My mom loved Al Pacino movies, so [we watched] Dog Day Afternoon…”
And honestly, isn’t this what we should be introducing our children to? Sure, Michael Myers is probably a step too far, but I’d rather have my kids watching the likes of Serpico and 12 Angry Men than the next piece of slop the MCU is putting out.
