Tim Cockey’s opinion piece lamenting the demise of Humphrey Bogart as a cultural icon (“Don’t Bogart those references,” Aug. 11) touched on a basic truth: You can’t expect young people to like something just because it’s good.
As a general rule, members of Bogie's generation aspired always to be more adult. The present crop cling hard to their childish ways. Boomers walked the line between adult and child, but we are certainly responsible for starting the perpetual-child trend among our own progeny.
Still, it seems tragic that this and future generations may have no interest in earlier movies, which are perhaps the most monumental cultural achievement of our society. There is so much to learn in the emotion, grace, passion, and clarity contained in Hollywood's collective output, not to mention the value of being able to glimpse society as it actually existed from a remove of 70 years or more.
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Of course, movies being art, they will be preserved, as all art is, by those devoted to them for their own sake.