"A Thousand Clowns"

Watching 1965's "A Thousand Clowns" with Jason Robards...

Home from work very early sick today -- actually, depressed and partly paranoid, weary and worn and tired from the prolonged cold and snow... -- watching bits of 60s movies on TCM: The Odd Couple, The Apartment, and now most of "A Thousand Clowns".

Some of the reviews of this movie on Amazon talk about how Robards's anti-conformity character changed, or at least affected, their lives or at least their outlook on life.

But, by now we have two generations of Americans reading anti-conformity books in high school -- "Catcher in the Rye" being the obvious -- and listening to heavy metal, and some rap, artists railing against conformity.

So by now, Jason Robards's character -- 30-ish, "clean and sober", with his suits and cardigans and clean undershirts beneath -- seems himself almost someone Holden Caulfield would consider the enemy.

Nothing against the play and movie being as they were on the cusp of "the 60s". But things have gotten more complicated, more complex -- tougher -- since then. It seems so alien, it is amazing to contemplate that this was within my lifetime.