Lights, camera, kids

When I sat down a few years ago to write a book about watching classic movies with modern children, it wasn't with a game plan in mind, or even a list of movies. I simply couldn't watch "Mulan" one more time. Maybe you feel my pain. Maybe you've noticed, too, that the balkanized state of today's viewing options -- Disney and Nickelodeon for the little guys; R-rated dramas, comedies, and action films for grown-ups -- keeps a family from shared movie-time and its associated memories and conversations. For me, old movies proved to be the answer, or an answer. (Turning off the TV set was another). My daughters Eliza and Natalie learned to surf genres and decades as well as channels, to view black and white as an acceptable (sometimes even preferred) alternative, and to appreciate Jimmy Cagney and Bette Davis as irreducible singularities. Either I've broadened their cultural horizons or irretrievably warped them; ask me in 20 years. For now, here are a few samples from the book that resulted, "The Best Old Movies for Families" (Anchor).

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Appropriate ages: 7 and up.

The Sell: Boys will be girls.

Why it's here: It's an elemental calculus: (Men) + (Women's clothing) = Funny. I have no idea why this is so, but it goes back a ways. Presumably there was a Cro-Magnon comedian 10,000 years ago who strapped on a pair of coconuts and the Paleolithic equivalent of a housedress and slayed 'em around the campfire one night. The genetic express runs from that to the Monty Python boys and right through this movie.

There's a lot to love in this, the comedy many observers feel is the funniest single movie to come out of Hollywood. There's Jack Lemmon at the top of his game as a Nervous Norbert who finds the freedom to be as femme as he wants to be in drag. There's Tony Curtis delivering a pitch-perfect Cary Grant impression once he puts on the yachting cap to win Marilyn Monroe. ("Nobody talks like that!" snipes Lemmon . ) There's old Hollywood ghost George Raft as gangster Spats, and resuscitated vaudeville ham Joe E. Brown as the millionaire with the hots for Lemmon; the latter is especially priceless as he flaps his enormous mouth and gets off the movie's closing gag, a topper that is inarguable and hilarious.

And there's Marilyn. Let this movie be your children's introduction to her, and to the entire concept of the beautiful and the doomed in popular culture. From Monroe they can move on to Judy Garland and James Dean, to Buddy Holly and Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, to all the unlucky and unready whose deaths we seem to need. Marilyn was the first moth to the flame of modern celebrity, and all you have to do is mention that she died young, show your kids "Some Like it Hot," and let her vibrant, uncontainable sadness do the rest.

The Searchers (1956)

Appropriate ages: 12 and up.

The Sell: What happens when being a hero turns you into a villain?

Why it's here: Because it riddles the western with doubts and complexities. "The Searchers" is for when you want to move a kid beyond entertainments like "Stagecoach" and be gripped by a harder drama, one with moral as well as physical dimensions.

At what point does someone watching this for the first time understand that Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is not a nice man? At what point do they understand the movie's greater point: that men like Ethan are necessary for civilization but will always remain outside it? The first is a child's realization, probably coming when Ethan stampedes the buffalo so the Indians will starve. The second is a revelation, underscored by the film's final, effortlessly eloquent image of the door closing on its hero. We stay inside. He doesn't.

It's not a western for young children. There's that sequence where Ethan returns from burying the body of Lucy Edwards (Pippa Scott) in a gully; he's visibly shaken by what has been done to his niece, and when one of the search party pushes for details, he cracks -- John Wayne "loses it" -- and furiously tells the man never to ask him again.

For older kids, there's a lot to chew on here and also a lot to enjoy. Jeffrey Hunter, young and handsome and troubled in a modish way, lets us hang our sympathies on someone while we sort out our feelings about Ethan. But that sorting out is the true drama of "The Searchers," and the searching mostly goes on in our hearts and heads. Would Ethan be more effective if he were less of a racist creep? Or do we know and just not want to admit that a kinder man would have given up after one year or three, that hatred is a greater spur than love, that the graveyards of American settlement are filled with the bones of vicious men? And do we call them heroes now because we've forgotten what it took, or because we still carry their DNA?

Little Women (1933)

Appropriate ages: 8 and up.

The Sell: The "real" American Girls

Why it's here: This is the movie that sold Eliza on the classics, on Katharine Hepburn, on Louisa May Alcott -- on the old America that popular culture does its best to erase daily. All girls play with all dolls, drawn to whatever fantasy projection is in the playroom at the time, but there are those who are drawn to Barbie, those who feel kinship with Groovy Girls, and then there are the kids who go for the American Girls line -- who, however young, sense value in an older, even unfashionable way of doing things. (This, of course, is what the dolls are selling.) They're the girls who read Laura Ingalls Wilder as evidence of a continuum of girlhood and who perhaps find tougher meat there than in what modern kid culture offers.

Here, the young Hepburn is that continuum made flesh and she honors Louisa May Alcott's self-portrait. Jo doesn't marry the boy next door, even though he's in love with her. Rather, she moves to New York to become a writer (blazing a trail that is now a freeway), suffers doubts about her art, her family, her own pigheadedness, and then finds a quiet sort of love with her intellectual equal.

The Jos of today live in Brooklyn and start websites, and their every move is encrusted with all-knowing irony. The women of "Little Women" are pre-irony, though, and some kids will find that corny. The ones who don't -- who are naive or mature or some admixture of both -- will recognize the artless sincerity here as a thing to be emulated, even if the world doesn't always respect it.

Roman Holiday (1953)

Appropriate ages: 8 and up.

The Sell: The original "Princess Diaries"

Why it's here: Princesses come cheap if you're a little girl in our culture. They're everywhere : the Disney royal line of Ariel, Cinderella, Jasmine, Sleeping Beauty; the Anne Hathaway heroines of "The Princess Diaries" and "Ella Enchanted"; teen queens like Hilary Duff in modern dress; fallen parodies like Paris Hilton; faithful film versions of Frances Hodgson Burnett, princess dolls, princess books, princess costumes -- all dedicated to the proposition that our wonderful daughters are princesses as well, the stars of their lives and heirs to all the charmed things that will happen to them. There are more royal houses in a single American elementary school than in all of pre-WWI Europe.

But. There are princesses and there are princesses. Some are born to it by bloodline, others by entitlement, still others by grace. Audrey Hepburn is of the latter -- the cinema's own young and ardent royal.

The film parses themes of duty and rebelliousness in a manner that any young kid can understand, but it does so in a non-threatening way. Hepburn is not about to go wear black and read Kerouac -- that will come in "Funny Face" -- let alone throw on a belly shirt, get a tattoo, and score some Oxycontin. Rather, her runaway princess finds pleasure in simply walking down the strada without having to be anywhere at all, the same way kids unbend into any day they're not being hustled from one activity to the next. In fact, Princess Ann is very like a modern American child of privilege: She is the center of activity and, in many ways, her royal house's reason for being, yet she's powerless to move in any meaningful way.

My daughters recognized the rightness of the ending, in which the princess returns to her post, broadened and empowered by her adventures, but they mourned it too -- mourned the loss of the genuine independence they felt both Ann and they deserved. It would, and will, be coming.

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

Appropriate ages: 10 and up.

The Sell: Let's get small.

Why it's here: All you have to say to a kid is: Guy shrinks until he has to fight off the family cat. Cue it up, mom. But, more unusually, this film has the chutzpah to follow through on its basic premise. Guy shrinks. Why? Doesn't matter. When's it going to stop? It's not.

The movie has been read as a statement of mid-'50s alienation, a naggingly doubtful negative to Eisenhower-era positivism. OK, if you say so. To a child, the very real power of "The Incredible Shrinking Man" comes from the way it exploits our curiosities about size and fears about proportion. Don't you think kids think the world is too big for them? Don't you think they worry about how to grow into that world? Isn't the idea of the process reversed -- happening to an adult, no less -- some combination of delicious revenge and worst-case scenario?

Anyway, who doesn't think it would be kind of cool to live in a dollhouse, or to battle a spider with a pin? And who doesn't feel they wander unseen sometimes through their own home, parents and siblings looking right through them? "Incredible Shrinking Man" asks us to adjust to changing perspectives, to use the things at hand, and to look among the molecules for our fellow travelers. It's Zen Buddhism through the back door of cheap '50s sci-fi: What if Scott Carey shrinks into nothing? What if he's already there?

Reprinted from "The Best Old Movies for Families" by Ty Burr © . Published with permission of Anchor Books, Random House Inc., New York, NY.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.