Love in the time of Swine Flu

So I wake up this morning and am bombarded with sneezing pigs. Vomiting pigs from Mexico. Swine flu has arrived in all of its ad revenue generating programing. Nothing can give us a boost in ad revenue like a good old fashioned health scare. Remember all that duct tape and plastic wrap you bought during the bio chemical scare back in 2001?

While you are holed up in quarantine, hiding from your infectious children let me suggest a few good precode films which may help you get through this time without breaking down and buying some crazy anti-biotic pinata at Home Depot.

The Rains Came (1937) OK, a few years off, but pretty interesting. You can tell this is a post code movie because Myrna Loy falls in love with an Indian doctor and then dies. But, she is very aggressive towards her love interest and is quite the woman of the world. Just to be clear..I'm not saying that Indian people are comparable to Mexican culture, but it deals with people traveling outside of their borders and their experience with another culture and infectious disease. I enjoyed it very much because it has this very powerful Indian woman, I think she's the equivalent of a queen who smokes and talks like Obama. Pretty cool.

If you are feeling a little ambitious you could watch the 1914 film. Tess of the Storm Country stars Mary Pickford and Harold Lockwood who died in 1918 at the age of 33 of Spanish Influenza. We can pay tribute to those who were lost to something that we can quite easily combat now with modern medicine.

1918 was the year of the Great Spanish Flu outbreak. This had a very large influence on film. Many stars were affected by or had survived the outbreak. Vera Kholodnaya, of whom I know nothing about but now I am interested, died of the Spanish Flu (or the Bolsheviks) had here career cut short in 1919 at the age of 26. Be Silent, Sorrow, Be Silent, a 1918 film about a circus performer who is married to a drunk acrobat and gets a sugar daddy, Mirages; Children of the Century and Zhizn za zhizn / A Life for a Life.

While you are in hiding, let me know what you find out about these films.

Influeza 1918 (this is an American Experience film, but looks like this may put things in perspective.)