Frances Langford was a beautiful band singer back in the 30’s and 40’s. Well, cute is a more accurate description. She was only five feet tall, and had a round face framed by sculpted curls. I was watching her on Turner Classic Movies, and as she was singing I noticed her perfect teeth. I remember wondering how someone got a perfect set of glistening white teeth in the 1930’s. Maybe they were false. I know Clark Gable wore a dental bridge.

Miss Langford’s teeth glistened. Black and white film was made with some kind of silver nitrate and when you saw the movies in a theatre you were watching pure white light bouncing back off a silver screen. Watching her vibrant energy and charisma made me think about the way we can still look in on these long dead entertainers and be affected by the force of their personalities. They come at us as a sort of glow, a moving light show that somehow evokes the charm of a vanished past. 

In books and films, ghosts were often portrayed as shifting colourless lights. The iconic lady on the staircase supposedly looked like a projection, usually transparent. A staging gimmick called ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was used in theatres. It involved lighting and an angled glass sheet, and it made an actor below the stage appear as a transparent glow that could actually interact with actors on the set.

Miss Langford lived most of her life in the Florida sun. There are parks, walkways and a dockside pavilion down there named after her. As if southern Florida wasn’t hot enough for her, she accompanied Bob Hope on his tour of the South Pacific entertaining servicemen during the Second World War. Her signature song was “I’m in the Mood for Love” and when she sang it before thousands of troops, one G.I shouted out, “You’re in the right place, baby!” It got the biggest laugh of the show.

A fighter pilot heading out for a routine surveillance mission offered her a ride in the back seat of his plane. Miss Langford was enjoying the view of a shining sea until the pilot spotted a Japanese freighter and dived to strafe its decks. She hung on, terrified, as bits of the freighter spiralled past her canopy.

We live with the past before our faces more than any previous generation. We see the frenetic inventiveness of men and women long gone, and we see the embarrassing values of writers and studio bosses who didn’t have the advantage of our evolving social norms—their attitude toward women and their racial condescension. We can’t get into a time machine and walk among these shining ghosts, but any time we want, we can watch them from afar. What if we could do the same for the future?

One of the novelties you can find on Youtube now involves old film footage run through the latest software. Colour is brought in, and that annoying speed problem caused by the original camera rate has been ironed out and calmed. Add a little image enhancement and you have an eerily realistic glimpse of the distant past.

I watched a lady with a long gown filmed on the streets of New York around 1910. She stepped over a subway grate and the sudden rush of air lifted her skirt so high you could see her ankles. I couldn’t help thinking of the famous Marylin Monroe scene from forty years later. The difference, of course, is that this unknown lady was genuinely embarrassed, and her ankles have come down to us over a hundred and thirteen years.

I can imagine a sort of senior high school course in which boys and girls are required to watch movies from the 30’s. They’d probably hate it of course, but with a little direction, they’d get to see how our society relentlessly changes over time. Maybe they’d decide that evolving tastes and standards are generally a good thing. 

I wonder if they would get Frances Langford the way I did.