This St. Patrick’s Day we are taking a quick little sojourn to the early 1960’s. Advertising is beginning to ramp up its volume and reach. The increase in prescription drugs and therapists is also beginning to touch the masses. How one feels or the evaluation of one’s emotions is starting to appear in younger people’s conversations. We must remember pre WWII the idea of therapy and even prescription drugs for any ailment other than one that was life threatening was almost un-heard of for the general public. In the more cosmopolitan cities, such as New York, having a therapist or taking ‘drugs’ (that is prescriptions drugs) for ailments of the mind may have begun, but in Middletown USA, such concepts were quite foreign.
So, on the theme of the changes coming out of the 1950’s into the 1960’s I thought today’s Movie Sunday would be Doris Day and Rock Hudson’s film: Send Me no more Flowers.. It has the farcical comedy misunderstandings of a late 1950’s movies, but with some of the new themes coming to the decade of the 1960’s in Drugs and therapy and dreams. Even the concept of hypochondria, as the Rock Hudson character feels in today’s film, is a very 1960’s sort of problem. If one were expressing illness when there was none in the 1940’s, they would not have been given a pill, but told to “buck up and go outside and get some fresh air”. Time, it seem, are a changing.