This thread is entirely ridiculous. This is like saying you don’t like most movies made after 1990. It shows a lack of viewing experience and cinematic ignorance that is unworthy of being rationally argued with.
While it’s true that acting and cinema styles have changed through the years, I can’t say that I agree with the OP’s sentiment, or that it’s merelt spectacles that hold my interest in early films. I still love
**Arsenic and Old Lace
Marx Brothers movies
Abbott and Costello movies
Casablanca
Maltese Falcon
Gone with the Wind
**
And tons of others – and that’s just from the 30s and 40s. Boring and slow-paced they’re not.
my mind still balks at thinking of 1950s movies as “old movies”, even though they predate me. There’s a huge list of films from that era that I think of as some of the greatest films made – Seven Samurai, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Third Man, Forbidden Planet.
About ten years ago I decided to work my way through the AFI Top 100 movies, checking off the ones I had seen and trying to watch a bunch of the others. I was really disappointed how many of the “classic”, “best” films I really didn’t enjoy, including:
Casablanca
Some Like It Hot
The Maltese Falcon
It Happened One Night (this movie won something like 5 Academy Awards- hated it)
The Third Man
Rebel Without A Cause
Vertigo, and
The Manchurian Candidate
The cutoff for me seems to be about 1960. Not that I love everything after that date and hate everything before it, but around that time the style of movie acting seemed to improve to be more realistic. It’s more noticeable with comedies. I think drama is drama, for the most part. What audiences would find “dramatic” in 1942 would for the most part still be found dramatic today. But what was considered comedic in 1942 just seems so quaint and un-funny today- I think comedy has matured at a much faster rate than drama, and become much more sophisticated over the years.
I love this movie! I watch it, or parts of it, every time it’s on TCM – which seems to be fairly often. There’s so much going on – never a dull moment – and the set looks so authentic.
One old movie I’ve tried to watch is Intruder in the Dust. It’s so heavy-handed, like a 1940’s version of Crash. Maybe it gets better, but I haven’t been able to get past the first 20 minutes. Claude Jarman’s acting is just awful.
Both drama and comedy change over time, and I don’t agree with this blanket statement. I find some early drama over-stylized and artificial. But i love the early Marx brothers movies. I still think Arsenic and Old Lace is comic genius. (And so, for that matter, is the work of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, but we don’t want to confuse things with silent films).
On the other hand, a lot oif things haven’t aged at all well. I watched Soup to Nuts on DVd last week. It was written by Rube Goldberg (who gets a cameo), and features his inventions. And it’s the first screen appearance of The Three Stooges. How can it miss?
Easily. The Stooges were apparently the highlight of the movie, but I couldn’t see why. It wasn;t just that they weren’t performing their later shtick (a lot less slapstick, and no sound effects) in their later characters – I didn’t find them at all funny or engaging. Larry Fine, in particular, comes off like an obnoxious wise-ass. Ted Healy (of whom the Stooges were “the stooges”) was supposed to have been an extremely popular comedian and leading guy. Based on this film, my reaction is “God knows why”. There’s nothing outstanding or funny or even empathetic about him. And Rube Goldberg’s inventions are boring and fall flat. Nothing in the rest of the film even approaches funny.
but to say that comedy hadn’t developed enough is to miss the point – comedy had developed for ages on live stage, and had had a couple of decades in the movies (even if without sound). It was still adapting to the new medium, but so was drama.
I have trouble sympathizing with anyone who’d refuse to watch movies with Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, etc., etc., etc.
You’re not the only one. Looking at the list of the top-rated 50 films from 1940-1949 from the IMDb, I’ve seen the following:
Casablanca (1942)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Double Indemnity (1944)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
The Great Dictator (1940)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Rope (1948)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Key Largo (1948)
To Be or Not to Be (1942)
Out of all of those, the only ones that I really liked (i.e. I’d happily watch them several times) with were The Best Years Of Our Lives, It’s A Wonderful Life, and The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (one of my favourites!). The rest of them I found entertaining enough, but possibly full of hammy acting (Casablanca) or not as funny as I’ve heard (Sullivan’s Travels). And those are supposed to be the cream of the crop (at least according to the IMDb’s voters).
Yeah, the AFI list is a TERRIBLE, awful, horrible list. Read the article I linked to above for an alternative list.
There is no hard and fast rule that says everyone has to revere every movie on a list of “classics”.
I like a lot of older films (“Rear Window” and “Stalag 17” stand up against any modern movie), but there some with a moderate to high “meh” factor for me - including “The 39 Steps” (the book was great, the movie plodding), “Vertigo” and “Citizen Kane”.
There are a lot of crap movies in any era, including this one. Rather than seeing all of the current crop preserved for posterity (at least 4 out of 5 of which are highly forgettable or just plain lousy), I’d rather see space made for good older ones to be archived.
I probably wouldn’t classify most of those as “classic” movies, though.
Some more of that “cheeseball” acting from pre-1960s films:
Intruder in the Dust*** is not only a really great movie, a meditation on racism through the eyes of a white teenage boy in the Jim Crow South–written by Faulkner; directed by Clarence “National Velvet” Brown, Garbo’s favorite director–but it’s a pretty rare find; very difficult to see (the VHS is listed as high as $135 on Amazon). The only place I’ve seen it is every once in a great while on TCM. I’d say it’s a rare enough opportunity that it’s worth finding your way through to the end.
I understand the OP’s premise. I really dislike Humphrey Bogart, and a little Katharine Hepburn goes a long way (my husband strongly disagrees). Old melodramas are *really *melodramatic, and the acting styles are more suited to live theater than the movie screen. I grew up on these movies on TV, but there are a lot that I just can’t sit through. I think it would be helpful to recommend movies that we feel do hold up.
mte.
Put. The crack pipe. Down.
I don’t think there’s really such a genre as classic movies. The people who made them didn’t know they were making classic movies - they were making movies for the audience of their day just like today’s moviemakers are.
So movies are good and some are bad. There were good movies and bad movies being made in 1940 and and in 1975 and in 2010.
And what lissener said is true. Movies have conventions. We’re more familiar with the movie conventions of today than those of the past. If you sent an average movie from today back fifty years, an audience would probably think it was too loud and too dark, the editing was spastic, the cameras were swooping around, the performers were mumbling their lines, and the movie dragged on way too long.
Actually, over the grand scheme of old movies, ***Casablanca ***is not really very good. I’m not sure why it’s found its way through the erosion of time that left many other, better, movies by the wayside–some cultural hook it found itself anchored to–but while it’s not a *bad *movie, it’s certainly nowhere near the best of its kind.
Check out ***Gilda ***for a similar but, IMO, more entertaining movie. It’s like Casablanca–triangles and WWII espionage in a third-world Casino–but with a sense of humor. (***Gilda ***is available through Netflix streaming.)
I don’t like most of them–more for plot than for acting. I just feel like they’re so predictable. Maybe back then they weren’t but today it just feels…I don’t know, so cliched. Sometimes they’re not, but I just prefer newer movies that play with cliches or are more self aware or mocking. I mean, these aren’t what you’re talking about, but I hate watching slasher movies from the 70s because they’re just so…cut and dry. People die, etc. The 90s film “Scream” is kind of lame, but if I had to watch a slasher, I’d watch that because I like when people can say, “OK, this is cliche, but we can play with it.”
I just like that playfulness, that sort of meta-ness, and things that play too straight just kind of bore me.
I’ve always kind of wanted to like them–I love when people say “I love old movies” and they just rattle off facts and get so involved. I do get the sort of love of the vintage–my favorite music is from the early 60s…but yeah, never really “got” the old Hollywood thing.
I recall Arsenic and Old Lace as being quite funny, but I saw it aeons ago. Would this be a reasonable one to show a coupla kids - 10 and 13?
While this is hardly an approach that will have much success gaining friends or influencing people the underlying point, as I see it, is that if you can sweepingly say you dislike old movies, that’s not because the old movies are sweepingly bad. It’s because you have chosen to live with that false prejudice than make a real effort to learn your way around it.
To a degree, the OP’s sweeping statement is kinda like someone who doesn’t speak French trying to read a French novel and concluding, from their frustrating experience, that French is inherently meaningless, and is a total flop as a language. Rather than learning French. Not that you MUST learn how to watch old movies, but to blame that choice on the films is kinda backwards.