I was watching Stigmata the other day and this took me out of the story. The phone rings (a land line), and the girl answers it, “hey Mom”. The mother asks, “how did you know it was me?”
About a minute later the girl says, “hold on a minute, I need to change phones.” She then goes to the phone in the kitchen.
Are you talking exclusively about technology, or societal morality as well?
If the latter, then the entire dialogue of the last 30 minutes of The Lady Eve (about her former paramours) would apply. Ditto all of the Doris Day romcom’s. Ditto My Favorite Wife, The Awful Truth, etc.
Summer Rental is still one of my favorite movies. There’s a scene where John Candy is trying to adjust rabbit ears in vain, trying to get a clear picture on the black & white TV.
You won’t see that much anymore.
Scandals involving unwed mothers won’t be huge plot points anymore.
If I was reading a book or a screen play where a parent said that line, I’d completely assume it was set in the 1950s or something. Do people not go to church anymore? No, of course they do. Is it very commonplace for Mom and Dad to get their children into their Sunday best, corral them all into the family station wagon, and go to church every weekend? No, it’s perceived as being a much less common occurence.
I wonder if many younger people today would know straight away the significance of someone receiving a telegram in older movies. By that I mean it used to be shorthand - woman opens the door to finding someone waiting to deliver a telegram, drops to her knees, shrieks and wails. We don’t need to be told she’s got a boy in the war - or had one, anyway. How soon until the screenwriters for period pieces have to make it more clear?
Groucho as Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup:
“My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.”
There was an old Mickey Rooney movie I saw years back, where he said to Judy Garland “Pardon my boner,” meaning mistake, or error. I don’t think you’ll hear that conversation much in contemporary (family) movies.
The Death Notification thing has happened in real life.
In her book Who Gets the Drumstick?* Helen(North)Beardsley described seeing her priest arrive and walk to her door. Pregnant with her eighth child she opened the door and asked him “Is this an official visit Father?” and he told her it was.
*The book that the movie(s) *Yours, Mine, and Ours *were loosely based on.