We are blessed in the San Francisco/San Jose area to have the Stanford Theater, which lovingly shows classic films and is currently running the entire Cary Grant library. (Bless you Stanford Theater!) Husband and I went to see a double feature last night of To Catch a Thief and An Affair to Remember.
To Catch a Thief was very entertaining (and the print was in really good shape, always a plus.) However about midway through there’s an excruciatingly long scene where Grace Kelly drives a sportscar through a high-speed chase through a twisty mountain road. Gah! I kept thinking the whole time “ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod…PLEASE don’t DO that!” Very eerie.
An Affair to Remember was a trip. Absolutely hammy and in one part Deborah Kerr is conducting a church group of your standard urchins and waifs in a song. Mid-way through the song the white kids all part and the two black kids come to the front and start bustin’ out in this total vaudville-style, down-on-the-plantation dance sequence. By this time you’re aware the movie is total dreck made tolerable only by the inclusion of Grant, but holy crap! Judging from the audible gasp from everyone in the auditorium no one else was expecting it either.
We saw The Apartment last week, and don’t even get me started on that. It’s like a whole 'nother world!
I’m not quite sure what your point is, but I don’t find old movies “creepy” to watch. For the most part, the direction, writing, and acting of movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood were far superior to ours. Back then, the faces of actors and actresses had character, and the performers learned their craft in vaudeville or the stage. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddy Prinze, Jr., for example, pale in comparison to Hepburn and Tracy or Bogy and Bacall.
Now if you mean uncomfortable gender or racial stereotypes, I just chalk that up to the prejudices of the era. The climate of the 1930s, for example, didn’t allow black performers to play anything other than slaves or housemaids. Similarly, Chinese and Korean actors, like Keye Luke and Philip Ahn, were stuck playing “the inscrutable Oriental.” Often, Caucasian actors played Asian roles, as when Boris Karloff played the title role in The Mask of Fu Manchu.
Now what is wrong with The Apartment? Don’t be dissin’ billy Wilder movies!
I am a HUGE fan of GOOD movies, no matter how old they are. BUt of course I find myself overlooking certain . . . cultural artifacts present in movies made in eras other than mine. Usually, I find that I CAN overlook such things if, on the one hand, I understand it to have been perfectly acceptable at the time the film was made and, on the other hand, if the film’s good enough to warrant the little extra effort involved in making such allowances. Films like Birth of a Nation and The Quiet Man, however, I find it impossible to sit through: their offensiveness is egregious enough not to be excused by cultural context.
I find the fossilization of old practices and attitudes one of the more interesdting things about old films.
For instance:
The Seven Year Itch The whole movie is predicated on The Summer Bachelor. If it weren’t for this movie and Alistair Cooke’s old essay The Summer Bachelor I would have no idea what was going on. In the pre-air conditioner days, it was the practice for families rto send the wives and children out of the hot, sweltering city to the beach or the mountains or some other cool suburb. The wage-earner husbands stayed in town, living in a literally mothballed apartment, joining them on weekends if he could. Temptation was omnipresent, as both sources make clear. As Cooke pointed out, air conditioning was the death of this institution.
Correct me if I’m wrong but my guess is what dates a movie like “The Apartment” is the piggish treatment of women in the workplace by some of the male characters (especially Fred MacMurray’s). Of course, the movie was made in 1960 and that was long before anyone was familiar with the terms “EOE” or “sexual harassment suit”.
There are what my friends refer to as “Saratoga Moments” of hideous irony in some films—like Grace Kelly driving that speeding car. It’s named after Saratoga, in which Jean Harlow tells a doctor that “I’m perfectly healthy”—she died about a month after the scene was filmed.
Other Saratoga Moments include Natalie Wood almost falling off a boat in Inside Daisy Clover; Carole Lombard climbing into a small plane in To Be or Not to Be; James Dean’s auto-safety commercial . . . Lots more I can’t think of right now.
That specificly, but also stuff like there are two blacks in the entire movie, and they are the shoe-shine boy and a guy sweeping the lobby and emptying ashtrays; the whole concept that it would be horrible and unseemly to take a woman to a hotel, but no big deal to take her to a friend of a friends apartment for the exact same purpose; the surrealness of the bank of elevator operating gals, lead by the head elevator-operator dominatrix or whatever. (These weren’t old-tyme elevators that even required an operator, they were just the kind where you push a button, but for some reason it must’ve been out of the question to expect big-shot business guys to push a button for their own floor or something.)
The Grace Kelly thing I found creepy just because of the way she died. A whole different “20/20 hindsight” kind of creepy. Like if you were watching an old movie and there was a plot to take town the World Trade Center with jet planes. It would weird you out right? Like when you watch a Naked Gun movie and OJ Simpson is beating the crap out of someone for laughs.
Cal has pretty much hit the nail on the head with what I’m talking about. I’m not saying the movies themselves are bad or not interesting and well done, but I do find some of the practices of the past to be disquieting or hard to comprehend. Take Breakfast at Tiffany’s for example. The whole thing sort of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m still trying to figure out what’s defining creepy here. Saratoga moments? Racial stereotypes? Real creepiness?
I will weigh in with the blather, whether it’s on-topic or not, that one of the creepiest old movies I’ve seen is The Bad Seed. In it, an angelic little girl engineers the deaths of several people who cross her. I think somehow it’s the impression I have that MOST old movies don’t really deal in hideous subjects (yes I have seen Psycho) and are relatively benign (like, I don’t know, old Westerns or something) which makes this movie so creepy. The other reason is that it IS very creepy.
Cal, I sort of disagree with you on The Seven Year Itch. I thought it was pretty easy to figure out that families got sent away for the cool summer breezes while Daddy stayed in town and sweated. I mean, nobody told me and I guessed that was what was happening. I suppose I didn’t realize that a/c was the death of this ‘lifestyle’ but I would venture to suggest that this probably was sort of a northeastern phenomenon anyway. After all, noplace handy to send the family TO in the deep, deep South.
Actually jayjay, Jean Harlow did not die in an auto accident. That was Jayne Mansfield. I believe Jean Harlow died of a kidney infection that complicated by the fact she didn’t seek medical treatment until it was too late (either she or her mother was a Christian Scientist).
BTW voguevixen, in the “Naked Gun” movies it was usually O.J. who was getting beat up.
So, gobear, you’re saying that older movies are better than contemporary ones, because Freddie Prinze Jr and Sarah Michelle Gellar are no Tracy and Hepburn? Hmmm…
But back to the OP: I used to watch older movies always keeping in mind that things were just “different” then. So I’d see something that was racially offensive, or sexist, or prudish and naive, or just plain cheesy, and just accept it because that kind of thing was acceptable “back then.”
But then I saw His Girl Friday and To Have and Have Not, and those blew that theory all out of the water. Apparently, people in the 40’s were perfectly capable of making sophisticated movies with well-written adult characters and still stay within the Hays code – they just didn’t. So I’ve got a lot less tolerance for “classic” movies than I used to; I no longer assume that just because something was made before 1965 is inherently better just because “they don’t make 'em like that anymore.” There’s a hell of a lot of insipid (or offensive, even) stuff on the AMC channel that doesn’t really give me a warm nostalgic feeling but just makes me feel all creepy inside.
And I’ve never been able to tolerate Breakfast at Tiffany’s; I don’t think it’s that great a movie to start with and I can’t imagine Mickey Rooney’s act ever being acceptable.
One more thing: in the just-plain-creepy department, there’s this one Shirley Temple movie that I caught a little bit of when I was flipping through the channels, and it was an image that’s been burned into my mind forever. A friend of mine told me she caught it the same night I did, and told me what the title was, but I’ve already forgotten it again. The scene was this: a man was lying face down on the floor, and Shirley was straddling the guy, grinning and holding a HUGE butcher knife. (Turns out the man was tied up and she was cutting the ropes, but it took me several moments of WTF?!? before I was able to piece that together.)
– I agree that it would feel more comfortable if, when shooting Birth of a Nation, Billy Bitzer had shut his camera down after the first 20 minutes.
But may I get on a soapbox for a moment?
That film represents popular feelings in this country less than 100 years ago. Live with it.
To progress we should never forget where we’ve been. If Birth of a Nation makes you squirm, that’s a good thing.
“I believe Jean Harlow died of a kidney infection that complicated by the fact she didn’t seek medical treatment until it was too late (either she or her mother was a Christian Scientist).”
—Off-topic a little bit again . . . Jean had constant medical attention (her mother was the one to call the doctor). But this was in the pre-antibiotic days, so little could be done for kidney disease back then.
Back on topic, I like the fact that movies inadvertantly introduce us to the kinds of social and sexual changes in everyday life that we otherwise would never know about. I don’t find it creepy, I find it enlightening and fascinating!
Are you talking about movies like the Doris Day/Cary Grant classic, “That Touch of Mink”? The whole movie revolves around whether or not Doris will sleep with Cary, and all the “hilarious” situations that surround it. It would be nearly impossible to make that movie today, as Doris and Cary would be in bed within the first 5 minutes (as my wife says, “Come on! He’s Cary Grant! Do him already!”).
Well the Disney classic Peter Pan has the ‘What makes the Red Man Red?’ song that is kind of embarrassing.
But I do find it interesting to see the different attitudes in older films.
I wonder sometimes about Willy Wonka. Could you make that film today? Could you really say it’s bad for a kid to be fat? Or would Faruka be ‘sharing imparied’?
Oh man, how could I forget that part?! For some reason the creepy part that stuck in my mind was the whole $50 “tip for the ladies room attendant” thing. (Luckily I had a more worldly friend to explain that to me, lol.) And George Peppard as a “kept man” or whatever. (Well, that’s more depressing than creepy.) I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been able to watch the whole thing at once because I keep getting up and going “arrrgh!”
I hope I’m not giving the impression that I dislike old movies in general, because that’s not the case. Most translate fairly well, with the only difference being copious amounts of alcohol and cigarettes being consumed, haha.
I hope those of you talking about “The Birth of a Nation” know that the “cultural artifacts” in the movie were not perfectly acceptable at the time. There was an uproar because of it’s racism.
According to here http://www.filmsite.org/birt.html , two scenes were cut from the movie, but the film was still called “the meanest vilification of the Negro race.”. It was even denied release in some cities.
I’ve never seen the movie myself (but do hope to some day just because it’s such a legend), but the site does go through the movie pretty well word-for-word, and I do see what all the fuss is about. I just didn’t want people going around saying this was the era’s view of the black man at the time. In fact, this is the same time the NAACP was founded (they were the first to gripe about TBOAN). I’ve also read a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories where he had nothing but good things to say about black people.
