Dirk Bogarde in Victim
Made in 1961 before homosexuality was decriminalised/legalised in 1967
But Luke wasn’t directly railing against the government, his self-centered malaise as establishment defiance is all 60’s.
A teenager watching that today would remark, “So the guy ate 50 eggs, who cares?”
Nitpick, just for credit-due’s sake: “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” is by Shel Silverstein.
To be fair, with the possible exception of Louise Brooks, the style of all the actors you mention would stand out like a sore thumb in today’s movies. They may have been a little different from the standard style of the teens, but they were still very much of the era. The silent films whose performances really stand out for me as very close to modern in subtlety and realism of style are ***The Crowd, Hindle Wakes, and A Cottage on Dartmoor. ***
I did not know that. (I did know he wrote “A Boy Named Sue”). Ignorance fought.
I found Vixen Slut Nurses #32 to be trapped in the collective unconsciousness of the early 2000’s, while both Vixen Slut Nurses #31 and Vixen Slut Nurses #33 to have aged very well.
The L Shaped Room was a movie starring Leslie Caron who played an unmarried ,pregnant teenager who moved into a bad apartment to fend for herself. It was not the thing that we were public about in 1962. It was a big think back then.
Roger Moore’s James Bond movies. Yes, some of it is Moore’s limitations as an actor. And I know that there was a sense in which he was playing the role broadly with a self-deprecating wink. But much of the role is about his representation of an image of masculinity that is locked into the 70s zeitgeist.
That whole idea of cool that he promoted now looks lame to the extreme and utterly dated. He looks like the ads Playboy ran in the 70s that typically had an uber-guy drinking cocktails listening to his fabulous stereo. A woman used entirely as set-dressing paws him with desperate yearing in her eyes as he gazes indifferently elsewhere. Maybe he’ll do her the signal honour of gracing her with his sexual prowess. Or maybe not. It’s entirely his call, as she passively and desperately uses her sexuality to get his all-important attention.
Moore just looks like an aging pants man caught in terminal brand idolatry; pathetic rather than heroic. It’s just no longer possible for that shtick to sell.
The James Bond look was already dated by the '70s. It was hatched in the '50s, and stayed frozen in that era.
My vote is for “West Side Story”-I mean-young punks snapping their fingers and chanting “cool it”? And Officer Krumpke?
Nobody in his or her’s teens would understand this film.
Incidentally, in “The Graduate” (when Benjamin rents a room in Berkeley, to be near his love), he has a extremely funny interchange with the land lord:
(Landlord): “are you wunna dose outside agitators?”
(Benjamin): “no”
(Landlord):
“I hate does outside agitators”!
That was one of the best lines in the flick:D
A lot of this comes under the heading of Values Dissonance. See also Discredited Trope.
And? Establishment defiance is alive and well 50 years after the 60s - it’s just usually redirected at different targets. That doesn’t make “Cool Hand Luke” irrelevant in the least. And the film is rich enough in other allegories to still make it relevant on many other levels. A teenager watching today can just as easily see the connection between Luke eating 50 eggs and his later statement of “Stop feeding on me!”, and going deeper, how that ties in with the Christ allegory - all without needing any familiarity with the 60s zeitgeist.
One-note movies like “Love Story” become irrelevant because they have no other structure to lean on.
Actually, Roger Moore SALVAGED the James Bond series, as I see it. It’s the earlier Sean Connery movies that seem dated to me, because Connery played them so straight.
Moore was RIGHT to play Bond with a wink and a nudge!
Now, if you want to see some truly dated, pathetic attempts at looking cool, watch any of the Rat Pack movies of the early Sixties. Sinatra, Martin & Co. thought of themselves as hip, swinging, cool, Ring-a-ding-ding kind of happening guys. They had no idea how laughably UNcool they’d look in jus ta few years.
Things to Come, screenplay by H.G. Wells, 1936, was based in a zeitgeist that assumed humanity’s salvation lay with scientists and technical experts rebuilding society on a rational basis.
As David Szondy remarks on his Tales of Future Past website:
Also instructive is George Orwell’s 1941 essay, “Wells, Hitler, and the World State.”
I couldn’t disagree more (Moore?)
I find the Moore films damned near unwatchable, except for For Your Eyes Only, which was the straightest and most Fleming-like of all of his.
but I could watch the Connery Bonds over and over. And do.
Astorian, I’m focusing on the zeitgeist thing. It’s not about the worth or otherwise of the Bond oeuvre in its various incarnations or who was the better Bond. It’s about specifically the spirit of an idea of masculinity that is almost unrecoverable now. Assumptions about how men are to behave towards women when being cool inform the whole Moore enterprise in a way that is present despite the broad nod to self-mockery.
It’s a bit like Hitler’s moustache. It is now impossible to imagine how anyone ever thought it looked cool because of the sustained (and I hasten to say deserved) mockery of it. But it clearly must once have conveyed something like authority, efficiency, a certain economy of line, and rebellion against Kitchener-style WW1 moustaches that had gone before. Yet no-one today can relate to that. Just as no-one can relate to the unspoken assumptions underlying Moore’s Bond’s cheesiness.
Why are you showing The Graduate in a computer class?
No need to “correct” me. I grasped your point perfectly, though I don’t agree with you.
I agree with you, although the Moore film I can watch more than once is To Live and Let Die, because I’m into the voodoo/vodoun thing.
Connery played Bond with a working-class rough edge underneath the suave veneer, something that I think Daniel Craig captures better than Moore, Dalton, or Brosnan ever did. I always got the sense from the Connery portrayal that Bond had grown up rough, learned to fake nobility, and was a complete sociopath.
I assumed he meant composition.
I’ll nominate Network, from 1976. I’m sure younger people with some knowledge of history and a dark sense of humor can appreciate most of the film. Nevertheless, it probably helps a lot to have lived through that time — in particular:
[ol]
[li]The shallow pursuit of high ratings had not yet taken over television news reporting. (It soon would though.)[/li][li]There was a real malaise in the air, in 1970s America. Not that we all walked around moping every day. But, after Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, rapidly rising crime rates in the major cities, not to mention the Cold War always rumbling in the background, there was a widespread sense that society was severely broken, degenerating, and that no one really knew what to do about it.[/li][/ol]
Ya do, huh? Well I’ve just never liked Vixen Slut Nurses #33.
It insists upon itself.