What are some movies that were great when they were released, but now just look ridiculous?
The inspiration for this thread was last night when I was watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. There were lots of little things that made me slap my forehead. The special effects looked cheesy. The costumes looked really dated. But by far the worst was that the villan, a man of advanced genetic engineering, the galaxy’s most advanced human, was wearing a freakin’ mullet.
This may get me some flack, but The Searchers. Audiences don’t react well to it nowadays. People perceive it as cheesy or offensive.
Whenever I’m watching some historical movie, or SF film set in the Future, Pepper Mill will walk by and casually announce when the film was made, based on the hairstyle and clothing.
I don’t really think that outdated fashions irretrievably doom a work. By that standard, Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Cleopatra and Julius Caesar (especially as portrayed in his day) shouldn’t have survived. People learn to allow for it. Fay Wray isn’t my ideal of feminine beauty, but that doesn’t ruin the original King Kong for me. Neither do the dated effects. (For that matter, I still love ** Star Trek II**, effects and all. )
So, while I wouldn’t say **Star Trek II ** is a Great film, I do not think it has been made unwatchable by time.
Movies that have been made unwatchable by time are those where attitudes have changed so radically that you have a completely different perception than those originally watching it. Like movies with extreme racial stereotypes.
i suspect that films like the original Imitation of Life or The Children’s Hour would be perceived very differently today. I’ve never seen either of them, and don’t recall their ever being on television:
Dated special effects don’t bother me. I grew up on Doctor Who, Star Trek (no bloody letters!), Twilight Zone, Time Tunnel, Outer Limits, etc… on TV and damn dirty apes in the movies.
Even political changes making certain dramas and thrillers out of date are okay by me.
What gets me is social issues and everyday life things taken for granted. Being out of context by 30 to 60 years makes me glad for internet movie/TV trivia sites to fill in my entertainment quotient. Comedies of the 30s and 40s are where I most notice it.
For the record, Imitation of Life was on TV at least once, in the 70s. I don’t remember being scandalized by it back then, but that was a long time ago.
STII was still watchable, but some of it just looked silly, and much of it was the styles. I remember watching it with a GF in the late 90s. She wasn’t a fan, and she could be pretty snarky sometimes. In a scene towards the end, David is on the bridge and has the arms of a sweater tied around his neck. GF pretty much lost it at that point. I can’t watch that scene anymore without thinking “Yuppy douchebag.”
Not long ago I was watching Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia. Not a great film by any stretch, but definitely has not aged well. The radical hip counter culture clothes that the kids wore seemed terribly quaint and non-threatening. When one character told another to “Wake up and smell the coffee”, that was pretty edgy in 1983. Not it’s an Ann Landers cliche.
Imitation of Life is soapy, but by no means objectionable, except to those annoying belligerents who manage to milk a dispute out of any depiction of race. It’s about a white woman and a black woman who go into business together, but maintain separate private lives. The idea of two women of different races becoming successful off a good idea is just what I did all that marching for in the 1960s.
The Children’s Hour is a rather circumspect depiction of accusations of lesbianism between faculty members in a boarding school. Mostly remarkable for the fact that the concept was depicted at all in those repressive times.
Movies based on character and story can endure because those are relatively timeless. But movies based on state-of-the-art technology will age poorly because the state-of-the-art will move on and leave them behind. And movies that are based on some topical issue will age poorly when society resolves that issue. (Nobody today is going to see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? or The Stepford Wives or The Boys in the Band the way they were seen by the viewers of their time.)
Anything that depends upon a knowledge of something current but ephemeral will have trouble with this.
Lewis Carroll’s parodies of contemporary sentimental poems in his “Alice” books don’t really work today because the poems have been pretty much forgotten. They live on in literature simply because Carroll made fun of them. Otherwise, “You are Old Father William…” would only be known by specialists in Victorian Children’s Literature. Similarly, the preface to one collection of Fredric Brown’s previously unpublished pulp stories noted that the solution to the mystery in one case depended upon knowledge of a piece of 1940s radio advertising. That’s not a recipe for making your work Something For The Ages.*
Movies of this sort include the “Next Generation” Star Trek movies, which explain damned near nothing about the characters. It might be my agist prejudice, but I think the first six movies could just about stand on their own, at least as a group. But an unfamiliar newbie will be thoroughly lost trying to pick up the threads in the Next Generation series.
I’ve read that the ending of the Disney film The Sword in the Stone is ruined because it depends upon a joke that requires you to be familiar with a 1960s Pepsi commercial. I still can’t figure out which line this is supposed to be. Or which commercial.
A lot of the parody movies out now are going to suffer this fate, as well. Interestingly, I don’t see any evidence that the original Airplane! has suffered – it’s pretty self-contained. But films like Date Movie and Meet the Spartans and Superhero Movie are going to be incomprehensible in a few years. If they aren’t already.
Films made in the 1950s about the effect of TV on the movies are going to look quaint, at best, even today. Nobody shows the Twonky anymore (Hans Conreid deals with an alien-influenced, intelligent TV. The story was adapted from a somewhat dark fable by Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, but played for laughs). And the center section (with Tony Randall explaining why TV is better than the movies) of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? will look weird (if it doesn’t already) to future audiences.
*which they weren’t supposed to be. Brown wrote them and sold them to pay the bills. His novels are a lot less ephemeral.
This question comes up every now and then. And I have to make the same comment I always make.
There are two reasons a movie can be called “great.” One, that it breaks new ground and does things technically, visually, or thematically that had never been done before and which influence the movies which come after it. Two, that it does what it does in an almost perfect way combining good writing, directing, acting, etc. into a thoroughly enjoyable movie experience.
Examples of the first abound among silent “classics” (Potemkin, Birth Of A Nation, etc.) and early talkies **The Jazz Singer **comes to mind). Audiences at the time rightly recognized these movies as great advances in movie-making and wouldn’t have hesitated to call them great. Audiences today, if they didn’t know the background of them, would consider them old-fashioned, stilted, and boring. But they are still “great” movies. No serious history of movies would be complete without discussing them.
Examples of the second generally result from changing writing styles, acting styles, and societal values. I recently tried to watch again The Seven Year Itch. I couldn’t do it. It was too much a product of its time. I suspect most of the people reading this board have never seen the movie. And there is no reason why they should even if they are a serious student of movies.
Really? I haven’t seen many old movies, but I liked the The Seven Year Itch all right. Middle-class man, married with children, contemplating affair with young sexpot. How is that dated? Plus it has the archetypal Marilyn Monroe scene with her skirts blown up by an air vent. Maybe you were thinking of a different movie?
No, that’s the movie. Maybe I just couldn’t stand Tom Ewell’s acting style which was very 1950s. In any case, do you think most readers of this board would like it or that it will be studied 50 years hence?
I could deal with the mullet, I could not deal with the sparkly glove on one hand only.
I like “The Graduate,” but it’s one that I don’t think has aged well.
Easy Rider seems dated and fatuous now except for Nicholson’s performance.
One thing that dates it is the very setup – the “Summer Bachelor”, created by the desire to have one’s wife (and kids) comfortable during the hot steamy summer months. In the time before air conditioners, the way you did this was to send them off to the country or the seashore for the summer, while the male breadwinner stayed in the city at his job. This was, naturally, a source of temptation. Alistair Cooke did a wonderful column on it back in the 1950s, about the time of the play and movie. Air conditioning (as Cooke notes) killed off the institution of “The Summer Bachelor”.
However, the movie the Seven Year Itch contains a prologue that explains all this, so the premise isn’t exactly lost to a modern-day audience. They don’t need Cliff Notes to figure out what’s going on.
2001: A Space Odyssey, the future as we saw it in 1968, looked utterly dated by 1971 because the fricking phone company changed its logo! So here’s this advanced society, using phones from the '40s!
Of course the closer we got to the actual 2001, the more dated it looked in other aspects as well.
At least in the Claudette Colbert original, both women are equally responsible for the success of the business (a pancake restaurant and franchise) and are equal partners, yet the black woman remains personally and emotionally subservient to the white woman, acting as her de facto ladies’ maid and nanny to her daughter. In the Lana Turner remake, they’ve thrown off the balance; Lana is a famous actress and her black maid is devoted to her, but is obviously her employee, not her partner, a respectable position.
It is kind of embarrassing. I think they gave up on Tom Ewell as a leading man pretty quick.
I’
m thinking more about the subplot of the woman’s daughter as the “tragic mulatto passing for white”.
Notice, too, that when they remade the movie in the 1960s they considerably changed the plot.
According to a TvTropes member, Philadelphia is another movies whose message is already quite dated.
I think 2001 aged remarkably well, with the exception of the goofy furniture on the space station and maybe some of the fashions that couldn’t quite shake 1968. It’s amazing to me how it still holds up.