Help me assess/appreciate old-time movie acting

Cafe Society
1

I often have difficulty perceiving the acting in old movies to be good, I think largely because conventions about acting were so different back then - pre “method”. Possibly also because of the way movies were produced.

Last night we watched the 1940 “Pride and Prejudice” with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. Now I know Sir Larry is considered to have been an excellent actor, and I know that good actors can be placed in lousy films. I also acknowledge the added difficulty of acting in a period piece (especially when the producers seemed so unclear as to what period they were trying to portray!) But I had a hard time seeing anything in his portrayal that impressed me as good acting.

I guess I could go on about what I found “not great” about this specific performance, and I will if desired, but I have similar feelings about most older movies. I’m going to try to come up with a movie where I thought the acting “believable.” Even in movies I like - like Casablanca - I think I accept the cartoonish acting because I enjoy the story so much.

2

(I am in no way knowledgable about acting styles, but here are some thoughts: )

One of the things that bugs me about old movies is that each actor speaks alone, one-at-a-time, while all the others in the scene remain quiet.

In real life, of course, people don’t do that. Depending on the tone or mood , they might complete each other’s sentences affectionately, or interrupt each other, yell at each other angrily,etc. And we modern folks expect actors to do the same–i.e to speak realistically. That’s what makes an actor believable.

But in the 1940’s, actors did not speak realistically. And, to me the weird thing is that nobody expected them to do so. For some reason, people liked that formal style of speech.
But, for my modern expectations, it makes old films look faked and unbelievable.
One minor reason for that old convention (of speaking one-at-a-time) may have been the techology of their day. On a live stage, in the days before microphones were invented, it must have been difficult for the audience to hear, unless the actors spoke clearly and separately. And it may have still been necessary through the 1940 and 50’s because early microphones were not sensitive enough to distinguish individual voices within a group, if they speaking at the same time.

3

Yeah - the delivery is a good part of it. They seem like they are orating, more reminiscent of many plays. But even the facial expressions and mannerisms seem very unnatural. Just gets in the way of my enjoying the story.

Of course - maybe that is the way people moved and spoke back then before I was born, and before the world was in color! :wink:

4

Is realism a good thing?

An advantage of a non-realistic presentation is that you can more clearly deal with your topics in a straightforward manner. Look at the contortions that Star Trek had to go to, in order to give a series of morality plays. They had to invent whole planets just to talk about race and gender and whatnot, and come up with an excuse for each planet as to why they were currently in a crisis moment that the outsiders could help to decide.

I recently watched a film called The Fits, showing a girl studying to be a dancer and dealing with a crisis where people are getting sick from something. But, watching the movie, it’s clear that the writer/director had a clear intent for what subject the movie was supposed to address, but I’ll be dammed if I could tell you what it was. They were hamstrung by a realistic presentation. They couldn’t have the character suddenly break into a monologue to the audience to explain what relevance the disease had to her. There was a disease, she caught it, end of movie.

A more mainstream example would be the movie, Troy. The original story is presented as a struggle between the goods, using mankind as their chess pieces. For the sake of realism, this was removed. And that left much of what made the story a classic on the shelf. Perhaps the writers could have gotten around this handicap, but fundamentally it’s not a story that was written to be realistic and will probably always suffer from such a presentation.

Some stories work better with a non-realistic, oratory presentation.

Akira Kurosawa’s Ran maintained the dramatic, oratory aspects of a Shakespearian play and is probably the best film version of a Shakespearian play. A more realistic version would have been worse.

Though there are, of course, movies that are better suited to a realistic presentation. But not all.

(It’s not entirely relevant to this thread, but this video about the Iliad is worth a watch: The Iliad - what is it really about? - YouTube )

5

I watch some old film noir stuff now and then, The Big Sleep was one recently. Humphrey Bogart - his delivery seems so rushed. I imagine because he’s trying to appear edgy, but it wasn’t just his. The little guy that got poisoned, same thing. I like the movie, but even the famous Bogey/Bacall repartee that’s supposed to be witty just seemed off pace. I much preferred his dialog with the bookstore girl and the cabbie.

So I don’t know. I like the old movies, and wasn’t around back then to compare how real people talked, but the dialog does seem strange today.

6

In the old series “Hollywood” one camraman pointed out that in the beginning of sound movies there was only one microphone (perhaps hidden in a bunch of flowers) and the actors would take turns approaching it and speaking their lines.

That’s one possible.

Also, in his biography “The Name Above The Title,” Frank Capra said that sound engineers told actors to leave space between their lines for editing. Capra would have none of it and had his actors interrupt each other.

Remember, too, that often actors in Hollywood came from the stage. It could be that “stageness” (is there such a word?) would creep in.

7

Oh, let me add one other thing. Someone will probably point out that by the 40’s films had progressed to boom mikes that could follow some of the action.
True, but the key word is “some.”
They were still using delicate ribbon mikes. Swing those things through the air and you could destroy the ribbon, rendering the mike useless.

8

Well, this may have to do with what I grew up with, but I have the opposite problem with movies. The “realistic” style of most movies today either bores or annoys me. For one thing, the whole talking over each other approach makes a lot of dialogue hard as hell to follow. Most modern movies that I rent I have to put the subtitles on because of all the “realistic” mumbling and overlapping jabbering. Annoying.

Also the whole shaky cam business is a pain in the eyes to watch, not to mention nauseating. Happily, this particular film fad seems to be diminishing, thank god. I think people are seeing it for the pretentious little cinematic tic that it is.

No, I much prefer my old Turner Classics and company. At least those old movies said what needed to be said, and didn’t leave you guessing as to a character’s motives, or leave you wondering what the fuck just happened.

9

The Hollywood style of acting started changing in the early 1950s with the advent of “method acting.” (Started: the change took more than a decade.) Marlon Brando is credited/blamed with introducing it in A Streetcar Named Desire. Whether this is strictly true - noir films were tending toward more realistic performances after the war in any case - the world itself was tending toward less formality and more casualness. We are so used to it that we don’t see it. Actors were supposed to act. Why should anyone want to watch if they moved and spoke naturally?

10

First of all, how is that unrealistic? Most conversations in real life are one person at a time. Think of how often you talk over another person. Most people wait their turn except when agitated or angry.

And, of course realistic dialog is boring. Take a look at the Watergate tapes. Here you have one of the greatest coverups of all time, and people wander from the subject, repeat themselves, talk about irrelevancies. Even today, writers cut that sort of thing out.

Third, plenty of movies in the past had overlapping dialog. Listen to His Girl Friday or Citizen Kane.

Finally, the style of the 30s and 40s acting has not gone away. You can see it in most TV shows and movies. There have been slight variations, but I don’t think anyone from the 30s would see much difference in watching an episode of any drama you see and anything produced in the UK would be exactly what they expected in acting style.

11

On rereading my post, I see that it is unnecessarily snotty and bitter which in no way answers the OP’s request. I apologize.

I suppose the best way to approach old fashioned “unrealistic” movies is to accept that unreal quality, as you might do for a musical. No one breaks into song with a full invisible orchestra in real life, but that shouldn’t interfere with your enjoyment of the musical. The acting has been described as “cartoony”. You don’t criticize cartoons because animals can’t really talk, do you? And some cartoons can be about serious subjects. Just enjoy a declamatory acting performance for the emotions it presents, and the point it’s trying to make.

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Just because they are all films does not mean they are the same art form. Prior to the 1950s most movies were more closely related to a recorded stage play than to the “realistic” slice-of-life we have now.

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That was only true for a few years in the early 1930s. Although, if you want to see what he’s talking about, watch Hitchcock’s Blackmail, a beautiful partial talkie.

I am a huge fan of old movies. I love Golden Age films as well as silent films, and I disagree with the original thesis of the OP.

However, *Pride and Prejudice *with Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier is just not a good example of anything. The script isn’t very good, as it leaves out too much of the book-- the best dramatization of the book if the British-American TV co-production with Jennifer Ehle.

The 1940s P&P suffers from a lot of problems. One is that is seems to have been lifted into Victorian England for no apparent reason other than people were more familiar with the costuming style. Greer Garson is far too old to play Elizabeth Bennett, and it was a mistake to cast her. She was a very good actress who deserved her Oscar for Mrs. Miniver, and turned out lots of other quite noteworthy performances, but this was a mistake, although FWIW, she tries. Lawrence Olivier, from what I have read, did not want to do this film, and seems to be phoning it in. Apparently he’d been having an affair with Vivien Leigh, wanted her to play Elizabeth, and when the studio wouldn’t comply, got all snitty, and turned in a wooden performance.

It’s not the only bad P&P out there. The BBC version from the late 1970s isn’t very good, again, mostly because someone whittled it down to 2 hours, and made poor choices. Also, the actress who played Elizabeth was unlikable, in my opinion.

Olivier turns out much better performances in other films. He is terrific in Rebecca, where he’s being directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and his last performance, in 1979, in Universal’s remake of* Dracula* (to coincide with the German remake of Nosferatu, I always suspected) is surprisingly good. He is quite ill, and the movie has several flaws (it has some good points too, though), but Olivier plays Van Helsing, and is great.

I don’t know what to recommend to someone who makes a blanket statement about not liking old films. Some of my favorites are screwball comedies, and they have very fast talking in them. The acting is stylized, but it is stylized for screwball comedies, and isn’t any more realistic than you’d expect gritty realism from Saturday Night Live. Three films I especially like are To Be or Not to Be, The Awful Truth, and Bringing up Baby. The first one is a black comedy, and may be the original film in that drama. It makes fun of Hitler and the Nazis, right smack in the middle of WWII, when no one knew how it would turn out; it was a brave film to make, and got panned on first release, but it’s now considered great.

I guess if you don’t like them, you don’t like them, but I feel sorry for you, like you’re someone who is allergic to animals, and will never know what it’s like to have a pet. You’ve missing out on something wonderful that is just there for the taking.

14

Your first paragraph contradicts the second, though you probably don’t think it does. People don’t talk one at a time. People talk all at once with one person getting more time than the other, but if you had a long conversation where one person just sat and stared at you in dead silence while you spoke without some much as uttering an “uh-huh” you would be freaked out. Also, like you said, people don’t talk in clear sentences and tend to repeat themselves. Also people rarely wait their turn. They mostly jump in before the other person is totally finished. Pinter and Mammet attempt to mimic this and get called stylized. It’s not, it’s realistic, but unusual. The Gilmore Girls too (if you aren’t intimately familiar with Mammet or Pinter.)

The problem with the OP is that the premise that modern acting is realistic is faulty. It’s really not. It’s actually moving farther away from realism for the most part right now. Older acting was a different style and that was the style that was accepted at the time. It has a little to do with technology but a lot to do with what audiences accept as “correct”. The Olivier Pride and Predudice wasn’t very good, but that isn’t because of the acting (though the acting may have suffered because of it. )

My suggestion to the OP, if you really want to appreciate older acting styles is to actually immerse yourself in them. There are tons of great old movies. Go watch a lot of them. Limit yourself to not watching anything made after WWII for a month. Then go watch, oh I don’t know Rebel without a Cause or Streetcar, then go back to regular TV. You’ll see three distinct styles (maybe more, there were a lot of acceptable acting styles in Hollywood before Strasburgs imitators took over) and maybe have an appreciation for some of them.

If you don’t want to do that go take an acting class from anyone who is Anti method. This will be the majority of acting teachers today. Figure out what acting is about from your own perspective.

I can also recommend reading but it’s hard to follow something like that without having a little more first hand knowledge.

15

Oh and, Reality Chuck, I know you are on the side of the angels in this debate so I don’t mean to make it sound like I was arguing against you, it just that style of writing wasn’t a that realistic and we shouldn’t pretend it was. Neither should we pretend that what is going on now is realistic. It’s just accepted
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This is flat out wrong. Prior to the 1930s maybe. But while acting styles moved slowly, movies had progressed from filmed stage plays pretty darn quickly. At least big budget ones. Gone with the Wind was released in 1940 and sure as heck wasn’t a filmed stage play.

16

My God, how could anyone NOT love To Be or Not to Be? Funniest movie ever made.

“Zo…they call me ‘Concentration Camp Erhardt,’ eh? Hee hee hee.”

“I’ve never met a man who could drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes.”

“Go ahead…pull the beard!”

…I guess those don’t work so well out of context…

17

Very true. Directors had figured out that they could move cameras around by the 'teens. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1925) is a tour de force of camera maneuvering.

Of course, the occasional movie reveled in its “theatricality.” See Adam’s Rib from the '40s and The Importance of Being Earnest from the '50s.

18

Right, and that was intentional. Like Hitchcock doing Rope. People thought it was cool.

19

I really notice the old style acting in the Hope/Crosby Road pictures. Bob and Bing talk in a casual style as if they just wandered onto a movie set, while everybody else talks in that stilted movie style.

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You can’t discount that there were a lot of people who were just bad actors then too.