They work anytime. I hadn’t seen the Jack Benny version until after I saw the Mel Brooks remake. I was surprised by how much of it was a line-for-line duplication. I wouldn’t have believed they could make that movie in the midst of World War II.
The Mel Brooks remake was okay. Anne Bancroft certainly wasn’t as toothsome as Carole Lombard in the original. And there was one great line that they couldn’t use in 1942:
Nazi Official: “We Nazis are not so tyrannical. We only want to purge the theater of Jews and homosexuals.”
Mel Brooks: “Without Jews and homosexuals, there IS no theater.”
And unfortunately the American slang term “a piece of cheese” had disappeared by 1983, so they didn’t get to do the great repeated joke about Napoleon/Bismarck/Our Fuhrer from 1942…
This (the Benny/Lombard version) is my favorite film of all=time, ever.
One of the reasons that Birth of a Nation is so important to film history, is that it used almost every camera angle and movement possible with the technology of 1914. Close-ups, reaction shots, overhead pans, long shots, using the camera to establish dramatic irony, it all happened for the first time in Birth of a Nation. DW Griffith (the director) had been an actor, and it occurred to him that other than the proscenium view, you could show you audience the view of another character, or the view of “omniscience” that would then close in on smaller and smaller details.
He experimented wildly, and it all worked.
Watch a film, even a short, made in 1913, them one made in 1916, and see how much changed. Everyone moved away from the camera as an open proscenium, to the camera as narrator.
Totally. Though film before talking is almost a different art form.
Oh, I’d say the silent film is a TOTALLY different art form. Vitaphone changed everything. “All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing,” all different.
OK, I’m caffeine deficient and I haven’t read the whole thread. But I’m going to post anyway.
I think that ‘stilted movie style’ comes archetypes of the time. You had the Small Town Girl Living In The Big City, The Gangster, The Street Kid Who Wants To Be Good, The Street Hood, The Innocent, and so on. The archetypical characters are expected to look, speak, and act in specific ways. ISTM that filmmakers try to make modern characters more nuanced. In the past, many characters seemed on-dimensional. Sure, The Gangster may have once been The Street Kid Who Wants To Be Good, only Something Happened to turn him Bad. But ISTM the backstory was only touched upon, whereas today they are more in-depth. I think the stilted dialogue was used as a shortcut the audience used to immediately identify the archetype, whereas today the actors tend to speak as real people do.
Changes in writing styles could be its own thread. Suffice it to say, audiences looked for and expected something different from movies of the past than audiences of today do. You don’t have to go too far back to see these shifts either. Stuff from the 70s is really really different from stuff today,and that was really really different from the 40s and so on.
I don’t see the word “editing” in this thread yet. I’ve watched state-of-the-art,
“daring” movies from the late 1960s and early 1970s that, to my now twenty-first-century eyes, surprisingly appear slow and slogging. The Graduate, for example, now plods along. Hell, so do some Sam Peckinpah movies and Superman, the Movie. So, to some degree, cable television and some theatrical movies have raised the bar in visual/narrative storytelling for anyone who spends a lot of time watching a screen.
But, at the same time, I’ve given up even trying to process action/fight sequences in, say, Marvel Universe movies (despite my being a Marvel fan since the early 1960s). My brain and/or eyes just cannot process such super-quick cutting, which is (I presume) tailor-made for “kids” as old as 30 …
I watched The Music Box with Laurel and Hardy today and was reminded of something else. While the stars of the day in the 30s and early 40s were usually coming from the stage everyone else was a holdover from the silent era and simply an employee of the studio. They were employed because they could be counted on to show up on time and sober (usually) and would work for cheap. But they learned to act in the silence pictures rather than onstage and silent era acting does not work in talkies. So, in The Music box EVERYONE except Laurel and Hardy are uniformly terrible because they are acting as if they needed to communicate everything though body language. While that’s something to be tolerated rather than appreciated, it has to be taken into account.
Thanks all. I’m thinking that for me (and my wife) this may just come down to taste. Also, I am not personally a HUGE fan of film. I tend to view movies as a way to be entertained for a couple of hours, rather than studying them before and after viewing, and comparing them. I tend to choose modern films based on the reviews I’ve read. Through that, I’m able to winnow out the films I know I’ll dislike, or stack the deck in favor of films in which I’ll at least like something. And I tend to just watch movies that are available in the local theaters, or on disc at the library, or on demand. So my constrained viewing practices ensure that I’ll remain somewhat ignorant.
Old films, I know less about. So I choose based on what I’ve heard/read over the years, or actors/directors. As a result, I think my choices are more hit or miss. I posted in a couple of earlier threads about our not entirely successful efforts to watch films from certain actors like Sidney Portier or Gregory Peck.
Also, my tastes have changed over time. When I was young I was a HUGE fan of the Marx Bros, Laurel and Hardy, or even the silents of Keaton, Lloyd, etc. Now, even tho I appreciate the Marx films (and doubt a week goes by without my quoting from one or another), I don’t enjoy watching them again. And the last couple of times I tried to watch a L&H movie or a silent classic like The General, I haven’t found it enjoyable at all.
As a kid I watched a ton of old movies on TV, so I have some limited familariity with the bigger stars and titles. (Seemed like Ruggles of Red Gap was on every other week!) Nowadays I try to watch some number of older “classic” movies in the same way I try to read some number of classic books - to expand my basic knowledge and so that I will be able to form my own opinions about them rather than based on others’ criticism. But I limit my willingness to spend time watching (or reading) something i do not find enjoyable or rewarding in some way or another, just n the interest of self improvement.
Never did like the screwball Cary Grant comedies, and find films like Some Like it Hot to be a long slog for the sake of a fun line or two. Remember trying to watch Double Indemnity within the past year - a movie I enjoyed as a kid, and was unable to get through half of it. And a couple of years ago I really tried to rewatch most of Hitchcock - to no enjoyment/appreciation.
To some extent, the past is as “foreign” to me as foreign films, which have also been somewhat hit or miss for me. My wife is out of town this week. Maybe I’ll see what is available On Demand or at the library, and watch a couple this week, see if I can figure out what I’ve been missing. Or - like some foods - I’ll just figure that I can have a healthy and enjoyable diet without certain tastes.
It may just be that I lack something that would allow me to appreciate this form of art. The same way that when I go to an Art museum, there are some galleries I generally avoid.
Resurrecting this because last weekend, on a lark, I watched True Grit (1969) starring John Wayne, and the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (2010) back-to-back and I was struck by the stark contrast in style. While both movies feature the same plot, same characters, basically the same dialogue, and, with only a few major deviations, all the of the same scenes, the two are very, very different films.
The difference in style is striking, and it took me a while to articulate exactly what the difference was, but I eventually decided that in the “old Hollywood style,” everything appears to be fake; even stuff that is very, very real, like the Rocky Mountains, still somehow looks like a set, as opposed to the modern style, in which everything is made to seem realistic, even when portraying the fantastic and impossible.
I understand what you mean about those two movies, but I think that’s a question of production values (i.e., the amount of money available to spend). I think the acting in the modern True Grit is highly stylized, and I would not describe it (or nearly any Coen brothers movie, for that matter) as realistic.
That has to do with what we, as modern audiences, have come to accept aa “real” vs what previous generations thought of as “real”
None of it is actually realistic if you actually think about it, and sometimes the most realistic stuff is what looks fake. Vhs film with long depth of field like you might see in an 80s BBC show or Soap Opera, is actually far more realistic, but looks cheap and fake to us.
Shakey cam and lens flare for some reason were thought of as being very realistic for a while. Goodness knows why.
Seeing the unreality of all of it is not always easy or enjoyable. But it’s enlightening if you want to do this sort of cross generational comparison.
Actually, depending on the social setting, that kind of behavior portrayed is perfectly believable. My grandparents’ social peers were extremely unlikely to interrupt someone (both sets of grandparents, and the two pairs had little in common beyond nationality and approximate age, for very wide values of approximate). I’ve worked in teams in which nods and a-hums were common, but interruptions again extremely rare. My current team, if you want people to stop cutting across each other you need to set up a formal meeting. Manners, like mode of dress, change across space and time. I’ve known people who had no problem watching The Tudors but who were bothered by movies from the '40s in which every woman wears '40s styles… the people in question had problems understanding that yes, people did dress that way in the '40s!
Actually, reading this post hits almost every type of movie that I actively dislike:
- Old movies (I see black and white I think Hays Code. Hard pass.)
- Cartoons
- Musicals
I roll my eyes at all the raving about La La Land, for example. Especially that thread on here telling people to watch it instead of Star Wars. I’m not a huge Star Wars guy; I’ll watch them sort of like I watch comic book movies: On my DVR, probably not even getting around to them for months after I record them. But a musical? Yeah, no thanks. Big fan of Emma Stone, but not that big of a fan.
This pretty much sums up what I DO watch.
And it can still be. Naturalistic acting and sound ambiance can make it difficult to pick up the detail of what’s said. I noticed, in His Girl Friday (Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, 1940), that the actors’ speed of delivery gets faster and faster as the action gets more and more farcical - but you can still hear every word, because they’re articulating rather than mumbling.
Well, that’s how I was brought up, too. Granted, the more interesting movie characters aren’t going to have perfect manners, or they wouldn’t present so much of an acting opportunity, but cross-talking, mumbling asides and shouting each other down aren’t an absolutely essential pre-requisite of meaningful conversation.
I submit that much of your reaction is because of what we have been conditioned to expect in contemporary films, in terms of lighting, depth of field, camera usage, color choices, grooming styles, etc. etc. etc. It is always instructive to me to look at a movie from say 20 years ago that was absolutely contemporary for it’s time - it will look dated and artificial to us now.