Kelly’s Heroes still works well. You just have to remember it’s not really a war movie - it’s a heist movie that happens to be set in the middle of a war.
I didn’t see Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. But I did see it when I was thirteen which may have had the same effect.
That describes it perfectly.
If you’re looking for a good anti-war movie, I’d recommend The Americanization of Emily.
Huh. Never seen sand pebbles. I just added that to the list for me!
The older movies aren’t paced the same way newer ones are. My teens don’t much care for them, either, unless they’re on the big screen. The Great Escape would be a good one, I think.
Can you expand on this?
I liked Bonnie & Clyde. I saw it when I was younger and I really enjoyed the romanticizing of the bank robbers. It made me root for the “bad guys”. But I also really liked the banjo music during the chase scenes. I actually felt sorry for Bonnie when the Texas Ranger spit on her.
I think that most movies from this era would be better entertainment for a younger than teen, say ten or eleven. Your parenting skills may differ than mine (I don’t have any kids), but it’s your choice as to what you let your kids watch. In this over-informed internet age, I think kids become jaded to movie violence very quickly. Then again, this is coming from a guy whose sister showed him **A Clockwork Orange **at around twelve years old. So take that with a grain of salt.
As an aside, you might want to discuss the differences in “then vs now” movies. Remember how your parents were totally freaked by Psycho? Most people who see it for the first time nowadays usually go “meh”. I would recommend showing him The Thing-Both the Howard Hawks version and the John Carpenter version. It’s really the same story, but man, are those two movies different. Just goes to show you how movies have changed over 50 years.
Other recommendations, if you’re looking for nostalgia, would be **Cannery Row **and The Long Riders. Cannery Row because of John Houston’s narration, an excellent story, and the image of a simpler time with people doing the best they can with what they’ve got. I recommend the Long Riders because I do it every chance I get. Not only is it a great western, but it also shows the James/Younger gang as “good guys” who you get to feel empathy for, shows honor amongst gentlemen, and the cast is five real life sets of brothers playing movie brothers. Most people overlook that fact as well. Oh, and a great score to boot.
According to Blache Barrow, that indicent never happened.
According to her book (My Life With Bonnie and Clyde), a lot of other things in the movie also never really happened.
I really like the movie until I read Blache’s book. Blanche’s book made their life seem pretty depressing, always on the road, living out of a car, constantly traveling hundreds of miles back and forth, always fearful of being identified or caught. Blache made it sound like a pretty miserable way to live.
It got 10 Oscar nominations, including nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, and five acting nominations.
As for recommendations, Last of the Mohicans is almost 20 years old, so I guess that would count as a classic from a teen perspective. For westerns, I’d recommend The Cowboys.
That’s it exactly. The pacing of older movies just doesn’t work for today’s audiences.
Oddly, the most entertaining part for me of this thread is learning what movies click for kevlaw’s son and which ones don’t. Please keep us posted.
Another component that seems to have changed drastically is exposition.
Last night I watched for the first time in many years Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and was stunned at how sloppy the story line was developed and revealed. Gigantic leaps and huge holes and all in the name of “suspense.”
The antithesis is either the overly talky backstory and flashback montage to tell you all sorts of nitpicky details that may be real parts of the plot or just clumsy red herrings, or the bare bones detail revelations of masterpieces like Soylent Green (1973) (masterpiece only in the sense of how the twist at the end is a real surprise).
“Bad Day” in spite of a stellar cast was just swiss cheese in terms of plot and story development. That was more the norm in those days than now.
I saw Bonnie & Clyde for the first time a couple months ago. I liked it, but I watch a lot of older films, so I’m already practiced in sinking in to a style of filmmaking that is long past. The things I liked about it were the same things Ebert did – these were likable, believable people and we spent enough time with them to really get to know them. Plus, they were presented so differently than movie criminals are today (all skintight black outfits and precision timing). And then the ending, even though I knew it was coming, is just really horrible and brutal in its refusal to cut away.
Also, Faye Dunaway was just off the charts beautiful. I could look at her all day, and she was an excellent actress back then too. What a tragic case of time refusing to stand still.
–Cliffy
sound track was and is great. when a movie gives a boost to the soundtrack music genre it is a popular and maybe good movie.
This is sort of related; have any of you watched old movie trailers? Most of them suck hard. Even ones from like ten years ago. There’s just something different about them that I can’t put my finger on.
Pretty good example: 1969 True Grit trailer
Does that change the fact that it received many mixed and negative reviews at the time of its release? See for instance Variety’s 1967 review, which says the movie had some good parts but was uneven and rather disappointing. I can’t find it online, but Newsweek’s Joseph Morgenstern slammed the movie upon its release, only to later say that he’d been wrong and re-review the movie much more favorably. There’s a little about this, and the other bad early reviews of the movie, in this 1997 L.A. Times piece.
Wow. I’ve never seen the original but it looks fucking horrible from that trailer.
It’s a good movie. You’d never know it from that trailer, though.