Amen brother! It always cracks me up to watch the scene from The Day The Earth Stood Still where two doctors, having just examined Klaatu, are discussing his superb health at age 70. Both doctors light up and smoke during the whole scene
I agree, but suspect our own modern slang and fashion will seem just as quaint and stilted 50 years hence. By then we’ll sound like caricatures of ourselves (to our descendants, at least).
“Grandma, why do those people in that movie dress so funny?”
“People around the turn of the century were much more formal than today.”
I draw the line at 1960 or a couple of reasons: I was born in 1961, so that’s personal. Color was replacing B&W as the default and themes previously forbidden by the Hays Code were drifting into mainstream movies. The sudden glut of European art films in the 50s made nudity a somewhat easier sell by 1960 (although not as easy as by 1970). Cary Grant’s career was still going strong, and Jimmy Stewart’s as well, but most of the major stars of the 40s (the zenith of “Old Hollywood”) had pretty much retired by 1960. There was no huge paradigm shift, but those were some of the minor ones that signaled a demarcation between old and new.
I’m in my mid-20’s but I consider old movies to be movies made before 1960, maybe 1970.
I consider every film made in the past decade as “new” whereas some of my friends consider movies from 2000 to be “old” movies. People will have different definitions.
I took my then-ten year old daughter to see Apollo 13. Looking at Jim Lovell’s kids, she asked me if the movie was set at Halloween. I replied, “No, dear, that is actually how kids dressed in 19[del]69[/del]70.”
I’m 26, and I say before the seventies. All movies in decades subsequent to that are referred to by decade until 2000-2011, which are just “movies” (if not nineties movies due to style.)
Now, if you’d asked me what movies I consider old, I’d have given a different answer. It’s just that “old movie” makes me think of a particular type of movie. I know 40s, 50s, and 60s movies are different, but there’s just something that seems the same about them.