In another thread Ordinary People came up, and someone said it’s, well, ordinary. I said, it’s more just dated. Then I mentioned Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as a horribly dated movie.
If TCM were doing a festival of horribly dated movies, what films would you nominate?
Oh, and please don’t nominate Birth of a Nation, because that film was controversial for being racist as soon as it was released. Also, don’t nominate good films that are just technically dated. Yes, all special effects before CGI are a little dated, and all FX from the 1930s are pretty well-dated, but some films with dated FX are still great films, like The Invisible Man or the Fredric March Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Plenty of Oscar winners are dated, though. Johnny Belinda is horribly dated sheerly through the ignorance of Deaf people it displays. No one did any research, because no one thought there was any to do. When TCM runs it, they run a disclaimer with Marlee Matlin and Linda Bove saying how awful it is.
Also, films that were inaccurate and bad from the get-go are not dated. Reefer Madness is just a bad film. I’m looking mostly for films that are dated for social customs, or for really laughably inaccurate scientific information-- Destination Moon is about 85% accurate in its depiction of what a NASA flight to the moon would be like. The made some major flubs, like getting the surface of the moon wrong, but it’s so close, it can be forgiven a few things, being made 11 years before a manned flight to the moon. On the other hand, some movies where the entire plot depended on people acting the way they did because of Freudian psychology are pretty laughably dated.
Two of my favorites would be Dr. Strangelove and My Man Godfrey, but the days of the Cold War and the Depression are long since passed.
Speaking of Kubrick, how about 2001: A Space Odyssey? I don’t mean just the the year 2001 has come and gone, but there was a certain attitude, and a certain look, that the 1960s thought the future would have (although the pods do look like something you might pick up at the Apple store).
Because it’s an Issue Film about the Issue of how Ordinary People see mental health practitioners, and it doesn’t mean they’re crazy.
Attitudes have moved on a bit since then.
Philadelphia is dated in multiple ways, from its treatment (or portrayal of the relative lack thereof) of AIDS to its portrayal of no lawyer being willing to take the case of a gay man who was fired for getting AIDS.
In short, a modern film would have to work a lot harder to convince the audience that a senior partner at a huge law firm is on the verge of dying from AIDS, and is about to lose his job because of it.
Ninotchka: Garbo Talks! Garbo Laughs! Garbo Acts In A Light Comedy About The Stalinist USSR!.. Yeah, no. The Great Dictator, a film Chaplain has said he’d never have made had he known the truth about Hitler, has aged a whole lot better. (Of course, with lines like “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”… can something retroactively become a really, really dark comedy?)
The first couple Home Alone films would require a few new contrivances to explain how nobody’s cell phones work and they don’t notice. Of course, those films were barely based in reality as it is.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles because online booking, AirBnB and Uber. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because we don’t institutionalize the mentally ill anymore. Well, we do, but with prison instead.
Dark Victory. Today, it would be unforgivable for a doctor to withhold a “negative prognosis” from his patient… and for her best friend to go along with it.
These Three or The Children’s Hour. We no longer live in a world in which same-sex attraction is cause for malicious gossip and blackmail, ruining the lives of everyone involved.
I’m not sure how well those would have helped. They got diverted to a different state and Dell knew that because of the storm all of the hotels would have been pretty much booked already, not sure how many AirBnB people would have . Hell, Doobies Taxiola WAS the Uber of the time.
I think that it’s more dated mostly because of the lack of credit card use and a cell phone/texting. I’m sure Neil would have had his email car rental agreement though, which would have lead to a much more boring exchange for a new fucking car.
I don’t think that’s dated. I can see movies being made today with just that gag. It’s still fine to be politically incorrect in comedies as long as you’re making a gag of it, see Tropic Thunder and innumerable other such movies.
Eh, you could date a lot of films because the plot didn’t make use of a device yet invented…
60s movies featuring the “go-go” culture are laughably, even shockingly, dated, and a good example is FF Coppola’s You’re A Big Boy Now. Released in 1966, this film features a segment about a young lady who goes to the psychiatrist to discuss a sexual assault… and he gets so horny about her story that he tries to assault her as well. And the entire sequence is played for laughs!
The Bells of St. Mary’s does the same thing, especially since the way they treat her is borderline abuse - Not allowing her to do what she loves.
Our local college did the play. The first act worked as a period piece, but for some reason they set the second act the present day. Not only did your point hold, but nowadays no one would interrogate two people in the same room, to prevent exactly what happened in the play.
Phone Booth comes to mind- when was the last time anyone actually saw a phone booth in the wild? Even 15 years ago, they were an endangered species, but if they’re not extinct now, they’re awfully close.
Really any movie that relies on pre cell phone telephony as a major part of the plot is going to be pretty dated these days.
Also, movies where the culture has changed significantly; “Revenge of the Nerds” stands out in particular- at the time it came out, the scene where Louis shags the hot cheerleader while wearing Ted McGinley’s character’s costume, was played for laughs, instead of being creepy and rapey like it would be considered today. Ditto for Lamar’s exaggerated gayness, and a lot of the other stereotypes.
The original Black Christmas: Olivia Hussey plays the final girl heroine; she’s pregnant, but she has no intention of keeping it. In fact, she doesn’t mince words at all – she flatly states she intends to have an abortion. She never changes her mind. Her boyfriend who wants her to keep it is depicted as such a creep, he becomes a suspect for being the killer.
No horror movie today would dare to depict a pro-choice heroine being so open about wanting to have an abortion. And even if it did, she’d change her mind before the final reel.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but doesn’t the opening narration pretty much say that’s it’s one of the last phone booths in New York and is going to be removed soon?
They just showed one recently, “Mission to Moscow (1943).” Walter Huston plays Ambassador Joseph Davies, who comes back after a trip to the USSR, informing the US about just how badly misunderstood Stalin and cronies are, that they are actually good people who want the best for the USSR.
I think it’s unfair to call Philadelphia dated. It’s a movie that pretty much portraits the attitudes towards homosexuality and AIDS at the time.I think most modern viewers would see it as a history piece of a worse period in gay rights and not scoff at the outdated attitudes.
To truly call a movie “dated” there needs to be an element, technology or attitude, that puts the entire premise into question. In the Sean Connery starred Rising Sun the movie’s narrative treats Japanese supremacy over western business as a done deal. It depicts Japanese business acumen as almost supernatural. It makes the whole film ridiculous.
