If TCM had a marathon of dated movies

Cafe Society
21

Aw c’mon, it may practically be in suspended animation, but it exists. :slight_smile:

More seriously, I’d say whether a movie is dated or not depends on whether the dated aspects is a matter of whether it’s a one-time “OK, this is how things worked back then” and once you’ve accepted that, it’s easy to enjoy the movie, or whether the dated aspects keep on driving you nuts throughout.

For instance, I don’t find Dr. Strangelove or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest dated, but I’m sure Philadelphia would drive me up the wall.

And yes, 2001: A Space Odyssey is terribly dated. Hell, it was already dated when I saw it again in 1983 - it really was a movie that could have only been made in the 1960s.

22

Smokey and the Bandit, because it is no longer illegal to sell Coors beer east of the Mississippi.

(Saw this one again last Saturday, so it is fresh on my mind.)

23

Agreed. You can’t fault a film set in the past for consciously showing the attitudes of that time period in a bad light.

OTOH, if a film portrays a time period without question, then it can become dated as attitudes and assumptions change. Gone With The Wind uses some very dated portrayals of slavery.

There’s a certain amount of datedness in Cabin in the Sky, though there is debate about the appropriateness of the proposal.

24

American Beauty is completely dated throughout, especially Chris Cooper’s subplot as the homophobic Marine.

It’s unfair to mention Pulp Fiction, but seriously, where can you buy a milkshake as cheap as five dollars these days? And nobody cares about tongue studs anymore.

25

Singles for the 90’s grunge aesthetic.

26

That’s not even the worst of it. There’s also Holly making her living as a professional “date” and Paul’s status as a kept man, plus Holly’s marriage to Doc at 14.

27

Don’t think they’ll ever be extinct until someone invents a cellphone that doesn’t need charging.

As for some of the suggestions here, historical movies like Titanic don’t date for the simple reason that they’re set in the past, ie when the Cameron movie was made people had already stopped traveling by ocean liner. Titanic could be remade today and it still wouldn’t seem dated.

Having said that one way historical movies can date is if the leading players are given the attitudes and sensibilities of the director’s own time, and that’s admittedly quite common as the modern audience needs to sympathize with the heroes/heroines. Then, of course, if those sensibilities should change the movie will instantly appear dated.

I think movies set in the future date the quickest for obvious reasons, eg 2001 cited above.

Smart Money, 1931, is an example of a dated movie. Nothing wrong with the plot about con artists being conned in return. It’s the attitude of the characters, especially the main one played by Edward G Robinson. He likes gambling and every time he places a bet he rubs the head of his black assistant (it was common in those days to rub the hair of a negro for luck). It’s hard not to let it distract you from the movie unless you’re very used to watching films from that period.)

28

Rambo 3 had Rambo fighting alongside the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which was so wrong after 9/11 that they had to change the film’s dedication.

29

WarGames.

30

Big. I watched this again at Christmas, and it is so 80’s that it’s painful. Still a great movie, but holy shoulderpads, Batman.

31

Can you explain this to me? How can there be a “dated portrayal of slavery?” I’m not being a bitch, I just don’t understand the comment.

32

The portrayal that the slaves were all happily working in the fields. It was a fairly common image in the 1930s and earlier.

33

I think Ordinary People holds up very well. The sense of shame it depicts surrounding seeing a mental health therapist was mostly background stuff, and even today, people tend to see depressed/suicidal people as weak and needing to suck it up.

The movie comes off better if you concentrate on the three people in the family, trying to come to grips with tragedy of loss, and the disintegration of the family itself. It’s not a happy ending, uplifting and all that. I wouldn’t call Ordinary People dated at all.

34

That’s only one scene in the whole four hour movie, for cryin’ out loud.

35

Holiday Inn has a whole blackface segment celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, complete with the actual black “mammy” housekeeper singing segments with her own two actually black children/grandchildren. Holy shit that was uncomfortable to watch. Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds and a whole band full of blackfaced white people all in tatterdemalions and fright wigs. Jeeesus.

That’s dated.

36

Sixteen Candles also had the hunky jock give his passed-out drunk girlfriend to Anthony Michael Hall, in return for Molly Ringwald’s panties.

37

That’s not “dated”. That’s just a movie about unlikable people. Kept men and professional “dates” still exist.

Holly’s a hooker that doesn’t go all the way. She only fails to note that fact at the beginning. She’s a con woman. But the movie treats her as the “good guy”.

38

Not in the same way. The expectations about sex and sex roles today are very different. If such relationships go on today, they’re much more up front and explicit.

I doubt that today you’d get many well off guys “dating” a hooker that didn’t go all the way. Holly would never get away with her shtick.

I agree with you there. Despite it’s reputation as a classic, the movie always creeped me out. The two main characters were just dishonest exploiters.

39

For me it’s any movie with a “heap big” American Indian. Of course that doesn’t stop Disney from airing Peter Pan unedited on television.

40

Just because there’s some plot point that needs explaining because times have changed doesn’t make a movie outdated to the point of being unenjoyable-- for example, in The Awful Truth, you could nullify a pending divorce, at least in New York, in the 1930s, and in enough other places in the US for general audiences to “get” what was going on, by “re-consummating” the marriage so to speak. Yes, if a couple who had filed for divorce, but who had not had the divorce finalized had sex again, the divorce was nullified. This is why Irene Dunne and Cary Grant go to such lengths not to be caught alone together, to the point of her once lying and saying that she is his sister. They are a couple with an impending divorce who are already seeing other people.

Now, Irene Dunne does make the situation pretty clear through some dialogue, such as saying that things will be easier when the divorce is finalized.

[Mild Spoiler] Knowing the law is really important at the end, when a clock is counting down to midnight, but nevermind.

Anyway, this is still an hilarious and very personable film to which people in 2017 can easily relate, obsolete law or not. Feelings about interpersonal relationships, and recognition of physical humor or good one-liners has not shifted paradigmatically, so the movie holds up.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is stale, though, because paradigms around mixed-race relationships have shifted light years since the mid-sixties. Not only that, the target audience practically no longer exists. What happens is that white liberals who have always given money and lip-service to equality of race relations, and raised their daughter to be a “color-blind” liberal, and now she has brought home a black man and announced that she wants to marry him, and suddenly they feel all sorts of negative feelings they didn’t even know they harbored.

There might be people who have actually been through that, and now their grandchildren are in high school who might find it interesting, and there might be people who are biracial adults who never knew their liberal grandparents struggled with anything, who might have an emotional reaction to it, but all the liberals who were being invited to search their souls in 1967 are mostly no longer with us, or at least don’t need a movie to prod them to their real feelings about mixed race relationships.

So that’s the difference, IMO, between truly dated movies, and movies that are just old.