Spinning off from this thread, what movies are totally of their era, little time capsules that take you back to another world?
I’m thinking, for instance, Bells Are Ringing, which has such a mid-century sensibility, what with the answering service, the 35-year-old “girl,” the Runyonesque bookies, the wonderful “Drop That Name!” number.
Also, nearly any Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler movie, with their wonderful Depression-era naivete (and yes, I think a lot of people snickered at them even in the 1930s).
How To Murder Your Wife. Jack Lemmon is at a drunken bachelor party, blacks out and forgets that he married the woman coming out of the cake. Who speaks no English. (Virna Lisi). Hilariously dated with some quaint notions of a woman’s role in the relationship and all that.
Terry-Thomas starts things rolling by talking straight into the camera in a snooty butler’s accent, detailing the finer points of Jack Lemmon’s apartment, even giggling when he uncovers a fancy woman’s shoe stuck in the couch.
Cut to the next scene, a ridiculously over-the-top set piece where you’re supposed to believe Lemmon is a jewel thief, when he was really just taking pictures to use as storyboards for his comic strip. (This really needds to be seen to be believed).
Also some great location shots of Manhattan under construction. (The noise and the construction site next door to his apartment play key roles).
Finally there’s some character actor I had never seen before whose schtick was apparently to make strange honking sounds while he spoke.
Well, heck, any older work that takes its mores and beliefs as given is going to fall in this category. as an example, the play and movie of Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn, but especially the play, where it’s assumed that premarital sex doesn’t happen, and it’s a very bad thing when it does.
When we’re watching old flicks, Pepper Mill will often oint out the assumed subservience of women. In It! The Terror from Beyond Space (not exactly a philosophical tract), the two women on board the Second Spaceship to Mars do all the food serving. Operation Moonbase is cringeworthy in its portrayal of women (and Heinlein wrote the damned screenplay!)
and don’t even start on racial stereotypes in 1950s and earlier flicks (and national ones in the War Years).
Really, almost any of the original Twilight Zone episodes. I’ve been trying to figure out if it accurately reflects the prevailing attitudes and speech mannerisms of the time, but almost all the characters talk like lower class palookas from Brooklyn. Even the astronauts and scientists speak and act like characters from a Damon Runyon story. (After the Apollo missions, it would be a lot harder to write a part for astronauts where they sound quite so much like unskilled truck drivers.)
I think it’s because the show dates from a time when a lot fewer people had gone to college and/or had scientific backgrounds.
The Twilight Zone episodes had Rod Serling’s voice – that’s the way he writes and that’s the kind of words he puts in his characters’ mouths.
As to the OP question, I’d say that “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” comes quickest to mind. Nowadays, the only way you can do this kind of a movie is as a comedic farce like in Bernie Mac’s “Guess Who”. And I’d say that’s a good thing.
Svengali (1931), with John Barrymore, in the title role as the hypnotic master of a young opera star, gives a performance as expressionistic as the sets. 19th-century humbug done with cinematic flourish by director Archie Mayo.
Well, thats not taking into account that the original Xbox controller’s gravitational field bent the light around it, thus giving a smaller appearance.
The entire blaxpolitation genre of the 1970s, with its emphasis on petty criminals, thieves, pimps, hustlers and thugs as people to be admired. Thankfully there are other roles for blacks out there, and the open admiration for the thuglife seems mostly confined to the gangster rap subculture.
The comedic partnership between Jack Benny and Eddie Anderson (as Rochester) is essentially unreplicable today.
I like the whole concept of a Reno Divorce. I guess I am thinking of The Women. But it’s in other movies too. I just like the idea that even though it’s the 30s and you probably have to get married, it will just make being single all the sweeter when you get your Reno Divorce! You get to go to Reno with all your friends and hang out with the Cowboy lady and the icing on the cake is now you’re single! If they had that now I would get married.
Now, Voyager is pretty dated. I watched it recently because I loved it as a child (I was a weird kid), and it hit me how utterly dated it is. The whole “spinster” thing doesn’t work the same way now that it did in 1942.
Sadly, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is badly dated today. No senator would break down and confess like Claude Rains did; no politician these days has a sense of shame at all.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek goes to great lengths to have Trudy Kockenlocker get married to Ratzkywatzky or something before becoming pregnant, the assumption being you can’t have sex without marriage. In addition, it assumes that a woman with a baby can’t get by without a husband. Though a great film, it’s essentially impossible to remake in a modern version.
I rather like this movie, although it’s a little too self-consciously “psychedelic.”
Don Johnson plays a nice boy who moves to the big city to find himself.
^C ^V Also some great location shots of Manhattan under construction. (The noise and the construction site next door to his apartment play key roles). (Thanks for saving me some keystrokes, Dooku.)
The construction noise is practically constant. As Stanley unneccesarily explains to the jaded libertine that he’s having for tea, “They’re building something.” Are they ever! It’s the World Trade Center going up. It has an eerie quality now, because they’ve only got the first few floors partially completed, and there’s dust and rubble everywhere. It’s just a bit too much.
Stanley’s an aspiring filmmaker, though-- and the movie he’s working on, Headless, has to be seen to be believed. Four stars. Better than Head, even.
All those patriotic, misty-eyed WWII films: So Proudly We Hail, Since You Went Away, etc., etc. That kind of non-ironic, stiff-upper-lip (but quivering lower lip) attitude vanished (for better or worse) with Vietnam.
They’re both fascinating and horrifying: I can’t decide if I’d rather live in their world, or if we’re well out of it. But they’re great snapshots of an era (and, again, many real-life audience members back then were no doubt thinking, “Must be nice for Claudette Colbert or Myrna Loy to have everything so black-and-white”).
Just about any movie from the 50’s to the 90’s wherein the Ruskies are automatically the bad guys. It’s almost amusing to watch some of the really over-the-top ‘All commies are evil’ films of the 1980’s.
*Breakfast at Tiffany’s * is a great film, but who-boy is that dated. I didn’t get the whole $50 to go to the powder room bit plus the way George Peppard talks to Audrey Hepburn, and especially Mikey Rooney as a Chinese man.
