The attitude toward drinking in The Thin Man and sequels is horribly dated – Nick and Nora drink constantly and it only makes them more charming and witty.
But that’s what happens when I drink!
All the stiff-under-lippery of Brief Encounter (Celia Johnson decides not to run of with dishy doctor Trever Howard because her old stick-in-the-mud hubby is a decent sort and people would talk) seems very distant to today’s mores, but perhaps less so when you consider than Noel Coward meant their love affair to show what it was like being gay at the time (v. covertly, of course).
I adore British war films like In Which We Serve and The Way to the Stars because all the stoicism and decency makes everything all the more tragic. It also shows what a shock it must’ve been to the Brits to have the relatively brash US-ers taking over their patch.
Is it? Rochester was not some minstralish Steppin Fetchit character but the wisecracking employee with the best lines. It’s a character that many writers try to create and many actors try to be these day but maybe you hadn’t noticed because those writers are not of the caliber of Benny’s writers and those actors are not of the caliber of Jack Benny and Eddie Anderson.
I’m enjoying Scott Eyman’s new bio of L.B. Mayer, despite the fact that I’m not in the bibliography. Scott says at one point that Wallace Beery slapped Mickey Rooney too hard in a scene and the director made him apologize. I e’d Scott about the factual error in the book: it is impossible to slap Mickey Rooney too hard.
Having seen this turd on AMC 9it seems to run continuously), I’d say its an example of a genere long past its time. first, it presents the Vietnam war as if it were a boyscout outing. Nobody gets hurt or killed 9except for the bad guys). Second, John Wayne is an overweight, middle-aged colonel who actually goes into combat. Finally, it includes all of the cliches about the military. in essence, its a WWII movie made in the 1960’s.
Oh, and the numerous technical screwups: (the sun setting in the South china sea, pine trees in vietnam, beautiful, innocent vietnamese girls who speak perfect english. And, a non-corrupt ARVN officer 9played by that guy from Hawaii Five-O!
Harold and Maude. This one hasn’t aged well at all, but I still remember it with a great deal of affection. The Cat Stevens songs on the soundtrack were quaint enough when the film was still making the rounds of the repertoire theaters, but they seem doubly or even triply (is that a word?) quaint today. I doubt that many who don’t belong to the '60’s generation could understand and enjoy this film.
I don’t know if Mrs. Miniver belongs in this thread, or the other one, but it belongs in one of them.
Scenes where they’re in the bomb shelter, and going out to watch the commonplace bombings, still capture the wonderful surreality of living in a war zone with an immediacy that anyone of any age can grasp.
On the other hand, the over the top symbolism in scenes like the funeral in the roofless church are as dated as dated can be.
Same deal with Roller Ball. I don’t know if it’s a brilliant commentary on the society we’re still headed toward becoming, or a charming, dismissable bit of bad sci-fi.
In another thread, someone expressed the opinion that the “Raindrops” scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has aged poorly. I concur.
No, he speaks, but he says things like “Mrs. Ford. HONK! Heehoohahahahooheehoo!!” Rather…odd.
“Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” 
Another one that always amuses me is when they use “Make Love” in the old-fashioned not-referring-to-rumpy-pumpy way. The one I can remember right now was in It’s A Wonderful Life. Donna Reed is on the phone with her mother and looks at Jimmy Stweart and says “He’s right here. In fact, he’s making mad love to me!”
And yet another (I’m rolling): Play Misty For Me. The movie grinds to a halt while Clint and Donna Mills frolic about while “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” plays in the background. In it’s entirety. THankfully Clint found himself an editor in his later directing efforts. They wind up naked in a stream down in Big Sur, in soft focus, passionately…hugging. You’d need to give me more than that to get me in that freezing-ass water. 
Without even IMDB’ing, I’m going to guess, “Charlie Callas?”
Any sixties Biker flick or hippie movie. Yeagggh but most horrible is Wild in teh Streets. I guess it is a sly satire but it comes off as everything I hated about late sixties cinema: Preachy pretentious “with it” dialogue. Freeze frames and experimental shots that come off as amaturish rather than unique.
I just checked - his name is Eddie Mayehoff. I didn’t recognize anything else he’s been in. Here’s his picture.
“Eddie Mayehoff—when you can’t afford Charlie Callas.”
My husband got his autograph on a plane when he was coming back from Vietnam in ‘66. I don’t care much for him there, but he and Judy were swell together when they were puttin’ on a show. And I liked him in Boy’s Town, too. Like the “Old Elvis”, “Old Mickey” just sucks.
I recently saw On the Town which was made in 1949. The plot starts simple three sailors have twenty-four hours shore leave in New York City and wish to make the most of it. Adventures ensue.
The key piece which makes the movie (and yet make it a product of its time) is “Miss Subways” (Played by Vera-Ellen). One of the sailors falls in love with her (or the idea of her) when he sees her picture with that title. He imagines her as the quintessential New Yorker, and a celebrity. In truth, she’s ordinary (if beautiful), from his small town, and wants him to believe that she lives the life he thinks she does almost as badly as he does. ( I hope that makes sense). Two other young women help with the “deception”.
I’m not entirely convinced that the NYC of that era was quite the way it is presented in the movie, but I think there was a will to believe in NYC as a very large small town and that all it takes to be a celebrity for a day is a little belief in yourself and the help of your friends that would be difficult (if not impossible) to recreate today.
It is. The problem is not that the caliber of talent has slipped (I don’t agree, btw – I just think in the 1,000 channel universe there’s way more venues for crap to get an audience) – the reality is what we find funny as a society has changed.
I was mostly commenting on the privileged white boss / subservient black dynamic that underpinned their relationship. At a time when almost all blacks in servant roles on radio, TV and movies were dim-witted, asexual, foolish and superstitious, Rochester was freshingly normal – and funny. *For its time. * The closest employee/employer dynamic that reached Benny/Anderson standards afterwards was Sherman Helmsley and Marla Gibbs (with Isabel Sanford) on the JEFFERSONS and that only worked because they were all black and Florence was openly disdainful of both her employers. Robert Guilliame’s Benson almost does the same on SOAP and at the governor’s mansion except he wasn’t nearly as subservient nor outrageously defiant of his bosses – and the Tates were not as funny as Benny; nor were Klauss or Clayton Endicott III Benson’s bosses, but his co-workers. Poor Rosario on WILL & GRACE is forever being raked over the coals.
Rochester had some great lines, which is bumpkus against a comedian of Benny’s masterfulness, whose persona was so well honed he got one of his biggest laughs in his career by famously not reacting at all. (“Your money or your life!”)
Essentially unreplicable. See? I have noticed.
Is it Gentlemen’s Agreement where Gregory Peck pretends to be Jewish and every time he brings it up everyone is shocked and dismayed by it? There’s this huge scene where he drops his bomb at a high-class party and everyone is scurrying around trying to figure out “who let the jew in?” and “how do we get him out before we catch it!!!” Very surreal by today’s standards.
Also any movie where the boss has a bar in his office, and offers anyone a drink, regardless of time of day.
When it first came out, I thought The Boys in the Band was brilliant. Now it is painful. The stereotyping and self-hatred make it difficult to watch.
In Arsenic and Old Lace, along with many other films of the day, one of the characters is insane and believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt. Everyone accepts this as a perfectly harmless eccentricity. For plot reasons they want to commit him to a sanitarium, though, and its director is worried because they already have too many Teddy Roosevelts and another one might be disruptive. They’re short of Napoleons, however.
I somehow doubt there ever was a time in which insanity took this form or that troops of Napoleons and Roosevelts smiled at their attendants in the Happydales of the world, but the attitude toward mental illness in all the old films is appalling by today’s standards.
Of course, I consider almost all of Frank Capra’s movies to exist in a parallel universe to our own. And not in a good way.
Just BTW, Rochester is an interesting case. Most people remember his character today as the wisecracking unsubservient, smarter-than-the-boss persona he played on television. But the original Rochester - from his introduction as a railroad porter (with the ridiculous name of “Rochester Van Jones”) well into the 1940s - was far more stereotypical of the day. He was indeed lazy and shiftless, addicted to gambling and womanizing.
It’s to Benny’s credit that he did eventually humanize the character but the persona we have of Rochester owes a lot to selective memory and a rewriting of history.
P.S. There’s no such word as “bumpkis.” Perhaps you meant “bupkis”?