Movies in the fork of a road

Cafe Society
1

In this “No Country For Old Men” thread, among several topics that were discussed, there’s an issue of how No Country may have opened a few doors for filmmakers in terms of leaving various plot/character/motivation/chronology and other such sorts of details either unexplained, unresolved, or just plain hanging, no matter how often you rewatch the movie or how much external material (such as the parent book) one goes searching through for answers.

Whether that’s true or not (and if you have thoughts on that specific issue, please go to the other thread for that) I’d like to get some thinking on movies that have marked such a turning point in how movies have been made. There’s little doubt that Citizen Kane set many standards, both technical and artistic, that are still in fashion today. Other “turning point” movies might include The Wizard of Oz for its use of color and B&W to establish different realities within the story (although it had a few predecessors in that specific sense, Wizard has probably affected more viewers than those older movies have).

In my own movie-going history, Bullitt marks the first movie I can remember where dialog was reduced to a minimum and action, facial expressions, camera work and other methods were used to advance the story. I’ve read reviews that say that the movie is a jumble, without any discernable plot, but I never felt that way the first time I saw it, and still believe it holds up well as a story.

Of course, Pulp Fiction was all the rage 10-14 years ago, with classes being taught on it, with frame-by-frame analysis of all the gimmicks and techniques Tarantino either invented or resuscitated from bygone eras.

I prefer to think that The Usual Suspects was on the cutting edge of a genre that (as far as I know) doesn’t even have a catchy name, even though quite a few movies have emulated aspects of that movie that were new to me in it.

This thread is for exploring such movies in your own experience that, for you at least, represent either a seismic shift or a quantum leap or a point of no return in the world of movie arts and sciences.

Which movies appear at a fork in the road and once you’ve taken that movie’s fork you rarely see other movies going down the other fork, or even back over the original road?

I just saw an old 1958 Gary Cooper movie (Man of the West) with Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Lord and a few other character actors of the era, that I had seen a long time ago and had remembered as being an above average (though not a Shane or High Noon) Western, and had remembered one bit of dialog along the lines of:

Cooper: I’ll go in to Lasso myself.
Cobb: Okay. Take Trout with you, then.
Cooper: I’ll go in alone.
Cobb: Being with Trout is like being alone.

As it turned out, that was about the only thing I can recommend to anybody about the movie, beyond some nice scenery and some nice Julie London. But one of the reviews mentions how this very movie may have been one of the American Westerns to have influenced Sergio Leone in the rawness of the setting and the level of violence (tame for now, edgy for then) that appeared in the Spaghetti Westerns to follow in the next few years. Who’d have thought that Man of the West might be considered as an example of what this thread is after?

2

Tom Jones was the first movie I saw that used slow motion for effect.
Raising Arizona was the first movie I remember that had people screaming at the top of their lungs while the camera panned down their throats. It has been overplayed to death.

3

Good ones! Tom Jones is the first movie I can recall where food and the consumption of it becomes a sex scene. Used with variations in such things as Babette’s Feast, Nine 1/2 Weeks and the one with Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub and their “Big Night” (or something similar for a title) is almost totally about food. Probably others that I’m not recalling readily.

Just to be sure what you’re saying, could you mention a couple of movies where the “panning down the throats” cliche’ has been done? :slight_smile:

4

Star Wars. It made science fiction into something that could make big money for the studios, and invented the modern blockbuster in the way it made people watch again and again in the first run (Jaws also was an influence in the latter). Before SW, people saw a movie once and might see it again on TV. After SW, people would go to the movie and then come back a few days later (or even the next day).

It also ushered in the era of special effects movies and put an end to the 70s films where quality did very well in the box office. The demographics changed from adults to teenage boys, and now films are pretty well segregated between “thrill ride” blockbusters and “independent” films (I’ll use the term even though some of the films I mean are made in studios) that get the awards, but aren’t the top BO champs.

5

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (the original one) was a huge turning-point for me and for millions of other horror fans. It’s hard to describe the shock that this movie caused in audiences who were accustomed to the mainstream horror-film conventions of earlier times. Reader’s Digest published a condemnation of Night of the Living Dead because of its graphic violence.

I find it troubling that NotLD now seems so tame. I remember having been truly horrified by it when I was young, and now it can be shown on TV unexpurgated and nobody bats an eye.

6

NotLD has another fork – not just the explicit gore but the ending. The monsters won, and they kept on winning, in the Freddy and Friday movies. I suppose the monsters have to win or there’d be no sequels, but it was still a change from horror movies of the 50’s and 60’s, where the monsters were destroyed in the end.

John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing is a fork movie too. That’s the end? That can’t be the end!

7

“Jurrassic Park” - realistic animated critters. I still remember the first time I saw it, and was so blown away.

Now, it’s nothing unusual at all. But back then, man it was cool.

8

Psycho. Though it took a long time to get started, it did create the slasher movie genre, and the murder in the shower was quite graphic for its time (it seems far less graphic today, but far more horrifying). It also was unusual in that the lead actor was killed fairly early on. That’s not a common trope, but I did just see it in a film I rented yesterday.

9

This is so wrong…

Snow White

Not only the first full-length animated film, but a real pacesetter. It’s not just animated, it’s REALLY HIGH QUALITY animated. Even today, few have matched the sheer beauty of this film, and many have tried.

DAMN YOU, Walt Disney! There BETTER be a Hell, so you can burn in it!

10

I don’t remember a movie before the Lion King in which all the main characters were animals. Now studios make main character talking animals in all sorts of animation and live action movies.

I also don’t remember a lot of films being 2 hours long before Titanic, but I think that movie raised the bar for the expected duration of future movies. Films that could easily have fit into an hour and fifteen minutes less than 20 years ago are painfully dragged on for two hours or more. It’s almost unheard of for a movie to last less than 1.5 hours these days, and most of them are at least 2. 3 hour movies like Lord of the Rings and its sequels barely even make us raise an eyebrow anymore.

Terminator 2 set a new standard for blowing stuff up. The budget for that movie was freakin’ unheard of at the time, and most of it was used making the most impressive destructive demolitions possible. It’s no big deal by today’s standards, but it gave us a new expectation for action movies. Lots of movies since then have briefly taken the “highest budget ever” honor, but Terminator 2 has the honorable mention for making it popular to spend ungodly amounts of money on smashing stuff and blowing it up.

11

48 Hours was the seed of black guy/white guy buddy movies. Before that, I believe you’d have to go back to The Defiant Ones and In the Heat of the Night, but neither of those was a trendsetter.

Thelma and Louise was released at a time when it looked as if women were in danger of being phased out of movies entirely. Imagine, a buddy movie in which both leads are women! Unfortunately, it did not spawn a subgenre, but I think it did squash the convention of only having a woman in an action film so she can be put in peril and have to be rescued by the male lead (and flash some booby along the way).

I was going to say that Airplane! was the first film to spoof an entire genre, but then I remembered the Matt Helm movies, which were a parody of James Bond. Still, the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams started the ball rolling for real.

12

There were plenty of them before Lion King:
**The Secret of Nimh
Watership Down
Bambi
Bill and Coo
Perri
**

The list gets a lot longer when one or two humans are in there, but aren’t really there as characters, like Lady and the Tramp.

13

Ever hear of Gone With the Wind? Ben-Hur? Exodus? The Ten Commandments? The Greatest Show on Earth? The Longest Day? How the West Was Won?

Epic films have often been longer than two hours (all the above were at least 2 1/2, and some were over three). Titanic merely revived the epic.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Not for the comedy (which is brilliant, but inimitable), but in the portrayal of the Middle Ages as being nasty and dirty. Prior to that, medieval films showed everyone as wearing fine clothes and armor, with the peasants neat brown cloaks and maybe a smudge on his face. Holy Grail showed even the knights as being filthy, and the peasants were in rags. Since then, anything set in medieval times (and in most other historical eras) is shown as being dark and dirty.

14

Wasn’t Amadeus quite long, also? I believe it predates Titanic by a couple of years.

15

The Thomas Crown Affair (original)

I am given to understand its the first movie with criminal as hero figure.There had been plenty of criminal protagonists before, most of them bad guys (Little Ceasar) some of them sympathetic characters (The League Of Gentlemen) But it always ended badly for them, with the “crime does not pay” message hammered home. Thomas Crown was the first to show the criminal getting away with it.

I believe it also pioneered the use of split screen to show simultaneous action in different scenes, so loved by 24.

16

I just realized, while rereading the OP, that I may have given a wrong impression in my comments on Bullitt. I did say, and did mean, that dialog was reduced to a minimum as far as advancing the story is concerned. Yes, I’m familiar with the silent movies! And, yes, I know that earlier movies than Bullitt were far from talky.

But none can exceed the old Ray Milland movie The Thief (1952) which took it to an extreme that (unfortunately) hasn’t been copied all that much. As such, that movie represents a “fork not taken” and is thus outside the scope of the thread. I just thought I needed to clarify.

Carry on.

17

Even a casual skim of my post shows I never said Titanic was the first long movie, or the longest movie of it’s time. It just marks a spot in history where movies went from typically 1 1/2 hours long to typically between 2 and 2 1/2.

18

Well, I did mean that around the time of Titanic, there was another movie, Amadeus, which re-introduced the long movie.

19

Well, so does The Ten Commandments.

And I doubt movies are now “typically” between 2 and 2 1/2. How many comedies can you name with that sort of length?

All Titanic did was do what epic movies from the 50s always did. And there were always longer movies. Just looking at the Oscar winners list, you have five films over two hours winning Oscars the five years before Titanic did. There’s was also Dances With Wolves, The Last Emperor, Out of Africa, Amadeus, Gandhi, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather, Godfather II, Patton, Oliver, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady and many others.

I was wrong in ignoring these, but clearly the length of Titanic is hardly anything revolutionary.

20

Toy Story began the era of all-CGI cartoon movies and began the decline of traditionally animated movies. After that, if a movie was animated, it just had to be CGI. Fortunately, it now looks like traditional animation may be making a comeback.