Au contraire, mon frere. I think Busby Berkeley production numbers were fascinatingly surreal then and now. The rest of the film around them may have dated horribly, but the production numbers pulled out on their own are, to me, mesmerizing.
Speaking of really bad movies, does anybody remember “TAPS”, with the late George C. Scott? The plot of this movie was so ridiculous that I couldn’t see how it ever got made! It concerned a bunch of students at a military school, who decided to fight their eviction (the school was going to be converted into condominiums). Anyway, they decided to fortify the place, and fight off the interlopers. Eventually the Army gets called in to evict the pesky squatters, and a bunch of kids get killed! Totally unbelievable. I can’t imagine anybody in a military school fighting to STAY INSIDE in the first place! Maybe they liked the rotten food and the cold showers! This movie might have been plausible when it was made…but now it is just high camp comedy.
Even on that basis, there was nothing particularly new about that. Klute, for instance had Jane Fonda talking to a psychiatrist. The Flame Within (1935) used a visit to a psychologist’s as the basis for its plot. When Ordinary People came out, no one thought there was anything unusual about a person talking to a psychiatrist to solve their problems. And if that sort of plot is automatically dated, what about {b]Good Will Hunting**? (I personally don’t care for this type of psychological breakthrough story.)
Aaack! West Side Story is one of the greatest movies ever made! The dancing in the opening scene is not meant to be taken literally, but as a symbolic representation of being young, male, and alive. Considering the gap between the races today, I’d say that WWS’s depiction of ethnic warfare is incredibly tame by today’s standards, but it is still a work with great emotional power.
You have to be able to look past the costumes and hairstyles of the era when a film was made, and look at the underlying cultural assumptions of the work. For example, scenes where the men are decisive and in charge and women timidly wait to be rescued shows how much sexual politics have changed over the last half century.
You can also tell how racial politics have changed. Gone With The Winddepicts blacks as shuffling, mush-mouthed, tap-dancing, chicken-stealing fools. In cartoons of the day, the situation was worse. On TCM the other day, I saw an Oscar-nominated cartoon from 1936 called The Old Mill Pond, which was a Cotton Club-type musical revue which showed frogs singing and dancing like popular black stars of the era, such as Cab Calloway. I never saw more tap-dancing and “feets, do yo’stuff” material in a cartoon before.
Cervaise: a belated thank you to you. Yes, “Big Jim McLain” is the film all right. Note the lone review in the thread you provided: “worst film”. I agree.
Actually, considering that Planet of the Apes was made in 1968, it would have been downright futuristic for it to be shotin a self-consciously “70s” style.
The movie that I find painful is the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with its “hawk” Geberal ape and the prtesting leftist studentapes (carrying protest signs, no les). If my daughter tries to watch this one in a couple of years she’s going to have to have her aging arents explain about the 60s to her. The 60s, in fact, will seem more alien than the Planet of the Apes.
Hi Hodge
Doris? MY Doris? My role-model for so many years? (And let me tell you an eleven year old boy who models his behaviour on Doris Day has a damn hard life ahead of him)
Hodge-mate, she shouts when singing the Q song at the end of the film so that her son can hear her upstairs in the embassy. It’s a plot point. She is really a good singer in her way.
She hated the Q song, and didn’t want it in. Hitch insisted. It made her a lot of money, but she still hated it.
The reason she was popular was that she played a friendly natural girl very convincingly , and could be sad or terrified effectively too. She had good timing, especially in comedy, and lovely white hair. Sun-kist [sub]TM[/sub] Barbie has exactly the same colour.
She is rather winning in “Calamity Jane” a film that has not or has aged well, depending on your point of view.
It’s so hopelessly old-fashioned in its view of the sexes that it makes for non-stop hilarity when shown to a gay and lesbian audience. Every character dresses in the clothing of the opposite sex at some point, or appears at length in their underwear, or is tied up or sings about their secret love - hehehe – it’s too perverse.
Terrific thread, everybody, good contributions. Hodge, be nice to my Doris please.
RedDORIS
No offense, Redboss, because I like D. Day as well, but I still think the original version of that movie was better tha isn’t as dated as its remake.
I’ve been re-thinking TMWKTM and I may have been hasty in some of my statements. I originally said “The whole first act consists of an American family … naively bumbling into a dangerous situation”. Actually, it’s only Jimmy Stewart’s character that acts naively then goes barging around making an ass of himself. Doris Day’s character, on the other hand, is much more suspicious at the outset and then acts more rationally later on. Day, not Stewart, figures out the Ambrose Chappel riddle then acts decisively by going to the concert hall.
It seems that Hitch was subverting the traditional male/female roles typically portrayed in that era. Also, I wonder if he wasn’t having an elaborate joke on Americans and American tourists. Stewart’s character embodies the ignorant, obnoxious stereotype of the American traveller abroad. I still think this movie is lesser Hitchcock and I much prefer the original but, as with most Hitchcock movies, there appears to be a lot going on underneath the surface.
Redboss, I concede your point about her shouting the song to her son upstairs (although this doesn’t explain why she shouts it in the hotel room with her son). But, if what you say is true and she really did hate the Q song, then I’ll have to give her credit for having more taste than I thought. She turns in a credible performance in this movie so I guess she may even have some acting chops. However, I find most of her movies (especially the Rock Hudson ones) to be absolutely cringe-worthy if not high camp. As for her music, Q song excepted, I’ve found most of it to be so bland as to have made no impression on me whatsoever.
Hodge
Stanley Kramer!!??! What about The Caine Mutiny? If the dramatic tension of a subordinate contending with an incompetent, neurotic superior, and then being tried for his career and maybe his life isn’t timeless, then I don’t know what is.
Oh well, you did say 95%. What movie or movies by Kramer do you think are the exceptions?
Because over the past years child abuse has become such a major issue and sensitivity to the subject is so great(only because of this really) some of Shirley Temple’s films can seem quite bizarre. The sight of a little four year old girl cavorting predominantly with men in very touchy feely ways is something you probably wouldn’t see much of today.
None of the Katheryn Hepburn movies work for me any more. Every single character was a cutout cliche. The boss who doesn’t want to hire a woman except as a steno… She must have made twelve with the same boss saying the identical lines. Maybe her studio only had one writer. But at the time they seemed fine, now, when you see them all together in a retrospective week on some channel, they all blend together.
I don’t have much to say on the OP except that anyone who slams Tron is risking a swift and merciless punishment…
But…
This is the second time this week I’ve seen the phrase, “Au contraire, mon frere” on the boards. What? Are we turning into a bunch of faux french spouting pretentious weenies?
Hey…did I so ‘faux’ there?
Oh, merde!
Ordinary People
Airplane
It’s a Wonderful Life
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Gentleman’s Agreement
Is this the “Movies that have NOT aged well” thread or the “movies I could watch 100 times without getting bored” thread?
I mean, except for “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”, which is in another category altogether, “Gentleman’s Agreement” is my favorite movie. I once watched it six times in one week. Although some of the specific situations it involves are dated, the overall sentiment is as relevant today as it was in 1949. It’s secret is in its very “tepidness”. It’s not a movie about people being beaten or thrown into ovens. It’s about the everyday ordinary bigotry that “good” people let slide. It’s about the snide comment at the water cooler, and the nasty joke at the dinner table. The bigotry of “Gentleman’s Agreement” still exists today, which is why that movie is still so powerful.
And the stigma about psychiatry that is portrayed in “Ordinary People” still exists today as well. For every parent whose kid is seeing a counselor, there is another who thinks that “no shrink is going to mess with my family”. More importantly, the kind of family that the movie portrays, in which everything looks beautiful on the outside, but is rotten at the core, can be found everywhere.
For truly dated movies, I’d point to the wacky and arbitrary experiments with color and filters found in many films of the 1960’s, with the Cliff Robertson film “Charley” being a prime example.
Hmm…
Not sure if it’s dated YET, but I’m sure it will be:
Clueless. Typically any movie that uses a TON of slang will become dated, but still. Just the fact that it has Alecia Silverstone in it, who hasn’t been seen in a while, I guess, is enough to date it in my eyes.
For the record, Viet Nam does have pine trees.
My nominee is “Gladiator”. It won best picture when it came out, but today it just seems like formulaic tripe. Oh, wait …
I nominate Kelly’s Heroes. It’s a weird mish-mash of a World War II story with 60’s-era hippie sensibilities. There’s nothing that ages more poorly than a period movie which makes no effort to avoid anachronisms. A hippie tank driver??? World War II GIs with long hair???
Actually, I have this gripe about a lot of movies from the 60’s and early 70’s. Apparently, no actor working then was willing to cut his hair for the sake of historical accuracy. So you get World War II movies with shaggy GIs, or GIs with handlebar moustaches.
Come to think of it, MAS*H committed this same sin. I realize that Hawkeye and Trapper John are rebels, but sorry, even rebels in the early 50’s didn’t wear long hair or handlebar 'staches.
Any SCI-FI film made in the 50’s but set in the supposed 21 century where they are using slide rules and the computers(?) are made up of a collection of tubes and a black and white TV screen.Its the technolgy which lets it down .At least in “2001 A Space Odyssey” most of the technology in the film still seems very modern.
Movies that age the worst? Any SF movie that relies on special effects over story. Hence movies like Tron, Black Hole, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Saturn V, any of the early '80s schlock like Krull or Space Hunter in 3-D, age badly. I wince, more often than not, at the SF I watched as a kid and thought it was cool.
The movies that age best? Musicals. Singing in the Rain, Brigadoon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, even Hair, Brother Sun and Sister Moon and Jesus Christ Superstar. If I liked the musical as a youngster, I probably still like it today. Maybe it’s because musicals usually have more of a fantasy/timeless setting.
By the way, I can think of one Kate H. movie that ages well. “The Lion in Winter.”
Just one small note: Many people seem to be listing not movies that have aged badly but movies that were bad to begin with. Ex: TRON and THE BLACK HOLE have not aged badly; their flaws were obvious from the first day of release. Likewise, bad '50s sci-fi flicks were always bad – although, to be fair, there were a handful of good ones that do hold up, like DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.
A film that has aged badly should be one that was highly regarded in its day but which doesn’t hold up well after the passage of time. For intance, EASY RIDER may have been a big deal in its time, but its entertainment value today is mostly as a cultural artificat (“look at what people thought was cool and hip way back in the '60s!”).