I didn’t get around to seeing The Sixth Sense for a good long while. I happened to be reading the letters page of some magazine when I came across a description of what the big twist was. It’s still a hell of a movie even if you know about the big twist, but I do wish I had gotten to watch the movie while blissfully unaware.
Yes! Wafting about my all-white mansion in, dressed in chiffon and sequins. Every room adorned with several enormous vases full of flower arrangements… Sitting with my beau at a little round table in an elegant nightclub watching the newest Busby Berkeley extravaganza with a cast of hundreds of Depression babes and boy dancers, tap tap tapping their hearts out…We were lower middle-class and had tv but I never got to see any classic old movies until the late 60’s, when college students discovered the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. And PBS began showing films - movies starring Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant - on tv. Then came TCM 
Exactly!
If the whole Pennies from Heaven escapism was a yawning chasm between reality and Cinema for Americans (played by Steve Martin) and Britons (Bob Hoskins in the BBC original), it was even worse for impoverished Fascist Italy with their state-sanctioned White Telephone movies.
I rewatched Blazing Saddles over the weekend. I may not have seen it since I first caught it back i n 1974. My wife Pepper Mill watched it with me.
I was unbelievably disappointed. We didn’t laugh, didn’t smile even once. It was not an enjoyable experience.
This is weird. I still LOVE Young Frankenstein and The Producers (the original, non-musical version) and even The Twelve Chairs, not to mention his later movies.
But sitting through Blazing Saddles was downright painful. I admit that some of it was the lack of surprise – even though it’s been fifty (!!!) years since I first saw it, I still remember a lot of the lines and routines, and any humor they had due to the surprise is gone. (I have to admit, though, that when I first saw the trailer for the film, not knowing that it was a Mel Brooks comedy, that when Mel Brooks, unrecognizable under makeup as the Indian chief, suddenly breaks out in Yiddish – “Shvartzes!” – I completely lost it. But this time I knew what was coming.)
Definitely part of the mood-killing was the free use of “the N word”, and all the casual racist talk. Yeah, I know they’re poking fun at racism, but it doesn’t sit well these days.
But that’s not all. The writing and the lines seemed forced and dead in a way that the writing in Young Frankenstein doesn’t suffer from. It’s hard to believe the film got three Academy Award nominations, and is on several lists of Funniest Films. I can see it being judged as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress – it definitely is. But that doesn’t mean that it’s funny (sadly).
Just one more anecdote about TCM’s programming:
This might just be confirmation bias, but it seems to me that the most common thread among the 1930s and 1940s movies on TCM are “two men vie for the attentions of the same woman.”
Just saw Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed (1980) , knowing absolutely nothing about it going in. Main stars are Ben Gazzara and John Ritter (more or less playing Peter Bogdanovich), and featuring Dorothy Stratten. And despite the fact that Ritter is in it and it has the word “Laughed” in the title, this is not a comedy, although there are some light-hearted moments.
Anyway, I’m going to have to watch it again, because I didn’t get a whole lot out of it other than it was a vanity film for Bogdanovich in which the Bog/Ritter character has a crush on a pretty girl *“way out of his league” as Ben M’s post-film comments indicated. Not a whole lot really happened in this movie.
*He had recently broken up with Cybill Shepherd and would soon have a relationship with Stratten, but that’s another story.
So, he too, has known suffering.