They’re old because I was showing that older movies weren’t necessarily slower paced.
And not all the newer movies that were in black and white were done so as “Oscar Bait”. There’s no reason that Some Like it Hot or The Apartment or Irma la Douce (all Jack Lemmon features, I note) couldn’t have been in color – they were big studio movies, with big enough budgets.
Mirage is a non-comedy suspense movie with the same screenwriter and some of the same stars as Charade, a color comedy-suspense movie that preceded it. I suspect they went to black and white because the tone was darker.
I cannot believe that nobody has mentioned “M” by Fritz lang yet!!
More Fritz Lang goodness: “Metropolis” (not just B/W, but silent to boot!)
I would add three Charlie Chaplin classics:
"Modern Times" "The Great Dictator" "Monsieur Verdoux"
I think that “M”, more than 80 years old already, holds very well when compared to modern police procedurals (and deals with this contemporary figure of fear, a pedophilic serial killer (!!)). Extremely taut story-telling, fascinating script, very VERY compelling, and makes you think about a lot of stuff.
And “Metropolis” is, not just visually amazing, but truly visionary when it comes to showing for the first time science-fictiony things that are nowadays taken for granted (including a video-telephone!). The story itself is more than a little preachy and the acting is typically silent-movie-hammy, but the world presented in the movie looks AWESOME.
As to the Chaplin films I mentioned, I think they should be mandatory viewing for everybody That’s all
“M” is also based on the true story of the infamous Peter Kurten aka “The Vampire of Dusseldorf” which in my opinion adds even more historical significance.
Re: “Metroplis” everything you say is true. I was actually going to do a different thread regarding the silent films but hey, we can include them here.
Re: “Monsieur Verdoux” I always like to reference that movie when I ask this trivia question: In what movie does Charlie Chaplin play a Bluebeard-like serial killer? Rarely is the question ever answered correctly and even many movie buffs are not familiar with this film; Martha Raye steals the show!
sigh * I’ll be brave and admit I don’t really like black and white movies. I’m not sure what’s so special about them. I love color, my world is in full color, I don’t have to watch movies in B&W anymore, so why the HELL should I limit myself?
That’s not to say I never watch any B&W movies. At a quick run-through of this thread, I have watched, and enjoyed:
M
To Kill a Mockingbird
Them
Dr. Strangelove
Rebecca
Psycho
Duck Soup
A Night at the Opera
Young Frankenstein
Call of Cthulhu (2005)
Wasn’t Roman Holiday in Black and White also?
I watched and didnt enjoy:
The Maltese Falcon
It’s a Wonderful Life
Citizen Kane
The Seventh Seal
But none of these were made “better” in any way merely because they were black and white. I think black and white is a serious detractor from films. It’s not about the pacing, necessarily, it’s just so blah and boring to look at.
Like others mentioned above, I grew up with black and white TV, and I had to check a couple of choices where my recollection of the movie is in black and white even though it was made in color. Shane is an example, even though I’ve seen it in color, and it has gorgeous color cinematography, my memories of the movie are still the black and white images I saw as a child.
I’m not a fan of most black-and-white movies not because of the medium, but because of the overly dramatic and theatrical style of acting that was the norm back in the monochrome days. I’ll say the same thing about color films from the era, too. Yes, there’s exceptions.
I’m not a fan of certain film genres that were common in the era, mainly musicals and depictions of high society. Seems like when I’m flipping through the channels, every time I pass by TCM there’s either 100 danging girls diving into a pool, or a Katherine Hepburn-type in an evening gown descending a grand stairway.
There’s always some survivor bias in these threads. The black and white films that are still shown today tend to be the classics, productions considered to be among the better examples of the art. We tend not to see see the other 95% of movies from the era. Believe it or not, they made crap then too; not everything was Casablanca or Citizen Kane.
It would be patronizing to say that younger audiences want explosions, special effects, and sex; they all have short attention spans, and none can appreciate quality. I think younger audiences are used to natural method acting, and find more dramatic, physical classical acting off-putting and inauthentic. They expect more realistic, natural settings; for example, more diverse casts (not for the sake of diversity alone), or city streets that aren’t full of perfectly groomed white people. They’re generally not fans of musicals, and gunslinger/cowboy-and-Indian westerns have little appeal.
Here is a big fat huge problem to me that is routinely unaddressed in these threads about old movies - they are ALL white people. It’s not that I *mind *seeing all white people, but I do get really sick of it really fast, especially when the little bit of non-white people are often completely racist caricatures. I’m sure I’m not the only non-white person who had Breakfast At Tiffany’s completely ruined for them by what’s-his-face playing an incredibly racist Japanese guy.
So many of these old movies are also about men. If we are lucky, the girl gets to be the pretty little accoutrement or help out a little bit, but the man is the Number 1. Now that’s still out there, but it has lessened, and women do much more (but still are rarely the main lead in many genres!) But it’s exhausting to see the woman always needing to be rescued, or being a simpering little girl, or what-have-you.
JoseB, I love you, but those three Chaplins, IMO, are all inferior to The Gold Rush, The Kid, and City Lights.
I have a theory based on nothing that many people’s preference for Buster Keaton over Chaplin is because they are much more familiar with Modern Times and The Great Dictator than his earlier work. They’re good, sure, but a step down from his best.
Also, never see ***Limelight ***(it’s easy to avoid; it’s not like anybody shows it much).
I’ll give you 50% on this - Not everyone is easily moved into the human aspects when the outward visuals create a barrier. This is true of current movies presenting historical periods, just as it is true for contemporary films made in, say, 1981. Some times folks just can’t or don’t want to get past these aspects. I suspect viewers in 2030 will be equally put off by our current spate of CGI-mecha-world-destroying movies.
As for acting styles - to some degree, we consider today’s styles more realistic because that is what we have been conditioned to accept by repetitious viewing. It’s still an essentially unrealistic style, just one we are accustomed to.
Being someone in my 20s with a very poor attention span (due to mental illness and side-effects of medication), I note the following things about black and white movies: -
As others have mentioned, old movies tend to be very slow-paced by modern standards. A kid who is into fast-paced action movies is going to be clock-watching.
On a related note, old movies tend to be very “wordy” – a lot of standing around talking, not a lot of visual spectacle. In a way, they are more like plays. This makes it quite hard for me to follow the plot – I couldn’t follow The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon to save my life.
There are a lot of similar-looking middle-aged white men in suits and hats. Put them in a monochrome picture, and it makes it very hard to keep track of who is who.
That said, I did enjoy the following black-and-white movies: -
Harvey
Strangers on a Train
Sunset Boulevard
12 Angry Men
To Kill a Mockingbird (nowhere near as good as the book of course!)
No one can follow the plot of The Big Sleep. It’s not just that it has a dense plot - it’s that it doesn’t really explain what’s going on. There’s a story that the screenwriters couldn’t figure out who was supposed to have killed one of the characters, so they called Raymond Chandler, the author of the book the movie is based on. He didn’t know, either.
The Big Sleep is strong on atmosphere and characters, but not so much on plot details.
I did mention Metropolis up in post 26, but on this board I have mentioned that M is one of my absolute favorite films of all time, and I own the Criterion Collection DVD, and have it on my hard drive, on my tablet and on my smartphone. Sort of the comfort food of movies to me
Actually, now that I think of it, I own both the older Moroder Metropolis and the new fully restored version as well. I happen to like both the disco and the Wagner soundtracks
[I have somewhere around 1500 DVDs, and probably 250 video tapes - all purchased legally. No idea of how many illegally taped movies I had back in the day, but I had around 1000 tapes that I tossed - I probably should have kept them and tried to transfer onto DVD but in an 800 square foot house with 3 people living here we don’t really have the room to spare.]
I’ve seen some good black-and-white movies, but there seem to be so few. Only the best of the best can get past the differences of the era, which includes not only the palette but also the pacing, the acting style, and the tropes, etc.
I do think that a GOOD colorization tends to improve most of the good ones. In fact, I haven’t seen a good colorization that wasn’t an improvement on the original–although I’ve seen a lot of bad colorization. But I can conceive of their being a movie where the palette serves a purpose rather than being a limitation. (The ones I do know of aren’t really black and white movies, say Schindler’s List, Pleasantville, and The Wizard of Oz)
But, to me, a good movie allows you to get lost in it, and a monochromatic palette is just another barrier to being able to do that. But a bad colorization job is a much better barrier–that’s the reason I don’t necessarily want to watch everything colorized.
Re: Difficulty in following “The Maltese Falcon.” Honestly it was not until I was in my 40s and got a copy of it on VHS and watched the explanation three or four times before I was finally able to figure it out.
Re: All the Caucasian cast members of old movies. What can I say? That was just the times. As someone else mentioned, in 2030 and beyond I’m sure that those audiences will pick apart our contemporary films since they will be out of date by that time as well. As for the color film “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” yeah even Blake Edwards supposedly made a remark about some “controversial casting” but never apologized for putting Mickey Rooney in the role of a Japanese artist. As far as I know, nobody seems to know why that occurred, but I hear it’s considered one of the most blatant examples of miscasting in the history of film.
I’m 28. I balk at watching B&W movies mostly because of the unfamiliar “theatre-ish” acting styles. It really pulls me out of the movie. B&W movies I have seen and really enjoyed:
*Jane Eyre *(the version with Orson Welles; hubba hubba!) Bachelor Mother starring Ginger Rogers and David Niven Night of the Hunter
An interesting thing about The Maltese Falcon is that Sam Spade doesn’t know what’s going on through most of the movie, either. He bluffs a lot - he pretends to know with the hope of figuring it out on the fly. One thing I like about the movie is that at the end Spade is able to explain it all to the police in a few simple sentences. Once you cut through all the lies, it’s actually pretty simple.
That’s all 
