Mrs. L.A. and I watch TCM all the time. I grew up watching old movies on the local (and Los Angeles) broadcast channels. (Of course they were broadcast channels; there was no cable back then!) Sunday mornings I had a choice: I could watch religious programming, or I could watch The Little Rascals. Easy choice. The Little Rascals led me to Abbott and Costello movies. There were The Three Stooges. And of course there was classic Science Fiction and the WWII films. Suffice it to say that I watched a lot of movies that were decades older than I was, and that as I learned more about film and filmmaking, my appreciation for classic films grew.
What is a ‘classic movie’? It’s hard to define because contemporary films become old films or ‘modern classics’, and then at some nebulous point they become ‘classic movies’. Airplane, to me, is a ‘classic movie’; but it’s not the ‘era’ of filmmaking I have in mind for this poll. For the purposes of this poll, let’s say that the film had to have been released in 1976 or earlier.
There are many films I loved when they were new in the '70s. When I watch them today, I notice how slowly they often move. Different era. Different storytelling. Today, there’s the hundred and twenty-eighth sequel to a comic book character, and these films seem to move very fast and more attention seems to be paid to CGI than filmmaking, if you understand what I’m saying. My sister, eight years older than I am, refuses to watch a black & white movie. She thinks B&W movies are boring. TCM shows young people who enjoy classic movies. I wondered how many people much younger than I am enjoy them.
So if you’re under 30 years old, do you like classic films?
Tell her an entire messageboard is waiting to hear if she thinks Raging Bull is boring, or Seven Samurai.
Oh, has she seen The Birds (or Psycho, or any early Hitchcock)? Night of the Living Dead? Bet she’d be intrigued by Some Like It Hot or *Dr. Strangelove… *
She must’ve seen It’s A Wonderful Life. What about Casablanca?
You can tell her that many of these have a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.*
ETA: Okay, my secret motivation with this post is to get my daughter (and her fellow Millennials) to try some of these and then take the poll.*
I’m over 30. But I’ve been watching old movies my whole life. TCM is celebrating 25 years on air. I’ve been a loyal viewer since they started. The lil’wrekker tells everyone she never saw a cartoon when she was little. Which isn’t true, I still have all the Disney dvds. I liked them too. She likes old movies now, too. She’s 20yo.
I never understood people who say all older movies are boring. I’d rather watch a 90 minuter older movie than a 3 hour slog of a modern movie since it seems like every single movie now has to be 2 hours and 30 minutes minimum.
I’ve seen a lot of these movies and found them utterly boring. I struggled to find anything amusing about Some Like It Hot and Dr. Strangelove and find Hitchcock’s films to be too slow and dull.
FWIW, I’m over 30 and have watched nearly two thousand films, from the 1880s to the present day. For whatever reason, I find that I simply don’t like most films—especially dramas—from the mid-1960s and earlier. Perhaps it was a different style of acting or directing then that just doesn’t click with me. I do actively seek out older (pre-1960s) films, but I generally stick with genres and actors from the era that I’ve had good experiences with. I also use a movie recommendation site, Criticker, where I’ve entered ratings for almost all the films I’ve seen and get suggestions of what else to see based on what others with similar tastes have liked. The system isn’t perfect but, in combination with some background research, I’m usually able to avoid disappointments.
I have friends who will write off a black and white movie because, in their mind, B&W=boring, period. From time to time I can get them to watch something, but it usually doesn’t work. If/when I can get them to watch an old movie, they do typically like it. My explanation for that, and for why I like older movies better than newer ones is that the technology was still in it’s infancy and without the ability to use special effects or CGI like we do today, a movie had to rely on the story and not how showy it is. You walk away thinking about how great it was as opposed to how good the CGI was. Of course, on the other hand, if you’re going to watch His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story or All About Eve, you have to be paying attention. These aren’t movies that you can spend half the time ignoring to look at your phone or go to the bathroom and not really miss much.
I have a feeling that a lot of people that don’t like B&W because it’s B&W haven’t given B&W movies a real chance, but rather it’s more that they consider them old and therefore boring. It’s also possible some people would rather watch a visual movie than a story driven movie.
But at least you’ve given them a chance. It’s not that you won’t watch them because they’re old, it’s that you’ve watched movies of that (very broad) genre and know you don’t care for them. I love Hitchcock, but some of his movies can be slow. I don’t recall liking Rope or The Birds all that much, but North by Northwest is good and Rear Window is one of my favorite movies ever.
As far as acting style in 1960’s, it seemed like there was a limited amount of actors that popped up in so many movies (ie Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart and a handful of others) and if you didn’t care for that well articulated, Mid-Atlantic way of talking, I could see it turning you off.
But, like I was saying, you’re not not watching the movies because they’re B&W, you’ve given them a chance, don’t like them and that should be good enough.
According to this chart from 2009, popular films jumped about 12 minutes in length in the 1960s, and have stayed static since then. About 2hrs and 8min.
Going back to the 1920s, the average was never as low as 90 minutes. Films in the 2000s were about 16 minutes longer than in the 1950s.
A quick glance at Rotten Tomatoes’ Top Box Office list for this week showed several films under 110 minutes.
I like Rope because I know the Leopold & Loeb case, and because I tend to like it when directors experiment. To me, Rope is a fine example of an experimental film. The Birds scared the crap out of me when I saw it on TV when I was little. The image of the guy with his eyes pecked out has stayed with me. Nowadays I find the animated birds and the sounds the birds make to be a little silly; but I give allowances to 1963 technology. We watch Rear Window just about every time it comes on. As hard as it is to get Mrs. L.A. out of the house, we actually went to see it on the big screen a couple of years ago.
As for psychonaut not liking Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb…
I’m sorry, I have no idea what I was thinking this morning. I actually do like Rope. It’s a great exercise in suspense and reminds me quite a bit of Columbo.
Maybe I’ll revisit Birds someday, but for now, there’s plenty of other Hitchcock movies out there that I love…and it’s hard to beat Rear Window.
I’m 26 and I generally don’t watch classic movies. Not necessarily out of some dislike for them but mainly because I already have so many books to read/movies to watch that I usually just watch something that I heard of recently. Which is usually something more contemporary. The exception to this is Westerns. I have watched a number of older westerns because I love the genre and there haven’t been many coming out lately. So if I want to watch one I have to go back further.
I agree that I don’t like the huge amounts of CGI and never-ending fight scenes in movies today as well. However, even with that being said, old movies can be really slow. And their acting style is just strange. Overacting maybe. The sense of humor is definitely different.
I know you chose 1976 as your cutoff point, but it’s all relative.
I recently came the the realization that Raiders of the Lost Ark is as old to my 16-year-old nephew as Casablanca is to me, each having been released 21 years before our respective births.
I enjoyed Casablanca when I was a teenager, and he has seen and liked Raiders. So we’ve both watched and enjoyed “classic” films - from our own perspectives.
Extending the analogy, Casablanca to my nephew would be like The Great Train Robbery to me - a curiosity, a relic of another era. I’m sure he’s never seen Casablanca, and I’m honestly not sure what he’d think of it if he did. But I’m probably not going to convince him to watch it.
Watch *His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, Duck Soup, The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, *or any Warner Brothers movie from the 30s: their pace is faster than anything shown today.
They also can resolve things without interminable fight scenes.
Modern movies have this too, except instead of old movies not having access to CGI, modern movies don’t have access to money. Obviously comic book movies dominate the box office, but they suck so much air out of the room that most other movies can barely get any budget at all. So these non-CGI modern movies face similar pressures to sell it with story. One example I saw recently that I liked was The Man from Earth. That budget may have been four-digits, with nothing but like 6 adults in a room talking. Great story, though.
For me personally, I refuse to watch anything released under the Hays Code, which started in the 1930s and officially ended in 1968. One easy way to remember when it ended is that it just happened to coincide with movies getting good: The 1970s. I view Hays Code movies with the same side-eye I view propaganda films, not just from the Nazis but from anyone. Those films could have more artistic merit than any movie I’ve ever seen, but the amount of censorship and lack of artistic control over content makes both propaganda and Hays Code films a hard pass from me.
I’ve seen arguments that the Hays Code, or any kind of similar censorship, makes you be more creative. If you can’t swear, or blaspheme (seriously, that’s a Hays Code rule), or do things that real live people do, you have to come up with creative subtext and whatnot. Sure, that’s great that people made do, but it did not improve the movies to be subject to such draconian censorship.
Hays Code movies are essentially the primetime broadcast network shows of cinema: Heavily censored and watered down to make them palatable for the masses.
I think for younger people used to rapid MTV cuts and action scenes filled with CGI characters, the pacing and action for a lot of old films can seem slow and dull.
