Twelve O’Clock High
Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
Jason and The Argonauts
And if 4 guys named Paul, George, John, and Ringo released Rubber Soul today, it would be dismissed as cute but too retro (though that Paul is a dreamboat). The metric you’re using is, with all due respect, a specious one, since certain art forms and specific works of art will adapt to it more easily than others, when evaluation of art should not be “could it be released today” but “does it still resonate decades later”. The fact that Miracle doesn’t fulfill the first standard doesn’t mean it fails the latter.
A bright teenager would know that there is an enormously large grey area that straddles these two criteria you characterize as separate and distinct. A perfect example: there have been several attempts to remake and “contemporize” King Kong, but if you released the original 1933 film (with the same quality of special effects) today, it would be seen as campy or chintzy or at least rooted in nostalgia. But even though the remakes are more “modern” and better qualify as “contemporary entertainment”, the original is the one that still best stands the test of time. It remains the masterpiece and not just because it’s a “document of historical interest.”
The Adventures of Robin Hood
Arsenic and Old Lace
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Operation Petticoat
The Red Shoes
7 Faces of Dr. Lao
Some Like It Hot
The mention above of John, Paul, George and Ringo made me think of “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964).
I found that the Sturges film does not still resonate today.
I think that for most people that will be true, but do not have proof.
Rubber Soul and the the Beatles still are gaining millions of new fans every year.
If was Rubber Soul was released today, it would have a chance of being a best seller, but even if it wasn’t it could very likely be treasured by a cult following (without a knowledge of Late 60s culture and music being needed.) And it could easily spawn cover versions in contemporary music styles.
But… let me stop make random comments and address your main point, which I believe is “there’s no importance at all to whether or not a movie would be praised if it were released new today, rather than 50 years ago.”
I’d say there is. It means that the movie still (in your words) “resonates.” “Duck Soup” could still garner huge praise for the word play and for Harpo’s pantomime. It could easily become a cult film. Those things simply have not been done better in the time since it was made.
*Nostferatu * could be as popular as, say, “She Gotta Have It,” Cleaned up a little and with the right marketing it could do better than “Blair Witch Project.”
I’d say that a lot of people would prefer “High Noon” to “3:10 to Yuma” and if the production values were the same it could gross more money.
So, how a movie would be greeted if it were were released as new today isn’t an ultimate yardstick of quality and I didn’t present it as such… but I don’t think my comment about* Morgan Creek* was meaningless.
Finally I don’t think I categorized the criteria of “does it resonating” and “what if it was released today” as separate and distinct… with no gray areas.
And really your idea that if a movie was “hilarious” when it came out that it will always be hilarious is very strange. Surely you didn’t mean that.
The Great Escape (1963). I watched in the late 90s as a 14-year old, and it remains my favourite movie to this day.
Shane.
Without a shadow of doubt the best western ever made
I’m not sure how much age has to do with it; when I was a teenager, I was watching old Bob Hope movies that people my mom’s age thought were totally corny.
That said…Bob Hope movies! Specifically the “Road” movies with Bing Crosby (“Morocco” and “Utopia” are the best), and My Favorite Blonde. If you like the Marx Brothers and Looney Tunes, these movies are at about the same level as fun and irreverence. I especially like them because there’s a slight amount of improvisation, which goes a long way toward making the performers seem human, rather than weird, stiff 1940s people.
Bringing Up Baby is another good one, along those same lines.
Pre-code films are also known for being a little more sophisticated. The 1930s version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the one with Fredric March) is sexy and suspenseful, even today, and movies like Design For Living and Trouble in Paradise (both directed by Ernst Lubitsch) portray adultery in a way that would have been impossible after 1934.
Billy Wilder is a good bet, too. Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and the Apartment, from 3 different decades, all blew me away when I was a teenager.
I haven’t seen Father Goose or Harvey or Hard Day’s Night, but I can think of a few movies comparable to some others on the list.
Rear Window – Rope, Wait Until Dark, Cape Fear, Psycho, Night of the Hunter (great tension in all those)
High Noon – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Shane, The Searchers, Seven Men From Now
Nosferatu – Freaks, the Bela Lugosi Dracula, James Whale’s Frankenstein
Casablanca – I can’t think of anything comparable to Casablanca. Maybe The Third Man or Sunset Boulevard, not because the stories are similar but because of the ambiance.
Ditto for The Little Foxes, and if she likes that then The Magnificent Ambersons, Now Voyager, Dark Victory, How Green Was My Valley
Duck Soup
A Night at the Opera
It Happened One Night
Sullivan’s Travels
We just saw The General last night. It was awesome. A lot of people are unwilling to try silents, but they’re missing out - they’re perfectly accessible. And you can totally tell that to get the shot of the train falling off the bridge into the river, they just threw a train off a bridge into a river. Like to see a movie today where they do that.
It isn’t, but I’d put it on the list anyway. Then add the real #1 - Red River.
If you’re in the mood for something less than an hour, my daughters love watching Perry Mason reruns with me. They’re free on www.cbs.com.
My girls really get into the 1950’s B&W genre, for some reason. Jackets and ties for dinner. Smoking in every scene, with cigarettes always offered as an icebreaker. Nurses and maids that wear uniforms. Two-seated roadsters and hip flasks.
Perry Mason has got just enough film-noir quality, but without any real violence in it, that makes it suitable for them. Plus, they love the implied romantic tension between Della and Perry (especially ironic, considering Raymond Burr was gay), even though nothing ever comes of it.
The Gold Rush, starring Charlie Chaplin.
Another vote for The General, starring Buster Keaton.
Desk Set, starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. The computer science is dated, but the movie is really about office politics, and is just as relevant today as it was then. And Tracy and Hepburn are just plain fun to watch!
Father of the Bride, and Father’s Little Dividend . . . the Spencer Tracy originals, not the Steve Martin remakes.
That’s where YMMV, though clearly quite a number of people disagree
Actually, I’m not saying anything of the sort. You claim that a film “holds up” if you could release it completely unaltered today and have the same reception. That’s your metric, and while that may be true with some movies (or music or TV shows, etc.), to have that be the standard for whether things remain good or not is an incredibly limited one.
I really think you’re kidding yourself, here. I love the Marx Brothers, but that style of humor is rooted in long-faded traditions of vaudeville, most of which would be foreign and unappealling to modern audiences. It’s an impossible thing to predict, but to claim that one movie would survive in the marketplace today while the other wouldn’t is essentially unsupportable and conflates back to “I found one funny and the other not”. And by using the convenient “cult following” meme, you’re also moving the goalposts, since cult followings are by definition things that are rejected by the mainstream and only have a niche level of appeal that doesn’t translate to something with wider potential.
Bolding mine–and there you’re moving the goalposts again. And I also think you’re kidding yourself about High Noon: nobody fires a shot in that movie until the last reel; modern audiences would have an extraordinary lack of patience for that level of pacing (especially in a genre that is largely irrelevant to modern tastes, anyway). Ditto silent movies, no matter how amazing, like Nosferatu. Both have stood the test of time for their own reasons, but I’d say “because they could still be released today” is decidedly not one of them.
Not meaningless, just reductive. If you don’t think it’s funny or insightful, that’s fine (though personally inexplicable), but your primary argument against the film is that “released today” reason, and it’s simply too insubstantial to take very seriously, I’m afraid. You’ve already admitted that you don’t like most old movies, so I think that says more about your personal criteria than it does about the sustanibility of films from those eras.
You said:
You position an either/or condition here, and you’d already established that a “contemporary entertainment” criteria you use is the “released today” one. There are plenty of films that resonate today (meaning they are more than of mere historical interest) while still being unreleasable as “contemporary entertainment” (my Kong example, for one), but your statement doesn’t make allowances for those films.
I can’t mean an idea I never once expressed.
The Grand Illusion, assuming the bright teenager has nothing against subtitles.
Singing in the Rain is my teenaged daughter’s favorite pre-1965 movie. I love it, too.
Wouldn’t it be far simpler to ask if any post-1965 movies hold up?
The target age at which most movies are aimed has fallen inexorably in the last 50 years (the same is true for popular music). As a result intelligent adult movies are far less common now than they were 50 years ago. Hollywood knows what the kids want, they want more bangs for their bucks.
Of course, this isn’t to say that wonderful, intelligent movies aren’t still made, and that isn’t to say that they didn’t churn out pabulum years ago. It’s just that the proportions have changed in favor of the slush.
It took 40 posts for someone to mention The Seven Samurai?
The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers (Alec Guinness’ Ealing Studios comedies).
Plenty of Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin.
Rebel Without A Cause.
The Day The Earth Stood Still.