I witnessed a memorable geography based reaction as well. It happened during this scene:
Probably the most throwaway line in the speech is, “My father is in the Army and he wants me to join but I could never work for that corporation.” When I saw the movie it got the biggest reaction in the entire movie. I was watching it in the Fort Rucker theater.
When I was in high school, there was a theatrical re-release of The Godfather. I saw it with some friends, and when they got to the “sleeps with the fishes” line, one of them groaned, “I can’t believe they used that cliche!”
Is the tinkly piano in the original movie Bananas? I’ve never seen it, but that music saps a lot of seriousness out of the subway scene with Stallone.
Also: Allen burying his face further and further into the magazine, and kicking the crutch out of the way? Darkly funny, I think.
Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor is about a reporter who fakes mental illness to go undercover and investigate a murder in an insane asylum. At one point he finds himself in the nymphomaniac ward, and on realizing where he is, mutters a low, horrified “Nymphos!”
I don’t know how it played in 1960, but a mid-1990s college film school audience erupted in laughter.
This doesn’t quite fit the premise because virtually no time had passed but…I saw Wayne’s World on opening weekend, a totally wild time as it hit during reading week that year. There’s an exchange in which Cassandra says “II’ve been so busy with my band, I thought I was getting meningitis.” Something like a week earlier, a high school kid in Ottawa had gone home at lunch because he wasn’t feeling well, went to bed and died from a particularly nasty strain of meningitis. That line landed…shall we say, uneasily.
I remember being aware of it the first time I saw it (in high school) in 1968. I guess it’s kinda subtle?
Pretty much anything Leslie Nielsen was in prior to Airplane! is hard to take seriously now, since he became so associated with deadpan comedy in the 1980s.
James Bond disguising himself as a Japanese man in You Only Live Twice seems pretty silly nowadays.
In From Here to Eternity (set in Hawaii) someone talks on the phone and moves to reveal a calendar page saying “December 6, 1941.” It was probably a chilling reveal when the movie was released, but the obviousness of it is very heavy-handed today.
Similarly one of the few things about Rebel Without a Cause that I find distracting is that James Dean’s father is played by Jim Backus and all can think about when seeing him is Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island.
The entirety of Reefer Madness.
I was playing Mafia: Definitive Edition the other day, and there’s a bridge in their faux-Chicago setting called the “Giuliani Bridge.” Which I suspect landed a lot differently when the game originally came out in 2002, than it did when the remaster came out 2020.
There’s an early scene in The Exorcist in which the possessed girl’s mother is talking with a psychiatrist about Regan’s peculiar symptoms, and the doctor says very seriously,
“There’s a new medicine I’d like to try… it’s called Ritalin.”
The late ‘90s crowd watching the special Extended Edition in the theater (the Coronet in San Francisco, if anyone remembers that place) laughed uproariously.
Well, of course they laughed. Demonic possession calls for an anxiolytic. Any idiot knows that.
It’s pretty horrifying still, at least it was the last time I saw it.
Lots of memed lines and scenes aren’t actually that meme worthy when actually seen in full context.
For a less errr…horrific example, Anakin’s “I hate sand” line from the prequels is perfectly fine when said in context. (It was in response to Padme recalling that she had enjoyed lying on the beach sand as a kid).
Not precisely “serious back then”, but in Annie Hall, when she says she’s thinking of going back to school, Alvy says, “Just don’t take anything where they make you read Beowulf”.
My father spent 1964-1967 creating an early concordance of Beowulf, starting with renting a keypunch for the house and my mother inputting the text. So we lived with that book for years. As a result, my family finds that line inordinately funny; for anyone else, it’s a slight grin at best, I think.
She’s my sister!
Slap
She’s my daughter!
Slap
She’s my sister!
Slap
She’s my daughter!
(Chinatown, 1974)
Jim Carrey’s character (an alien) in Earth Girls are Easy watches Rebel and then quotes the line “You’re tearing me apart!” completely out of context. After watching that, the original by James Dean seems pretty hilarious.
I haven’t seen that one, but The Room uses that line as well. Actually I haven’t seen The Room either, but I’ve seen clips of it, and I’ve seen The Disaster Artist. For those not familiar with it, The Room is widely considered to to be one of the worst movies ever made. While it’s trying to be a drama, it falls into the “so bad it’s funny” category.