Kid Auto Races at Venice. Charlie Chaplin’s first appearance as the tramp, one of films great icons. Chaplin also revolutionized film comedy, changing it from three or four jokes a reel to three or four jokes a minute.
Stagecoach. Revived the western, turning it from a cheap filler for double features into a serious art form. Also made John Wayne into a major star.
This is Spinal Tap. Invented the mockumentary.
I would say Rebel without a Cause. It was one of the first studio films to deal with adolescence as a bone fide sub-culture.
I thought of that one, but I was not sure of the timing.
I was not sure how to compare these three. They are all before my time.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
The Wild One (1953)
Blackboard Jungle (1955)
Jim
Animal House - started a long line of brainless comedy movies.
The Battleship Potemkin - one of the first major pseudo-documentary films, an early propaganda classic, and the source for a lot of now widely used camera techniques.
Halloween - the first big slasher movie.
Nosferatu - early horror classic that established many ideas still in use.
Tron - the first mainstream movie with computer generated special effects.
Rebel without a Cause (1955) was heavily influenced by The Wild One (1953).
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for changing the face of Western movies.
I have to challenge this one. What other movies did this influence? I cannot make the connection. The most famous Westerns of the 70s were still Clint Eastwood movies and looked for like a maturation of Clint’s spaghetti westerns. Silverado did not appear influenced.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a very good movie, but I cannot think of the movies it influenced.
Jim
I can help a little since I saw these when they first came out and was able to see what elements of society they drew on or depicted and how they influenced society themselves.
The Wild One stressed the restlessness and anti-social nature of the biker gangs of the post-war period. These were not teenagers but adults, some of whom had served in the war. The lawlessness was pretty tame, even by the standards of the time, but the concept of gangs taking over a town and causing chaos was somewhat frightening. The main thing the movie did was boost Brando’s appeal and put another jazz-themed score out to consider. It didn’t have all that many “serious” copiers, although it must be considered among the many influences on the spate of biker and hotrod movies to follow.
Blackboard Jungle was a high school teenager comment about how the educational system in bigger cities was breaking down. It also pushed the Juvenile Delinquent concept along with some conviction. Viewed against the movies it influenced its violence is again rather tame, with each new copycat ramping up the degree of violence and rejection of authority. It had many copiers that are still coming out even today.
Rebel was in color and CinemaScope, where these first two were B&W, so it did make a bigger statement about Hollywood’s acceptance of the Teen Rebel genre as something to build on. The teenager against family and “anything for kicks” themes were pushed pretty hard and the Chickie Run was as realistic a car race/disaster as I had seen until then. The biggest influence it had, however, was James Dean, whose only two other movies (East of Eden and Giant) were the basis for almost every young actor of the period (on into the 60’s and 70’s) trying to adopt his look and mannerisms. There are even efforts to attribute much of Rock’s excesses to trying to embody Dean.
It’s hard to think of earlier movies than these three that deal with teenagers and juvenile violence any more convincingly. Before these, kids were just bigger children and were rarely given any special status or position of concern. These three movies did indeed change that picture within a short span of time. By the time Elvis got cranked up and Rock took off, barely five years went by. It was a restless time, even for a teenager growing up those days.
Any movie set in the future, whether utopian or dystopian, has to bow before this one as its predecessor-
METROPOLIS!
The big difference I see is that The Wild One and Blackboard Jungle were made with the assumption that, while the “rebels” were portrayed sympathetically to a large degree, the audience would see them as “outsiders”. In Rebel Without a Cause, this had changed - it was expected that the audience would identify with the rebels and would see the traditional characters as the “others”.
That’s an excellent distinction. And vaild as far as I’m concerned. Rebel may have helped to establish the Teen Audience as well as any other movie.
Asian horror looked a lot different after ‘The Ring’.
Creepy children in horror films - credit to ‘Sixth Sense’, or further back to the twins in ‘The Shining’?
Asian horror was a lot more popular in the the West after Ringu, but Japan has been putting out decent horror movies since 1960’s Jigoku.
If you want creepy kids, you need to go back to at least 1961 and The Innocents.
Nah. Spinal Tap’s from '84. The Rutles - All you need is cash is from '78. There might’ve been an earlier mockumentary, but Idle and Innes sure beat Spinal Tap.
Thank you **Zeldar ** & Little Nemo. I think together you really clear that up. It was too far before my time.
Jim
Understandable. Until maybe five years ago (more or less) Rebel Without A Cause kept a place in the IMDB Top 250. Down nearer the bottom, but still on the list. Somewhere in the intervening years it has lost some of its luster and I’ve been puzzling over what’s behind that. Other movies pushing it down probably.
I do know that my youngest son, now in his 30’s, had almost as much fascination with Dean as I did. May still. We don’t discuss such matters. But my daughter’s husband, only slightly older, can’t make a connection with the movie. Too dated for him.
Based on this one example, plus others I have noticed my own attraction to dwindling over time, I gauge that unless a movie is really timeless and period-independent, it’s going to lose its zip after a generation, maybe less. I’ve even started threads on this issue before.
And that’s not just the period it represents. But the style of those times grows ever more hokey with passing years and the advent of new technology and tastes. That helps to explain, perhaps, why I have so much trouble adapting my own tastes to the CGI and comic book themes these days. Just not my bag. My reaction to the latest episodes of Star Wars was, “why do I want to see toys fighting cartoons?” Bottom line: I don’t.
Tsk, tsk, tsk! No respect for the classics! I nominate A Streetcar Named Desire. A cosmic leap in acting technique by a sweaty, predatory Marlon Brando makes this the first in a long line of movies to feature serious method actors at its center. Truly one of the great ones.
Surprised it took so long for someone to mention Metropolis. Not just sci-fi/futurism, but anything in the mad scientist genre was probably influenced (maybe indirectly) by Rotwang’s laboratory.
The robbery scene in Rififi established a style for every heist movie ever made.