I’ve pondered this myself. I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to make a movie that is genuinely timeless, that doesn’t date, and so I started to pay attention to old films, trying to work out which ones still seem absolutely fresh today. Not so much the plots but the style. The look, the music, the sound design, editing, credits etc (old British films tended to have all the credits at the beginning, and just one slide at the end with THE END, or perhaps a single diagonal list of the main players). The conclusion I reached is that the perfectly undateable film would probably have to be a period drama, and thus already dated, shot as simply as possible, with actors and actresses who didn’t go on to be famous and who wore period-correct hairstyles etc.
The film would have to be lucky that a subsequent, ubiquitously famous film did not copy some element of it and thus date it to the time of the subsequent film. I’m thinking of e.g. Saving Private Ryan or The Matrix, which both had very distinctive and original visual tricks that were subsequently smothered to death by floods of imitators, and are thus through no fault of their own inextricably linked to a certain time. Compare either of those with Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had plenty of imitators, but was shot in a deliberately simple, old-fashioned style. Mostly on location, with a lead actor who had an everyman quality. Orchestral music, well-done practical effects, set in the past. It’s a good example of a film that has aged very well.
You’d also have to make a distinction between films that are definitely of their time, but which feel like modern period dramas set in that time, and films which are of their time and feel old. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is obviously set in the late 70s, what with the hairstyles and the televisions, but it doesn’t feel particularly old. In contrast, every single frame of Rocky IV screams 1985. Every single frame of Rocky IV was targeted at the people of 1985; outside that year its effect is nil.
See, I was thinking of Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, which is set in Napoleonic times, with period-correct costumes, and beautifully shot, but the whole thing has nonetheless dated. Specifically it looks and feels like an extended New Romantic video, what with the dandy highwayman looks and the obvious graduated sky darkening filters. The same is true to a lesser extent of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, or Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract; for someone my age, it is hard to look at those films without thinking of Adam Ant (or in the case of the latter film, Channel 4 and women in dungarees). Perhaps future generations, who have no organic knowledge of Adam Ant, and of the video for David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes, will view them more kindly.
Barry Lyndon benefits from having Ryan O’Neal in the lead, because he is extremely bland and his career tanked thereafter. Classical music, subtle lighting effects, Kubrick’s particular visual style. Certainly it has dated far better than A Clockwork Orange, which was supposed to be in the future, but now looks like the fag end of the 1960s distilled into a pint glass. Stanley Kubrick’s a fascinating director to ponder in this respect. He controlled his films, down to the design of the credits, and there was no way he was going to bow to fashion, and so most of his films have aged very well albeit not perfectly. In the future, when Jack Nicholson is long-dead, and no-one remembers him, there won’t be much of The Shining that says 1980.
I suppose the ultimate answer is that no single thing dates a movie; it’s a combination of things. For example, the original Night of the Living Dead felt old-fashioned to me because it’s in black and white, and the characters generally look and act like people from the past - in fact, the first time I saw it I assumed it had been made in the 1950s - but the brutal, uncompromising attitude hasn’t dated. A plot point later in the film where SPOILER the hero shoots one of the living living SPOILER genuinely surprised me.
I’ve often wondered how a child, with no previous exposure to old films or old culture, would react to Easy Rider or Electra Glide in Blue or Logan’s Run or All the President’s Men etc etc. All of those films seem dated to me, even though I wasn’t alive when they were new, because I have built up a mental picture of early-70s cinema. Downbeat endings, meandering plots, all the cast in their thirties and forties. I suppose at first they just seem alien, and then over time the faces become familiar, and the music, and - paf! - the alienness and the time period become linked.
On a small technical level, footsteps. In 60s action films. Seriously; the last time I saw The IPCRESS File I was struck by how the sound mix was full of footsteps during action sequences, and this seems to have been a quirk of the period. Same with the fight sequence on the train in From Russia with Love. Obviously-looped dialogue that doesn’t have any room ambience, that’s another thing.
Gordon Jackson. You don’t know him, because you’re American, but trust me. He dates a film. And blue light; blue light dates a film to the 1980s. You know, it’s interesting to compare the first two Robocop films. The original came out in 1987 and doesn’t absolutely reek of the 1980s; the style is modest, nothing tries to be deliberately contemporary, and the general look has a sensibly formal approach. The bizarre ethnic mix of the Detroit street gangs hasn’t dated, in the sense that it was weird back then. Still, the brutal violence is just as funny as it ever was. In contrast, the sequel has a distinct and pervasive whiff of the early 1990s about it, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.