What's the most recent classic film you've seen for the 1st time & how'd you like it?

Define classic any way you like.

I just saw The Ox Bow Incident(1943) this weekend. Great film- a bit heavy handed in a couple of places but overall very good and not your run of the mill western. It was a very surprising choice to make in WW2 because it’s a very dark depiction of a ‘grass roots’ ‘going to find the bad guy’ story.

I was most surprised by the inclusion of two characters implied (certainly not said) to be gay. Major Tetley’s son Gerald (played by actor William Eythe, who was gay in real life [though he had a studio marriage]) is an effeminate young man who’s a disappointment to his father who denounces him as “a female son”, and “Ma” Grier is a butch old woman who dresses like a man, spits tobacco, and rides with the posse (played by the ubiquitous and Oscar winning Jane Darwell, rumored to be a lesbian IRL). Gerald Tetley turns out to be one of the “good guys” (more or less) and Ma is one of the villains of the lynch mob. (In the book, but not in the movie, Gerald Tetley hangs himself by strangulation just like the man they’ve killed was hanged, which is what prompts his father’s suicide.

It’s not surprising the film lost money, but it is surprising Zanuch and Fonda et al had the cajones to make such a film in a time of unfettered (and necessary) patriotism. Much is made of the fact that when Fonda was a boy he actually witnessed a lynch mob in Omaha hanging a black man, and while usually I don’t like psychoanalyzing the dead too much it probably isn’t coincidence that the story had great resonance with him.

What have you seen recently for the first time? And do you agree it’s a classic?

To the above add-

I didn’t realize the preacher character in Ox Bow- Sparks- was black until I was reading about the movie after watching it. Because it’s a b/w film, most of the scenes are at night, and the actor- Leigh Whipper- was obviously multiracial (I’m guessing American Indian blood as well as black)- it’s easy to miss. It makes his character’s inclusion as the spiritual leader/voice of reason more interesting upon learning he’s black (which I understand he was not in the book).

Well, I know it’s not a classic, but it’s slightly older.

Annie Hall

We hated it more than Roger Ebert hated North. I don’t think Woody Allen is my kind of guy.

I watched Paper Moon when it was on TCM (maybe not recently, but in the last few months).

My SO and I have very different tastes, and we both enjoyed it. We were flipping channels, there was nothing on, and we watched the whole thing. It was well paced, well acted (no surprise considering it starred Tatum and Ryan O’Neil), and interesting. All in all, a great lazy Sunday kind of a movie.

La Dolce Vita and The Battle of Algiers. I enjoyed them both, and I think they deserve their reputations as “Great Films”.

My favorite scene has always been the rasslin’ match between Ryan and (a very young) Randy Quaid.

Yes! It was perfect.

Just saw Oklahoma yesterday. Liked it, in all its 1950’s Kitschy-Western glory. Not too sure if many men in the 1870’s=era Old West (or in the Great Plains) wore yellow shirts with red kerchiefs, but what the hell - I’m sure somebody did, at one time or other.

I watched La Dolce Vita recently. I don’t see what is so great about it. I got bored two hours in and didn’t finish the movie. Is there more to it than just some Italian guy trying to get laid?

I just watched 2001: A Space Odyssey yesterday. It pretty much blew my mind. i’m still not sure what to make of it all. I thought about starting a thread on it for people to talk about the film, particularly the last half hour.

Well, it depends on where you draw the line on “classic.” If Shaft is a classic, then it’s that; if not, then it’s Some Like It Hot.

Shaft: Ok, so Shaft is without a doubt the coolest private dick ever to be a love machine to all the chicks. I enjoyed seeing New York of the 70s, and there’s no doubt that I got a kick out of the character of Shaft. The plot was nothing special, though, and the movie was a bit slow overall. Nothing I’m going to rent again, but I might stop and watch it if I’m scanning the channels.

Some Like It Hot: My first ever Marilyn Monroe film. Like when I saw Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I was just stunned with Monroe’s looks and charisma. I’ve seen all the classic shots, but you don’t really realize just how beautiful this woman was until you actually see her moving on the screen. More than that, she’s got a personality to match, assuming that she was more or less just playing herself in the film. The film itself was good, silly fun. I was a bit shocked by the Jack Lemmon storyline–for the time, it must’ve been incredibly risque, and it was presented in a fairly positive, non-judgmental way. Bottom line: It’s not going down in my list of all-time favorites, as I recall it dragging in spots, but I’d watch it again any time.

I suppose Modern Times would be considered classic. I was scrolling through my channel guide a few days ago looking for something for background noise while I cleaned house and saw that TCM was currently showing The Gold Rush, and that Modern Times was going to be starting in about half an hour. I’d never seen any Charlie Chaplin movies, just clips, so after muttering to myself about the missed chance to see Gold Rush I set the DVR to record Modern Times so I could watch it later.

When I did watch it I was surprised by how much I liked it. I could see why people talk about Chaplin’s comic genius. I really regret that I hadn’t thought to check the rest of TCM’s schedule, because they showed The Great Dictator next, and I missed it.

I just saw Hitchcock’s *Sabateur *for the first time. It’s not Hitchcock at his best . . . pretty good but uneven. It stars Robert Cummings, whom I knew only from his TV career. I had no idea he was old enough to have starred as an adult in a 1942 movie.

There were a lot of strange things in the movie, like the scene with circus freaks, and several holes in the plot, unlikely coincidences and details that didn’t make sense. All in all, a not-too-bad movie, but I had trouble suspending my disbelief.

The Grapes of Wrath for me. It gave me a good feel for some of the history of where I live. being a recent transplant interested in economic development issues, it gives me a feeling for where the long-timers are coming from, even if they are essentially clueless in the present tense.

I also saw Frank Capra’s *Meet John Doe *(1941), starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Cooper was of course wonderful, and it was nice to see a young Stanwyck, when she was still somewhat hot (I don’t believe she aged well at all). The best scene was when Cooper and Walter Brennan were playing mock-baseball in a hotel room. And Spring Byington was lovely, as Stanwyck’s mother.

The bit about the “John Doe Clubs” got to be a little heavy-handed. The movie was made at the tail-end of the Depression, just before the U.S. entered WW2, so that kind of populism was a sign of the times. And of course this is a Capra film.

Supposedly, they had filmed several endings for the movie, and tried them out with test audiences in different cities. The one shown was the most popular, and I think the best possible ending.

I don’t think there could be a bad Gary Cooper movie.

I recently saw Blast of Silence directed by Allen Baron. As I understand it, it’s what an Indie film would be in 1961. It’s available on Criterion.

It’s about a hired killer who heads to New York over Christmas to kill a mid level gangster. It’s pretty good stuff, really. I enjoyed it immensely.

I don’t know if it qualifies as a film classic…

That’s my favorite film of all time. De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess, but I think Fellini was saying more about the shallowness of the culture which Marcello is reporting on, than about Marcello trying to get laid. His failures at romance are just further instances of his inability to engage meaningfully in his life and career.

With that kind of theme, there’s not exactly a neat resolution at the end (although I think the ending is amazing). So if you don’t feel the story very interesting 2 hours into it, I doubt if watching the whole thing would change your opinion at all.

My contribution to this thread: I recently saw Jules and Jim, one of Truffaut’s classic films. It was the second Truffaut film I’ve ever seen–I’d already watched 400 Blows and liked it. But I think I liked Jules and Jim a little more. I liked how the story started off very brightly, and then turned much darker with the onset of the First World War. Catherine (Jeanne Moreau’s character) is fascinatingly frustrating, or frustratingly fascinating.

Last night I watched Cinema Paradiso for the first time. It was an enjoyable little film, but I think it’s probably a bit overrated. It seemed like technically there were some serious flaws, the editing and production values were notably poor and the movie as a whole just didn’t flow very well. It’s a very pleasant, small little story that’s acted very well with likable characters, but not nearly deserving of some of the praise it gets. I suppose the fact that it’s a foreign film and that it’s romanticizes the movie experience to such a great degree raises it’s worth to Hollywood types, film critics and theater students.

Don’t trust anybody who says they understood the last half hour of that film the first time they saw it and without reading the book. They’re lying.:wink:

An important thing to know is that the novel 2001 and the film 2001 were released simultaneously and to complement each other. The film wasn’t based on a bestselling book and the book wasn’t just a novelization of the movie- it was an odd arrangement. They were intentionally meant to go together. The movie makes a lot more sense after reading the book.

The most important thing in the novel perhaps is the obelisk and the hominids, which isn’t particularly easy to understand if you watch the film. The hominids are a group of beings far closer to apes than humans and incapable of much by way of deep thought. In the book the elderly leader of the hominids has just died and the group abandons his body; the new leader is his son, though it makes it clear that neither father nor son nor any of the other members would have remotely understood such a relationship and the new leader is ‘chosen’ as new leader basically because he was the fastest and meanest- nothing remotely intellectual about the process as they have only the beginnings of self awareness.
When the hominids encounter the obelisk (a many millions of years old relic from an advanced civilization that you never learn anything about) it scans and transforms them, especially the leader (who is the most ‘intelligent’ such as it is) and subtle differences begin to appear. His sounds, which were previously mainly screams of emotion like an animals, become slightly more nuanced, and though still not a rational animal he begins to be able to put pieces of separate memories and observations together (not in language but images- “there were prints like that last time we encountered wolves… and the time before that… so those prints must mean there are wolves around”). In the movie, this is when he realizes that he can use the bone (or is it a rock? I don’t remember) as a tool when he’s trying to get to the marrow in the dead animal, and then he realizes that the same tool he can use to crack dead bones can crack living bones, which enables his tribe to kill and drive off the members of a rival pack trying to get the same food.
Basically, the obelisk has maximized his genetic potential and greatly expanded his consciousness, thought processes, etc… His tribe and their descendants gain hegemony over the other hominids, and because their increased intellects enable them to get better food their brains develop which makes them make better tools and make more discoveries, etc.- essentially, the obelisk pimped their brains and greatly accelerates evolution of the species into humans by accelerating their consciousness and awareness.

Tens (or hundreds) of thousands of years later the mind has continued to evolve to such an extent that now descendants of these creatures are creating rudimentary spacecrafts (the “bone in the air becomes a Blue Danube space montage” sequence). They’ve even created artificial consciousness where there was none themselves (HAL)- a baby step towards what the obelisk has done. When the astronaut encounters the obelisk, it “jump-starts” his evolution and increases his consciousness to the degree that it did that of the first of his human like ancestors.

Or else gives him acid. I was never completely sure.

I do know that the first time I saw that movie (in a theater during a re-release in the early 80s) I was messed up for a while. I had been expecting STAR TREK or at very least simple-Jules-Verne-with-good-special-effects and it wasn’t that (though visually it was beautiful). In time I’ve come to appreciate it a lot more.

The first of the sequels,2010 (the only one filmed to date- Kubrick was so against a sequel that he destroyed many of the props and unused footage, incidentally) is also by Arthur C. Clarke but it is also far more conventional narrative form. (It’s about an expedition to find out what happened to the Discovery and you encountere HAL and Dave again.)

Trivia: Anthony Hopkins based the voice of Hannibal Lecter in part on HAL, who he regarded as (like Lecter) superior to humans and emotionless about destroying them, and as one of the most menacing voices he’d ever heard. (Accounts vary as to whether HAL was named to be “one letter ahead of IBM”, though I think currently it’s said that wasn’t the case.)

I (re-)watched that one recently on netflix. It was about twice as long as I recalled form the theater 20 years ago. Sure enough, it was a “directors cut” or something. It really dragged and didn’t have the same impact IMHO.