I was just looking at link in the “bad movie” thread, and noticed the movie is only 59 minutes. So why were movies from that era (say before 1940)
They weren’t always - Intolerance is three and a half hours long.
I’ve been wondering for several years why contemporary movies are so long. When Titanic was released in 1997 there were a lot of jokes about how long it was (194 minutes), but it seems like a lot of “serious” films of recent years are around three hours long and even action movies and children’s movies are often over two hours long. It seems like in the '80s and '90s movies were generally an hour and a half to two hours long, but I couldn’t swear that this has been a shift in the industry rather than a shift in the movies I happen to be watching.
Fritz Lang’s classic silent film, Metropolis, made in 1927, is over two hours long, depending on which edit you see.
The infamous pro-KKK movie, Birth of a Nation, made in 1914, runs to 190 minutes.
The original version of the 1924 silent film, Greed, was over ten hours long. Over the director’s protests, the studio edited down to a mere two and half hours.
From Wikipedia’s list of the top grossing silent films, we have:
Ben Hur (1924) - 143 minutes
The Big Parade (1925) - 141 minutes
Way Down East (1920) - 145 minutes
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - 134 minutes, edited down from 156
The Ten Commandments (1923) - 136 minutes
Orphans of the Storm (1921) - 150 minutes
Of the other eight on that list, most run around 90 to 100 minutes. Only Harold Lloyd’s For Heaven’s Sake (1926) is less than an hour long.
Yeah, I knew they’d be exceptions, and I shouldn’t have picked a year cut-off.
It cost a lot more to make the movie. These days it still costs a lot, but, especially if it’s shot digitally, extra scenes on the same set don’t necessarily cost more.
Olden days movie-going also wasn’t just about seeing the main film. At least in the UK, and I have the impression that the US was similar, there’d be a newsreel, a cartoon, and sometimes a short film as well as the main movie. Plus, of course, there were double features including a b-movie (which wasn’t necessarily what we think of as a b-movie).
And I’m with Lamia - movies of the past 15 years or so do seem to be a fair bit longer than movies of the previous twenty years.
Wouldn’t their length be part of their success, though? I mean, they were intended as epics, and genre-wise some of them are epics; they weren’t intended to be run-of-the-mill Saturday matinees.
The epics make up less than half the list. Here’s the full list, from here.
- The Birth of a Nation (1915)
- The Big Parade (1925)
- Ben-Hur (1925)
- Way Down East (1920)
- The Gold Rush (1925)
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
- The Circus (1928)
- The Covered Wagon (1923)
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
- The Ten Commandments (1923)
- Orphans of the Storm (1921)
- For Heaven’s Sake (1926)
- Seventh Heaven (1926)
- Abie’s Irish Rose (1928)
As you can see, it’s a pretty broad field - comedies, westerns, romances, and thrillers are all included. The epics make up less than half the list. Only two of them are less than 90 minutes (The wiki entry for Abbies Irish Rose doesn’t include a run time, but IMDB gives it as 129 minutes - I should have included it in my previous post). The two shortest are the aforementioned For Heaven’s Sake at 58 minutes, and the 70 minute long Chaplin film The Gold Rush. The rest run a pretty standard hour and a half plus change, about the same as most contemporary films.
That’s still a lot of epics - films intended to be long as well as significant, so their running time isn’t incidental - and even they don’t run hugely long compared to current movies. The Gold Rush was a huge deal for Chaplin, not an everyday silent movie. It’s not surprising that the biggest-grossing silent films are the longest ones - they were the really big releases, not representative of ordinary movies of the time.
The long movies usually used to have intermissions, when everyone would go pee and restock on popcorn. I guess bladders were smaller then, and stomachs were larger.
A quote supposedly attributed to Alfred Hitchcock stated that “The length of a film should be directly proportional to the endurance of the human bladder”.
The last movie I can remember seeing that featured an intermission was Gettysburg at 261 mins.
If you’re talking about Sucker Money, the movie I linked to, the reason is simple: the film was a B picture. They were done fast and cheap and were shown as double features.
You had many classes of older movies. People here are talking about epics. And there were regular A pictures, which ran around two hours or so (another film I linked to today was The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and clocks in at 116 minutes).
But B pictures were often an hour or so. A theater would show two of them in the time frame they showed an A picture. Usually admissions were less; sometimes the B pictures were shown as matinees.
B pictures were replaced by TV dramas (even shorter, but not by that much in the beginning) – TV shows in the 50s were very similar to B movies.
A while back my Tivo recorded something it thought I’d like: Five Million Years to Earth that was over 100 minutes long. It was compelling, but I couldn’t sit through it, I’m used to shorter movies on TV.
Shorter movies go back the era of the Double Feature. Back in the day, theaters would show two movies alternating. You bought a ticket and got to see both. The owners wanted to everyone out in three hours. So, there were a lot of movies made which were 80 to 85 minutes long. Two of them made a nice double feature.
I always thought it was because of the novelty. Yes, people were used to lengthy plays, but with the new film media you might have wanted to show people what it could do. Also, the cost of producing a film might have factored into it, such as the longer the film, the more reels needed for it, etc.
The first feature film was the Australian The Story of the Kelly Gangfrom 1906, clocking in at around 60 minutes, but only 17 minutes survive. The first American feature film was Oliver Twist from 1912, which is partially lost. I’m unaware of the running time. The oldest surviving American feature film is Richard III from 1912 (one of my favorite DVDs because of that), which clocked in at 55 minutes.
Plus in the old days, there were newsreels, short subjects, cartoons, and sometimes live performances included.
Keep in mind that old movies were also the equivalent in their day of television. You still have lots of sixty minute “movies” being produced, we just broadcast them on TV rather than show them in theatres.
Here is a chart and a table of the average length of the 50 top-rated films from each of the decades from the 1910’s to the 2000’s:
As you can see, from each of the decades since the 1920’s, the average length of the 50 top-rated films for each decade has always been more than 90 minutes. The average length of the top-rated films for each decade has always been more than 120 minutes since the 1960’s. So, while there has always been a fair amount of shorter films, there has always been a tradition of longer films since about 1920. You have to go back further than that to find a period when there were almost entirely short films.
I remember from a documentary on “Gone With the Wind,” when that movie was first in the theaters, they dropped everything else–cartoons, newsreels, etc–from the program. Presumably they did the same for other epic-length films, but it wouldn’t be the normal theater-going experience.
I think also when television came in, part of the movie industry’s reaction was to provide movie goers with things the boob tube didn’t have: more color films, widescreen “cinemascope” films and longer movies. Although there was pressure to keep them somewhat short.One of the instructions in making “From Here to Eternity” was it couldn’t be over two hours and the initial version of Judy Garland/James Mason “A Star is Born” was cut from 3 hours to 2 1/2 to allow for two showings an evening.
Before World War II there was strong studio control and they wanted films made quickly and didn’t care for the “auteur” theory of giving the director lots of leeway in making a long film (assuming the word was used back then). It was a real assembly line. Make them and do the next film.