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Some Other Landmark Movies that Could Be Discussed


Lots of folks...me included...make the case that Psycho was a landmark film that "changed everything at the movies." The studio readers said the book Psycho was 'impossible for films"; the censors didn't want to approve the script, and then the censors tried to stop the film from going into release.

But Hitchcock had his Wasserman-backed ducks in a row and Psycho got to show things, and say things, that had never been shown or seen before.

Honestly, is there an American studio film before Psycho that comes close to its blood and violence? I think both On the Waterfront and From Here to Eternity are pretty violent movies, but its men fighting(and killing) men, sometimes out of shot(how Clift knifes Borgnine in Eternity.)

Yes, Richard Widmark tossed that old lady in a wheelchair down some stairs, and James Cagney in White Heat is psycho all the way and a stone killer. But of MEN.

Psycho upped the ante on violence, on the TYPE of violence(slashing and stabbing) on the victims of violence(pretty much total innocents, one of them a beautiful, naked woman) and on the aftermath of violence(Marion Crane's 9 minutes as a roughly handled corpse.)

Nobody cusses in Psycho, but the sexual innuendo is strong and Janet Leigh is in lingerie a lot. John Gavin is shirtless in a bedroom(not in a Roman epic like Spartacus, noted Gavin, he was more comfortable doing that.)

And the explanation of what Norman had done to Mother.

And the flushing toilet.

And even Bernard Herrmann's screeching strings for murder -- the censors were almost as upset with that as they were with the murders.

Psycho didn't go where the hard R would go, but it went farther than anybody before it had gone.

Someone wrote: "Film history is sliced in half during the shower scene -- all the movies before Psycho, and all the movies after Psycho."

But what of some other, later landmarks that might merit a whole lotta looking at?

My choices(some of them) follow. In chronological order. But I've decided that The Manchurian Candidate (1962) isn't really one of them. No the first one of them after Psycho is....

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No the first one of them after Psycho is....

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (1964)

You gotta write down the whole title...its as challenging as the movie itself.

People WERE worrying. The superpowers had nukes, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a close one, and we were asked to live with the prospect that our own leaders could blow up the world and end us all.

And Stanley Kubrick said: "C'mon -- that's FUNNY." Stupid, too. But unfortunately necessary once the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the competiton began...

The "R" rating isn't here yet, but there are lots of sexual references in Strangelove, from the coital planes at the beginning to the "boss man" discussion of going underground with gorgeous babes to repopulate the earth at the end. General Turgidson's bikini-clad babe seeking bed time is pretty sexy, too.

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1967

Bonnie and Clyde AND The Graduate

Film scholars seem to agree that the "American New Wave" began in 1967 (and then neatly lasted a decade til Star Wars in 1977), and weirdly enough, these films were always rather joined at the hip as indicative of "the new type of Hollywood film."

Bonnie and Clyde was about violence. The Graduate was about sex. But Bonnie and Clyde had a good dose of sex, too(Warren Beatty as the IMPOTENT Clyde Barrow -- whoa -- but Bonnie brings him around.)

The blood in Bonnie and Clyde was in color and hence red, and thus some critics found this to be the REAL bloodbath landmark -- not Psycho.

Au contraire. Bonnie and Clyde screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton dug Hitchocck, dug Psycho, dug Truffaut(whom they first asked to direct B and C) and frankly -- the gun deaths in Bonnie and Clyde(mostly of cops until the crooks get it in the end) were much less harrowingly PERSONAL as the bladed death in Psycho. In short, you could maybe watch folks get shot and deal with it. Stabbed and slashed? not so much.

But Bonnie and Clyde also connected with the "revolution" sweeping the world, B and C were folk heroes of a sort -- even as the movie painted them as dumb, brutal and doomed from the get-go.

B and C had a "rags to riches" story to match Psycho. Jack Warner had little faith in it. It flopped on initial September release. NYT critic Bosley Crowther was disgusted by it.

But the tide turned...some critics loved it. Crowther was phased out(correctly) as too old for his job(he was in terms of how he wrote; it was like trying to read your great-grandfather writing about rap.) Pauline Kael rode it to glory with along rave in the New Yorker. One critic -- Joe Morgenstern of Newsweek -- REVOKED his earlier pan and wrote a new review where "he got what these swingin' kids were doing, this time." No need to follow Bosley into the mire. And then the big deal: Bonnie and Clyde got a SECOND release, and THEN it became a blockbuster. This may be a one-of-a-kind movie release event.

Truth be told, Psycho looked musty, dusty, Gothic, Golden Era and formalistic --its from the fifties, really. Bonnie and Clyde is conclusively from the sixties.

I don't like it as much as Psycho though.

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Somebody pointed out that a lot of The Graduate was "as old as the hills":

An older woman seduces a younger man and he "comes of age."

A young man rescues his young beloved from a loveless marriage and defies the parents who forbid him her hand.

That's pretty Victorian.

But: The young man has been boinking the mother of his young beloved...and he rescues her AFTER the wedding vows are completed. And he does strange things with a cross.

What's interesting to me about The Graduate is that Mrs. Robinson just seems like a hotter deal than her daughter. She's messed up, to be sure but...she's hot. She likes what she does. She does it well.

The movie is famously a great deadpan comedy for the first half with Dustin Hoffman debuting as "somewhat ugly" (out goes Tab Hunter) but not, really. He's boyish, he's muscular, he's got drive and a hero's persistence hiding beneath his torpor. He was among the first of "the new young stars" to replace the Old Guard (Warren Beatty had been around for awhile.)

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1968

2001 A Space Odyssey

Kubrick again. He's on a roll...four years between films. That's NOTHING.

I'd say that 2001 is the first great "American art film" (even though it was filmed in England.) Its an MGM production that played at Cinerama Theaters where Mad Mad World played. And yet, fully two thirds of it are...inexplicable at first viewing.

Only the part with the astronauts and HAL were something an audience could hang onto ...suspense in the Hitchcock tradition, except really slow and banal and deadpan.

As for the rest? Symbolism! Big Themes! Classical Music! Outer space effects! A "psychedelic trip" -- and a Great Mystery of an ending...

I sum up the impact of 2001 by relating what was said about Rock Hudson attending the premiere in Hollywood. He got up and left halfway through, muttering, "I don't know what the hell THAT was all about!"

Only the hippies knew for sure...

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1970: MASH

Everybody loved MASH the TV show, but I didn't much. It seemed -- particularly in the beginning -- a mewling, laugh-track ridden silly sitcom in which Major Frank Burns was an idiot and they had a "guy wearing a dress."

But the movie, well, as one critic said: "MASH is what the new freedom of the cinema is all about."

You got that right. MASH is to 1970 as Psycho was to 1960: Announcing Change.

Nudity(Hot Lips in the shower, "the most horrifying shower scene since Psycho," wrote Richard Corliss). Cussing(the F word.) One hilarious sex scene(Hot Lips and Burns). Gore spurting out of the jugular vein of a surgery patient. Toking on a J. Vietnam references everywhere, though the film was set in Korea(to avoid Vietnam references.)

And the New Style of Robert Altman, 70's God. Overlapping dialogue(hey there Howard Hawks), a camera that roamed away from the leads to the bit players and back again, a shambling, improvised feeling to the whole thing(but it won Best Adapted Screenplay.)

The film seems incredibly sexist now -- and it did then, too. Well, it posited surgeons as knife-wielding psychopaths who use pretty sick humor and pretty predatory sexual practices to "relax" when facing death all day. (And, hell, the ladies all seemed to like it, too.) Note in passing: somebody wrote that surgeons posess some Norman Bates-like attributes: sticking knives into people is no bother, they don't faint. Psychopaths.

The movie started as a project for Lemmon and Matthau. That it ended up with Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould...hey, man, the 70's.

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1971: Dirty Harry

Nobody quite caught on how radical Dirty Harry was in 1971. Pauline Kael and others were choking on the politics of the thing: Harry is a fascist they said. But audiences thought: but the villain is a psycho who kills pretty women, children, priests..buries one woman alive after raping her pulling her tooth out with pliers...hijacks a frickin' SCHOOL BUS.

Dirty Harry gave us: the villain with no remorse whatsoever. All cruelty, all the time. But a sniveler when caught. And Dirty Harry beat, stabbed, stomped and shot the sucker. And we loved it.

And Dirty Harry gave us: the Action Hero. Yeah, he's a cop in this one, but he's really a Western gunslinger and now ALL of the cops would be Western gunslingers. Compare Dirty Harry to fellow SF cop Bullitt of just a few years earlier: Bullitt was polite, by the book, a rebel, yes...but very careful about protocol. Harry's a badass.

We never went back. Badass heroes and sickening villains. Hitchcock made a mistake, I think, six months after Dirty Harry came out by giving us a sickening rapist-strangler in Bob Rusk in Frenzy and just having him arrested. That wouldn't fly with Harry. He would have given Rusk a righteous beating.

I say two movies from the 70s combined to give us our movies of the 80s and beyond: Dirty Harry and Star Wars. One for the violence, action star good guy and Evil Bad Guy, one for the big effects. Put them together and you've got: Die Hard.

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1972: The Godfather.

The Big One of the 70's Golden Era. As someone wrote: "no one film better combined art with commerce." Though I say: Psycho came damn close.

Of course, The Godfather runs longer, cost more, has more characters and plot intricacies than Psycho. But they are both blockbuster art films. And they BOTH run on violent bloody murders as the "audience draw."

Someone else wrote that "The Godfather smashed forever the model of the backlot, soundstage studio film." Maybe. All those "real" New York actors. A comebacking Brando in the lead. The artful burnished cinematography.

And the great "dual track study" of "how to succeed in business" even as we studied the Pain of Family. (Those three brothers, then adopted Tom, then neglected Connie -- we knew ALL of them.)

What's odd to me about The Godfather is that nothing about it seems that revolutionary. I think what WAS revolutionary is that everybody was expecting a Harold Robbins potboiler like "The Carpetbaggers" and got THIS intelligently written and artful film (clearly influenced by Eurofilm) instead.

That's my list for now. But I've got more.

Do you?

PS. Ultimately, maybe we can pick one film OTHER than Psycho to linger on. But why?

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AS it happens, although Kubrick is a meticulous planner, Strangelove was a happy accident. Kubrick was to adapt a Fail Safe-like novel called Red Alert, perfectly straight. But when he and some assistants started reading a draft of the script, they started giggling, and the giggling turned into hysterical laughter. THat's when he had the epiphany that this material should be played for laughs. Indeed, if you consider some of the exchanges between Sellers and Scott in the war room, it's clear that if played differently, the exact same dialogue would not be funny at all, especially the stuff about Scott talking 20 million deaths, tops, and his plan for a full preemptive strike.

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AS it happens, although Kubrick is a meticulous planner, Strangelove was a happy accident. Kubrick was to adapt a Fail Safe-like novel called Red Alert, perfectly straight. But when he and some assistants started reading a draft of the script, they started giggling, and the giggling turned into hysterical laughter.

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I think I read that somewhere, too.

We do have that oddity in 1964 of TWO "nuclear doomsday" movies, both in black and white, roughly with the same plot, one told straight(Fail Safe) one told funny(Strangelove.) But Strangelove was terrifying, too.

Or maybe not. Look, I was a kid then, and my parents took me to both of those movies(at the drive-in, probably saving drive-in costs) and, for once, I GOT the plot. I got what it meant when Slim Pickens rode that bomb to glory. I got what it meant when President Henry Fonda ordered an American nuclear attack on NYC to make up for obliterating Moscow.

But it didn't much bother me. I felt "this is the world I live in" -- and I think I had a very big wrong idea: that if the bombs went off, POOF, over, disappeared, no pain.

I eventually learned I was wrong on that one.

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THat's when he had the epiphany that this material should be played for laughs. Indeed, if you consider some of the exchanges between Sellers and Scott in the war room, it's clear that if played differently, the exact same dialogue would not be funny at all, especially the stuff about Scott talking 20 million deaths, tops, and his plan for a full preemptive strike

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Absolutely. This was Hitchcockian black comedy on a scale Hitchcock never dared. The death of millions reduced...to a punchline.

And also: eventually a movie about a small bunch of guys contemplating having an entire world to themselves "to start over" -- with beautiful babes to make babies with. Its almost a fantasy of escape FROM the world. For THEM. Which makes the End of the World funnier still.

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In fact, in Fail Safe, Walter Matthau's character spouts the same nonsense about megadeaths and preemptive strikes as Scott does in DS and it is played totally straight.

Ironic that Matthau, known primarily for comedy, and Scott, more for drama, played these twin roles but with Scott playing for laughs. (Has any other actor ever gotten a big laugh from an audience simply by saying one word "Five!")

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In fact, in Fail Safe, Walter Matthau's character spouts the same nonsense about megadeaths and preemptive strikes as Scott does in DS and it is played totally straight.

Ironic that Matthau, known primarily for comedy, and Scott, more for drama, played these twin roles but with Scott playing for laughs.

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This illustrates, I think, how "character men" have more latitude that matinee idols to play either side of the mask, so to speak.

In the 60's, Matthau rather carefully balanced dramatic roles(Lonely are the Brave, Fail Safe) with comedy roles(Goodbye Charlie, Who's Got the Action?) but stayed believable in both (In Charade, he rather played both types of role at the same time.) That said, whereas Matthau could sneak some humor into his work in a drama like "Lonely are the Brave," he had to play Fail Safe totally, completely serious. He is in many ways the cold-hearted villain of the piece.

The one-two step of The Fortune Cookie and The Odd Couple launched Matthau as a star for the 70's. There, he made his name mainly in comedy, but "forcibly" got himself into three straight thrillers in a row: Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman, Taking of Pelham 123. Two of those got great reviews(the first and the last) , but box office was weak, so back to comedy hits Matthau went(The Bad News Bears, House Calls.)



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As for George C. Scott, like Matthau he was a character guy, and he played serious most of the time. Stangelove is the great anomaly; but he was also in the weak comedy "Not with My Wife You Don't" with farceur Tony Curtis and gorgeous Virna Lisi.

Scott trailed behind Matthau in achieving stardom, but Patton did it. Still, Scott never really held onto that stardom. The Best Actor Oscar Scott refused to accept perhaps killed his chances to work a lot in Hollywood, he never had Matthau's accessibility on screen, and he tended to play cold, raging men even when sympathetic(as in Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital.)

Here's some trivia: Twice George C. Scott was set for roles in Westerns but then replaced with John Wayne: The Cowboys and The Shootist. The Shootist was Wayne's "perfect last film"(he played a gunfighter dying of cancer); The Cowboys was serious, too(and Wayne died in that one, too.) Anyway, in both cases, the producers saw Scott(wrongly) as the "hotter star and better actor," but eventually saw the light: John Wayne would make these movies "special."

Wackier trivia: John Wayne won HIS Best Actor Oscar for "True Grit"(gratefully accepting it the year before Scott turned his Best Actor Oscar down), but at least two other actors were under consideration to play Rooster Cogburn: Robert Mitchum and....Walter Matthau!

I can see Matthau as Cogburn, maybe more than Mitchum. And Matthau had played enough serious roles to have made Cogburn's tougher side believable.

But if ever there was a John Wayne role...

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"Film history is sliced in half during the shower scene -- all the movies before Psycho, and all the movies after Psycho."
In my lifetime only Star Wars (1977) feels like it really did (permanently? for the forseeable future?) change movies and the movie business and even world-culture (e.g., becoming *the* go to resource for explaining and caricaturing almost any conflict) almost overnight. And if Star Wars is Jesus creating a BC and an AD then Jaws is John the Baptist. After SW, highly sequelizable and merchandizable sfx-driven spectaculars for teens and tweens in the first instance were going to be Hollywood's bread and butter going forward, with almost everything else tending towards insignificance from a profitability perspective (it would take 30 years for SFX to become utterly pervasive and for the full recasting of Hollywood in Star Wars' image to run to completion - with lots of further milestones along the way: Alien, ET, Terminator, Robocop, Batman, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Matrix, Spider-man, Iron Man, Dark Knight, Avatar, Gravity).

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"In my lifetime only Star Wars (1977) feels like it really did (permanently? for the forseeable future?) change movies and the movie business and even world-culture (e.g., becoming *the* go to resource for explaining and caricaturing almost any conflict) almost overnight."

I agree with this. It was the convergence of American pop culture, via westerns and beach-blanket goofball movies, with science fiction; and it is the only film I can think of that literally changed history.

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Another landmark film (although in my view not quite at the level of Star Wars (1977)) is Toy Story (1995). The first computer-animated feature would have been a big deal regardless of quality/story etc., but TS was near-perfect story-telling and voice-casting, and an instant classic. It was also instantly obvious that (i) the change to animation would be as fundamental as the arrival of color or sound - computer-animation would be the standard going-forward; (ii) Pixar was something special and that they'd likely be a new industry cornerstone, the new Disney; (iii) the full digitization of every aspect of movie production and work-flow was now inevitable - the end of film - as computers and memory and networks would continue to much cheaper and faster. (iv) interestingly, at the time replacement of actors with CGI constructs seemed to be just around the corner, but that turns out to be much harder to do than anyone realized.

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Hmm... I'd probably disagree. Never having seen Toy Story, I take your word about its quality and innovativeness--but that's the whole thing. I never saw it or wanted to see it. An adult in 1995, children's films never were in my repertoire. So I think I'd stick with the original Star Wars, which had intra-generational appeal. Everything about it was the "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" landmark of its era and I'd argue the game-changing film of the 20th century.

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I like and tend to agree with the rush towards "Star Wars" as the "landmarkiest landmark" movie in screen history -- truly a "game changer" even if other movies(this is my opinion sneaking in) changed the game in different ways in the years leading up TO Star Wars.

But the "Star Wars" game change is now 40 years in, and it seems to me that what Star Wars did was to so utterly destroy the models of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and early seventies as to render THAT era of the "motion picture" -- over and done and never to be seen again.

Supposedly what lies ahead in the decades ahead will be movies becoming more of a "sensory wraparound event." Though I don't think narrative will ever go away.Its on cable TV, and yes its in a few Oscar bait movies, and it won't go away -- but it is not the big driver of movies today. And hasn't been since Star Wars. Hell, what's the big movie the world is waiting to see this December? Star Wars! Another sequel -- with MARK HAMILL actually set up as "the man we've all been waiting for(Harrison Ford led off the sequels and left...)

Still, I was thinking about Psycho, too. And some of the other movies I put up as landmarks. And my thoughts follow.

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I had posited these landmarks:

1970: MASH
1971: Dirty Harry
1972: The Godfather.

Really? One a YEAR? Landmark change once a YEAR?

Well why not keep going:

1973: The Exorcist
1974: Chinatown
1975: Jaws
1976: Rocky
1977: Star Wars

--- Each was important in its own way, but in some ways, these seventies films (at least before Star Wars) had to be taken as using the "New Cinema of the 70's to Do New Things":

MASH: Break all taboos in general
Dirty Harry: Loosen the cop from moral strictures by making the villain a sexually sadistic monster.
The Godfather: All "the bad guys to win" with a certain likeability even as the Hollywood film was reinvented with Eurofilm techniques and a new intellectualism of script.

So you kind of bundle that group.

As for Chinatown, it joins Deliverance in being a SPECIFIC "R-rated taboo breaker": Incest in Chinatown, male rape in Deliverance. But Chinatown rises up a level pretty much for its ties to The Godfather: intelligent filmmaking at an adult level that "reinvents genre" for the 70's.

Still: the "landmark FILM" of the seventies before Star Wars may well be a "package" of them, starting in 1969(Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy) and churning on through the realistic(Five Easy Pieces), oversexed(A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist) and downbeat(like, everything in 1974 except Mel Brooks' films.

Hitchcock's Frenzy gets into that pack, but just barely. It was seen as more of a personal comeback for him as part of "the New Wave." But it FIT.

Indeed, I'd say that Hitchcock's only two landmark films were also close together: Psycho(for all the reasons we talk about) and North by Northwest(for how it took action way up in number of set pieces and created a template used from Bond to Indy to John McLane to Neo.

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"Star Wars" changes everything in 1977, but it had two "lead ups" getting there:

Jaws(as noted by swanstep), which moved the bets on blockbusters to summertime(perfect for a shark at the beach movie), whereas The Exorcist, The Sting and The Towering Inferno had all been Xmas blockbusters, the usual model at the time. Jaws had roots in the shock violence of Psycho and SOME of that film's bleakness(innocents die; Quint dies)....but had a big happy explosion at the end(unbelievable, of the shark -- to be followed two years later by the Death Star blowing up bigger.)

Rocky: After the gloom and doom and "nobody wins" torpor of 1974 and 1975 films, Rocky gave audiences a Reason to Believe. And to Try. And to get in shape, dammit. This good guy was a GOOD guy, and even if he didn't win(the 1974 effect)...he went the distance.

All of which set the stage for Star Wars, made for, among other reasons, this key statement from George Lucas: "I was tired of seeing movies where you come out feeling worse than when you went in."

He had a point. Yes, movies should expose the grim realities of our time, but since time immemorial, they have also served as escape for people living hard, grim, desperate -- but OK earning-wise -- lives.

That George Lucas' desire simply to make a feelgood movie would so thoroughly rout the established order -- and change things forever better and for worse -- nobody saw in the beginning. How could we?

But...here we are.

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I noted that somewhere I had read of Psycho and Star Wars as being "event films" in terms of public consciousness. Let's suggest here that each, in its own way(Star Wars moreso, sure) WAS a "game changer film."

How about this?:

Psycho "changed the game" so that the movies could get more real, raw and nasty. Beautiful heroines die before halfway; the detective doesn't solve the crime, HE gets killed. The victims' loved one are left bereft forever. The "nice" first-billed lead of the movie proves a total monster. And "the facts of the case" are revolting. And the violence is as nasty and bloody as ever shown to that date.

All of these paved the way for more adult material in American studio films, and eventually led to the X and R ratings...which eventually led to all that downbeat hard-R early 70's stuff.

And Star Wars changed it all back.

Disney, not Hitchcock , would become the muse. Kids (and especially teenagers) would be the controlling fanbase. The good guys win(for now.) Effects and technology trump narrative and acting.

Note: I'd say Star Wars(1977) to Superman(1978) to Batman(1989) to Spider-Man(2002) to Iron Man (2008) is the path to where we are today. Iron Man truly launched the "Marvel Universe" and DC has now caught up with ITS Universe.

But Star Wars...like Psycho...branched out far beyond just one "sub-genre." I think swanstep listed quite few members of the family tree (and how about "Alien" as the hybrid child of Psycho AND Star Wars?)

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And now a little "backwards in time respect":

Those of us who go on and on about "Psycho changing everything" don't seem to show the proper amount of respect to the 30 years before it came out. I know on this very board we have some posters who know the 30s, 40s, 50s inside out, and love many great films from that period and really, all that can be held AGAINST many of those films is: they were censored. Sometimes heavily. And while nobody says that a movie has to have cussing or nudity or sex or realistic violence to matter, these "Hays Code movies" sure seem DIFFERENT to us today.

What's also known about these movies is that sex was certainly there, a LOT. Notorious, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Casablanca...WE know(today) that the main characters were having sex, it just wasn't spelled out. (And I don't know, maybe back then even the sex we never saw was more discreet and less porn-like.)

But to go in another direction: sex probably wasn't much always the big seller of 30s and 40s films anyway. At least a lot of them. Romantic love was. Comedy was. Personal sacrifice in the WWII years was. Filmmakers like Frank Capra and Leo McCarey had other things they wanted their audiences to consider.

Some game changer films BEFORE Psycho: That French one where the rocket hits the Moon in the eye and the Moon cringes; "The Great Train Robbery"; "The Jazz Singer." Yeah, I'd say THOSE were game changers: we GOT movies; and then we got SOUND movies.

So let's not let me get too high and mighty in suggesting that the movies really didn't change until Psycho...or necessarily until Star Wars.

But this: in the 30s and 40s, movies with the plots of Psycho and Star Wars were B's(The Cat and the Canary") or serials(Buck Rodgers.) SciFi was rarely given an A-budget(this mainly started in the 50s), horror rarely drew "name actors." (Karloff and Lugosi rather trapped themselves as horror stars.)

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I suppose the game changers of "how film works" would be like this:

The first movie(the French moon one?)
The first full-length silent movie(The Great Train Robbery)
The first full-length sound movie(The Jazz Singer)
The first "Hays Code" movie with full censorship(I have no idea; something from 1934?)
The first movie to challenge the Hayes code on ALL aspects(Psycho -- even as Anatomy of a Murder, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment were pushing the envelope somewhat)
The first X movie("Midnight Cowboy," 1969)
The first R movie (its something like 1968's "Secret Ceremony," but here, I would nominate MASH as covering all the bases that the R-rated movie could cover in a Best Picture/Big Hit way.)
The first summer blockbuster(Jaws...though really, Psycho was, except it took 15 more years to be noticed)
The first movie to "push back" against the movies of the 60's and the 70s: Star Wars.
The first full CGI movie: Terminator 2
The first full CGI animated film: Toy Story(thanks swanstep, this is a BIG one in terms of where the money is made today by Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks...)

and...

hey'd I miss anything?

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The first full CGI movie: Terminator 2

I'm confused, T2 had a lot of CGI for its time but it wasn't shot digitally or even edited or post-produced fully digitally (from a digital intermediate) as far as I'm aware. It was so impressive and well done though that it told you a lot about where movies were going.

I wonder whether Midnight Cowboy really deserves mention. The Wild Bunch from the same year feels like more of a landmark to me.

In general, people like Peckinpah and Tarantino seem to me to have had a big impact on the history of films through their whole body of work. Wild Bunch and Pulp Fiction were big at their times but in both cases it's the example of their whole bodies of slightly disreputable work (resisting tidier models) that's been influential.

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I'm confused, T2 had a lot of CGI for its time but it wasn't shot digitally or even edited or post-produced fully digitally (from a digital intermediate) as far as I'm aware.

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Uh oh. My "layman's approach on this particular film runs aground against your technical knowledge. Here's what I meant: as I recall, it was Cameron's "The Abyss" that had the first "morphing effect"(of a watery face hanging in mid-air) and that was impressive. But T2 had the morphing new killer robot ALL THROUGH THE FILM. And it was pretty cool to see even if -- today -- I'm just kind of underwhelmed by the whole effect. I don't know from digital here, I'm talking "morphing." And as I recall, Spielberg soon thereafter said he would use CGI for "Jurassic Park." So that's how I picked up the term.

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It was so impressive and well done though that it told you a lot about where movies were going.

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Coming in 1991, Ts rather set the technical pace for the decade. And then Pulp Fiction came along to show us there was still plenty of surprise left in the narrative and dialogue form. Those two movies seemed to "make the 90s" for me.

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I wonder whether Midnight Cowboy really deserves mention. The Wild Bunch from the same year feels like more of a landmark to me.

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Here is an example of how I think my little exercise can "focus our thoughts on what's really going on here." I'd say that clearly The Wild Bunch is THE movie landmark of 1969. It ended the decade as Psycho had begun it -- by giving us an old-fashioned movie genre in a new-fashioned, ultra-bloody form.

But it turned out that The Wild Bunch did more than that. The zillion-edits, different film speed massacre finale of the film wasn't just bloody -- it was EXCITING. The action movie really starts here, though I can't say I saw many shootouts as spectacular as the one that closes The Wild Bunch ever again. It took too long and cost too much to shoot. (An 80's movie with Nick Nolte called "Extreme Prejudice" had a good mini-version, though; I think Walter Hill directed.

All these years later, The Wild Bunch is well-remembered and Midnight Cowboy is -- not so much. And that's why my exercise in defining "landmark" is somewhat self-defeating. Midnight Cowboy is the first major X-rated film, and the only one to win an Oscar but -- the MPAA didn't really know what to do with the X rating, they soon re-rated Midnight Cowboy down to "R" (to make money) and X became the porno industry's favored term(or XX.)

My claim (and others') for Psycho's landmark status is supported by its box office, its scholary longevity of discussion, how it predicts years of movies to follow it. But it had no rating; kids could walk right in, today it looks sort of mild beyond the two murders, which aren't that bad, considering. Still, its a landmark.

And even as The Godfather is considered the greatest film, or greatest modern film, in many circles -- it doesn't much fit on a list of "objective landmark films." It is simply a great film that reflects the freedoms and time of its making. It HAS to be on a list of landmark films.

As does Pulp Fiction, a movie that "changed everything" except it turned out that its power and magic were the work of one auteuristic creator, one of those film artists who only turns up so often(Hitchcock was one) and who revels(as Hitchcock did) in shocking sensibilities with a great sense of humor and style.

Pulp Fiction is QT's Citizen Kane, looming over everything else he did and making the rest seem anti-climactic. I prefer the next one -- Jackie Brown -- for its "Rio Bravo-ish" easygoing pace and length and middle-aged heroes and villains. Thereafter, QT took six years off and came back as a pretty messed up guy who still makes movies people want to see and talk about.

Pulp Fiction belongs on a landmark list.

I suppose this could end up just turning into an "AFI Greatest Movies List," but I think more is going on here.

Which brings me back to Psycho:

It was a blockbuster.
It was not a "family film."
It showed, said, and did things that movies weren't supposed to show, do or say.
It made full-house audiences scream, all around the world(it was not a movie you WATCHED, it was a movie you GOT INVOLVED IN.)
It dominated its year of release and lasted for decades beyond that.

Its a landmark film.

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Regarding films made before Psycho, I find it interesting how many earlier works feature graphic descriptions of violence with little to no "shock" from the public, especially comedies. Laurel & Hardy, particularly, made jokes about being hung, committing suicide, there were descriptions of peoples' throats being slit, etc.

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I did not know that about Stan and Ollie. I haven't seen a lot of their films. I loved them for awhile back in the 70's.

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The Three Stooges were much more visually violent and there was some backlash from angry parents,

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Not mine. They just warned me that if I did any of those things for real, I would kill somebody and go to jail for the rest of my life.

In my male teens and 20's, it was a great male bonding thing to watch all that violence -- AND all that anti-social behavior(Moe just couldn't like ANYBODY for very long without unleashing on them -- its like today's political discourse.)

And the Stooges made me laugh. At that older age.

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but I guess because it was cartoonish it didn't match the shocking nature of Psycho.

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Hitchcock once said that a great slapstick moment is when a man suddenly drops through the ground where a manhole cover has been removed. We laugh. But if the camera went over and looked down and we saw the man screaming with broken bones and blood on his face...we'd be horrified.

So it was with Psycho. The violence was real and vicious and invoked upon people who were innocent and didn't deserve it and had no idea why it was happening to them(oh, maybe Arbo felt it was over the money, but he was wrong.)

And consider this: in From Here To Eternity, hero Monty Clift kills vicious bad guy Ernie Borngine(who has beaten Frank Sinatra to death in the stockade). Clift knifes Borgnine behind some crates; we don't see it, its the finish to their knife fight, two men in a fair fight, the good guy wins(but sickeningly so.)

Well, when Mother stabs Arbogast finally and fatally, THAT's out of view , too. But the "horror element" is this: its not two men fighting a fair knifefight. Its an OLD WOMAN with hideous strength stabbing a totally helpless man in a business suit. Our "moral compass" is thrown way off, and Mother seems like a Monster, inhuman.

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[deleted]

Great to find the old Psycho crew over here, by the way.

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Isn't it reassuring? There are a few more from that board it would be nice to hear from, too.

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Check your private messages when you get a chance, ecarle, I'm waiting to hear from you

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I'll take a look. I may have to answer you "out here." Havent tested the PM system here, though I've read some PMs and tried to answer or to "follow their recommendations."

You will hear from me.

I remember you. I love your board name: Emergo. William Castle. House on Haunted Hill.

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IMHO, EC: Midnight Cowboy, landmark for its time, isn't landmark for all time, not the way Psycho is, or even The Sound Of Music. Same for The Wild Bunch. That these were two of the most discussed films of 1969 is beside the point. I'm not knocking them. They're very important, but not landmarks. Same with that other Peckinpah, Straw Dogs.

Even Rosemary's Baby, which I sort of love. it's almost a female Psycho of witchcraft, and made with exquisite skill by Roman Polanski, but not a landmark (sadly). I feel the same about Chinatown, so important when it first came out, so landmark for the Seventies. A classic neo-Noir, I suppose, but not landmark.

But then there's "landmark as zeitgeist" and "landmark for the ages". Easy Rider belongs in the former category, and yet in its day and year its success was massive, yet its influence lasted maybe two years. By 1971 there was talk of Dennis Hopper as a has-been, with the hipper than hip previous year's sensation, Elliott Gould, soon to crash just around the corner.

But every decade has its share of six day wonders, and the Seventies was a time rich in not so much that but of stars, in some cases true overnight sensations, whose stardom in many cases barely survived the decade: in addition to Gould, Ali MacGraw, her Love Story co-star Ryan O'Neal; Timothy Bottoms,--yeah, I know, who?--okay, the guy Timothy Hutton replaced ten years after The Last Picture Show; nor should we forget Cybill Shepherd (sp?); and the Altman gals: Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Karen Black. Peter Boyle had his time in the sun as a tough guy character star at a notch or two below the level Ernest Borgnine had achieved twenty years earlier.

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ecarle, good list. But I don't think GTR was full length, that would wait till Birth of a Nation in the US although Cabiria had come out of Italy two years earlier. And JS, contrary to popular belief is largely silent except for some musical scenes and one brief dialogue scene with Jolsen and his "mammy".

Also, first full Technicolor film: an adaptation of Vanity Fair, but with ha different name.

First, roadshow blockbuster: Gone WIth the Wind (also, first use of the D word)

First frontal nudity: Some film from the 30s with Hedy Lamarr swimming

First use of the F word (in English): This is a tough one because there were two British films from 1967 and I'm not sure which was released first: Barbara Jefford in Ulysses, or Marianne Faithful in I'll Never Forget What's His Name. In an American film, possibly from the football game in MASH. (Sophia Loren said it in Italian in Marriage Italian Style.)

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movieghoul: thanks for the "fill ins."

I'd say that the F word in MASH may be the first MAJOR use of the word, in a major American studio film that was a big hit, seen by many. A Best Picture nominee, even. Funny thing, its not said in the context it COULD be. The line is from one player across the line to another:

"That F'in head is coming right off!"

Its a quick cut to the line, which shocks and makes you laugh and suggests imminent violence all at the same time.

First Technicolor film is important. Of course, Hitchcock's first Techniclor film is Rope. And his final b/w film is...Psycho.

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In this continuing hunt for "landmark films" (a term which is hardly conclusive), I thought about this well-accepted parlor game:

The year's Best Picture versus the year's Landmark Film.

The greatest example in film history comes from 1941:

Best Picture: How Green Was My Valley
Landmark Film: Citizen Kane.

Yes?

But try this little trio:

1960

Best Picture: The Apartment
Landmark Film: Psycho

1973

Best Picture: The Sting
Landmark Film: The Exorcist

1975

Best Picture: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Landmark Film: Jaws

...the easy thing to see there is that the Academy wasn't going to award thrillers or horror the Big Prize in those years. And we've only seen it once: Silence of the Lambs.

The parlor game changes when the "landmark film" could have just as well won the Oscar:

2005

Best Picture: Crash
Landmark Film: Brokeback Mountain

Here, we really have prestige films battling, but clearly Brokeback had something landmark about its content.

Oscar made a race of two films that drew a line on "where the movies are" in 1994:

Best Picture: Forrest Gump
Landmark Film: Pulp Fiction

But then we have the years where the Best Picture and the Landmark Film were the same:

1943

Best Picture: Casablanca
Landmark Film: Casablanca

1972

Best Picture: The Godfather
Landmark Film: The Godfather (with a possible nod towards Cabaret.)

And of course

1969

Best Picture: Midnight Cowboy
Landmark Film: The Wild Bunch

Westerns rarely won the Oscar (Unforgiven, which wasn't FULLY a Western; anything else?) and The Wild Bunch was so bloody it sounded in the horror genre, too.

Anyway, for board discussions somewhere someday on the order of that of Psycho, look no further than the Landmark Films. The Best Pictures...not so much. Chariots of Fire? Gandhi?

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And it occurs to me, I forgot a big one:

1977:

Best Picture: Annie Hall
Landmark Film: STAR WARS

I mean, other than Citizen Kane, could this be the biggest snub of them all?

Not to mention, Woody Allen aggressively "boycotted" the Oscars that night...though his leading lady Diane Keaton showed up to get her Oscar for this film.

The "short version," of course, is: genre films except for Silence of the Lambs just haven't gotten Best Picture respect, ever. From Dracula to Frankenstein to King Kong to Psycho to The Exorcist to Jaws to Star Wars ....to The Dark Knight. "No can do."

I have this vote as well:

Best Picture: On the Waterfront
Landmark Film: Rear Window

The problem, of course, is that On the Waterfront is considered a landmark film, too. And as a matter of the Brando performance, it is. But it is also rife with too much method(Cobb, Malden and of course, Steiger) and some pretty simplistic scenes of action.

Against which, Rear Window is a model of cinematic technique AND a breakthrough story about the darknesses (murderous and sexual) of our neighbors.

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Best Picture: Annie Hall
Landmark Film: STAR WARS

AH didn't change the whole movie business and culture the way SW did, but it's definitely a landmark in its way. *Incredibly* funny, deftly juggling tones and an incredible range of cinematic idioms from cartoon inserts to direct addresses to camera to flashbacks with current-day characters walking around in them to comedy subtitles to unbroken musical numbers, and so on.... AH does it all and it all works. In a way it has a 'degree of difficulty' associated with it that's almost as high as SW....and like SW the finished product is so affecting and slick that it almost looks easy and obvious.

In another year, SW might have won Best Film and Director and AH just gets Best Original Screenplay and Actress (Titanic over LA Confidential is the model here - and Maybe LAC would have pulled an AH-like upset if there hadn't been other excellent adult-oriented movies around such as Boogie Nights and Sweet Hereafter and Affliction to divide the not-interested-in-Titanic vote). But only the most fevered SW fans think that it was any great injustice that SW lost the biggest awards to one of the top 3 or 4 romantic comedies of all time.

The situation wasn't like 1989:
Best Film winner: Driving Miss Daisy
Landmark Film (not even nom'd): Do The Right Thing

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It's interesting to check out the film101.com, critical consensus website. They compile lists not just for years but also decades, quarter centuries, genres and so on. For our purposes the decades links on this page are most interesting:
http://www.films101.com/years.htm

They have AH at #3 for the whole '70s followed by SW at #4. (With Godfather and Chinatown as #1 and #2).

They have Psycho at #2 for the '60s and The Apartment in the #10-#20 range (with 2001 at #1)

They have LA Confidential at #5 for the '90s and Titanic in the #10-#20 range (with Pulp Fiction at #1).

They have Do The Right Thing at #5 for the '80s (and ET at #2) whereas Driving Miss Daisy is around #100 (and Gandhi is in the #25-30 range).

They have All About Eve at #10 for the '50s and Sunset Blvd at #11 (with Vertigo #1, Seven Samurai at #2, and so on...).

Anyhow, if these consensus judgments are to be trusted then years like 1977 and 1974 and 1950 are just those amazing years when several all-time greats - instant landmarks really - arrived and did attract enough immediate critical and public support to get nom'd, and voting probably was very close, but still one had to lose.

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It's interesting to check out the film101.com, critical consensus website. They compile lists not just for years but also decades, quarter centuries, genres and so on. For our purposes the decades links on this page are most interesting:
http://www.films101.com/years.htm

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Lists, baby! LISTS. I love 'em. Bring me more!

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They have AH at #3 for the whole '70s followed by SW at #4. (With Godfather and Chinatown as #1 and #2).

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Hmm. Godfather and Chinatown seem right. I'd put Star Wars between them. And maybe Jaws. Godfather first.
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They have Psycho at #2 for the '60s and The Apartment in the #10-#20 range (with 2001 at #1)

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Nice finish for Psycho, but I'd of course move it to Number One. It is more accessible than 2001, more compact, emotional , and HUMAN(oddly enough.) Time to again note the trivia: the first voice of HAL the computer was...Martin Balsam's. He coulda been in BOTH of those classics, well, vocally in one.

Surprisingly nice placement for The Apartment -- my favorite Billy Wilder film. For its heart and its wit, and its pain en route to happiness. But also because -- just like Psycho -- it shows us what 1960 was like to live in.

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They have LA Confidential at #5 for the '90s and Titanic in the #10-#20 range (with Pulp Fiction at #1).

LAC is my Number One, with Pulp Fiction right behind it(the "blueberry pancakes" woman dropped Pulp Fiction for me; plus LAC has that old-style Holllywood studio polish versus the cheaper indie look of PF.)

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They have Do The Right Thing at #5 for the '80s (and ET at #2) whereas Driving Miss Daisy is around #100 (and Gandhi is in the #25-30 range).

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And Number One?

I guess the 80's is my "loss decade" in that I cling to DePalma's Untouchables as Number One. Its a less complex, less mean "cop team" movie than LA Confidential, but I sure loved it the first time I saw it. Morricone's music(about five different motifs, all different, all great), Connery("Aw, hell --we're all gonna die of something!"), Mamet's script("Here endeth the lesson") the set-pieces, the "group on a mission." (No, wait, I'm worse on the 2000s.)

ET is very high on my 80's list. I akin it to "Vertigo" as a "straight rush to the heart" that doesn't make much sense as a story.

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They have All About Eve at #10 for the '50s and Sunset Blvd at #11 (with Vertigo #1, Seven Samurai at #2, and so on...).

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Vertigo, huh? Well, mine's North by Northwest. So there.

I"ve always loved this: NXNW is my favorite movie of the 50's. Psycho is my favorite movie of the 60's. They were released about 10 MONTHS apart. But NXNW caps the fifties, and Psycho launches the 60s.

Interesting though per this list: Vertigo Number One for the fifties; Psycho Number Two for the sixties. Hitchcock Da Man.

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Anyhow, if these consensus judgments are to be trusted then years like 1977 and 1974 and 1950 are just those amazing years when several all-time greats - instant landmarks really - arrived and did attract enough immediate critical and public support to get nom'd, and voting probably was very close, but still one had to lose.

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Yep. They were very good years.

I'd also put 1954, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1967, and 1973 on such a list of "years with too many great films. And 1994. And 1997.

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They have Do The Right Thing at #5 for the '80s (and ET at #2) whereas Driving Miss Daisy is around #100
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And Number One?
I guess the 80's is my "lost decade" in that I cling to DePalma's Untouchables as Number One.

Their #1 is Raging Bull. Fair enough I say but in a way it does show the limits of breaking things down by decades: movies that hit big in a ---0 year often *feel* like a poor representative of the following decade and belong in spirit to the previous one.

As for '80s being a 'lost decade', there's just no getting around that US film was in a populist mode, which made for lots of great entertainment but not much 'swinging for the fences' of the sort that gets critics and other people with a long view of film really excited. Non-US film *could* have picked up the slack but didn't really in my view. Films 101 has Wings of Desire, Ran, Fanny and Alexander at #3-5 and Dekalog creeps into the top 10. These are all fine films but they're not in the same league in terms of impact as previous game-changing foreign films from Aguirre to The Conformist to 81/2 to La Dolce Vita to Seven Samurai to Persona to Belle de Jour to Breathless.

Still, the '80s had some of the best broad entertainments ever made: ET, Raiders, Terminator, Ghostbusters, Back To The Future, Ferris Bueller, Die Hard, Untouchables, Predator, Dirty Dancing, Aliens, Fish Called Wanda, Beetlejuice, Heathers, Robocop, Princess Bride, Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment, Toostsie, 48 Hours, Road Warrior, Lost in America, Blues Brothers, Big, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Batman (1989), Throw Mama From The Train,...

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AH didn't change the whole movie business and culture the way SW did, but it's definitely a landmark in its way.

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Absolutely. And here's where we get one of those "split decisions" where AH and SW were actually more close together as lasting acheivements than one would think -- even if the revenue margin was WAY in SW's favor.

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*Incredibly* funny, deftly juggling tones and an incredible range of cinematic idioms from cartoon inserts to direct addresses to camera to flashbacks with current-day characters walking around in them to comedy subtitles to unbroken musical numbers, and so on.... AH does it all and it all works. In a way it has a 'degree of difficulty' associated with it that's almost as high as SW....and like SW the finished product is so affecting and slick that it almost looks easy and obvious.

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Yes. Woody Allen rather struggled with his "early funny ones" until he managed to mount Love and Death -- the one before AH, and my favorite Woody -- with suprising historical flourish for a low budget movie.

AH built on that, and created the kind of bittersweet rom com that lasted forever after (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle), but NEVER as cinematically charged as this one. Its like Woody became cinematic, all of a sudden.

And thereafter...Interiors. Manhattan. Stardust Memories. A rather total tonal shift, very serious even when funny. And decades more..some great, some not so great. Why Woody's just like Stephen King...

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In another year, SW might have won Best Film and Director and AH just gets Best Original Screenplay and Actress (Titanic over LA Confidential is the model here - and Maybe LAC would have pulled an AH-like upset if there hadn't been other excellent adult-oriented movies around such as Boogie Nights and Sweet Hereafter and Affliction to divide the not-interested-in-Titanic vote).

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Great point about how LAC got "routed by other small quality films" thus clearing the deck for Titanic.

I guess we're back to our Oscar parlor game, here, but that's OK. How movies could have been "sure bet" Oscar winners if only released the year before or after is..one of the great games:

I think LAC would have beaten The English Patient had it been released a year earlier.

I think The Godfather would have beaten The French Connection had IT been released a few months earlier(as originally planned) as the Best Picture of 1971, thereby paving the way for Cabaret to win 1972.

But that's how it is with ALL elections, yes? Timing is everything, luck, competition. (Nothing was going to beat Schindler's List that year.)

I recall reading that somebody told Richard Nixon he would have lost the 1968 election had it been it held a week later. "I know when the damn election date was," he replied. As if say, he KNEW he could win as long as it WASN'T held a week later. (Of course, he likely would have lost the election entirely if Bobby Kennedy hadn't been shot...but that's other trivia.)



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But only the most fevered SW fans think that it was any great injustice that SW lost the biggest awards to one of the top 3 or 4 romantic comedies of all time.

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Yes, though there was some squawking at the time about the Star Wars loss. Even from a major critic or two, as I recall. For they felt that Star Wars -- unlike other "mercy blockbuster Best Picture nominees" like Love Story and The Towering Inferno -- was REALLY GOOD, extremely creative and imaginative, rather like Pulp Fiction in giving us a new world to experience complete with a new language.

And Woody rubbed it in by "not caring."

I'll always be torn: Woody Allen finally showed up at the Oscars when it was the one after 9/11, to introduce a clips piece on NYC. Was the idea that such a moving event in his home town compelled him to go? Or was it that ONLY something of that magnitude could get him to deign to show up? If you get my drift...

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The situation wasn't like 1989:
Best Film winner: Driving Miss Daisy
Landmark Film (not even nom'd): Do The Right Thing

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Like Rear Window wasn't nominated, or Psycho(even though Hitchcock was nommed Best Director for both.)

I recall Kim Basinger echoing your sentiment from the Oscar stage...a no no. Did she ever get to go back as a presenter?

Yes...after winning for ...LA Confidential.

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Okay. I'll give it a whirl, EC, and I shall stick to talkies, hey?

Inevitable twins: 1931's Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. Each is a classic in its own right. Together, they changed Hollywood, putting the gangster picture on the map.

Similar duo: Dracula and Frankenstein, also from '31, they put the horror film, which wasn't really a genre till then, and then le deluge.

King Kong, from 1933, a blockbuster, it made musical accompaniment to action (called "mickey mousing" at time), the movie is itself a monster, looms as large as Psycho in film history. (Though unlike the Hitchcock picture it didn't put giant monsters on the map, not right away anyway, it virtually invented the "talking picture spectacle" as it came to be known.)

The later Thirties are more generic even as there are great films aplenty, and to carry on over Gone With The Wind would be redundant, so I'll pass for the time being.

Citizen Kane, love it, hate it; steering clear of it is impossible. Sad to say that as the years have passed and the Internet came along, the word overrated might almost have been invented to create the dividing line between those who love it and those who say "meh". Its influence is everywhere. Yes, it lost money upon its initial release, yet had ever a flop been more influential? While not itself a film noir and the noir genre is unthinkable without it.

After that, I'm getting tired. Worthy of mention from later on: The Sound Of Music. The epitome of the unhip was the film that displaced Gone With The Wind as the highest grossing movie of all time. It brought big budgeted musicals back to life for one last hurrah, and a long one it was, extending into the Seventies (think Ross Hunter's 1973 Lost Horizon). Also, its star, the English Julie Andrews replaced American Doris Day as the last of the "square" female superstars-role models-ideal wives and mothers with no real sex appeal but plenty of female fans.





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Okay. I'll give it a whirl, EC, and I shall stick to talkies, hey?

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Excellent, telegonus. Talkies are fine; I can't keep up with anyone on silents!

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Inevitable twins: 1931's Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. Each is a classic in its own right. Together, they changed Hollywood, putting the gangster picture on the map.

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Oh yeah. And Cagney and Eddie G. were early examples of stars who did it "without matinee idol looks." They did it with their voices, and their attitude...though I'll admit, young Cagney was pretty good looking(I ALWAYS see Sean Connery in his brow and sneer, shorter though he was. NOBODY I ask sees that. Hah.)

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Similar duo: Dracula and Frankenstein, also from '31, they put the horror film, which wasn't really a genre till then, and then le deluge.

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Yep. I always rather see them as the "Psychos" of their time; people screaming and fainting in the theaters, near-bannings. But they just don't have the power-punch of the Psycho murders.
Psycho, I might add, rather mixes Dracula(Norman thin and vampirish in his dark clothes) with Frankenstein's monster(Mother on her lurching rampages, more monster than Mother.) Says I.

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King Kong, from 1933, a blockbuster, it made musical accompaniment to action (called "mickey mousing" at time), the movie is itself a monster, looms as large as Psycho in film history.

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From everything I've read...probably MORE than Psycho. And it shows ya: the genre movies that make so much money now could have dominated the screen a lot earlier in film history -- but American studios turned their noses up.

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(Though unlike the Hitchcock picture it didn't put giant monsters on the map, not right away anyway,

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That seems to have waited til the 50's and radioactivity and Godzilla and (from radioactivity) any number of GIANT creatures -- ants(THEM), spiders, etc.

But Godzilla wasn't the first "dinosaur on a rampage movie" of the 50s. An American Warner Bros hit called "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" got there first. An A-bomb woke that guy up in the Artic and he made his way down to NYC(eating a fishing boat and a lighthouse en route.)

Some years ago, I decided that "Beast" was my favorite of 1953 and it gets to hold that title as an adult. In Los Angeles, this was a HUGE local ratings buster and played all week on the Million Dollar Movie (Once a weeknight, twice on Saturday twice on Sunday.)

Trivia: Few Hitchcock movies played the Million Dollar Movie in LA in the 60s. One was Dial M. The other was Man Who Knew Too Much '56 -- BEFORE it was shown on network. Hitchcock and JImmy Stewart sued over that -- and Man '56 got showings on NBC, ABC, and CBS over the next decade!

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it virtually invented the "talking picture spectacle" as it came to be known.)

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Kong, you say? (I got distracted.) Hmmm..never thought of that.

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The later Thirties are more generic even as there are great films aplenty,

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Well, they've been telling us about 1939 for decades now -- though me, I'm partial to 1959. And 1960.

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and to carry on over Gone With The Wind would be redundant, so I'll pass for the time being.

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OK.

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Citizen Kane, love it, hate it; steering clear of it is impossible. Sad to say that as the years have passed and the Internet came along, the word overrated might almost have been invented to create the dividing line between those who love it and those who say "meh". Its influence is everywhere. Yes, it lost money upon its initial release, yet had ever a flop been more influential? While not itself a film noir and the noir genre is unthinkable without it.

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I expect Citizen Kane will always hold a high spot because it ISN'T a thriller or genre piece, though it borrows the tropes(spooky giant mansion, noir lighting, Kane going kinda mad; not to mention Benny Herrmann). A film like Psycho will always be seen as a bit too "easy to watch" as a traditional thriller; Kane had more on its mind, the Story of a Great Man(who wasn't so great.)

But remember: someone called "Psycho" -- "The Citizen Kane of Horror Movies." But I call Psycho: Citizen Kane. They're equal to me...

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After that, I'm getting tired.

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Sorry to hear that, but we value getting you for whatever stretch we get you. Every time!

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Worthy of mention from later on: The Sound Of Music. The epitome of the unhip was the film that displaced Gone With The Wind as the highest grossing movie of all time.

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Yes. Sometimes we forget that "Landmark Films" can be a function of the box office. Its like the Godfather in that it is a Best Picture that was a big entertainment blockbuster.

It brought big budgeted musicals back to life for one last hurrah, and a long one it was, extending into the Seventies (think Ross Hunter's 1973 Lost Horizon).

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That was a fascinating stretch, akin to today's comic hero cycle, but shorter.

THe Sound of Music was the biggie, but Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady the year before helped set the stage.

It took a few years to get them cast and made but...

Camelot
Oliver
Star!
Throughly Modern Millie
Darling Lili
Funny Girl
Finian's Rainbow
Paint Your Wagon
Hello, Dolly

...were the big ones I can remember. They either flopped or couldn't earn back their money even if the grosses were huge(Paint Your Wagon, Hello Dolly.)

The musical made Julie Andrews -- and then it sank her. Mille, Star, and Darling Lili(especially the last two) sank her as quickly as Mary and Maria had launched her.

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Also, its star, the English Julie Andrews replaced American Doris Day as the last of the "square" female superstars-role models-ideal wives and mothers with no real sex appeal but plenty of female fans

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Whereas Oscar Levant said of Doris Day, "I knew her before she was a virgin," I think one of Julie's husbands was more blunt, saying that her , well, "hair down there" was ...lilacs.

I trust we recall that Mister Hitchcock tried to sex Julie up by pairing her under a pile of blankets doing something unseen but likely naughty with Paul Newman, at the beginning of Torn Curtain. Paul Newman was one sexy guy, Julie was pretty but just couldn't pull the sexy off. This was staged to generate the heat of Janet Leigh and John Gavin at the beginning of Psycho(albeit with the gimmick of the man and woman being covered up)...but it felt like a corporate business meeting between two "Superstars"(trademark 1966.)

And this: When they made Torn Curtain in 1966, Julie Andrews was actually a bigger star than Newman. She was paid more and had those recent blockbuster hits. But by 1973/74, Newman was still star enough for blockbusters like The Sting and The Towering Inferno -- but Julie Andrews had been long since consigned to TV. Only Andrews' husband, director Blake Edwards, saved her -- with a trio of films -- 10, SOB(where Julie is famously topless and STILL not sexy), and the Big One, Victor Victoria.

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Truly, EC. Citizen Kane is special. And another thing that I (and many others) love about it: it's a great back lot movie that HAD to have been a back lot movie. This is not a film that could have been made on location. The location is the RKO studio. An issue worth pondering here: all the skill, the genius, really, that went into the making of studio films back in the day. The art departments, the sound men, editors. Kane isn't just an Orson Welles film, it's a labor of love created by many hands. Gifted people, most forgotten except by hard-core movie buffs, without whom Welles could never have fashioned the picture.

To go back to those early sound films: the two "dynamic duos" of crime and horror really do stand out from the pack. Each is different from the other, even in its own genre. The success of Dracula may have spawned Frankenstein but Jimmy Whale was not at all like Tod Browning as a director. Similarly, Little Caesar is minimalist, and like Dracula didn't cost a ton of money; and also like Dracula its title character ventures from the boonies,--downstate Illinois for America, Transylvania for Europe--to the big cities of London and Chicago. Rico and Dracula aren't alike at all physically or temperamentally, though each is pursued by a dogged realist who takes him out in the end; an Irish police detective in LC, a doctor in Dracula.

King Kong was too "lightning in a bottle" to have yielded successors, thus unlike Psycho or Jaws it produced no copycat follow-ups of the Homicidal-Baby Jane-Tentacles-Orca kind. The budget busting nature of the film, which had to be a blockbuster, likely intimidated Depression era studios, even the biggest of them.

Apropos of the Fifties, bug-eyed monsters and giant creature pictures, they owed a lot to Kong, though so much time had passed they couldn't follow a similar course. BTW: didja know that Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, a big hit for Warners, maybe even their biggest for 1953, was a pickup?

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To continue: Beast was an indie, and a pricey one, and when the producers consulted Warners on a possible distribution deal the studio saw gold, bought the movie outright, which, alas, denied huge profits to those responsible for its making. That one's follow-up, Them!, was wholly Warners. Yet even this late, with color, 3D and CinemaScope available, the studio, which had had some success with 3D, passed on all three and chose black and white.

As we've discussed before: Warners made the right choice. Black and white ties the film to Noir and also to the late Forties-early Fifties semi-docs of the Northside 777-Walk East On Beacon kind, which made it look like it was really happening, not a movie. This was of enormous help early in the film, when it's still playing like a mystery. Later on it takes on some of the characteristics of war films, of which two of its featured players were veterans of, notably Battleground, which both James Whitmore AND James Arness had appeared in. We've also gone over the Jaws-like aspects of Them!, which has a very similar plot structure, and in my opinion is better in the suspense department early on, if less colorful. The ending of the earlier film is near apocalyptic feeling, while Jaws feels downright pastoral by comparison.

Finally, and briefly: Godzilla, King Kong Of The Japanese monsters, eh? I saw it not too many months ago and it's actually, even in its "butchered" American version a stark, beautiful, tense and exciting film from start to finish. Aside from maybe the "island connection", complete with natives, it has little in common with King Kong, though on second thought these two are similar in having their title monsters wreak havoc on a major city. Kong's damage was small beer compared to the near nuking of Tokyo by by the Pacific sea monster. In Japan (for sure) and internationally, less so in America, I think it's fair to say that Godzilla is a landmark film,--and then some.

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To continue: Beast was an indie, and a pricey one, and when the producers consulted Warners on a possible distribution deal the studio saw gold, bought the movie outright, which, alas, denied huge profits to those responsible for its making.

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Hmm. Too bad. That story is as old as the hills in Hollywood.

But Ray Harryhausen was launched and -- with Bernard Herrmann doing the scoring - -became a legend with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts.

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That one's follow-up, Them!, was wholly Warners. Yet even this late, with color, 3D and CinemaScope available, the studio, which had had some success with 3D, passed on all three and chose black and white.

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I think Them started up as a 3-D production to be done in color. But they turned it into a "desert noir" b/w film instead. Still, modern day prints of the film start with the title word "THEM!" in color and 3-D-like depth over the b/w opening shot.

A great childhood memory of : Them. It was on the Million Dollar Movie, all week.

The TV guide summary said something like "Giant mutants run amok in Los Angeles." But it didn't say what the giant mutants WERE.

I watched the film with its first half hour of great "mystery in the desert." WHAT has killed an entire family in their vacation trailer(save a little girl) who have vanished? WHAT has killed a General Store owner whose corpse is bloody ( a grisly image for a 1954 film) and surrounded by piles of sugar. WHAT kills a police officer -- offscreen -- his death accompanied by his high-pitched scream and an even more high-pitched sound of the attacking killers?

WHAT? About forty minutes in, we find out: giant ants.

And that's how I first saw Them. NOT knowing the monsters would be big ants. I can still remember the surprise.

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As we've discussed before:

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I suppose. But revisits are great!

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Warners made the right choice. Black and white ties the film to Noir and also to the late Forties-early Fifties semi-docs of the Northside 777-Walk East On Beacon kind, which made it look like it was really happening, not a movie. This was of enormous help early in the film, when it's still playing like a mystery.

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Absolutely. Them has been praised for its realistic first forty minutes in which -- by having the cops think they are dealing with a serial killer psycho - -the groundwork is laid to take those killer ants VERY seriously (and we never see too many of them, maybe three were built for the movie.)

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Later on it takes on some of the characteristics of war films, of which two of its featured players were veterans of, notably Battleground, which both James Whitmore AND James Arness had appeared in.

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Well, as Stephen King noted, in the militaristic fifties, the military was always called in to do battle with these monsters, and civilians were subjected to martial law and other indignities because The Army Knows Best. In Them, the officers believe Fess Parker that he saw giant ants -- but they order him kept under lock and key in the looney bin "for national security reasons."

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We've also gone over the Jaws-like aspects of Them!, which has a very similar plot structure,

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Yes. Long build up and then three men team up to fight the creature(s). Edmund Gwenn is the rough equivalent of Richard Dreyfuss; James Arness tracks with Roy Scheider, and James Whitmore gets a Quint-like death in the jaws of a giant ant.

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and in my opinion is better in the suspense department early on, if less colorful.

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Hmmm. Well, almost a tie for me. Jaws benefits from having less censorship and thus more bloody terror to the initial attacks.

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The ending of the earlier film is near apocalyptic feeling, while Jaws feels downright pastoral by comparison.

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Well, Them is from that militaristic, Cold War paranoia period of American films. These monsters were often stand-ins for The Communist Menace. Red ants, not Reds...

Them also anticipates The Birds in suggesting that animals COULD take the earth over from humans.

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I should note that while The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms gets my 1953 Best of slot, Them could have easily gotten my 1954 slot if it were not for Rear Window.

Yes, these are ridiculous choices if taken against the serious films of the year(From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront) but both The Beast and Them taught this young fellow about the mechanics of thriller story telling: build-up, suspense(both films have the authorities not believing the protagonists about these creatures existence), and pay-off: The Beast destroys NYC with great determination (and radioactive blood dripping from his wounds); the ants are ready to take over LA.

Also: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Them got BIG promotion when they played KHJ-TV Channel 9 in the 60s. Boomer kids ruled; these were big event movies -- playing all week long on the Miliion Dollar Movie. They are seminal parts of my childhood...

...and they are leading to Psycho...

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Here is my list of favorite fifties movies:

1950: Sunset Boulevard
1951: Strangers on a Train
1952: High Noon
1953: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
1954: Rear Window
1955: To Catch a Thief
1956: The Wrong Man
1957: 12 Angry Men
1958: Damn Yankees
1959: North by Northwest

Pretty "Hitchcock heavy," yes? And yet I think Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and The Wrong Man are all classic and unique in different ways. Rear Window may be the masterpiece, but To Catch a Thief is the most glamorous movie I've ever seen, and The Wrong Man just may be the saddest.

Strangers on a Train sits all by its lonesome as the best of the Warners Hitchcocks -- action all the way(at least in narrative pacing, if not physical set-pieces) and the Second Greatest Psycho in Hitchocck (Bruno Anthony), played by perhaps the most tragic actor Hitchcock ever worked with(Robert Walker, who died shortly after making Strangers and only one more movie which he didn't finish entirely.)

North by Northwest caps Hitchcock's fifties run...but Psycho is really the "completion" of that run.

And that leaves only a few slots for "non-Hitchcocks."

Sunset Boulevard has plenty of Hollywood/LA Gothic atmosphere(Hollywood always seems to have its past faded figures intermingled with its current "hot ones") and a biting Billy Wilder co-written script.

High Noon is a suspense piece as well as a Western, and will always stand for all of us as a look at what it means to be abandoned and alone. (Yeah, John Wayne and Howard Hawks hated this, and made Rio Bravo in response -- but, its still a great thematic work.) That said, though High Noon is my favorite of '52 -- I like Rio Bravo(probably my Number Two for 1959) about ten times more.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is one of the "seminal" events of my childhood. The Beast's killing at an amusement park is a great climax, but I'll never forget how he first rises out of the bay and attacks Bowery dockworkers to start his rampage . Nor will I forget the poignant death of impish Cecil Kellaway in a diving bell that the monster eats like a bon bon. Cecil's great last words, via radio transmitter to his daughter: "But the most amazing thing about it is --" CHOMP. (Note in passing: diving bell scenes always creeped me out; its like lowering a human being in a coffin with a window into the briny deep.)

Damn Yankees and 12 Angry Men were also Million Dollar Movies, so I got intense multiple viewing exposure to them. Damn Yankees has just about the happiest musical song I"ve ever heard -- "You've Gotta Have Heart" -- driving the whole movie like the shower scene does in Psycho; but it has other great songs and great characters in Ray Walston's Devil and Gwen Verdon as his sexpot man-killer.

12 Angry Men has that great premise -- it starts with its all-male jury at 11 to 1 "guilty" and Fonda takes it all the way back to "not guilty" -- a great cast, great Hitchcockian direction and something to say about human nature: we generally avoid conflict with our fellow human beings, we avoid confronting them, we don't "dig deep" into their feelings. Well, these 12 men will not get that luxury. In trying to implement the Constitutional rights of their jury service, they confront each other and themselves.

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In choosing only one per year in the fifties, I do my movie love and memories a great disservice.

I mean, to leave these movies unmentioned:

Them
Marty
Giant
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Vertigo(yes, I DO like it)
Touch of Evil
Rio Bravo(sneaking up on NXNW as my favorite of '59)
Some Like It Hot
Anatomy of a Murder

....rather screws up the strength of my regard for these movies. Any one of them could be my Number One of those years, too.

I have great regard for such "obvious" fifties classics as Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun(but Strangers on a Train, Bruno, and that carousel are much more "fun" memories from the same year). From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront seem bracing, Hays-Code defying, and involving.

Its just that the Number Ones on my list matter just a bit more personally to me. Its interesting to realize -- just now -- that at least three of them played nine times a week on the Miliion Dollar Movie. I didn't watch every showing all the way through, but I watched bits and pieces of EVERY showing along with a first all-the-way-through viewing.

Not to mention, pretty much EVERY Hitchcock movie of the fifties holds a hallowed place in my heart, especially Dial M, Harry, Man 2 as unmentioned above.

And All About Eve from 1950. Great if a little too melodramatic for my taste now and -- why don't these dolts SEE THROUGH Eve? I like that George Sanders DOES...what a great role, what a great voice.

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1950: Sunset Boulevard
1951: Strangers on a Train
1952: High Noon
1953: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
1954: Rear Window
1955: To Catch a Thief
1956: The Wrong Man
1957: 12 Angry Men
1958: Damn Yankees
1959: North by Northwest

1950, 1954, 1959 agree.
1951 Streetcar
1952 Singin' in the Rain
1953 Tokyo Story
1954 Rear Window
1955 The Night of The Hunter
1956 The Killing
1957 A Face In The Crowd (HMs: Sweet Smell Of Success, Paths of Glory, 12 Angry Men, Wild Strawberries, Seventh Seal, Nights of Cabiria - I can watch any of these films any time.) One of the greatest film years - whole careers get built off of each of these films!
1958 Vertigo

I need to check out Beast from 20,000... Q. Checking now, a fathom is 1.8 meters, so 20,000 fathoms is ~3x as deep as the deepest known ocean trench on Earth. Is the finding of such a super-trench a plot point in the film or is the title just hyperbole/figurative?

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1950: Sunset Boulevard
1951: Strangers on a Train
1952: High Noon
1953: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
1954: Rear Window
1955: To Catch a Thief
1956: The Wrong Man
1957: 12 Angry Men
1958: Damn Yankees
1959: North by Northwest

1950, 1954, 1959 agree.
1951 Streetcar
1952 Singin' in the Rain
1953 Tokyo Story
1954 Rear Window
1955 The Night of The Hunter
1956 The Killing
1957 A Face In The Crowd (HMs: Sweet Smell Of Success, Paths of Glory, 12 Angry Men, Wild Strawberries, Seventh Seal, Nights of Cabiria - I can watch any of these films any time.) One of the greatest film years - whole careers get built off of each of these films!
1958 Vertigo

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I think in past posts, I've offered my favorites of the sixties and seventies(probably my two favorite decades for film; I grew up then) and the nineties(which for some reason I liked a lot better than the 80s).

I feel pretty solid about my fifties list. I would feel less so about a forties list or a thirties list, my expertise and memories and experience of those years is not extensive.

What's clear about my fifties list, of course, is that I elected to pick a Hitchcock 5 times out of ten. Which is another way of saying "most years in the fifties, my favorite was a Hitchcock." Which makes sense. If one is a Hitchcock fan but not really an overall MOVIE fan, why, every year he made a movie he would have the winner.

But that's not quite so either. I'm not really gripped by most of his forties films. I respect the British 30s stuff, but it doesn't really haunt my memories, either.

No, with the years behind us now, it seems clear that Hitchcock "peaked and hit his stride" from 1951 (with Strangers on a Train) to 1963(yes, I will let The Birds in; its just too damn famous and too great a technical achievement.) Hitch was on a roll, and for me, as a Superfan, it was hard for another, perhaps more accepted, perhaps more "Major" fifties films to overcome my mesmerized deep love of What Hitchcock Does.

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To hit a three-in-a-row grouping of

Rear Window
To Catch a Thief
The Wrong Man

rather betrays the more famous three-in-a-row of

Vertigo
North by Northwest
Psycho

...and I can't say that the first three outweigh the second three. But the first three outweigh other movies of 1954, 1955, and 1956 to me. And that's knowing that the very fine movies swanstep and telegonus have picked were out there, too.

This is repeating NOW, in the current phase of my life. I gave QT almost an "automatic win" for his last three films:

Inglorious Basterds 2009
Django Unchained 2012
The Hateful Eight 2015

As with Hitchcock in his prime -- except I'm not sure QT is in HIS prime -- I'm so anticipating and excited by ANY QT film that comes out that it rather "pushes out" the more formidable and noteable films of the year of release. And here's the weird part: each of those three films above has some sort of "overindulgence" flaw, and all of them have scenes of sadistic violence that has me questioning QT's mental state, and worried (a little) about mine.

QT gets my Number One for 1994 as well(Pulp Fiction) and my Strong Number Two for the great year of 1997(Jackie Brown -- bested only by the supergreat LA Confidential.) I guess the competition was stronger(in my mind) in the years of Reservoir Dogs, the two Kill Bills, and DeathProof.

And so it is with Hitchcock. Yes, I could give him the 5 Number Ones in the 50's I give him; but I can't give him 1950(Stage Fright) or 1952(I Confess) or 1953(Dial M.) I like them all, but they don't "blow out the competish" as Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and The Wrong Man do.

In fact, I think I tend to count To Catch a Thief and The Wrong Man as my two favorite Hitchcocks that don't usually make other people's ten best lists(where the Big Four and Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious and The 39 Steps are usually found.)

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I need to check out Beast from 20,000...

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I don't think it will hold much weight with you. First of all, you aren't first seeing it at "a single digit age." This was a childhood biggie for me. But to the extent The Beast gets to stay on my list, it is that I honestly couldn't think of any movie from 1953 I like MORE.

And there's this: the film (along with Them, also from Warners, a year later) was a pretty good lesson in story construction, and has a Hitchcock-like suspense through-line: the hero(who is French, adding exoticism to the story) gets the briefest view of the dinosaur in the Arctic....and nobody believes him. As it becomes apparent that the Beast is making his way down the Atlantic and destroying things along the way(a fishing boat at sea, a lighthouse on the rocky shore)...our hero keeps trying to tell everybody what he saw...and people STILL don't believe him. Its a strong Hitchcock trope. Eventually, our hero picks up a couple of people who believe him. One gets eaten by the dinosaur, and now EVERYBODY believes him. And then the dinosaur comes ashore in NYC and we get our big, long climax, which is pretty famous in monster movie circles.

I recall something clearly from the Million Dollar Movie viewings. The scene BEFORE the dinosaur comes ashore in NYC is a quiet and sad one, between our hero and the daugheter of the scientist who was eaten in the diving bell. The father is mourned. And then in the next scene, the Big Guy comes ashore.

I always felt some poignance to the scene before the monster comes ashore, but I felt excitement, too, once I'd seen the movie before: "Hey, they're mourning the eaten scientist. That means the NEXT SCENE is the big attack on New York. Here we go!"

Narrative.


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The entire movie, I might add, was built around a Ray Bradbury short story entitled "The Lighthouse," about a dinosaur coming out of the sea and attacking a lighthouse. In the movie, this is a chilling night scene, with the lighthouse shown "alone and waiting to be victimized" before the monster rises out of the sea to "mount and attack it." (It is as if the dinosaur believes the lighthouse is a "foe" that must be destroyed.)

There are a couple of lighthouse keepers who don't make it....haunting night scene.

PSYCHO CONNECTION: I have "The Beast" DVD and it has a trailer for the film from 1953. Before footage from the movie rolls, three "Young Warners Contract Players" take the screen, one by one. Each says something dire about the mysteries of nature that Earth faces in the nuclear age.

The three young actors are:

Merv Griffin(soon to be a talk show star)

Paul Comi(most famous as the cop boyfriend in Warners' House of Wax, another great 1953 scare memory)

and...ta da...Vera Miles. And I will say that Vera is not only beautiful here, but she delivers her "warning" with an emotional intensity that is Lila Crane at her most strident, all the way.

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need to check out Beast from 20,000...
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I don't think it will hold much weight with you. First of all, you aren't first seeing it at "a single digit age." This was a childhood biggie for me.
Fair enough. I know for a fact that I can never be completely objective about my (seen on tv in) childhood faves from (roughly) this era: Forbidden Planet, Jason and The Argonauts. That said, I've been impressed/moved as an adult first-time-viewer by things like The Incredible Shrinking Man and X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes and Day The Earth Stood Still. These are just well-produced, well-written, thoughtful films.

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Q. Checking now, a fathom is 1.8 meters, so 20,000 fathoms is ~3x as deep as the deepest known ocean trench on Earth. Is the finding of such a super-trench a plot point in the film or is the title just hyperbole/figurative?

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I think hyperbole/figurative...it just SOUNDS good.

However, the film does make the point that this dinosaur can evidently breathe underwater and is "following a trench" on his march(walking, not swimming) southward to NYC. I never quite understood how this "beast" could be so amphibian; but then I don't even think they give him a real name as a type. He's not a T-Rex or a brontosaurus. He's a "somethingsaur."

"The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" may be an indie, but it has that Warner Brothers studio polish(including the "echo chamber" sound system that always marked a Warners film in the 50s and 60's.) I'm pretty sure that it inspired the more ragged looking Godzilla(Gojira) from Japan the next year, and that triggered a whole series.

One more memorable "dinosaur on the rampage" movie was "The Giant Behemoth" a British production from the late fifties. I remember that movie because it was the first film launching a Los Angeles Saturday night horror series called "Chiller" in April 1962 (a childhood memory, but I looked up the start date in newspaper archives.)

It is a mark of how horror/Sci Fi cheapies could dominate the Boomer Kid sixties, that the first "Chiller" movies got full page ads in TV Guide and the Los Angeles Times. "The Giant Behemoth" was the debut film; the next week, it was "House on Haunted Hill." I can assure you that the "playground talk" about these two films was intense. "Hill" in particular got "Psycho"-like full coverage in boyhood talk circles.

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"The Giant Behemoth" was off limits in my house, because THIS dinosaur breathed a radioactive ray from his mouth that burned the faces off of people. The movie got turned off in my one-TV house. My ability to see the weekly "Chiller" movie depended on my parents going out or not; it took a few years to get a second TV so I could watch these things on my own.

I recall getting to see such "Chiller" classics as "Attack of the Crab Monsters" and "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman." About THAT one: She's pretty and she does grow to 50 feet and stomps down to a local bar to confront her cheating husband and his girlfriend. TV Guide put the full-page ad for "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" up, and all these years later, I'm here to tell you: that's one sexually suggestive ad. I'm shocked that they got away with it in 1958 or whenever the movie came out. Basically, the giant, sexy woman is astride a freeway, grabbing cars. In a short skirt.

But I digress.

I will say this: there were a LOT of creature features made in the 50s, but I think "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" and "Them" were considered to have bigger budgets and better scripts than the norm; Warners promoted them like A releases. And The Beast has that great Ray Harryhausen stop motion photography.

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Great choices, EC, though when it comes to films of the Fifties I get awfully contrarian, more so than usual. So damn much CinemaScope, 3D, Todd-AO, good girl Doris vs. bad girl (but we all love her) Marilyn. Then the (admittedly brief) Grace and Audrey rivalry.

So damn many long and quite frankly bloated films. I like some of them, a lot in many cases, but egads: The Greatest Show On Earth, The Robe, The Egyptian, Desiree, War And Peace,--and the Yul Brynner threesome from '56: Anastasia, The King And I and The Ten Commandments. OMG! If I hear the name Deborah Kerr mentioned I'm going for the gas pipe!



Here are some of my favorites from the Fifties, and I'll try to do it by year (by memory).

1950: The Killer That Stalked New York, The Gunfighter, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Caged, Convicted.

1951: The Steel Helmet, Pickup, Tomorrow Is Another Day, The Thing From Another World.

1952: Clash By Night, Beware, My Lovely, Don't Bother To Knock, Another Man's Poison, Holiday For Sinners.

1953: The Naked Spur, Invaders From Mars, It Came From Outer Space, Jeopardy, Pickup On South Street.

1954: Black Tuesday, Gorilla At Large, Them!, Suddenly, Dragnet, Riot In Cell Block 11.


I'm getting too tired to finish the decade but you get the picture, or rather pictures: short, fast, tough, to the point, daring, small scale, mostly black and white, often featuring has-been or past their prime stars or character players in the leading roles. Thrills and chills, very little in the way of respectability...




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Great choices, EC, though when it comes to films of the Fifties I get awfully contrarian, more so than usual. So damn much CinemaScope, 3D, Todd-AO,

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Its a strange decade. One sees now -- clearly -- how the terror of television(tiny images in black and white that people swarmed to watch) drove Hollywood to fight back on terms of size and color. You could not get those on your little b/w TV. Of course, the movie biz also found out that their overlong, bloated epics weren't much competition to Lucy and The Honeymooners given the human connection made by the characters to the folks at home.

And yet, "trailing" all the bloated fifties movies were all sorts of cheaper, tougher, lower key noir type pictures: The Killing, Night of the Hunter, Kiss Me Deadly, The Harder They Fall..perhaps even Strangers on a Train (a black and white movie more as a case of studio choice than Hitchocck's as with The Wrong Man and Psycho; Stage Fright and I Confess are, too.)

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good girl Doris vs. bad girl (but we all love her) Marilyn. Then the (admittedly brief) Grace and Audrey rivalry.

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A nice summary of four of the biggest fifties female stars. I guess Liz Taylor belongs on that list, but she was rather versus EVERYBODY.

Hitchcock worked most famously three-in-a-row with Grace(and sought her for The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and North by Northwest, too. And then famously got and lost her for Marnie) He did one with Doris -- one of her best. Marilyn he never wanted to work with; Audrey he wanted badly, getting her and then losing her for the unmade "No Bail for the Judge."




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Hey, Hitchcock "got and lost" two actresses roughly the same way: Audrey on No Bail for the Judge; Grace on Marnie. Oh, well, at least he got SOME movies with Grace. Hitch reportedly never spoke to Audrey again, and turned down doing "Wait Until Dark" with her accordingly(says one rumor; but Hitch was at Universal and that was a Warners film -- would Lew Wasserman have let Hitch "loan out" to Jack Warner?)

I wish Hitchcock, Hepburn and Wait Until Dark would have worked out. The film as we have it is a great, scary thriller(with Alan Arkin's Roat, says Stephen King, the greatest villain in film history.) Its already my favorite of 1967(based on the screamathon full house night I saw it). I do worry that Hitchcock may have "formalized it" and lost some of the hipness that is in the final film as we have it.

But boy, could Hitchcock have used a big hit like Wait Until Dark after Marnie and Torn Curtain. He could have been a real participant in that great movie year of 1967(in real life, Lew Wasserman killed "The First Frenzy" that year and Hitchcock sat the year out.)

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Yeah, those cheaper and tougher films are and were a save for me, by which even as a kid I'd have gone for Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan over Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi anyday.

I do like those Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals in my fashion, recognize the artistry in them. They were and are larger than life, especially Oklahoma! and South Pacific.

Damn Yankees is great fun, I agree, with Gwen Verdon selling her stuff, as it were, and Tab Hunter,--Tab Hunter!-- a revelation. If he hadn't been tied down to Warners, for the most part an at best second rate studio in the Fifties, he might have gone much further as a star. His biggest rival, Rock Hudson, had the often edgy U-I and of course Douglas Sirk backing him up, while Tab made "vehicles" with the likes of Natalie Wood.

But those movies you were "supposed to like" because they're good for you, like greens and vegetables, turned me off much of the time for that reason, just as oddball titles like Stakeout On Dope Street, Death In Small Doses and Riot In Juvenile Prison drew me in. Then there were all those period crime films that enjoyed some serious box-office success; and of course the deliberately beatnicky Roger Corman sci-fi pictures about Crab Monsters and haunted seas.

As to the period crime flicks I've always felt there was a connection between them and Some Like It Hot, which channeled roughly the same era. The Mickey Rooney vehicle Baby Face Nelson was actually a literal blockbuster in 1957.

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So damn many long and quite frankly bloated films. I like some of them, a lot in many cases, but egads: The Greatest Show On Earth, The Robe, The Egyptian, Desiree, War And Peace,--and the Yul Brynner threesome from '56: Anastasia, The King And I and The Ten Commandments. OMG! If I hear the name Deborah Kerr mentioned I'm going for the gas pipe!

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Ha. I thought Deborah Kerr was rather pretty and that Hitchcock should have used her(but in which picture? So many actresses, so few vehicles.)

But that list almost pinpoints what went wrong with many fifties movies. A whole lotta length, size, color...but often not much really gripping emotional interest. These were "coffee table book movies" with a certain heavy gloss to them.

I will admit to an affection for the Rodgers and Hammerstein films of the decade. In fact, one of my earliest memories -- I'm guessing 1958 so I was very, very young -- was the album of "The King and I"(the movie) playing in the house for me to strut around to, ala the King. (It's funny I can summon that memory -- its two years before Psycho so I can actually remember when Psycho didn't exist! But not much.)

Anyway, I saw these movies in the sixties in re-release and on TV, but Oklahoma, The King and I, South Pacific, and Carousel(with its marvelous instrumental carousel-based overture)...I dug them. The songs at least. They were on the radio all the time as I grew up. A strong memory of the late fifties and sixties. Funny how "The Sound of Music" rather trailed the bulk of Rodgers and Hamerstein to the screen, and ended up defining the sixties as the other films had defined the fifties.

But Damn Yankees was hipper, faster, lighter on its feet, sexier..."the anti-Rodgers and Hammerstein.") I mean, its got the Devil singing a song about "The Good Old Days" of the plague, Jack the Ripper, and cannibals...and Lola the Seductress singing about how she seduces and ruins men....

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Truly, EC. Citizen Kane is special.

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Oh, yeah. Its a movie that became too much the "usual greatest movie of all time" on paper and thus seemed to be taken for granted and rather disparaged over the years.

Until one looks at it again. And sees, in shot after shot, frame after frame, a movie made by a man who was basically saying "Look at what you can DO on film." Every shot is a major cinematic idea that required some sort of creative work(by the director AND those skilled folks of whom you speak) to bring it off.

I think Psycho is the same way. Every shot, SOMETHING exciting going on technically. The Birds almost pulled off the same feeling, except its early slow stretch with Tippi just can't get that paranoid mojo going that Psycho had.

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And another thing that I (and many others) love about it: it's a great back lot movie that HAD to have been a back lot movie. This is not a film that could have been made on location. The location is the RKO studio.

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Great point. I'd say that applies to Casablanca as well, and Notorious(even with hits Rio setting.)

In the 40s, movies didn't have to worry about televsion. Once television hit, "going on location" was part of the fight that also included Cinemascope, 3-D and epic grandeur as weapons against that little gray tube.

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An issue worth pondering here: all the skill, the genius, really, that went into the making of studio films back in the day. The art departments, the sound men, editors. Kane isn't just an Orson Welles film, it's a labor of love created by many hands. Gifted people, most forgotten except by hard-core movie buffs, without whom Welles could never have fashioned the picture.

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Absolutely. Welles was the "idea man" but its those other folks who executed.


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I would say by the 1970s, when the studios collapsed(except as "financing banks") and movies were made "handheld on location without built sets" -- a whole lotta craftspeople disappaeared. Soon they would be replaced with special effects people...but those people in turn became Silicon Valley CGI people.

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To go back to those early sound films: the two "dynamic duos" of crime and horror really do stand out from the pack.

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Proof positive that THOSE genres would survive and thrive once Hollywood got rid of the "prestige movie from a classic novel" approach to film narrative. Hitchcock benefitted somewhat from this, but he really didn't make crime pictures and he rarely made horror movies (like three out of 53.)

No I'm thinking of crime as : Cagney to Bogart to film noir to Bullitt to Dirty Harry to Lethal Weapon to Die Hard to Pulp Fiction.

Horror: well...everywhere. Forever.

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Each is different from the other, even in its own genre. The success of Dracula may have spawned Frankenstein but Jimmy Whale was not at all like Tod Browning as a director.

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True. Dracula and Frankenstein were linked together as the most famous of the Univeral monsters(The Wolf Man came a decade later) but the two stories are different as is the direction.

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Similarly, Little Caesar is minimalist, and like Dracula didn't cost a ton of money; and also like Dracula its title character ventures from the boonies,--downstate Illinois for America, Transylvania for Europe--to the big cities of London and Chicago. Rico and Dracula aren't alike at all physically or temperamentally, though each is pursued by a dogged realist who takes him out in the end; an Irish police detective in LC, a doctor in Dracula.

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Ah the Hays Code era -- the bad guy could have all the charisma and the best lines -- but he went DOWN.

Except Drac kept coming back.

And this: the color Hammer Dracula and Frankenstein movies of the 50s through the 70's. I haven't really seen them, but what a weird payoff for Hammer Studios, perhaps the only studio with an exclusive horror reputation? Universal was that way for some years, but branched out eventually.

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King Kong was too "lightning in a bottle" to have yielded successors, thus unlike Psycho or Jaws it produced no copycat follow-ups of the Homicidal-Baby Jane-Tentacles-Orca kind.

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Ha, Tentacles and Orca remind me that Jaws really didn't generate many serious successors or competitors. Nor did the Jaws sequels have any heft.

Jaws was rather a "unique" horror movie that made the case for a great white shark as the villain and pulled off something that nobody could ever replicate again. Its HARD to cast an animal as a villain. (Having the shark eat that little boy helped.)

At least many of the Psycho successors caught the bloody shocks of the psychopathic kills pretty well.

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The budget busting nature of the film, which had to be a blockbuster, likely intimidated Depression era studios, even the biggest of them.

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Yes. All that painstaking effects work cost money and time. As I recall, we got Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, but neither of them played on the epic scale of King Kong.

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Apropos of the Fifties, bug-eyed monsters and giant creature pictures, they owed a lot to Kong, though so much time had passed they couldn't follow a similar course.

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By the time all these movies hit local TV in the 60s, kids like me saw King Kong and Godzilla and The Beast as "from the same package." I had to develop into adulthood to realize that King Kong was made about 20 YEARS before Godzilla, with The Beast in between(but closer in time to Godzilla.)

I would say that whichever screenwriter seized on the atomic bomb as the source of either (1) creating giant versions of small animals(ants, spiders -- GRASSHOPPERS in "Beginning Or the End") or (2) "Rousting" giants from their sleep(The Beast, Godzilla, The Giant Behemoth) well -- they set the pace for an entire decade of SciFi horror.

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BTW: didja know that Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, a big hit for Warners, maybe even their biggest for 1953,

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I think I read that somewhere, and AGAIN the proof: The Beast and Them were huge hits -- likely kid/teenage driven -- and the Star Wars Future was ready to go in the 50s. It just took decades for studios to give up on adult filmmaking as their main bread and butter, and to shift to genre stuff.

I like to say: if the world were fair, we would have seen red carpet premieres in the 50s where the stars walking the aisle were Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue and Richard Carlson.

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was a pickup?

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I have read this and it fascinates me: the "indie film" has always been around, I guess. I mean, how did Harryhausen and company raise the money to make the pricey Beast BEFORE Warners bought it? It has a rich musical score, for one thing.

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Ha, Tentacles and Orca remind me that Jaws really didn't generate many serious successors or competitors.
Not for lack of trying! I was a kid and saw essentially all the attempts to redo Jaws and there were a *lot* of them:
Grizzly (one of the first out of the blocks - huge playground hit, saw it twice on first release notwithstanding its terribleness)
Orca
Piranha
The Swarm
The Car (beat for beat replay of Jaws with a car as the shark directed by Cat Ballou's director - in the same vein, Duel got re-released for the big screen down under)
Sasquatch (Jaws mixed with pseudo-science 'In Search of...' - dreadful)
Ha, even King Kong (1976) was sold as 'Jaws but where you cry when the shark dies'.
Jaws 2 was lame indeed but when you're 11 or 12 you don't listen to critics...I even read the novelization first!
And The Deep was sold as Jaws with wet t-shirts. I was confused.

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Ha, Tentacles and Orca remind me that Jaws really didn't generate many serious successors or competitors.

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Not for lack of trying! I was a kid and saw essentially all the attempts to redo Jaws and there were a *lot* of them:

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I expect I should have phrased differently. NOT: "Jaws didn't really generate MANY serious successors or competitors" but "Jaws didn't really generate many SERIOUS successors or competitors."

In other words, many "Jaws-like" films were made, but none of them managed to pull off the mix of serious thriller and A-list adventure that Universal and a committed director and cast gave us.

I remember being SO dishearted by "Jaws 2." Roy Scheider was there, and the Mayor, Murray Hamilton -- but Shaw(obviously) and Dreyfuss(by his choice) were NOT, and suddenly the Jaws trio was missing two corners.

Worse, I recall the whole story line shifting to a bunch of permed glossy teenagers that gave Jaws 2 the feel of "Beach Blanket Bingo" populated by Dr. Pepper commercial dancers.

And the shark attacks were terribly silly.

Note in passing: a silly shock scene in Jaws 2 in which a teenage girl watches helplessly while the shark kills her boyfriend found its silly match in Psycho II in a shock scene in which a teenage girl watches helplessly while "Mrs. Bates"(or someone) kills HER boyfriend. In both scenes in both movies, one sensed an A movie becoming a C movie, with not terribly great teenage actors pulling us out of the classic nature of the original films, with their skilled adult actors.

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Not for lack of trying! I was a kid and saw essentially all the attempts to redo Jaws and there were a *lot* of them:

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Grizzly (

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Wasn't there one called "Claws," too? Fitting.

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one of the first out of the blocks - huge playground hit, saw it twice on first release notwithstanding its terribleness)

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Interesting to see this group of films as YOUR "playground discussion fodder." Its a key element to the hows and whys of childhood/teenage filmgoing: SHARING the experience with your friends. Either (1) Those who get to see the film tell the story to those who don't OR (2) if all parties have seen the film, they exchange opinions on "the most gross scene" or some such.

I expect this desire to communicate on the movies we see and remember has formed the nucleus of internet chat groups, today.

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Orca

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In which the Jaws 4 plotline of a "vengeful animal"(killer whale) comes into play. The whale hunts Richard Harris down like a reverse Captain Ahab.

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Piranha

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I never saw the original(directed by Joe Dante, yes, a cult director?) but "me and the boys" saw the 3-D remake a few years back. The film opens with pirhana devouring an aged Richard Dreyfuss in his rowboat as he sings "Show Me the Way to Go Home."

The movie then becomes an odd mix of sexual exploitation(a lot of bare breasts) and truly gory deaths. And yet, our older group found the film immensely funny.

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The Swarm

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On my short list for "worst movies ever made." Bad lines like "the bees have always been our friends" really can't help stop but draw laughs and director Irwin Allen stages the killer be attacks like bad episodic TV. I still say that Irwin Allen delivered a well-written classic with McQueen and Newman in The Towering Inferno, but its like that's all he had in his bag(plus the poorly-written but visually impressive Poseidon Adventure.) After Inferno, the Irwin Allen career collapsed. The Swarm hastened the crash.

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The Car (beat for beat replay of Jaws with a car as the shark directed by Cat Ballou's director - in the same vein, Duel got re-released for the big screen down under)

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A weird movie. Since The Car was an instrument of Satan, there was an Exorcist vibe, too. And of course a Duel vibe. But it wasn't very good. With only James Brolin in the lead, it wasn't a star vehicle, either.

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Sasquatch (Jaws mixed with pseudo-science 'In Search of...' - dreadful)

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Ha. "Nevah hoid of it."

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Ha, even King Kong (1976) was sold as 'Jaws but where you cry when the shark dies'.

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That's what Dino De Laurintiis said. He was kind of right -- the shark never got any sympathy. But King Kong 1976 was a "guy-in-a-gorilla-suit" movie that betrayed the magic of the original...and also featured a giant gorilla robot for a few shots, that didn't work.

In short, none of the craftsmanship and care that went into Jaws went into King Kong '76.

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Jaws 2 was lame indeed but when you're 11 or 12 you don't listen to critics...

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No, you don't. I must have 100 childhood/teen favorite films that barely get two stars from the critics. But I love them.

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I even read the novelization first!

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Novelizations were cool. The authors wrote them FROM The screenplays So the scripted: "Norman looks at the car sink in the swamp" becomes "Norman looked at the car sink in the swamp." Except Psycho was from a novel so it didn't need a novelization.

I recall buying/reading the novelization of Tim Burton's Batman ...and the book had scenes not in the movie. Which means I was reading scenes in the SCRIPT not in the movie.
And The Deep was sold as Jaws with wet t-shirts. I was confused

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King Kong was too "lightning in a bottle" to have yielded successors, thus unlike Psycho or Jaws it produced no copycat follow-ups of the Homicidal-Baby Jane-Tentacles-Orca kind.
Although, of course, almost every big picture for the next 10+ years after KK has a Steiner-like full orchestral score so *that* impact was huge and immediate (and similar to Star Wars really which brought back rousing, full orchestral scores in a big way).

I'd like to add that 1933 is a very monumental year for US film. Sound technology has finally been locked and mastered and now Hollywood is ready to roll is the overall message. Kong instroduces SFX and spectacle and Steiner scores; 42nd St, Footlight Parade, and Gold-diggers of 1933 show Busby Berkeley arriving quickly at the height of his powers; The Marx Brothers make their best movie, Duck Soup, Cukor and Katharine Hepburn are great together in Little Women, Lubitsch is making some of the sexiest and wittiest comedy ever with Design For Living, Stanwyck is a killer star in Baby Face (anticipating most of noir really), Flying Down To Rio's fun and introduces Fred and Ginger, and so on. Suddenly US movies just *can't stop giving pleasure* at a time when the world really needed a pick-me-up. Lots of money's going to be made and deservedly so. Three Cheers for 1933 - old Hollywood was dead but new Hollywood was now it was clear going to be just fine.

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Agree 100%, Swanstep. I've felt the same for many years now. 1932 was the last year when sound pictures were "early talkies". By 1933 movies were movies, and they had sound. There was no need to make a distinction. There was a smoothness to films starting in 1933.

Even, where horror is concerned, such a skillfully and splendidly made a film as Karl Freund's The Mummy is an early talkie, while James Whale's 1933 The Invisible Man isn't.

Also from that wonderful year: The Bitter Tea Of General Yen, Only Yesterday, The Kennel Murder Case, Cavalcade, Berkeley Square, I Cover The Waterfront, Hallelujah, I'm A Bum!, Dinner At Eight and Queen Christina, and that's just for starters...

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1932 was the last year when sound pictures were "early talkies". By 1933 movies were movies, and they had sound. There was no need to make a distinction. There was a smoothness to films starting in 1933.
I like that way of thinking about it. A useful examples: There's a remarkable difference between Lubitsch's Trouble In Paradise (1932) and his Design For Living (1933), and I think it's grounded in the sound - TIP sounds like everything's being recorded through a tube and the acting necessarily feels constrained and distanced by that. DFL by way of contrast sounds modern and natural and Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March feel at home on the screen, and the illusion's complete, we're with them. Design For Living is completely intelligible and hilarious to any Friends- or Seinfeld- or Curb-viewer (just as It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, and all the rest are), whereas Trouble In Paradise like The Blue Angel is really for major film buffs only.

Of the early talkies I tend to think that All Quiet on the Western Front and M and Frankenstein transcend the limitations of their sound the best, perhaps because there's not too much playful quiet conversation in any of them to expose the limitations of their sound.
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Also from that wonderful year: The Bitter Tea Of General Yen, Only Yesterday, The Kennel Murder Case, Cavalcade, Berkeley Square, I Cover The Waterfront, Hallelujah, I'm A Bum!, Dinner At Eight and Queen Christina, and that's just for starters...
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Need to see all of these (except officially Dinner at Eight, which I know I saw at the peak of my Cukor-mania because I saw everything, but I don't remember it at all!).

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Funny about Dinner At Eight, Swanstep: I can scarcely remember any of it, either. Oh, a scene here or there but not the movie as a whole. But the Grand Hotel, which is similar, features many of the same cast, also doesn't stand out so strongly as I might have expected prior to my first viewing, and given its huge reputation (it's been demoted, it seems, like so many Metropix of its era).

George Cukor's work was getting better by the year back then, eh? By the end of the Thirties he was a master. His Forties work sparkles. I have yet to see Susan & God (do they keep it in a closet somewhere at TCM?) but know the Crawford pictures from the Forties and, of course, the Tracy-Hepburn ones. One of my favorite non-comedies they made together and with Cukor: Keeper Of The Flame. Such a dark film, indoorsy and yet woodsy, too. Some effective over the top acting,--it wouldn't have worked without it--and a strange fairy tale vibe, as if it were a contemporary non-musical noir riff on The Wizard Of Oz. A strange film for all involved in its making.

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I enjoyed reading the swanstep-telegonus dialogue on films of the 30s films...and I feel a modicum of shame at my inability to join in the discussion on practically any of them.

Though I can do OK on the original King Kong and The Wizard of Oz. Plus the Universal horrors.

I expect I've covered this before, but when I spoke to the "Chiller" series of horror/Sci Fi movies on LA local TV in the 60s, I should mention that there were two other horror movie package shows around the same time:

"Shock Theater": The Universal monsters and horror of the 30's AND the forties. Universal released this package and launched a "toy model" series of Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, Mummy, Creature from the Black Lagoon and other models you could build with glue as a kid. I did.
Shock Theater was on local channel 5.

"Strange Tales(of Science Fiction)". We kids called this "Strange Tales" for short, and it had a great eerie instrumental theme song called "Out of this World."(Available on YouTube; my nostalgia peaks.) This was on Channel 9, which was owned by RKO. Hence, the original King Kong and the original Thing from Another World played on this channel. But also packages of cheap SciFi like the truly scary "IT! The Terror From Beyond Space," which now does double duty as "the first Alien" AND the first "IT"(watch out, Stephen King.)

Growing up for a few years in a one-TV home, I only got to see these horror movies if the parents were gone or willing to let me watch. Eventually, we got one additional teeny-tiny black and white portable set and that's when I caught up on all the cheesy horror movies I could take. I also watched Strait-Jacket(with my eyes closed a lot), and the first half hour of Psycho(before the folks came home and I had to turn it off) on that little set.

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