Bad Vintage Movies

[Ugarte]

Some of the later Marx Brothers films, to me, didn't have that pizzazz that their earlier films did, especially "Go West", which seemed to recycle their humor, and "The Big Store", which seemed to be copying the Three Stooges' style, especially at the end.

I don't know about the other movies you wrote about, but as a fan I agree completely about the Marx Brothers.

Their early movies were little more than filmed stage productions, but they were meticulously fine tuned before live audiences before filming. They were a labor of love. The later movies were little more than studio system products designed to generate money to help Groucho and Harpo pay off Chico's gambling debts.

Chico had it bad for anything someone was willing to lay a wager on. Kind of sad in the end.

Mark
.

 

[sophia la shok]

i do seem to appreciate movies that are pre 1960's due to the clothes cars hair, etc. i do tend to watch any old film if i happen to flick over and it's on and usually most of it's bearable.

except for one that sticks out quite like a sore thumb in my mind. i apologise if any of you like it but i have a big problem with Went The Day Well. it's an old british film from '42 if i recall correctly, about a small village that hosts some soldiers among the residents and it all goes pear shaped from then on. i was annoyed because it's based on a short story by graham greene who i am usually awefully fond of. so i expected it to be fairly top notch. but i don't think i've ever been so bored. ever.

 

[Edward]

Plan 9 From Outer Space was so awful it was sheer genius! lol

Most of the stuff I loathe is 80s based, odly enough. [huh] There is a special circle of hell for all involved in such penile-compensation trash as Top Gun. I'd love to see Battlefield Earth to see if it's really as bad as they make out, but I'm waiting for it to come on TV....

Tere are very few films I find utterly unwatchable - even if I wouldn't ever want to see it again, I can sit through most things once. I at least want to know how it ends..... I have to draw the line at a lot of those 80s US 'made for TV movie of the day' capers, especially if they're a Daniella Steel adaptation.

 

[jake_fink]

Thread made me think of the Norman Mailer book The Spooky Art.

There is an unmistakable quality to any film which is not made as filmed theatre but rather appears as some existence we call film. That existence runs through Chaplin and Sunset Boulevard and Persona - it runs through home movies. It was Warhol's talent to perceive that in every home movie there is a sense of Time tying to express itself as a new kind of creation, a palapbility which breathes in the being of the film. The best works and some of the worst of film works have this quality. One can even find it in flashes in cranky old battered films of the purest mediocrity late at night on TV, B-films without an instant of talent, yet the years have added magic to what was once moronic - Time is winking her eye as we look at the film. Time suddenly appears to us as a wit.

Norman Mailer

 

[Dr Doran]

“It’s A Wonderful Life” 1946 didn’t do so well the first go… but, now it’s an immortal classic.

I hate it.

 

[Twitch]

Ugarte- your synopsis is genius in itself. It says out loud what none of us even thinks most of the time. "Movie mills" is a good example. Everything produced was not a winner and was never expected to be in the first place. For us to classify all Hollywood product as "classic" is just wrong.

 

[Lauren]

Oh, there's so many BAD movies out there. I get a kick out of old B movies, though, because they're cheesier than cheesy.
Go take a gander at the dollar dvds when you're next at Fry's electronics. They've got a slew of them on bad quality DVD... like "Confessions of a Co-Ed" and "His Private Secretary" and "the Nut Farm".
I couldn't sit through "The Kennel Murder Case" with William Powell, and I adore him.
And even though I love Barbara Stanwyck I hated "The Lady of Burlesque" (known originally as The G-String Murders and written by burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee.

 

[Dr Doran]

And even though I love Barbara Stanwyck I hated "The Lady of Burlesque" (known originally as The G-String Murders and written by burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee.

Wife and I JUST watched that 3 nights ago. (Actually, we stopped it after 45 minutes because we were too sleepy.)

I LOVED IT.

 

[Lauren]

Welp, to each their own[huh]
The first time I saw Casablanca I didn't like it, but now I do... maybe I'll give it another shot.

 

[pgoat]

But my vote for the worst movie I've ever seen from the "Golden Era" would have to be Mae West's 1943 flick The Heat's On. No plot, too many STUPID musical numbers that made me want to kick the TV, and Mae was totally NOT into it and you could tell. Mae knew it was bad and that's why she retired from films until her two 1970s MASTERPIECES Myra Breckenridge and Sextette. Now those two movies are great -- and I really mean that!

That's funny - when I saw this thread I was thinking of some ca. 1970 films I watched recently that are truly bad and while Myra Breckinridge is often lumped in with them (at some point it was voted the worst film ever made) I thought it had some redeeming points. It's certainly campy enough.

The other films I saw that were (imo) truly bad from the late 60s/early 70s included Ginger, The Peace Killers, Blacula and Mars Needs Women.

 

[merkman]

Plan 9 From Outer Space was so awful it was sheer genius! lol

Yes, this is the best of the worst. I love Ed wood.
Who could forget "Glen or Glenda"?

 

[Spitfire]

IMO 80 % of the so called Golden Days movies were rather bad.[huh]
We just tend to like them. Pure nostalgia.

 

[LizzieMaine]

IMO 80 % of the so called Golden Days movies were rather bad.[huh]
We just tend to like them. Pure nostalgia.

I think a lot depends on the point of view from which one views them -- if one goes into a vintage film with a snarky modern sensibility, looking for things to pick at and haze and ridicule, well, naturally they're going to find the films rather bad. Just as today's films will be mocked and ridiculed by the audiences of 2088.

The important thing to remember is that vintage films were not made for modern audiences -- the people who made them viewed them for the most part as disposable entertainment, with no idea that people would still be watching them eighty years down the line, so I think it's terribly unfair to insist on viewing them according to modern standards. If you're going to watch vintage films, the best service you can do the filmmakers is to try and see them thru the eyes of their intended audience. And if you can't do that, well, you might as well just stick to Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

 

[carter]

My parents used to put all three kids in our pajamas and take us to the Dusk to Dawn Drive-In Movies. If we stayed awake, or woke up, for the final film before dawn, it was usually a Maw & Paw Kettle film. I'm pretty sure they saved the worst for last.

 

[Spitfire]

I think a lot depends on the point of view from which one views them -- if one goes into a vintage film with a snarky modern sensibility, looking for things to pick at and haze and ridicule, well, naturally they're going to find the films rather bad. Just as today's films will be mocked and ridiculed by the audiences of 2088.

The important thing to remember is that vintage films were not made for modern audiences -- the people who made them viewed them for the most part as disposable entertainment, with no idea that people would still be watching them eighty years down the line, so I think it's terribly unfair to insist on viewing them according to modern standards. If you're going to watch vintage films, the best service you can do the filmmakers is to try and see them thru the eyes of their intended audience. And if you can't do that, well, you might as well just stick to Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

I think that 'bout 80% of modern films are bad too!
Does that help?

I teach film - and have a rather good feel for seeing old films with the old world eyes - but still: A lot of them are just uninteresting stories and bad direction.
Just as today.

 

[Dr Doran]

WE SHALL BE MADE INTO THINGS OF SONG FOR THE MEN OF THE FUTURE.

I think a lot depends on the point of view from which one views them -- if one goes into a vintage film with a snarky modern sensibility, looking for things to pick at and haze and ridicule, well, naturally they're going to find the films rather bad. Just as today's films will be mocked and ridiculed by the audiences of 2088.

The important thing to remember is that vintage films were not made for modern audiences -- the people who made them viewed them for the most part as disposable entertainment, with no idea that people would still be watching them eighty years down the line, so I think it's terribly unfair to insist on viewing them according to modern standards. If you're going to watch vintage films, the best service you can do the filmmakers is to try and see them thru the eyes of their intended audience. And if you can't do that, well, you might as well just stick to Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

I largely agree with you. I cannot stand how the Oresteia from 458 BC got mined by the Second Wave feminists in the 1970s to prove their point about pervasive "misogyny" in the western world. Aeschylus' message (such as it was) to the audience had to do with the dangers of unregulated vendetta. His work did not favor the gratuitous suppression of women; further, the demographic realities of the era before modern medicine NECESSITATED women spending a great amount of their time bearing and nursing children, only two out of six of which would reach adulthood and reproduce. The refusal to examine this statistic is a terrible shame. I also dislike how "New Criticism" of the 1950s (Lionel Trilling and so on into their later epigoni, postmodernists like Stanley Fish) deliberately ignored the social context of a work and only concentrated on its formal qualities.

It is often ridiculous to apply later standards to a work. I regret it especially when special interests twist a work to prove or disprove a special point of peculiar concern to them which wasn't even on the author's radar.

HOWEVER, scrutinizing an artwork, no matter how ephemeral its intent, for general quality decades later is almost inevitable if the artwork exists on, or has been recorded onto, a durable medium. There is nothing that can prevent this from happening. If later generations have enough luxury time to study past artworks, more power to them. If an artwork thusly lives on, it is blest. One generation might snarkily find it cheesy, and a later one might resurrect it as (perhaps unwittingly) brilliant. Homer has Andromache lament, "Upon us, Zeus set a vile destiny: we shall be made into things of song for the men of the future."

Many people in the 19th century did not like Shakespeare and Bach. Then in the 20th, society realized their uncanny brilliance. John Donne had fallen into obscurity until T. S. Eliot revived him.

Now people of mystic interest find Hildegard of Bingen interesting, whom I, and many past centuries, regard as a deplorable spiritual masochist and boring to boot.

 

[Ugarte]

Sturgeon's Law

I'm paraphrasing here, but according to Theodore Sturgeon, "90% of everything is crap."

Viz Sturgeon's Law.

Res ipsa Loquiter

Mark
.

 

[LizzieMaine]

HOWEVER, scrutinizing an artwork, no matter how ephemeral its intent, for general quality decades later is almost inevitable if the artwork exists on, or has been recorded onto, a durable medium.

See, that's the thing -- whoever said all films had to be viewed as "art," anyway? That sort of beard-stroking cineaste pretentiousness bugs me as much as hipper-than-thou snarkiness.

When I talk about viewing vintage films on their own terms, what I'm suggesting is to simply view them as their makers intended -- as simple entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. It's perfectly acceptable and perfectly valid to view a film as simply a pleasant ninety-minute diversion and nothing more -- because for the most part that's all it was ever intended to be. That doesn't make it *bad*, it just means it comes from a perspective today's ultracritical, take-everything-so-very-seriously generation finds beneath it. Those are the folks I'd like to lash to a theatre seat and force to watch "Sullivan's Travels" over and over again until they wise up.

 

[pgoat]

I agree. To me, bad=boring for films. Even if I don't like a film's viewpoint, politics, etc. at least it's food for thought/fuel for debate, etc. I do draw the line at gore or anything with gratuitous animal abuse (I won't go see many new films, obviously!).

But for old films, I have watched TCM on many a sleepless night or sick day at home and they pull out some real yawnfests on off-peak hours. Still fun from a nostalgic clothes/interior decor/film history angle, as previously noted here, but there is a difference between many of those mediocre flicks and the ones most agreee on as classics. The Maltese Falcon is not art imho but as entertainment, it certainly delivers, whereas the stinkers simply don't.

 

[happyfilmluvguy]

If you're going to watch vintage films, the best service you can do the filmmakers is to try and see them thru the eyes of their intended audience. And if you can't do that, well, you might as well just stick to Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

That's exactly what I try to do. It's difficult sometimes because my sense of today collides with my sense of yesterday and I end up either misinterpreting a scene or dialogue or an action or just completely ignore it because I can't understand it. Slapstick, for example, can be entirely boring or entirely hilarious. I saw a not so familiar film by Alfred Hitchcock called "The Wrong Man", with Henry Fonda. Now Henry Fonda's a pretty good actor and Alfred Hitchcock is known for his work. At the end, I felt it was long, I felt it was boring, I felt Alfred Hitchcock had made a dud compared to his other work.

Then again, it was a really interesting story and the style felt so real compared to other films I'd seen from him, even his later ones. It was as if I was simply following this man on a day to day basis, watching every move, hearing every word. I wouldn't be surprised if someone who saw it thought it was the most boring movie in the world. I wouldn't deny that, but you have to look at it in a different way.

I showed a friend of mine "The Third Man" and I could tell he was getting bored. It's such a good movie to me, and the music is very unique for it. Any other score could have been put in it, but the makers chose Anton Karas. At the end, I had to tell him what the twist and story was. He didn't catch it during the viewing. It's all a matter of who is watching what and how they interpret it.