Overly appreciated movies?

[Stanley Doble]

I have never seen a funny Charlie Chaplin film. Like Jerry Lewis, he strikes me as someone with no sense of humor laboring hard to turn out a funny movie. Both terrifically over rated.

I admire Buster Keaton for his amazing stunts and occasional laughs.

Harold Lloyd is the funniest silent comedian and also does the most heart stopping stunts.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm very fond of Lloyd and I like Keaton and Chaplin OK, but the silent comic I think was a true genius was Harry Langdon. Which places me in a very small minority of opinion, but Harry was a very small comedian.

I've always found Laurel and Hardy to be funnier on paper than they are on film, if that makes sense. Some of the descriptions of their gags make them sound hilarious, but there's something about the on-screen execution that's just a little too studied for my taste.

And Lucille Ball never did a gag in her life that hadn't already done better by Thelma Todd and Patsy Kelly.

 

[p51]

I've always found Laurel and Hardy to be funnier on paper than they are on film, if that makes sense. Some of the descriptions of their gags make them sound hilarious, but there's something about the on-screen execution that's just a little too studied for my taste.

Other than their famous piano moving bit in the 1932 short, "The Music Box", I have to agree.

 

[jamespowers]

I admire Buster Keaton for his amazing stunts and occasional laughs.

Harold Lloyd is the funniest silent comedian and also does the most heart stopping stunts.

You forgot Buster' buddy for a few films---Fatty Arbuckle. He was Benny Hill 50 years before Benny and even funnier---without sound.

 

[Zombie_61]

I have never seen a funny Charlie Chaplin film. Like Jerry Lewis, he strikes me as someone with no sense of humor laboring hard to turn out a funny movie. Both terrifically over rated.

I admire Buster Keaton for his amazing stunts and occasional laughs.

Harold Lloyd is the funniest silent comedian and also does the most heart stopping stunts.

I've seen only a few Chaplin movies, but enjoyed them.

The stunt work Harold Lloyd did in his movies is made even more remarkable when you learn he lost the thumb and index finger of his right hand in 1919 when a "prop" bomb (which turned out to be real) exploded while he was holding it; he subsequently wore a glove and prosthetics in his movies to hide the injury. Still, many of his "gags" weren't as dangerous as they appeared on film--carefully planned camera angles were used to hide the fact, and he used stunt men for stunts he couldn't perform himself.

Which brings us to Buster Keaton who, in my opinion, was absolutely brilliant. He not only devised and performed all of his own stunts (before his contract was sold to MGM in 1928, that is), but often doubled for other actors in his movies when they couldn't, or wouldn't, do their own stunts. This is not to say Keaton's career was injury-free. He fractured his neck while filming Sherlock Jr. (1924), and the injury went undiagnosed until a routine examination many years later. And when I've Got A Secret host Garry Moore asked Keaton how he did all of those falls without getting hurt, Keaton replied, "I'll show you," and opened his jacket to reveal his bruised torso. Moore later commented, "So that's how he did it. It hurt, but you had to care enough not to care." And, like Chaplin, in his early days Keaton learned everything he could about filmmaking (including how the cameras worked) so that he could put that knowledge to good use.

 

[skydog757]

I thought that The China Syndrome got a big bounce just from the timing of it's release (it came out about a week before the Three Mile Island incident). While the acting was very good (Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda) you could see where the movie was going very early on and, like many films with an agenda, came off as overly preachy. Although highly praised at the time, I don't think that it has aged well.

 

[Edward]

You forgot Buster' buddy for a few films---Fatty Arbuckle. He was Benny Hill 50 years before Benny and even funnier---without sound.

My kidney stone was funnier than Benny Hill.

 

[Worf]

My kidney stone was funnier than Benny Hill.

INFIDEL DEFILER!!! BLASPHEMER!!!! Scourge the unbeliever from feet to cap then let him contemplate his misdeeds on the tree of woe!!!!

Worf

 

[Touchofevil]

My kidney stone was funnier than Benny Hill.

To an observer, you might have been.

 

[Seb Lucas]

Hmm, since we're enjoying sacrilege, my overrated films:

- The Daniel Craig Bond films - kiss kiss bang bang tripe, with a dull star that looks like Vladimir Putin's younger brother.

- Lord of the Rings movies (as if the book aren't awful enough)

- Titanic (yawn)

- 90% of Tarantino movies. Pulp Fiction has a bit of life to it but the rest are so hokey.

- All Indiana Jones films after Raiders


That'll do.

 

[Nobert]

Here is a heretical opinion of mine. I have never really liked The Philadelphia Story. There are many fine touches in the film, lots of good performances. But the screenplay annoys me. It is so pious about its frivolity.

I especially can't stand the scene where Tracy's father shows up and reveals that his infidelity is actually her fault. In a different movie, this scene might have been played for comedy -- I can imagine a character in a movie written by Preston Sturges patiently explaining that when someone commits adultery, the children are always the real culprits. But in The Philadelphia Story, this scene is yet another humiliation that Katherine Hepburn's character has to endure so that she can be a better human being.

I get a similar feeling from Holiday, also written by Philip Barry. (Also directed by Cukor, and also with Hepburn and Grant, but I'm pretty sure that the weird ideas are Barry's.)

I can relate to this, for whatever it's worth. Philadelphia Story was a nice movie to catch on the late show, and as you said, had some good bits (Jimmy Stewart plays a great drunk). But I have trouble with a lot of the worldview expressed in most of those silver screen classics, the Hollywood treatment. Especially when it comes to romance. "Oh, darling, I do love you!" "Of course you do, my dear, I have broad shoulders and a cleft chin." In fact, the values I see expressed in a lot of those movies are what partly convinces me that I would not really want to be alive in the period in which they were made.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think Barry's plays are more a reflection of his own education and family background than they are of the general era in which he lived. A privileged young man who learned how to be a playwright at Harvard and Yale, both of which were then narrow, all-male bastions of elitism, would likely have a particular view of women which would come thru in his plays. But if any woman in my family had been treated as the women his plays are treated, they'd have said "The hell with this" and hit Cary Grant over the head with a skillet.

On top of that, Barry's characters were intended as caricatures of a certain upper-middle-class type. They were no more typical of actual Americans of the era than Bertie Wooster was a typical Englishman.

 

[Nobert]

I think Barry's plays are more a reflection of his own education and family background than they are of the general era in which he lived. A privileged young man who learned how to be a playwright at Harvard and Yale, both of which were then narrow, all-male bastions of elitism, would likely have a particular view of women which would come thru in his plays. But if any woman in my family had been treated as the women his plays are treated, they'd have said "The hell with this" and hit Cary Grant over the head with a skillet.

On top of that, Barry's characters were intended as caricatures of a certain upper-middle-class type. They were no more typical of actual Americans of the era than Bertie Wooster was a typical Englishman.

I don't doubt that those movies aren't really an accurate reflection of how people lived and acted, especially in the 30s, when most people were looking for escapism and glamor in their entertainment to take their mind off the Depression. But it's the fact that they accepted those values on some level; after all, the movies were popular. It's sort of like what you said elsewhere about Irving Thalberg, he pandered to the public taste and seemed to have no conception of quality outside of what sold at the box office, which makes him a kind of barometer for said taste. I don't think most people live and act they way people in "reality" shows do these days, but the fact that they're popular says something about our nation's current values (and not something I could express in language suitable to mixed company). The impression I get from the mirror that the silver screen holds up to 30s/40s society is that I would probably find many of the attitudes of the day straight-jacketing, especially regarding notions of masculinity. I could be wrong.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My point is more that you're only seeing one narrow reflection of that society in movies -- and there were other images of masculinity, just as common in the media of that time, that are no longer as commonly seen today.

To name just two good examples, consider Walt Wallet in the comic strip "Gasoline Alley," who raised a foundling infant left on his doorstep. Walt was shown nurturing and parenting the baby -- who grew into a toddler, who grew into a small boy, who grew into a teenager and on into adulthood himself -- and he did so in ways that wouldn't be out of place in a modern-era "male parenting" class. Another character who contravened what we think of as "masculine norms" was Amos in "Amos 'n' Andy," who was shown as a gentle, sensitive man who wasn't beyond crying when something terrible happened in his life, who treated his girlfriend/later wife with dignity and respect, and who became another extremely nurturing father.

But we don't see those images today because movies remain the most persistent examples of popular media, even though they were only one part of a much greater picture in the Era itself. When we use movies -- or novels -- or any other form of popular fiction as examples of The Era without considering the broader picture, we can't help but get a distorted view.

 

[Nobert]

True. It's hard to talk about things in generalized terms without seeming as if I'm making unilateral statements. I know that the movies of the period were the product of a draconian studio system. And, yes, good example with Gasoline Alley. The shrewish Bungle family also points to a different (albeit more jaundiced) view on relationships that was accepted by the public.

Mostly, my point was that I understand being rubbed the wrong way by the accepted attitudes, as presented in the "classic" movies of the times. I got a little off topic by widening the lasso to cover society as a whole. I have similar reservations about the values expressed in current movies, I'm just more inured to those.

 

[herringbonekid]

My idea of a great art film is "Sunrise." Beautifully composed visuals, but also a powerful, meaningful, comprehensible story.

do you think the man's behaviour is forgivable, the way his wife seems to ?

 

[jamespowers]

INFIDEL DEFILER!!! BLASPHEMER!!!! Scourge the unbeliever from feet to cap then let him contemplate his misdeeds on the tree of woe!!!!

Worf

Agreed.
I am getting my Best of Benny Hill out right now.

 

[LizzieMaine]

do you think the man's behaviour is forgivable, the way his wife seems to ?

I'd have pushed him out of the boat, but that's just me.

 

[herringbonekid]

I'd have pushed him out of the boat, but that's just me.

i can't believe she would forgive the husband on the same day he nearly murdered her because of his lust for another woman.
still, the film has a folk tale / fable quality about it which makes it powerful despite the lapses in believability.

 

[Nobert]

i can't believe she would forgive the husband on the same day he nearly murdered her because of his lust for another woman.
still, the film has a folk tale / fable quality about it which makes it powerful despite the lapses in believability.

Lapses in believability are, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder.