What did the film stars of the 1920s-1930s make of the 1950s-1960s?

[FedoraFan112390]

I just recently watched an episode of the Twilight Zone, called The Trouble with Templeton, about an aged theater star of the 1920s living an unhappy, unfulfilled life in 1960. Like quite a few characters who stay in the Twilight Stones' vignettes, this character longs to go back to a happier time in his life - for this particular protagonist, the year is 1927.

In another episode, The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine, there is a faded starlet of the 1930s who, now in her middle age, is obsessed with the past, watching the films of her heyday, wishing and longing to be back there - back in the good old 1930s, when she was a much wanted beauty, surrounded by handsome leading men.

My question is thus to you, do we have any idea what the major stars of the 1920s-1930s thought of the (comparative to the 1920s-1930s) faster pasted, banal, thin collared and single breasted, Rock N' Roll fueled Eisenhower-Kennedy years?

 

[Fading Fast]

I've seen both of those episodes and both are, IMHO, a riff on the movie "Sunset Blvd," where an older Gloria Swanson plays an even older, forgotten and slightly mad former silent screen star who has nothing but contempt for the, at the time, contemporary 1950s movies and stars. The movie is fantastic with Swanson killing it in the role as the aging, bitter former star pining for the day of her youth, beauty and fame.

I know that doesn't answer your question as I don't know the answer, but the movie does give one fictionalized view of an answer. Also, if you enjoyed the Twilight Zone episodes you referenced, I'm all but sure you'd love this really well done movie.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Regarding those episodes, I see it part of a larger Twilight Zone trope, the longing for a simpler time in the past. You see it best in the harried executive protagonists in "Walking Distance" and "A Stop at Willoughby" who are (sometimes literally!) dying to get out of the rat race and find peace. There are several other episodes built around characters suffering a sense of nostalgia or loss.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Many of them fully embraced television -- Dick Powell became one of the top producers of filmed TV, Ronald Reagan hosted General Electric Theatre (and became a well-paid public relations spokesman for the company), and performers as wide-ranging as Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young, and Groucho Marx all had long-running series of their own, Francis X. Bushman was a frequent guest star on all kinds of different TV shows, Harold Lloyd threw himself into repackaging clips from his 1920s films into comedy anthologies for 1960s audiences, Charlie Chaplin went even further and completely re-edited many of his 1920s films into new versions for re-release, Buster Keaton would do industrial films and commercials and rock-n-roll beach party movies for anyone who would pay him, and so on and on. It's a common thread in late-career interviews with all these types of performers that they don't want to talk about the past -- they want to talk about what they're doing at the moment.

The Norma Desmond stereotype did exist in real life -- the actual 1920s star Mary Miles Minter, whose career was shattered by the 1922 murder of her director William Desmond Taylor, actually did live in bizarre seclusion surrounded by memorabilia of her past -- but it was very much the exception. Most performers of the twenties and thirties who were still active in the fifties and sixties were perfectly satisifed to move ahead with the times. You need only look up some of the movies Bob Hope made in the sixties and seventies, or some of Jack Benny's TV specials of the same period for evidence of how they tried to fit in with contemporary sensibilities. They often failed in their efforts to do this, but they certainly tried.

Keep in mind that the twenties and thirties were no more remote in the fifties and sixties than the eighties and nineties are for us today. A 1930s star active in the 1960s was no more likely to be some kind of reclusive pathological nostalgic than a 1980s star still working in the 2010s. Tom Hanks doesn't go around with a big poofy haircut dressing like he did in 1982 and waxing nostalgic about his days on "Bosom Buddies."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Regarding those episodes, I see it part of a larger Twilight Zone trope, the longing for a simpler time in the past. You see it best in the harried executive protagonists in "Walking Distance" and "A Stop at Willoughby" who are (sometimes literally!) dying to get out of the rat race and find peace. There are several other episodes built around characters suffering a sense of nostalgia or loss.

This also tied in with the "Good Old Days" nostalgia fad of the 1950s and early 1960s, in which people born in the last decade of the 19th Century and the first two decades of the 20th Century looked back thru misty goggles at their pre-WW1 youth. This type of imagery was all over the place as a counterreaction to the Space Age -- if you got a giveaway calendar from a bank or a gas station five will get you ten that the pictures will show some sort of nostalgic small-town imagery with horse-drawn wagons, Model T Fords, and little barefoot boys in knickers rolling hoops along dusty gravel roads on their way to the Old Swimmin' Hole. Those TZ episodes were, among other things, Rod Serling's commentary on that fad.

"Sputnik? What's that?"

 

[plain old dave]

It seems like I read, heard, or saw somewhere that Andy Griffith intended The Andy Griffith Show to be a biopic of his youth in Depression era Appalachian North Carolina. Come on, what city in 1960 North Carolina, especially a county seat, wouldn't have paved roads in town?

That said, the TAGS ep "Man In A Hurry" exemplifies this trend, and is commonly recognized as one of the best eps of The Program.

Sent from my SM-J700T using Tapatalk

 

[Frunobulax]

It seems like I read, heard, or saw somewhere that Andy Griffith intended The Andy Griffith Show to be a biopic of his youth in Depression era Appalachian North Carolina. Come on, what city in 1960 North Carolina, especially a county seat, wouldn't have paved roads in town?

That said, the TAGS ep "Man In A Hurry" exemplifies this trend, and is commonly recognized as one of the best eps of The Program.

Sent from my SM-J700T using Tapatalk

Is that the one where the city guy learns to peel an apple?

 

[FedoraFan112390]

This also tied in with the "Good Old Days" nostalgia fad of the 1950s and early 1960s, in which people born in the last decade of the 19th Century and the first two decades of the 20th Century looked back thru misty goggles at their pre-WW1 youth. This type of imagery was all over the place as a counterreaction to the Space Age -- if you got a giveaway calendar from a bank or a gas station five will get you ten that the pictures will show some sort of nostalgic small-town imagery with horse-drawn wagons, Model T Fords, and little barefoot boys in knickers rolling hoops along dusty gravel roads on their way to the Old Swimmin' Hole. Those TZ episodes were, among other things, Rod Serling's commentary on that fad.

"Sputnik? What's that?"

Thank you for the info....They were also Serlings' fantasy too:

Brevelle: If you could live in another time, another era, what period would that be?

Serling: That's a good one. Well, if I had the means, I think I would like to be in Victorian times. Small town. Bandstands. Summer. That kind of thing. Without disease.

Brevelle: When life was simpler?

Serling: Much. I think that's what I would crave, a simpler form of existence. When you walked to a store and sat on the front porch. That's what I think I would like to do: rock the rest of my life. I don't mean "rattle and roll." I mean...you know...creak-rock.

While the 20s-30s might not seem distant to someone who was living in the 1950s-1960s, to me as an observer now, they seem like very different worlds:

-The Atom, and fear of Nuclear conflict.
-World War II, proving all who idealistically hoped for WWI to who hoped to be the 'war to end all wars' wrong
-The horror of the Gas Chambers, and Nazi death camps.
-Television as a major force in society, not just a novelty trink some very wealthy have
-The advertising all the place. The '50s, '60s just seem to me like more banal, commercial, faster paced periods than the 20s-30s.
-The cars. From beautiful works of art in the 30s to the tinny flimsy boxes of the '60s
-From Art Decco to Googie in architecture.
-Man in space, and the Space Race, of the early '60s.
-The invention and popularity of Rock N' Roll
-The Feminine Mystique
-The beginning of the end for formal wear starting in the mid 50s, when dressing in your underwear (a T-Shirt) in public became a sign of youth rebellion
-The concept of the nuclear family, with elders living separably from the family.
-The very concept of the teenager as a distinct group with selling/buying power and cultural power being invented in the 1950s. The beginnings of the idea of a generation gap, that would become more clear in the late 1960s (though when I say '50s-60s for the purposes of this thread I'm referring to the 60s only up to the day Kennedy was shot).

All of these things, for me, make the 1920s-1930s - the pre-WWII era - and the period after, exemplified best by the mid '50s through early 60s - seem utterly different to me.

 

[Fading Fast]

...Serling: That's a good one. Well, if I had the means, I think I would like to be in Victorian times. Small town. Bandstands. Summer. That kind of thing. Without disease.....

See my bolding above - "Without disease -" that's the thing: all pining for the past, all desire to live in a simpler / better / more honest time (which might or might not really be true) almost alway comes with a personal caveat.

I'm 52 and have all my teeth and they are in great shape because of fluoridation and modern dentistry (I had a few gum surgeries - not fun, but very successful and have had a few other modern dental repairs) - I'd be hard press to give that up. Polio, dying from a simple bacterial infection - nope, I'd prefer not to. And then there's my personal pet peeve, I can't stand to be around smoking - hard to go back to the Golden Era and avoid that.

I could easily live without all the modern technology - basically I did until the late '90s anyway as, if you took away my one TV in 1997, everything I had was basically available in some form to the general public in the 1920s/30s, but I don't want to have my tooth pulled because a simple gum infection can't be cured or contract some disease we can easily cure today but was fatal then.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Teen culture actually was well underway by the 1920s, and was widely parodied in movies and comic strips of the time -- "Harold Teen," which began in 1919 and ran into the 1950s being the longest-running example -- and by the 1940s it was thoroughly ensconced in popular culture: Henry Aldrich, Archie Andrews, "Junior Miss," "A Date With Judy," ad infinitum. The Boys in the 1950s raised marketing to teens to a fine point, but the teen culture itself was nothing new at that stage. The term "Generation Gap" far pre-dates its postwar use.

"The Feminine Mystique" merely took arguments Elizabeth Hawes raised in "Why Women Cry" and "Anything But Love" in the 1940s and reframed them for a 1960s bourgeois audience. Similar issues were being raised in the Socialist and Communist press in the US as far back as the 1920s -- the phrase "male chauvinism," as one example, could be found in the works of CPUSA authors as early as 1935. Sexual liberation was a major thrust, if you will, of 1920s youth culture. "Old fashioned morality" was sneered at by the shebas and shieks, as well as by their "sophisticated" elders.

Vast numbers of people in the 1930s considered "formal wear" something you got married in and got buried in, and was never worn otherwise. T-shirts, both plain and printed with licensed characters, were commonly worn as outerwear by kids and teenagers well before WWII.

You'll find the roots of "Rock 'n Roll" in the jump-music movement of the 1940s -- the main thing in the 1950s is that white people started playing it. The term "Rock 'n Roll" was first used in a song recorded by the Boswell Sisters in 1934.

World War II was seen by many adults in the 1940s as an extension of World War I -- "We Did It Before And We Can Do It Again."

Plenty of people sat on their front porches in the 1960s just watching the world go by. Life is as simple as you choose to make it.

I think, for what it's worth, that you can make a case that the 1980s are profoundly, profoundly different from the 2010s in pretty much every respect. It might not seem so if you lived thru the interval and saw the changes appear gradually -- but I can guarantee if you took a typical American from 1986 and abruptly popped him or her into 2016 they would be utterly gobsmacked, far more than a person from 1936 similarly dropped into 1966. The arrival of the Internet and its accompanying technology is the single most fundamental change in the way humans interact with the world since the invention of movable type.

 

[Fading Fast]

Teen culture actually was well underway by the 1920s, and was widely parodied in movies and comic strips of the time -- "Harold Teen," which began in 1919 and ran into the 1950s being the longest-running example -- and by the 1940s it was thoroughly ensconced in popular culture: Henry Aldrich, Archie Andrews, "Junior Miss," "A Date With Judy," ad infinitum. The Boys in the 1950s raised marketing to teens to a fine point, but the teen culture itself was nothing new at that stage. The term "Generation Gap" far pre-dates its postwar use.

"The Feminine Mystique" merely took arguments Elizabeth Hawes raised in "Why Women Cry" and "Anything But Love" in the 1940s and reframed them for a 1960s bourgeois audience. Similar issues were being raised in the Socialist and Communist press in the US as far back as the 1920s. Sexual liberation was a major thrust, if you will, of 1920s youth culture. "Old fashioned morality" was sneered at by the shebas and shieks, as well as by their "sophisticated" elders.

Vast numbers of people in the 1930s considered "formal wear" something you got married in and got buried in, and was never worn otherwise. T-shirts, both plain and printed with licensed characters, were commonly worn as outerwear by kids and teenagers well before WWII.

You'll find the roots of "Rock 'n Roll" in the jump-music movement of the 1940s -- the main thing in the 1950s is that white people started playing it. The term "Rock 'n Roll" was first used in a song recorded by the Boswell Sisters in 1934.

World War II was seen by many adults in the 1940s as an extension of World War I -- "We Did It Before And We Can Do It Again."

Plenty of people sat on their front porches in the 1960s just watching the world go by. Life is as simple as you choose to make it.

I think, for what it's worth, that you can make a case that the 1980s are profoundly, profoundly different from the 2010s in pretty much every respect. It might not seem so if you lived thru the interval and saw the changes appear gradually -- but I can guarantee if you took a typical American from 1986 and abruptly popped him or her into 2016 they would be utterly gobsmacked, far more than a person from 1936 similarly dropped into 1966. The arrival of the Internet and its accompanying technology is the single most fundamental change in the way humans interact with the world since the invention of movable type.

Lizzie, what do you think of the idea of the 1920s being the direct antecedent to the 1960s, but the Depression, WWII and "The Fifties" got in the way? Yes it's an oversimplification as many of the ideas that seemed to "burst forth" in the second half of the '60s more quietly percolated in the '30s - '50s, but the spirit of youthful freedom from existing social constraints - a liberated attitude toward drinking, drugs, sex, self expression - of the '20s very closely echoes the second half of the '60s.

To your last point, my Dad died in the early '90s and my grandmother (his mom) the early '70s, but in truth, were they to come back to life today (which would be way too much parental and grandparental disapproval than I could bear) their learning curve to new technology would be about the same, but had one of them died in the early '00s, they'd be, at least, half way up the curve.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think in most cases the 1930s were the 1960s with much better music -- there was more genuine social revolution in the air between 1930 and 1939 than in any other decade of the twentieth century. The war and the Red Scare interfered with it, but I submit that there's a direct line between the movements of the thirties and the movements of the sixties.

I see the 1930s as a counterreaction in many ways to the libertinism of the 1920s -- leading to a society that realized that uninhibited pleasure seeking was not the way to a better world. If there's a difference between the thirties and the sixties it's that that lesson seemed to have been forgotten.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

The ultimate TZ episode in this vein was "Once Upon a Time," starring Buster Keaton, no less. It starts in 1890, when Keaton is a man totally dissatisfied with the world around him, with all its noise, bustle and danger. The 1890 sequences are shot silent, with jerky action. He travels to contemporary 1962 and finds it just as awful if not worse, but encounters a man who wants to travel back to a "simpler"time, which he proceeds to do with equally disastrous, slapstick results. It ends with both men remaining, contentedly, each in his own time.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I think in most cases the 1930s were the 1960s with much better music -- there was more genuine social revolution in the air between 1930 and 1939 than in any other decade of the twentieth century. The war and the Red Scare interfered with it, but I submit that there's a direct line between the movements of the thirties and the movements of the sixties.

I see the 1930s as a counterreaction in many ways to the libertinism of the 1920s -- leading to a society that realized that uninhibited pleasure seeking was not the way to a better world. If there's a difference between the thirties and the sixties it's that that lesson seemed to have been forgotten.

During the Red Scare '40s-'50s, the labor movement music of the '40s was kept alive by Pete Seeger, who strove to prevent the music of Woody Guthrie from being forgotten. J. Edgar Hoover and others considered Pete and the Weavers to be an actual menace to the American way of life. Seeger was mentor to Bob Dylan who started out as a Guthrie wannabe and who, much to Seeger's dismay, kicked off the folk-rock movement of the early '60s, which fed directly into the liberation, antiwar and civil rights movements of the later '60s-70s.

 

[PeterGunnLives]

I've seen both of those episodes and both are, IMHO, a riff on the movie "Sunset Blvd," where an older Gloria Swanson plays an even older, forgotten and slightly mad former silent screen star who has nothing but contempt for the, at the time, contemporary 1950s movies and stars. The movie is fantastic with Swanson killing it in the role as the aging, bitter former star pining for the day of her youth, beauty and fame.

I really enjoy Sunset Blvd.

"I AM big, it's the pictures that got small!"

Great stuff.

 

[LizzieMaine]

During the Red Scare '40s-'50s, the labor movement music of the '40s was kept alive by Pete Seeger, who strove to prevent the music of Woody Guthrie from being forgotten. J. Edgar Hoover and others considered Pete and the Weavers to be an actual menace to the American way of life. Seeger was mentor to Bob Dylan who started out as a Guthrie wannabe and who, much to Seeger's dismay, kicked off the folk-rock movement of the early '60s, which fed directly into the liberation, antiwar and civil rights movements of the later '60s-70s.

One of the biggest thrills of my life was hearing Pete perform in our local high school cafeteria one night in the early '90s. It wasn't any kind of big promoted show, he just happened to be in town and a bunch of people got together to hear him. The concluding singalong to all the verses of "This Land Is Your Land" was truly inspirational. He plainly acknowledged mistakes he'd made along the way in his life, but he never, ever compromised his core beliefs.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

My wife, Beth, was a professional folksinger in the '60s, singing traditional songs from her family and Appalachian home. She was backstage with Pete and his wife at the Newport Folk Festival in '65 when Dylan went out on stage with his electric guitar. It was a legendary catastrophe, but more because of the terrible sound system than Dylan's instrument and performance. Incidentally, the song Dylan was trying to perform was "Maggie's Farm."

 

[Doctor Strange]

I was privileged to see Pete perform several times over the years, and to hang out backstage with him at one of the early Croton Point Park Clearwater Revival Festivals, circa 1982. I have never been in the presence of anybody who had more palpable charisma! He was really something. Talk about inspiration and integrity...

 

[Fading Fast]

I think in most cases the 1930s were the 1960s with much better music -- there was more genuine social revolution in the air between 1930 and 1939 than in any other decade of the twentieth century. The war and the Red Scare interfered with it, but I submit that there's a direct line between the movements of the thirties and the movements of the sixties.

I see the 1930s as a counterreaction in many ways to the libertinism of the 1920s -- leading to a society that realized that uninhibited pleasure seeking was not the way to a better world. If there's a difference between the thirties and the sixties it's that that lesson seemed to have been forgotten.

But in a way that's why I noted "youthful freedom from existing social constraints" as the connect I was making between the '20s and '60s was less political (or the serious politics of the '60s social movements for justice - which, I agree, had strong roots in the '30s as "The Great Society" could have been called "The New Deal Part II") and more to the "lighter" cultural ones of libertine attitudes toward dress, drugs, drinking and sex. I was far from clear in this distinction in my prior post.

There are connects between the two - but equal social justice for minorities and the larger gov't spending programs of welfare and other social ills that were realized in the '60s could have come about without the cultural shift toward a freer attitude about sex, drugs, drinking and dress. To be sure, my thinking (as always) is evolving as I learn more, but I see the lighter cultural connect being the '20s to the '60s and the more serious social policy / gov't programs connect being the '30s to the '60s (as you already noted).

 

[Fading Fast]

I really enjoy Sunset Blvd.

"I AM big, it's the pictures that got small!"

Great stuff.

That is a great quote in a movie full of great quotes. Not a week goes by that my girlfriend or I don't use "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille" (as a short hand for "I'm ready when you are") which is a bastardized version of the real quote "Alright Mr DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," but it flows better the altered way in normal conversation.