Classic Film Buffs - Check in Here!

I would suggest any film with Charlie Chaplin. Like The Kid, The Gold Rush, and others. The man was a genius. Buster Keaton was also very good. After a while you won't even notice the lack of dialogue.

 

I read an interesting biography of Darryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century Fox. He said Chaplin was not liked by some in the business. He was a real egotist.

At the height of his career, he had a staff of writers, including Zanuck, who wrote stories and gags for him, yet he took credit for every idea that appeared on the screen.

The writers had to cater to his egotism. They couldn't just put pages in front of him to read. At idea sessions,they would have to lay out some props in a certain manner so Chaplin would figure out the gag they wrote. It pissed off Zanuck when Chapline asked why he needed writers when he could figure out his own gags.

He got even. He put a bucket of water over a doorway one day. When Chaplin showed up for one of these idea sessions and followed the usual trail of props he got a bucket of water on the head. Zanuck told him off before quitting and going on to bigger and better things.

Another thing Hollywood did not like about Chaplin was his moral turpitude. He liked young girls. He had to marry 16 year-old Lita Gray who was pregnant. Otherwise, he would have been arrested for statutory rape.

His last wife OOna O'Neil was 18 when she married the 54 year-old Chaplin. He had several other young women.

 

I do not watch enough classics, but Ladri di Biciclette is a true masterpiece. I am also looking to, in the near future, watch Girl with hyacintes and Seventh Sail.

 

Walt Disney's 1940 classic Fantasia ...



I'm always amazed at the work that went into this wonderful film. Sound speed is 24 frames per second and generally a film like this would involve more fps than that. I'm not even going to bother doing the math on how many cells the animators had to draw the old fashioned way, by hand, to create this film.

The sequel that was made 60 years later, Fantasia 2000, is great, too, but the animators were assisted by computers, so it's not as great a work of animation as the original.

This is my favorite segment from the sequel, which is set to Igor Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite"...

 

Great movie. Lol! This part . . .

 

I challenge anyone to watch this clip and not laugh......

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/porkys/81251423/

 

Can a film be considered "classic" if it wasn't shot in black and white?

 

Gone with the Wind.

"Frankly Scarlett, I don't give a damn." LOL....what a cool line!

 

One of the best movies I've seen far as classics is The Great Waltz. True story of Johann Strauss.


I Want To Live ,Susan Haywood.



But my favorite one of all is "The Rare Breed".

 

Wizard of Oz?

Many great classics in color!

 

The first time I saw colorized movie was at the Thunderbird Drive In showing The Ten Commandments staring Charleston Heston 1950s I think. First TV I saw was in 1956 in our living room.

 

The dresses in this movie were beautiful,imo. And this woman had a great voice. It kept my 3yo and 5yo grandkids mezmerized as did Gypsy starring Natalie Woods. One ran around singing out the songs off and on for years. She sounds like Celine Dion today maybe from exercising her vocal chords in our ears for years.

 

It never ceases to amaze me how incredibly glamorous actresses were in those days. Today's Hollywood beauties simply do not compare with them IMO.

 

You got that right. Most have little talent in comparison. Back then they could sing, dance and had at least a resemblance of morals in public anyway. I still watch the movies and so do some of my daughters and grandkids. My son won't watch them though, well maybe Rare Breed and Its A Wonderful Life.

 

Absolutely.

Akira Kurosawa took color film to a whole new level by bringing a painterly eye to the medium. Here's a couple of stills from his last film Dreams (1990):





He also made a spectacle of his eye for color in Ran (1985), which many consider his greatest film. Unfortunately these stills are huge so I'm only going to post the links:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/01/56/89/015689b9661adfd5521984b1530faf57.jpg

http://lwlcdn.lwlies.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Ran-Film.jpg

http://lwlcdn.lwlies.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ran-akira-kurosawa-review.jpg

Akira Kurosawa is to color film as Orson Wells is to black and white. Both men fully grasped the artistic possibilities of their mediums and exploited them to the fullest.

Freddie Young deserves an honorable mention here, as well. He is best known for his Academy Award-winning cinematography in Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia. All told his work was nominated for 5 Oscars and he won 3 of them.

 

Point taken. There are obviously a few "classic" color films. It seems to me that most of the great films were shot in the B&W era, though. The movie makers of that day knew how to tell a story. It's all special effects these days. The best dramas are on TV, which makes sense. TV series aren't constrained by a two-hour time limit.

 

Yeah, Hollywood has gotten pretty lame lately. I can count all the directors I like on one hand.

I would agree that special effects has had a negative impact on film in general and cinematography in specific. Directors and cinematographers don't have to be as creative and ingenious as they had to be when Orson Wells and Gregg Toland shot Citizen Kane:



The one notable exception I can think of is George Miller's Mad Max Fury Road which won 6 Academy Awards and should have won Best Picture. It is rightly considered one of the best, if not the best, action films of all time, and I consider it an instant classic. If it hadn't been shot only 2 years ago I would have mentioned it earlier - it's a fantastic film:

 

I'll confess to a weakness for the Coen Brothers. I like Scorsese's films. "Raging Bull" and "Goodfellas" are his best IMO, but they're not exactly recent.

 

I do not believe that it ended the way everybody else thinks ...

 

What do you think happened? That Harry got away?

 

If you like a bit o' classical music you could do worse than watch Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's a bit grainy but the choreography and the production overall is nothing less than beautiful. Even the Elizabethan (Shakespeare) narrative is beautiful and easy on the ear, and that's coming from someone who doesn't much care for Shakespeare because I can't understand it half the time.

 

Holly deliberately allowed Harry to escape and substituted another body (substitution was previously been done during Harry's alleged "funeral"). Absolutely no doubt in my mind that it happened that way.