Movies from 30/40s

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What about the older movies? Personally I love them. Tonight I watched the Letter with Bette Davis, and it stayed with me for hours, (admittedly I moped around the house for hours afterward, remembering the music and the look on Bette Davis's face when she cried "I still love the man I killed" These films still carry the weight of film artistry like few films today do. Does anyone else feel the same? I would welcome any comments on this one.

-- Barb e. (Suesuesbeo@aol.com), January 13, 2001

Answers

I would go so far as to say, as probably most of our compadres here would say, that MOST of the films I watch are old movies. Maybe it's the artistry of the black and white film, the painterly stylization of Technicolor, or the classic music. Maybe it's the scene structure: In the thirties and forties, a typical scene ran five pages, and a movie, with its 120 pages (roughly a page a minute), usually contained about twenty or twenty-five scenes. Now thanks to our tv trained short attention spans and blowem-up cgi etc., it's easy to think this is boring and turn the channel to the 24 hour commercial that is MTV. But if you give it a chance it's almost always a rewarding experience. That's why I love the turner classic movies channel, no commercials and plenty of great old movies. For instance coming up on TMC on Friday the 26 of jan (2001) are two great thrillers from one of my favorite directors Fritz Lang.: at 11:00 PM (Pacific time) "M" (1931) The mob sets out to catch a child killer whose crimes are attracting too much police attention. Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustav Gründgens. D: Fritz Lang. BW 118 m. Then at 1:00 AM (Pacific time) "Fury" (1936) An innocent man escapes a lynch mob then returns for revenge. Spencer Tracy, Sylvia Sidney, Walter Brennan. D: Fritz Lang. BW 93m. CC You may want to tape these....;}>

-- s.merli (smerli@earthlink.net), January 17, 2001.

Ha ha, you lost me in the page a minute thing, but I've got some of it...it seems to me we still compare what comes out now to the masters back then. I can't help but wonder, why were these guys so great? It was the begining of the industry and yet the films were like great art. Go back even further to Fritz Lang, and you are really into reverence and speaking of painterly stylization, can you beat Erich Kettelhut's visions of Metropolis?

-- Barb e. (Suesuesbeo@aol.com), January 18, 2001.

"While the City Sleeps" by Fritz Lang is pretty darn good, I'm also a ig fan of Lang's. I wonder if anyone can tell me; the begining scene of the city scape, is this also done by Erich Kettelhut?

-- Barb e. (Suesuesbeo@aol.com), February 12, 2001.

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