"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Friday, February 17, 2012

Fifty Years Ago in Film

The Regular Guy goes to a lot of movies, lately mostly with the Regular Son.   I'm always looking for really good movies to see with him, on the theory that being exposed to good movies will raise his tastes and awareness above the Call of Duty/slasher film/juvenile comedy level of most high-school boys.   So we've seen Margin Call, Moneyball, The Descendants, Tinger Tailor Soldier Spy, as well as great old movies on the big screen at a local bijou that runs them on Saturdays at noon.   But when you look back fifty years at the movies that were out in 1962, you realize that the Golden Age for film is probably over.   Consider the films we could have seen that year:


There are at least five movies here that would win the Academy Award this year:  Days of Wine and Roses, Lawrence of Arabia (which would win any year it was up), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Manchurian Candidate, and To Kill a Mockingbird.   Instead, we have a lot of movies based on TV shows that baby-boomers watched when they were kids, or action movies based on kids' toys (like Transformers).   Yuck!

Oh, and notice anything about that list above from 1962.... not a single movie is a sequel.

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