Finding Old Films on YouTube

Most people draw that line at Bonnie & Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), which made a ridiculous amount of money but were scorned by hard-line Hollywood conservatives. But money talks and you can make a good argument that movies loosened up quite a bit after that time.

But I think a lot of people under (say) 35 would believe that films made before 1970 are old. They'd have a good point: a 44-year-old movie is not exactly new. But at the same time, consider that it's not that big a deal to buy a 1970 movie on DVD or Blu-ray today, or watch it on TV; it was unusual to watch 1930 movies back in 1970.

I once attended a film history class where the prof made a good case that movies kind of got perfected in 1939-1941, citing movies like Casablanca, Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and so on. His point was all the movies that came after that essentially just perfected what had come before. But if you compare a movie from 1930 to one from 1940, it's a huge, huge, difference; not so much from 1940 to 1950. There's a point where that form of pop culture kind of reaches a saturation point, and the changes are a lot more subtle.

 

The Red Balloon is on YouTube as well

 

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." I saw it in school in the mid 1970s. It's on YouTube.

 

VHS always sucked...BUT, I was happy with the machine I upgraded to back then...there was HUGE difference all around.

 

That's some house!

 

These were the little half or three quarter machines the schools had, both the LAUSD and Parkway in St. Louis County. Not quad machines, we weren't that crazy.

We did have a Moviola that as I recall was dual gauge but I never saw any 35mm cinema film on it, only 16mm.

 

Not that I liked it, but I thought that in the '80s the mass-market still liked '50s rock-and-roll. I could be wrong.
As a jazz fan, I listen to music as far back as the '20s.

As a fan of classic movies, I don't care how old it is, as long as it's good. And with the restorations to HD, I'm constantly amazed how good they can look -- like they were filmed yesterday.

Not really. The TV channels were filled with old movies from the '30s. As a film collector, I was buying dozens of b&w films, some from the silent era, on Super 8. The classic comedies were some of Blackhawk Films' biggest sellers. Ask anyone who was a kid in the '70 who The Little Rascals were.

I would have had a long argument with your professor. Did he discount all the silent classics? If something like Keaton's The General is not perfection, than I don't know what is.

There were some really bad movies made in 1930. There were some really bad movies made in 2014.

Maybe it's me, my age, and the time that I have lived in, but in general, not just in the movies, I feel pop culture hasn't changed much since the mid-80s. The decades from the '20s up until the '80s seemed to have their own look and feel. Yes, there have been changes, but the differences of the look and feel of the '90s, '00s, and '10s don't seem much different to me. But like I said, it could be my age -- approaching the half-century mark.

 

Another point I wanted to make about "old" films. I'd probably draw the line at the introduction of the ratings system (G, PG, etc.) Before that = "old". Also, "old" films generally have a different "look" because of the films stock and/or color process (or lack thereof.) B&W films didn't look like real life -- no one sees in B&W. Early color process, like IB Technicolor, didn't look like real-life either. The last IB Technicolor movie made in the U.S. was Godfather II, but by then the colors looked more like real life. (Compare to Singing in the Rain, for example.)