"Authentic" enough to bring Gramps to see

I was just seeing Get Low last night - and marvelling at its' feeling of authentic period-setting, and I started thinking, "Dang, I wanna bring my 75-year-old aunt to see this!"

I remember earlier this year, having come out of (Oscar-nominated0 The White Ribbon and thinking, it was as close as I'll ever come to seeing the world as my grandparents might have seen it in their youth.

Can you name some period-pieces that you feel transcend the film, and actually embody the sense of what it was like to be living back then? Films that - questions of racy storytelling aside - might be something you would bring an elderly person to, to help them re-experience a part of their history?

 

I'm rather keen on revisionist history, not the sort of think most elder folk like to face. That said, when it comes to period atmosphere there's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Also in love with Fanny & Alexander for many of the same reasons.

 

Not a period you can take a relative to, but from everything I've read about life in the 18th Century Barry Lyndon appears to be a remarkably close depiction.

 

A small film from the late '70s called Heartland tells the story of a mother and daughter who joins a gruff Montana rancher in what amounts to the roughest country in America in the early 20th Century. Puts the "rrk!" in "stark". Stars Rip Torn and Conchata Ferrel. I saw it just after my first exposure to the Pacific Northwest territory, and it rang totally true.

 

Maybe a left-field choice, but "A Christmas Story" seems to perfectly evoke what it was like to be a child in the mid 1940's, from people I've talked to who would know. (Ralphie would probably be in or near his seventies now)

 

In order to film interiors in candle light, Kubrick and Zeiss collaborated to make a t/0.7 lens.

Chad

 

Not "left-field" at all. I grew up in Terre Haute IN in the late 50s & 60s, and it feels perfectly authentic.