Parents are a crafty bunch.
For the first five or ten years of your life, culturally, they own your ass. As soon as you’re done with your sing-a-long cassettes, and Sesame Street has been brought to you by every letter in the alphabet (and by the number 3), it begins. Before you know it you’re nine years old, you love The White Album, you’ve heard Bette Midler’s Greatest Hits 47 times, and between Bewitched marathons (Dick York? Dick Sargent? Fuck ‘em both) and old episodes of Star Trek on Betamax, you’re still trying to figure out why a ‘59 Studebaker is the best car ever.
Then you hit your teen years, and you rebel against everything. You listen to anything with a “Parental Advisory” sticker, sneak into R-rated movies; anything your parents like is officially labeled “crap”. All of a sudden, you’re twenty-five. You’re writing Old School Week articles for Sexy Gypsy, and you find yourself thanking your parents for forcing you to learn the names of the giants upon whose shoulders your entire culture is standing.
Crafty, I tell you.
My parents had a rule when I was young. For every new movie that I watched, I had to watch an old movie too. Which meant if I wanted to watch Jurassic Park, I had to watch Casablanca to get to it. I resented the hell out of that rule, until I saw films like The Maltese Falcon, Psycho, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. After that, I was all over the old school, and these are a few of my favorites.

Rope

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Year: 1948
Cast: James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger
It’s no secret that Hitchcock was/is the master of suspense. But with The Birds, Vertigo, and Psycho, the suspense is based on implied violence, terrified actors, and a tense soundtrack. With Rope, the tension is there in spades, but it’s totally based on situational dialog. The mixture of suspense with Dostoevskian/Nietzschian philosophies on justice boggled my innocent little mind. This is why I fell in love with Hitchcock films.
Same Shit, Different Day: Murder By Numbers

Touch of Evil

Director: Orson Welles
Year: 1958
Cast: Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh
According to my dad, Orson Welles was the Quentin Tarantino of his day. I agree. The guy was a little off, and after Citizen Kane, he did a lot of weird crap (including his War of the Worlds hoax broadcast). But when I watched Touch of Evil, I knew Welles was not fucking around. Once I got over Heston’s bad Mexican accent, and the fact that Orson Welles ate Citizen Kane and his sled, i was more than impressed. From the first long tracking shot that would make Joe Wright feel like a bitch, Welles’ simple yet expert and genius filmmaking allows the characters to be completely and engagingly flushed out. Whether you’re a film buff or not, everyone should see this film.
Same Shit, Different Day: L.A. Confidential, Training Day

Carnival of Souls

Director: Herk Harvey
Year: 1962
Cast: Candace Hilligoss
The problem with old school horror films is that they tend to be…laughable. Especially if it’s black and white, the over acting and archaic special effects are lost on a generation that’s watching ghosts and ghouls in 3-D IMAX. But for open-minded youngsters such as myself, this one was food for thought. We always think that the crazy shit we see in movies is new; that the concepts weren’t even considered forty years ago. When I saw this I realized that, technology aside, so much of what we watch now has already been on screen at some point. The surrealistic cinematography is, at the very least, worthy of David Lynch’s early work. And the ending, while not as interesting, does make Shyamalan look even more unoriginal (I HATE that I can’t spoil a movie from the ‘60’s for you people…stupid conscience).
Same Shit, Different Day: The Sixth Sense, Mulholland Drive

Bunny Lake is Missing

Director: Otto Preminger
Year: 1965
Cast: Laurence Olivier, Carol Lynley, Keir Dullea
When I saw this film, I didn’t know who Preminger was. I wasn’t 100% on who Olivier was either, but I kinda got the feeling it was a departure for him, so I picked it up. Not only was I impressed by his role, but I was struck by the fact that it wasn’t the most impressive part of the film. Granted, a slow, downward spiral of emotion and personal sanity wasn’t pulled off as well in 1965, but the attempt in such an early era for film is commendable. Not many people can be crazy, and still keep up with Olivier’s acting, but Lynley pulled it off. If I didn’t expect the ending in the nineties, I’m willing to bet it made a lot of beatnik heads explode.
Same Shit, Different Day: Session 9, The Machinist

Straw Dogs

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Year: 1971
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan
I know that this one doesn’t exactly fit with the others. I also know that, as far as Peckinpah films, The Getaway is the standard (at least for Tarantino). But as violent and crazy and McQueen’s epic is, Straw Dogs is much more complex and morally vague to me. He may be a funny old Focker now, but back in the day, Hoffman definitely fit the part of an easy target for bullying. His character goes beyond sympathetic, and you actually pity him the way you pity a three-legged dog. The disconnect with him is so bad in the first half that, in probably the most graphic mainstream cinema rape scene up to that point, there’s a microscopic voice in your head asking if his wife isn’t smiling a little, happy to finally have a real man. This actually makes the crime that much more horrendous. Peckinpah’s style is usually graphic and in-your-face, but this one was so layered and ambiguous, it really stuck with me.
Same Shit, Different Day Panic Room, Irreversible

HONORABLE MENTIONS

• The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah, 1972)
• The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
• Strait-Jacket (William Castle, 1964)
• The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)
• Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974)
• The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
• Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
• Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
• Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan, 1950)
• The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974)

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