The 60’s

This week we had group 2 present their movie.  They chose Singing in the Rain, an excellent choice to portray silent film’s transition into sound.  They did a really good job with describing why they went with Singing in the Rain, and definitely filled their presentation with interesting little facts that I didn’t know about the movie at all.  Watching the dancing segments and seeing the skill pulled off in them really made me happy and put a smile on my face, and I think the class overall got a much better impression of musicals as a whole genre.  We talked a little bit more about the collapse of the studio era and how big studios just refused to get with the times, banking everything on happy go lucky films that nobody cared about anymore.  This paved the way for a really good time in movie history, the blockbuster age.  This was also before Hollywood had run out of ideas so the movies were, generally speaking, pretty original.  Movies were finally showing blood, and terrible consequences actually happened for once.  Before, movies would have somebody get shot but there would be no bullet hole, which just didn’t make sense.  In the late sixties, film makers decided to amp up the sex, blood, and violence for audiences.  It was a huge hit, and critics everywhere were either singing praises about these movies from the top of a mountain or they truly hated it.  It perfectly mirrored the sixties as a whole as a divisive decade.

Later in the week, we watched the classic movie Bonnie and Clyde.  This movie was so important to the time period that it came out in because it really had a lot of firsts.  The whole movie had masterful editing, especially the last scene of the movie.  When Clyde looks at Bonnie with fear in his eyes and it cuts back to her and she smiles knowing it was all over, I got chills.  That was such a great moment, almost an entire conversation, told just through editing skills and emotions.  That was so cool to me.  The movie also was wildly successful, and paved the way for more movies like it that people wanted to see.  It was really interesting to me to see how there were a bunch of subplots running through Bonnie and Clyde.  Everything with how CW’s dad acted and treated CW to the revenge subplot that the Texas ranger had was all secondary to the real story, but it also complimented the story perfectly by not getting too in the way of the real story but still adding a little variety to it.  The pacing was excellent too.  You didn’t need to see every bank robbery, because that was all just talked about in order to show the passage of time.  This was really clever screen writing and definitely kept the pace going at a fast clip.  Bonnie and Clyde was a hit back then, but it is looked at as a cinematic masterpiece now, and with good reason.