I think the quote you're looking for begins "Go home, Jake."

Could be — I haven’t seen Chinatown in ten or fifteen years. But actually I'm quoting the interviewer.

Well, there's one possible explanation for why more interesting and daring things seem to be going on in TV now than in movies.

I totally don't buy the thesis. This strikes me as totally a product of cherry picking; I'm betting in a careful analysis of *all movies* made in 1955 -- not just the classics we remember now -- versus *all movies* made in 2005, 2005 would utterly blow 1955 out of the water on almost any aesthetic axis (even correcting for the quantity of movies made).

The studio system is alive and well in book publishing. That, I suppose, is why workmanlike, budgetable Star Trek and Star Wars and Buffy novels are so much superior and so much more able to take artistic risks than first novels by "auteur"-type authors for whom " it is the thing — the one thing they’re doing — and it’s got to be a huge success".

Yeah, I think I'm with Ben about cherry picking. More generally, I can't help looking at the photo of David Thomson (and the fact that he was born in 1941, sez Wikipedia) and thinking, "Wait, this guy thinks the movies of his youth are better than the movies they're making today? ~That's astonishing!~" It strikes me as being rather like an assertion that JW Campbell's process of assigning stories to writers was better set up than what we've got now to produce good sf stories.

On a minor and more personal note, I'm always a little bothered by people who say things like "the mainstream of American movies has been terribly disappointing in recent years" -- 'cause I've seen a lot of movies that I've liked a lot in recent years.

(Though I should try to be fair to Thomson by admitting that he does note that he admires Spielberg and so on; he's not saying that all modern movies unequivocally suck.)

The old stuff is good too, of course. I'm just saying that I don't buy one of Thomson's premises, so I'm reluctant to follow him to his conclusion.

To be fair to Thomson, maybe it's just that he likes big-budget Hollywood movies -- at least, that's what he seems to be talking about. The breakdown of the studio system means that the artistic and creative elan is all in indie movies. It may be true that if you are only talking about big budget star vehicles, 1955 Hollywood had a certain advantage over 2005 Hollywood.

But I will put up 28 Days Later against any 1955 horror movie you care to name... takers, anyone? :-)

(IMDB suggests I test my hypothesis on:
Diaboliques, Les (1955)
Night of the Hunter, The (1955)
Three Cases of Murder (1955)
Dementia (1955)
Quatermass Xperiment, The (1955)
Tarantula (1955)
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)
anyone seen 'em?)

The Night of the Hunter is the sole movie directed by Charles Laughton, better known for his acting. It is the story of a misogynistic preacher in the deep South who chases two frightened children down a river; it is kind of allegorical and kind of expressionistic and deeply weird, and was roundly condemned by both critics and general audiences at the time. Decades later it acquired a reputation as an early and interesting experiment in the nonrealist film techniques.

I can't say I particularly like it, but it's interesting. Its lack of follow-up doesn't particularly favor Thomson's point.

I haven't seen any of the rest.

Isn't the problem, though, that standards have changed? We can't watch "Tarantula" with fresh eyes unless we unwatch every other creature film that's come after it. This is part of the problem with Thomson's thesis, as well as with Ben's counter. "Better" isn't a real comparison when you're talking about a medium like film, where technology is so much a part of the product. Film is practically a continuum, which is why we see so many damned remakes. Everyone wants to go back and show how much better they can do it now that they've got the technology.

"Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy," however, is pure genius.

I wouldn't really classify The Night Of The Hunter as a horror movie, but it's one of my all-time favourites. Mitchum's performance is great, the cinematography is stunning and it has this great expressionistic vibe in the way it portrays both small-town idyll and the evil under the surface -- almost Lynchian American Gothic (which is, I guess, why it might get labelled horror). Franz Kafka meets Frank Capra.

I heard 28 Days Later was a bit, well, shite -- but I haven't seen it, so I can't really argue.

Still, those are dodgy comparisons -- apples and oranges -- because NotH was more Laughton's art-house baby than a throwaway star vehicle for Mitchum. A better B-movie against blockbuster comparison, I'd think, might be The Haunting (1963) versus The Haunting (1999), the former subtle and great, the latter crude and complete bollocks. That's a good example of how improvements in technology don't neccessarily give more recent films an advantage in terms of standards.

But then again, that could just be cherry picking. I'm wary of the "movies were better in the old days" argument too.

28 Days Later was fucking brilliant, unless you’re a hard-core George Romero fan, in which case it was derivative tripe produced by outsiders with no understanding of the zombie genre.

Well... I do think Romero's first two are stonkingly good, but the third just didn't do it for me.

Shaun Of The Dead, though. Now there's a great zombie movie!

... isn't it generally believed that the fifties were crap for movies, because the great film-making set-up from the late thirties had collapsed during the war, and the prosperity/demand totally outstripped the supply?
I mean, the point of B movies wasn't that they were bad, it's that they were cheap and quick (and therefore formulaic). Studios now don't generally bother to make cheap and quick movies, as they don't need to scramble to put a new movie into the theater every week. So these cheap, quick movies weren't particularly scrutinized by the studios, because there wasn't time and it wasn't worth the effort. Now, looking back, these bad, formulaic movies also have things in them that it's hard to believe the studio would let through, and in part it's because of the system he's talking about. Now the 'low-budget' movies are still studio movies, cost millions of dollars, and are studio-scrutinized and sanitized nearly as much as big-budget movies. I think that's what he's on about.
And, of course, I think he's right, for all the cherry-picking, but then I have little use for his 'Golden Age' between Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown. Honestly, if I had to pick five years of film to concentrate my viewing on, I would far rather pick something centering on 1940 or so, for all the irrelevance and silliness.
Thanks,
-V.

So no “2001,” no “Butch Cassidy,” no “Godfather,” no “Chinatown,” no “Clockwork Orange,” no “Conversation,” no “Exorcist,” no “Graduate,” no “In the Heat of the Night,” no “Lion in Winter,” no “Patton,” no “Wild Bunch,” no “Young Frankenstein?”

I’m not saying that these are my favorite films or even that I like all of them, but I think Thomson’s on to something about the influence of that period. Especially if you extend it as far as “Star Wars” and “Apocalypse Now.”

I've been wondering if there's not something going in that 60s-70s period that's as much to do with developments of the craft in terms of acting styles and film stock, pushing the movies towards more variance of tone. By the late 60s method acting seems to be pretty much assimilated into the mainstream, so from Brando and Dean on you end up with edgier performers like Nicholson and Hopper. Same with the clear visual developments in film stock that make for less of the technicolour over-saturation, making a much "colder" feel possible. Maybe that period could be seen as Hollywood's brief love affair with a bleaker, darker, uglier style before it settled back into high-gloss visuals and more conventional stars.

Take the Western, for example... from Shane to The Wild Bunch to The Unforgiven. All three are great Westerns but I've always thought The Unforgiven was less revolutionary than it's made out to be. Gritty? Grim? It's nowhere near as grim and gritty as The Wild Bunch, I'd say, but that's as much to do with the film stock giving it that polished Hollywood sheen as anything else... that and the acting styles of Eastwood and Hackman, exuding "Hollywood star presence", where William Holden in The Wild Bunch was perfectly cast precisely because he'd passed his peak period of stardom, because he'd lost that glamour.

I guess that's what I'm wondering... if you can look at that 60s-70s period as one when a lot of movies were being made without the surfeit of glamour that studios before and after have tended to rely on to draw audiences.

Addendum: The much-lamented effect of Spielberg and Lucas on Hollywood movies from Star Wars on, could maybe be seen in that context -- as the return of glamour, with a vengeance.