What "Grandpa Movie" did you just watch?

Only a Qt3er would understand this thread title. Based on what suffices for a “Grandpa Movie” on the apparently sliding scale of our fearless host (@tomchick) , we’ll say anything made in the Twenttieth Century.

In this thread, just let us know what you watched and whether it was a first time or a rewatch, and we’ll kibbitz about it.

I’ll start,. So this evening, I watched Viva Zapata! for the first time, after @ChristienMurawski and I had a brief banter about Brando in an Oscar thread, after which I idly perused his career credits and I realized I had never seen this film.

I’d really like to see that! John McCain consistently cited that one as his favorite movie.

I watched Bridge on the River Kwai a few weeks ago when I was in the middle of my Empire of the Sun game.

I’ll comment in a bit, I am 1/2 way through.

The whole cast is fantastic in that, beyond the sterling Guinness. I am very partial to Jack Hawkins’ performance in that film.

“My God, what have I done”.

Probably the last “Grandpa Movie” I watched was Too Late The Hero (1970) a few years ago. And it wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered watching it as a kid on my black and white TV in my room. I remember it so vividly because I was still living with my parents then, and I had saved up to buy that little TV, and they didn’t know I had it, and watching TV was forbidden after bedtime, so I hid the TV in a cardboard box and covered the box with a blanket, and flipped the blanket up when the all-night movie-a-thon started.

“Too Late The Hero” was one of my first. I was totally enthralled by it as a teen. The enemy stringing loudspeakers up high among the trees to spook out the fugitives and talk them into giving themselves up? Brilliant!

Less so in my 50’s I guess.

Ooh. I’m an Elia Kazan fan, and I somehow missed that one. Thanks.

Watched a bit of a Spencer - Hepburn movie where she was a star tennis player and he was her manager. I was curious about the tennis scenes since Hepburn was touted as hitting the shots. She looked bad. Looked like an actress pretending to be a good tennis player. It’s hard to fake high-quality tennis.

I would mention Seven Samurai, which I watched a week ago, but it’s not a grampa movie. It’s too timeless.

I love to hate William Holden in that movie. What a schmuck. Worse than his character in Sunset Boulevard. Also, while I appreciate David Lean was trying to make a complex statement about cultures that value honor, the whole time I’m watching that movie, I’m thinking, “WTF, Guinness, you are totally off your rocker by any reasonable metric of what a man should do in your situation.”

-Tom

Watched Notorious again last week. Absolutely brilliant and still my favourite Hitchcock.

High five!

North by Northwest, Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo. Whatevs. None of those movies have Ingrid Bergman, Nazis hiding radioactive sand, or Claude Rains’ freaky mother.

-Tom

Exactly. I love how he manages to create such tension just by showing us the crate of Champagne bottles slowly emptying. Simply studying this movie and reading Hitchcock/Truffaut could save you a lot of money on film courses.

Watched The Thin Man for the first time.

That’s certainly one way to adapt Dashiell Hammett. It’s pretty delightful though - I don’t know that you’d be able to do a couple like Nick and Nora today, which is pretty sad all things considered.

Are the sequels any good?

Grandpa movies are most of what I’m watching at the moment, especially since I’m more or less caught up on contemporary releases so I’ve been filling my rental queue with things from the Flophouse recommendations section, and Eliot almost always nominates black and white films. I’m not going to count anything made after I was born, otherwise there would be too many.

So, for the last month:
Wake In Fright: As recommended in the 70s thread.
Adam’s Rib - the legal silliness and open misogyny are pretty hard to stomach at times, but Hepburn being Hepburn is always fun.
Silent Running: Eh, I was pretty underwhelmed to be honest.
Rosemary’s Baby: Classic, nuff said.
Notorious (what a coinkidink!): Left over from my previous Film Noir marathon. Great stuff

Yeah, that’s the part that didn’t hold up for me. As a kid, I was all like, whoah, those are two honorable soldiers on different sides of the war! What a profound movie about duty! But as an adult I was like WTF no way.

Viva Zapata was really well done. The history was accurate and didn’t feel condensed. Brando’s performance was true to Zapata; it didnt feel like he was a statue or an emblem (or, it being Brando, over the top).

The real standout, no surprise, was Quinn in his Oscar-winning performance.

Kazan asks essential questions about power structures, revolutions and questions the ability of any political movement to deliver on the ground social change. I am better for having seen this film.

Exactly! The explosion? Horrible fx…matchsticks? Lame

I’ve only seen the first, strangely. Never seen The Glass Key either…

Ladd and Lake? I should.

Ah, brilliant topic! Grandpa movies are probably at least 75% of my film consumption these days. There’s just so much to catch up on.

August is the best time of the year (TCM’s Summer Under The Stars) so I’ve been picking out some favorite actors and watching movies of theirs I haven’t seen:

Saw a bunch of Myrna Loy pictures: Test Pilot (OK, not great), Wife Vs. Secretary (very funny) and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (very very very funny).

Pretty much all the Sinatra movies I haven’t seen, including Man With The Golden Arm (a little overwrought) and the original Ocean’s 11 (unsurprisingly laid back and enjoyable silliness). The pick of Sinatra movies for me, though, was one I hadn’t even heard of before: Some Came Running, a surprisingly effecting and somewhat tragic movie that looked like it was going to be a rather dull family drama.

Recently they’ve been doing Walter Mathau, so I got to rewatch Charade (absolutely holds up), and saw Onionhead and Ensign Pulver (neither much to write home about), and I’ve got The Sunshine Boys queued up to see tonight.

That movie is a delight. Richard Benjamin is the secret third hilarious actor in that film.