The Period Piece Period

These days they're all but absent, aside from the work of auteurs who can do whatever they want, like Tarantino, PT Anderson, HBO, and Spielberg, but 40 years ago there was an abundance of movies set 40 years before that, in the days of prohibition, swing, racism, and cigarette holders.

Why? What was the appeal?

Was it because all that old art deco furniture--none of it disposable pre-fab stuff like we have today-- was still up in props, and the costumes merely mothballed in a still-undead studio system?  It perhaps says more about memory and the human need to evolve (in clothing and car design if not social progress) to look back to those wild carefree days. It's more than nostalgia in the 70s for the 30s, the way the 90s has it for the 70s; it's like a haunted decade ransacking its grandmothers' attic to find its voice before its censorious 50s mom got home.

Confession - I've never been a fan of period pieces - something about the use of old clothes I find depressing. I have a weird sense of 'virtual smell' with movies, and in period pieces, I get a sorrowful whiff of thrift store mustiness, and I feel trace resentment  because nothing vintage ever fits me and lord I have tried and the trying has left me feeling locked out of history. Also, it's an excuse for a lot of actors to get lazy, to rely on schtick, on Vaudeville patter that was corny even then. And I hate those ragtime-era plaids, those ornate feathered hairdos.

But the 70s' infatuation with the post-WWI, pre-WWII modern era, likely borne from the successes of BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE STING, an economic recession, and the popularity of cocaine and Vaudeville recycling variety TV shows, is a big exception to my overall period malaise. Why? Maybe because the 70s were the first overly permissive 'anything goes' decade since the Depression, since the crash and production code. Americans were much more liberated when I was as a kid than we are now. There are only so many cigarettes I can smoke in my own apartment before I feel the weight of the world crush me with its the heft of its snooty nanny-state rejection.

If you want proof of how great the 70s were, just realize that the 70s are still in fashion in Europe and South America. Since they never went 80s they didn't have to go all grunge in the 90s to try and forget them. In fact, in NYC there was a bit of a jazz age revival in the loungecore scene in the late 90s, which I was a part of with my gnatty tux jacket and feather boa and fearful darting eyes. Holla if you went to Lansky's or Windows on the World, Fancy and Moby on the turntables, before swing dancers and sneak attacks killed it like the goddamn 40s were happening all over again.

The 1970s were uniquely liberated thanks to drugs, wife-swapping, est, and a post-hippie middle class. As a kid therein I became a bit enamored with the older period depicted in the popular films I was never allowed to see. I couldn't even stay up to the end of most movies we saw on evening TV as a family as they ended at 11 and my bedtime was 10. It left me scarred and angry but also created a sense that films were mystical things --I often dreamed endings far wilder than any real life film could provide. Meanwhile I regularly marveled at the newspaper ads and TV commercials for movies that were coming through town. So I was very aware of certain styles and some I did not care for, like those damn flapper hats that hid all the hair worse than a nun (even as a kid I loved beautiful hair).

The Fortune

The disco look of glam was a direct relative of the art deco era, the speakeasies with their segregated floorshows, whiskey pints wrapped in cloth napkins and delivered under the finding a perfect collary to the selling and doing of lines of coke along the disco club tables, as dancers paused for quick snorts in the laps of guys in leisure suits, their sweat electric, their skin shiny with reptilian slimes of desire, cologne and dance floor sex oozing from inside their unporous open-chested polyester shirts. Doing a period film was the perfect excuse to conjure the class divides of the Depression, the tuxedos and glamorous gowns Hollywood dress designers still knew how to make, and maybe even had made back in the day, and maybe still had in storage deep in the wardrobes of Paramount.

But there's a deeper flow than mere fashion, the 30s/70s times, a 40 year gap, so in the 1930s they loved films set in the 1890s, ala the gay 90s, wherein the folks was gay, and not in a Depression. But hindsight makes the strait-jacket of production codes sweet by comparison.

A spate of period piece gangster films came out in the late 60s-early 70s and while BONNIE AND CLYDE might be thought of as the most influential, several of Roger Corman's gangster films predate it, such as his ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE which came out the year before, in 1967. Either way, a flood of Corman product followed, too vast to list all of here, as well as major label contributions like DILLINGER.

The Great Depression became a chance for heroism and stickin' it to the man. There were true stories not just of mobsters but of legendary hobos, tortured artists, social activists, writer, and mountebanks. McCarthyism was gone and we could examine the interest in communism in the 30s as being understandable. After all, in the Depression it seemed clear capitalism couldn't pull itself out of its own hole. And it couldn't. Imagine if the tea party were around back then, stopping all FDR's plans for the New Deal because of its resemblance to socialism and big government! We'd be a third world country by now!

In the interest of keeping it fresh, there was also going farther back, to the turn of the century and the era of Ragtime. When the film RAGTIME came out there was a lot of hooplah not least for Jimmy Cagney's return to acting (he plays a racist fire chief). A biopic of Scott Joplin predates it, as do other films set in this era. Coppola also visits the era for sections of GODFATHER 2, but he avoided the mistake of those awful checkered suits.

By the 1980s, with the inability of XANADU to recreate a yen for 40s swing, and the inability of 1941, UNDER THE RAINBOW, AT LONG LAST LOVE, NEW YORK NEW YORK or HEAVEN'S GATE to turn a profit, period pieces were out.

If anyone had any doubts about that, CITY HEAT in 1984 was the bomb icing on the cake. The cake itself was a huge loss of cash, time, and good will sunk into Coppola's THE COTTON CLUB.  The news covered the disastrous feud between producer Robert Evans and Coppola when the film went over budget and shooting was endlessly delayed and even half the people working on it were badmouthing it. But I think Evans was right. Coppola ended up with final cut and based on what Evans said about working with Coppola on the first GODFATHER film we can assume what he objected to was Coppola's insecurity-besmacked over-editing. The big crosscut killings in GODFATHER (between all the murder's and his nephew's christening) worked because there had been so much slow ominous build-up, i.e. Evans made Coppola lengthen the shots and slow parts down so the speedy parts would have contrast. Even by GODFATHER 2 it was getting cliche'd to have big violent scene crosscuts with a musical or ceremonial performance, and that's all COTTON is. So as far as we were concerned, that kind of thing was over - period.

Short List

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE - 1967

BONNIE AND CLYDE - 1968

THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY? - 1969

HELLO, DOLLY - 1969
A BULLET FOR PRETTY BOY - 1970

THE BOYFRIEND - 1971

 LADY SINGS THE BLUES - 1972

CABARET - 1972

GODFATHER - 1972

GREASER'S PALACE - 1972

THIEVES LIKE US - 1973

THE WAY WE WERE - 1973

THE STING - 1973

NEW YORK NEW YORK - 1973

PAPER MOON - 1973

 CHINATOWN - 1974

THE FRONT PAGE - 1974

GODFATHER PART II - 1974

THE GREAT GATSBY - 1974
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS - 1974

CAPONE - 1975

 DAY OF THE LOCUST - 1975

THE FORTUNE - 1975
LUCKY LADY - 1975

AT LONG LAST LOVE - 1975

HEARTS OF THE WEST - 1975

THE WILD PARTY - 1975

 THE RITZ - 1976

THE LAST TYCOON - 1976

BUGSY MALONE - 1976

HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK - 1976

WC FIELDS AND ME - 1976
LEADBELLY - 1976
BOUND FOR GLORY - 1976

SCOTT JOPLIN - 1977

JULIA - 1977

THE BETSY - 1978
DEATH ON THE NILE - 1978

1941 - 1979
AGATHA - 1979

LITTLE MISS MARKER - 1980

UNDER THE RAINBOW - 1981

POSTMAN RINGS TWICE - 1981

CANNERY ROW - 1981
REDS - 1981

MOMMY DEAREST - 1981

HAMMETT - 1982

VICTOR / VICTORIA - 1982

RAGTIME - 1982
EVIL UNDER THE SUN - 1982

FRANCES - 1982

UNDER THE VOLCANO - 1984

CITY HEAT -  1984 

COTTON  CLUB, THE - 1984

If I'm missing any, let me know... I deliberately left out war movies and westerns to not cloud the issue -but as long as there are tommy guns, fedoras, cigarette holders, lame dresses, forgotten men, flappers, and/or antique cars, it's here -- I think.