Framing The Issue

A while back writer Adam-Troy Castro wrote about contemporary film fans (for our purposes, anybody who primarily likes movies made in the last twenty years) who find older movies (for our purposes, films made during the golden age of the Hollywood studio system 1920-1950 though quite a few afterwards fall into this category) hard to watch because they seem slower and edited to a different rhythm than contemporary movies (we’re going to omit discussion of dialog and acting style because hey, the form evolved pretty fast once sound was introduced and some of the early sound era films do sound kind of creaky).

Full disclosure:
I love old movies, have hundreds if not thousands on DVDs in my collection, watch them on YouTube all the time.

Fuller disclosure:
I frequently take advantage of YouTube’s speed settings and watch these old movies and serials at 1.25X or 1.5X normal speed.

Because a lot of ‘em are slow by modern standards.

There are three reasons for this.

Practical:
While that nice big flatscreen TV in your living room may occupy as much of your field of vision as a movie screen in a typical theater, the fact is your mind recognizes it as a smaller and closer image than the movie screen.

Most humans enjoy depth perception via binocular vision and those who don’t frequently learn to interpret other visual clues to give them a way to reliable estimate how far away something is.

Your mind accepts things on a big screen as moving at a different rate from the identical footage show on a TV set.

The best example of this is It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World which appears kind of pokey and lacking comic energy when seen on a TV screen in your home but suddenly zips along at a blinding pace when projected on an 80-ft Cinerama screen with every joke landing perfectly (and this is especially true if you’re unfortunate enough to be watching the pan-and-scan broadcast TV edit and not the restored theatrical print).

Director Stanley Kramer demonstrated he knew how to do comedy on the big big BIG screen with It’s A Madx4 World.  He staged and paced the gags and action so audiences could absorb what they were seeing.

If a car crosses a screen in one second of real time, it impacts an audience far differently on a TV set than on a big screen.

One second to cross eighty feet is blindingly fast -- the audience’s minds process the fact they’re watching a huge image, not a medium size one.

Many of the golden age Hollywood movies were filmed and edited with this sort of pacing in mind.  What seems like a plodding walk across a TV screen is a brisk little jaunt on the big screen.

When old movies were shot, they were shot with this in mind.

Which is why those films often seem a bit slow when depicting action.

Pragmatic:
They made these movies in an assembly line fashion, and while they would do fancy editing and close-ups and insert shots if needed, they preferred to capture as much of a performance in a single take as possible.

There were filmmakers like the notorious William “One Shot” Beaudine who filmed almost exclusively in master shots, but filmmakers during the golden age preferred to capture scenes in as few takes as possible.

This contributes to good performances, the actors can play off each other uninterrupted, creating a more unified flow to the scene.

It also means it can drag some scenes out by a few seconds or even a minute or two.

Modern directors are used to splintering a scene into many, many individual shots and as long as they have the time to edit properly (and actors who can maintain consistent performances over several takes), they can squeeze out a second or two here, a second or two there by intercutting among characters.

Modern audiences are used to this fast paced editing rhythm and frequently grow impatient with the longer takes of older movies.

Padding:
In Hollywood a feature is any film 50 minutes or longer.

Studios -- particularly independent productions and the B-movie crews at larger film companies -- tried to keep their productions as short as possible, but also needed to make sure they hit the required running time. 

There’s an old Charlie Chan movie where he tells his son he’s just received a message asking him to come to Washington DC for an important case.

1. He puts on his hat and leaves the office.

2. He walks out of the building to a taxi.

3. The taxi drives off.

4. The taxi reaches an airport.

5. Chan gets out of the taxi and enters the airport.

6. We dissolve to stock shots of an airliner in flight.

7. Chan leaves the Washington DC airport* and gets in a cab.

8. Brief montage of several stock shots of Washington monuments.

9. The cab stops outside the office where Chan is to report.

10. Chan leaves the cab and goes up the steps to enter the building.

11. In the Washington office, the secretary of the man who summoned Chan announces he’s arrived, and Chan enters the room.

Five minutes of padding to make sure they hit their 50 minute running time.

Moral:
If you want to share your love of old movies, don’t fob them on an unprepared audience.  Let them know a little bit of what to expect.

There’s some great stuff in these old films, but the language of cinema has evolved since then.

© Buzz Dixon

* Just kidding; same airport, different angle.