Tonight on TCM, the prime time lineup features four movies with Emma Thompson. Since Emma didn’t arrive on the movie making scene until well after the Golden Age of Hollywood, the movies being shown are slightly newer. In fact, each of the movies was made in the nineties. To be specific, Much Ado about Nothing (1993), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Impromptu (1991), and Remains of the Day (1993). The oldest, Impromptu, places us a solid 25 years back while the most recent, Sense and Sensibility, just barely sneaks past the two decade mark at 21 years old. Now the name of the channel is Turner Classic Movies and, more than once, I’ve gotten into conversations here and elsewhere about what exactly defines a classic movie. It’s a subject of which I have never grown tired but now I’d like to throw aside age requirements and delve into the area of the instant classic. Do they exist or is that just a meaningless moniker? And if they do, do any of the four movies airing tonight fit that category? If not, what movies from the nineties do? And the aughts? And today?
Everyone has a rough idea of what the Golden Age of Hollywood represents. The years may vary a little bit but we all know that, wherever we decide to start it or end it, the height of it occupies the thirties, forties, and fifties. The teens and twenties are the Silent Period, the aughts represent the first forays into real story telling and before that is the nickelodeon era. The sixties is when the studio influence started to fade and non-American/British movies, especially from France and Japan, really started to make an impact. And, of course, the seventies saw the rise of the great post-studio era American directors like Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and others. The eighties on is still roughly considered (and I use the word “roughly”, um, roughly) new. That is, a movie released in 1986 might still feel new enough to not be a classic yet. It’s odd because in 1986, any movie released in 1956 would have been. The reason, one of many I think, is that from the late seventies on we’ve been in the same era, again roughly speaking. Call it the blockbuster era, or the second era of studio dominance, or whatever you like but it’s an era in which movies made thirty years ago don’t feel all that different than movies made today. Take Goodfellas from 1990. Watch that movie with someone who has never seen it and is unfamiliar with the actors (this is hypothetical, I realize this person probably doesn’t exist), let them know it’s a period piece, which it is (it took place in the past from the time of its making), and then ask them when it was made and they may answer, “I don’t know, last year?” Show them It Happened One Night and you’re likely to get an entirely different answer.
In fact, period pieces are good movies to use for this kind of thing because they don’t contain obvious clues as to when they were made, especially if the filmmakers paid particular attention to period detail, unlike many period films of the sixties in which no matter when they took place, everyone had mod hairstyles. A contemporary movie, on the other hand, say from the mid-nineties, will date itself with ancient looking computer and phone technology. But something like The English Patient, which takes place quite a few decades back in time anyway and doesn’t contain any now-suspect CGI, like, say, Titanic, won’t reveal its year of making unless the viewer either knows the movie or looks it up on IMDB. Some young kid unfamiliar with the actors might not think it any older than the latest movies in the theater today. As such, I think we’re inclined to look at movies made from the eighties on as, in a way, still being new movies, even if they’re thirty years old.
Due to this strange phenomenon, in which decades old movies still don’t feel old enough, I think the term “classic” has to be looked at two different ways. One way, the way we’re used to, should be based solely on age. Anything over 20 to 25 years, for instance, regardless of how we feel about it, has achieved “classic” status. But what about other movies, movies even newer? Is there such a thing as an instant classic? I asked that question at the top of this piece about the four movies playing tonight and whether it applied to them and I have the answer for at least one of them, The Remains of the Day, and that answer is “yes.” When I saw The Remains of the Day in 1993 I felt it was a movie that was going to stand the test of time. I see several movies each year that I feel that way about, even if I’m not crazy for them. I might still see them and think this one is going to be around a long time. The Remains of the Day was one of those movies and when I watched it for the third or fourth time a couple of years ago, I felt it had lost none of its luster. And so seeing The Remains of the Day on the schedule seems perfectly normal to me, both due to the age of the movie and its status as an instant classic.
I don’t think the day will soon come when TCM starts regularly airing new releases from the same year but it will keep inching the years up for classic status. I still remember back in the nineties when TCM aired Norma Rae. It was made in 1979 and at the time was only about 19 years old. I thought it was odd they were airing such a new movie. I worried that they were going to start showing movies from mainly the seventies and the eighties. That never happened. As for Norma Rae, now it seems a natural. Why wouldn’t they air it? It’s over 35 years old. I fully expect to see movies made and released this year on TCM in twenty years. They will still seem new while Goodfellas, which will be 45 years old, might be a regular slot in the TCM lineup. Along with all the classics from the seventies and before. I also strongly suspect TCM will stick to the Golden Era most of the time because its a vital part of cinema history with movies that other channels just aren’t showing. I further suspect that the newer movies, the ones coming in around twenty or so years old, will more often than not fall into the Instant Classic category. Or maybe TCM will have morphed into something completely different than a cable channel or website that we can’t even understand now because the technology hasn’t arrived yet. One thing’s for sure: As long as there are movies, the classics will always have a home at TCM.