What do you think is the best and worst thing about the Golden age of Hollywood?

Best thing - Every movie had a plot. It might not have worked but it WAS a plot. Now all (Ok, most) the movie plots are is "Good guy good, bad guy bad. And here's some nifty FX to wow you and distract you from the fact that this movie is a pile of feces."

Worst thing - The racism would be the knee jerk reaction. I was watching Hitchcock's Lifeboat. Tallulah Bankhead's character causally calls the Black survivor "Charcoal". Nice, huh? But racism was everywhere. Another was the promotion of features. Watching a lot of classics, I often find a great movie that I've never heard of. Why, from the start, the studios though the was the B feature. Advertisers ignored it, Theater owners ignored it, critics ignored it and audiences ignored it. It was like the studio heads told you what was good and what was bad.

I think you have pretty much nailed it. I have been lately watching a lot of the retrospectively named film noir from the '30s through the '50s and a lot of "B" crime movies that border on noir and am having such a great time with them.

As for modern movies, so many of them have pre-tested, pre-sold plots such as the Road Trip , the Sports Movie, famous actor comes down with a disease, the next in the Superhero saga, and so on. I am speaking very broadly and there are, of course, creative modern films but you have to search them out. You can't (as you could as late as the 1960s) just say, "I'm going to the movies tonight" and expect to find an entertaining film without even checking first on what's playing.

I've given the matter of "the best" some thought since the thread first appeared, considering how to characterize the artistic creativity and craftsmanship of the era, and it keeps coming down to one word: talent.

While it may sound not only overly simplistic but dismissive of those who've come along since, the case can easily be made that the period represented the most astonishing confluence and concentration of extraordinary talents that have ever existed: truly one-of-a-kind artists among writers, directors, cinematographers, composers, designers of all disciplines and uniquely gifted and larger-than-life actors, singers and dancers, of whom it's been commonly said, "We'll never see their like again." It may have been just happy coincidence that so many responsible for such a rich collection of entertainment all happened to be living at the same time, working with one another when the industry most suited to exhibiting their abilities was developing and maturing. Whatever it was, those of us who've lived through any part of it, along with anyone now or in the future who cares to avail themselves of this deep, broad and enduring reservoir of accomplishment, are the beneficiaries.   

To be fair, it might be that there are currently living just as many able and unique individuals, and it's merely changing tastes, or perhaps absence of vision, or even focus-group-driven cynicism that's taken the place of the once-dominant studio system that nurtured, utilized and showcased such talents, standing in the way of yet another golden age in which they could come to the fore. And for all I know, that new age could blossom at any time. But so far, it's been seen only once.

The worst? Naivete, if I had to sum it up in one word. It was partly an aspect of a burgeoning modern society in which there remained certain things that simply weren't discussed or acknowledged, or were at best swept under the rug: everything from basic facts of life to the racism cited by TheGoodMan19 and marianne48. And during the 20-year period from 1934 to 1954, that naivete was most aggressively institutionalized in the form of the Production Code Administration office as overseen by Joe Breen, under whose dictatorial powers certain topics were referenced only obliquely and others not at all, and right and virtue always triumphed, if only by requisite last-reel punishments meted out for crimes, misdeeds or so-called moral failings. Maybe "pretense" is an even more applicable word than "naivete;" under the PCA, an idealistic bill of goods was sold about a world that never really existed. 

But even this had its upside, as film makers found creatively subversive workarounds by which mature topics and harsher realities could be artistically portrayed, and many of those workarounds provided examples of sparkling dialogue, aesthetic representations and elegantly economical thematic symbolism that are now considered hallmarks of the era.

So there. And how I wish I could master that kind of economy of expression.                     

 

Best Thing: The studio backlot production/star recruitment system. The concentration of production in one place like a factory is what characterizes Hollywood the most IMO. Everything being in-house from screenwriting to casting to composing, even with their own cartoon divisions.


Worst Thing: The monopoly-like stranglehold on film production which eventually destroyed homegrown film in various countries where Hollywood had distribution. The sorry state of Western film is unquestionably a result of this loss of diversity and artistic freedom.

The movies were made