Favorite films set in early 1900s America

OUR TOWN

KINGS ROW

I'm very fond of Scorsese's Age of Innocence. It's beautifully cast and the settings show a range of New York homes and places of work. The costumes and music support the period . It's surprising to me that a film maker with such a personal vision of the New York of his childhood could take on the New York of Edith Wharton's novel with such verve.

The Untouchables

1900

The Roaring Twenties

Post-WWI is a different era IMHO

I call this sub-genre the "car western". It became especially notable in the revisionist 1960s. I don't recall if you actually see a car in Butch Cassidy -- the encroaching modern world is symbolized in that by the bicycle salesman. There is a car in Wayne's Big Jake and IIRC in The Good Guys and The Bad Guys.

The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944)
Hester Street (1975)
Sacco & Vanzetti (1971) <----Different ear?
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

The Magnificent Ambersons

I thought of you - and what you wrote that I've excerpted above - while reading this from an op/ed in a VA newspaper this morning:

"For me to enjoy a movie, it is important – almost a requirement – that the characters I am invited to identify with behave in a way that I respect. If possible, admire. As I’ve gotten older, I have found it less and less tolerable to have a protagonist who acts like a fool, or a jerk, or a scoundrel."

"...even when they behaved badly, the people in the older movies always seemed to be operating in some kind of a moral framework...And even if the characters didn’t care about such ideals, the viewpoint of the movies themselves expressed an allegiance to an ideal...in the movies of recent decades, the concern for any such ideals has greatly diminished."

Now, I'm sure the existence of the Production Code - which had in addition to its specific directives a catch-all warning about "lowering, degrading or offending public morals," or words to that effect - under the enforcement of Joe Breen's office of the PCA had a great deal to do with that. And I must acknowledge in passing that a number of films I admire most - Double Indemnity, All About Eve, Sweet Smell Of Success, Chinatown and Network among them - are darkly pessimistic or at the very least bitterly cynical examinations of the worst of human nature, although I must also add that this isn't exclusively the case, and that those I've listed can easily be taken as cautionary tales.

I'm afraid I'm not well-enough versed in the overall character of films made in the last dozen or so years to comment with any authority, but I can say that too many that I've seen made since the turn of the century reflected a shallowly simplistic, prevail-at-any-cost, "winners/losers" binary that began putting me off new films in general, and which has in turn both fueled and been fed by a similar social dynamic during roughly the same period, in a "vicious cycle" that imposes a sort of tribalism inexorably infecting most aspects of life.

It could be argued that the other side of the coin is that the periods those earlier films depicted, as well as that in which they were made, were ones marked by what most would now consider to be rampant injustice, rarely rearing its ugly head therein beyond a complacently shrugging acceptance of "the way things are." It's no doubt one of the costs of social progression and conscience that some of the good goes out the window with the bad. But it could just as easily be asserted that each of those films we've cited made aspirational suggestions, in these cases about the strength and forbearance of women, through their gentle and even satiric observations. Interesting, isn't it, that they all have that in common?

Sorry for getting all "meta." It happens sometimes on weekends.