Old Hollywod: Day 5

Happy New Year!

2023 is going to be a big year in film.

Dune part II, Oppenheimer, and mother effin Barbie!!

Sorry, I'm excited…

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, we had a major release this week.

That being Damien Chazelle’s newest film, Babylon.

For this reason, we are going to take a step back into Old Hollywood.

I know what you're thinking, “Oh this is going to be so boring, a bunch of black-and-white pretentious bullshit”.

To that, I would say this….

You have clearly never opened an email from Please Consume. We kick pretentious in the teeth and tell him to shut the door on the way out.

These old films are more than just history.

They are fun as hell.

Yes, this movie, and yes, it’s this scene.

To close out Old Hollywood week, we wanted to talk about the film that represents a turning point in New Hollywood.

Several days ago we talked about the Hays code, and today we’re talking about the film that helped kill the Hays code. Many historians view Psycho as the film that marks the end of the code's relevance.

How could you have a film that deals with such violence, nudity, and questions of gender/sexuality that is also heralded by critics and audiences alike?

Clearly, it’s not a problem with the film but with the system.

Psycho also represents the start of an entire subgenre… The slasher.

While Halloween solidified it as a genre, Psycho invented it. Often times when you watch movies that are important to what they helped pioneer, they feel quaint and like you’re eating vegetables.

Not Psycho though.

This film still rips just as hard as it did back in 1960.