The Period Piece Period

These days they're all but absent, aside from the work of auteurs who can do whatever they want, like Tarantino, PT Anderson, HBO, and Spielberg, but 40 years ago there was an abundance of movies set decades earlier, back to the days of prohibition, swing, racism, and cigarette holders. Why? What was the appeal? Was it because all that old furniture--none of it disposalble pre-fab stuff like we have today-- was still around, and the costume storage was still accessible in a still undead studio system?  It perhaps says more about memory and the human need to evolve at least in clothing and car design if not actually as a country to look back to those wild carefree days. It's more than nostalgia, the 70s for the 30s just as the 90s has for the 70s; it's like a haunted decade ransacking its grandmothers' attic to find its voice before its censorious 50s mom got home.


Confession - I've never been a fan of period pieces - something about the use of old clothes I find depressing. I have a weird sense of 'virtual smell' with movies, and in period pieces, unless they're really well done, I can smell that old clothes thrift store smell, and remember the frustration that nothing vintage ever fits me and lord I have tried and the trying has left me feeling locked out of history. And other things not to like - being set in the 20s-30s is an excuse for a lot of actors to get lazy, to rely on schtick, on Vaudeville patter that was corny even then. And I hate those ragtime-era plaids, those ornate feathered hairdos, though the 1900s-20s has a different flavor than the 30s, a worse flavor or at least I used to think so.

But the 70s' infatuation with the Depression, likely borne from the successes of BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE STING, an economic recession, and the popularity of cocaine and Vaudeville recycling variety TV shows, is a big exception to my overall period malaise. Why? Maybe because the 70s were the first overly permissive 'anything goes' decade since the Depression, since the crash and production code. If you doubt, just realize how much more liberated I was as a kid than I am now, even as an adult. There are only so many cigarettes I can smoke in my own apartment before I feel the weight of the world crush me with its the heft of its snooty nanny-state rejection.

If you want proof of how great the 70s were, just realize that the 70s are still in fashion in Europe and South America. They never left. They were too smart to just go all pouffy shoulders and crazy 80s hair just because the Brits on MTV were doing it. They knew the 70s was the best. Since they never went 80s they didn't have to go all grunge in the 90s to try and forget them. In fact, in NYC there was a bit of a jazz age revival in the loungecore scene, which was quickly overrun by swing dancing, like the goddamn 40s were happening all over again.

The 1970s were uniquely liberated thanks to drugs, wife-swapping, est, and a post-hippie middle class. As a kid therein I became a bit enamored with the older period depicted in the popular films I was never allowed to see. I couldn't even stay up to the end of most movies we saw on evening TV as a family as they ended at 11 and my bedtime was 10. It left me scarred and angry but also created a sense that films were mystical things --I often dreamed endings far wilder than any real life film could provide. Meanwhile I regularly marveled at the newspaper ads and TV commercials for movies that were coming through town. So I was very aware of certain styles and some I did not care for, like those damn flapper hats that hid all the hair worse than a nun (even as a kid I loved beautiful hair).

The Fortune

The disco look of glam was a direct relative of the 20s art deco look, the 30s films of night clubs with their white decor, endless floorshows, whiskey pints wrapped in cloth napkins and delivered under the table instead of on it by waiters during prohibition finding a perfect collary to the selling and doing of lines of coke along the disco club tables, as dancers paused for quick snorts in the laps of guys in leisure suits, their sweat electric, their skin shiny with reptilian slimes of desire, cologne and dance floor sex oozing from inside their unporous open-chested polyester shirts. Doing a period film was the perfect excuse to conjure the class divides of the great depression, the tuxedoes and glamorous gowns Hollywood dress designers still knew how to make, and maybe even had made back in the day, and maybe still had in storage deep in the wardrobes of Paramount.

But there's a deeper flow than mere fashion, the 30s/70s times, a 40 year gap, so in the 1930s they loved films set in the 1890s, ala the gay 90s, wherein the folks was gay, and not in a Depression. But hindsight makes the strait-jacket of production codes sweet by comparison.






A spate of period piece gangster films came out in the late 60s, early 70s and while BONNIE AND CLYDE might be thought of as the most influential. Several of Roger Corman's gangster films predate it, such as his ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE which came out the year before, in 1967. Either way a flood of Corman product followed, too vast to list all of here, as well as major label contributions like DILLINGER.





Actions of the Great Depression, true stories not just of mobsters but of legendary hobos, tortured artists, social activists, writers. and chicanerous mountebanks:







In the interest of keeping it fresh, there was also going farther back, to the turn of the century and the era of Ragtime. When the film RAGTIME came out there was a lot of hooplah not least for Jimmy Cagney's return to acting (he plays a racist fire chief who sets off a riot). A biopic of Scott Joplin predates it, as does other films set in the era (one of my least favorite as I despise those plaid suits the men wear, as on the poster for HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK and GREASER'S PALACE (below). Coppola also visits the era for sections of GODFATHER 2. 



By the 1980s, with the inability of XANADU to recreate a yen for 40s swing, and the inability of 1941, UNDER THE RAINBOW, AT LONG LAST LOVE, NEW YORK NEW YORK or HEAVEN'S GATE to turn a profit, period pieces were out.


If anyone had any doubts about that, CITY HEAT in 1984 was the bomb icing on the cake. The cake itself was a huge loss of cash, time, and good will sunk into Coppola's THE COTTON CLUB.  The news covered the disastrous feud between producer Robert Evans and Coppola when the film went over budget ond shooting was endlessly delayed and even half the people working on it were badmouthing it. But I think Evans was right. Coppola ended up with final cut and based on what Evans said about working with Coppola on the first GODFATHER film we can assume what he objected to was Coppola's overediting. The big crosscut killings in GODFATHER (between all the murder's and his nephew's christening) worked because there had been so much slow ominous build-up, i.e. Evans made Coppola lengthen the shots and slow parts down so the speedy parts would have contrast. Even by GODFATHER 2 it was getting cliche'd to have big violent scene crosscuts with a musical or ceremonial performance, and that's all COTTON is. So as far as we were concerned, that kind of thing was over - period.