Off the top of my head, here’s my list of dramas, and a couple of documentaries, that capture eras long since expired. It’s a rather New York and California-dominated list, but these films are time capsules not so much of cities that have undergone striking transformations in the last 45 years, but of American liberal worldviews and attitudes that have transformed since the early 1960s:
1. North By Northwest and Vertigo: Alfred Hitchock’s twin late-‘50s classics, showing a Manhattan and San Francisco, respectively, from the late 1950s that would both be utterly upended by liberalism in the coming decades. The lush North By Northwest, with its combination of New York City, the classic 20th Century Limited, giant ‘50s cars and Cary Grant at his peak is a particularly memorable time machine.
2. Gimme Shelter: Perhaps even more than Woodstock, this film captures the primitive ethos of the late 1960s like no other. And the dialogue has a uniquely McLuhan-esque ring to it, utterly capturing the stilted “whoa, heavy, bummer, man” jargon of the period. Try to tune out the rock music and just listen to dialogue next time you watch to see what I mean.
3. FM: The sunny, groovy side of ’70s Los Angeles and its peaceful easy feelin’ music, even as the barbarians of punk rock were waiting at the gate.
3. Annie Hall and Taxi Driver: the yin and yang of New York in the mid-1970s. Woody’s film in particular is one of the quintessential mid-1970s moments; Scorsese’s spot lights the dark underbelly of Manhattan during the Lindsay years, and Time Square at its nadir, before Rudy Giuliani revitalized the city. At least for a time.
4. The Last Days of Disco: Whit Stillman’s film, set in the waning days of disco and a very different Manhattan of the early 1980s than the Brooklyn depicted in Saturday Night Fever.
5. Wall Street: Manhattan’s financial world in the mid-1980s, or at least how we all imagined it to be.
6. Law & Order: The First Year: As Ed Koch famously said when he was voted out of office in 1989, “the people threw me out, and now the people must be punished.” Long before it became a liberal soap opera, this TV show in its earliest year effortlessly captured the horrors of the Dinkins era in New York.
7. And The September Issue, and New York in 2007. In 2006, I linked to one blogger who wrote that “Americans Hate their Fabulous Economy.” We can see just how fabulous it was – or at least seemed, via DVD and Netflix. If Americans want to scale those heights once again and not just relive them via our TVs and computer monitors, we’ve got our work cut out for us.
But in the meantime, what are your favorite time machine movies, whether they’re documentaries or fictitious productions? Unlike the closed loop world of the dead tree magazine industry, we encourage you to discuss in the comments below.
My wife and I really enjoyed The September Issue last year…
How about The French Connection with Gene Hackman and Roy Sheider set in early 70′s New York.
movietone news is on youtube
The naked City (late 40′s) perhaps older than you were considering, but a fantastic image of NYC before TV.
Three Days of the Condor or Parallax View, when Watergate and the Pentagon Papers made Americans think that maybe everything really was a conspiracy.
As far as Last Days of Disco, should one consider a movie made over a decade after the era it portrays to be a time capsule? Metropolitan would be a better choice if you’re going with Stillman. The changing of the Northeast elite from old money to the new meritocracy.
Although, the disco fan who said that the Philly sound didn’t qualify as disco because “for one thing, it was good” is priceless.
“Breezy” with William Holden; directed by Clint Eastwood. Movie is so so, but is a truly unique time capsule to 1972 upper middle class California. Never seen another movie that captures that culture and time period.
Repo Man and The Breakfast Club to me both capture late cold-war, mid-80s teen angst. Of course this dates me.
Whenever I see Brewster McCloud, I always say to myself that the ending must have made more sense in the 1970s.
Whenever I see any part of Casino Royale (1967), I always say to myself that it could only have been funny in 1967.
Dirty Harry to me was a little ahead of its time for 1971. I think of it as part of a later 70s backlash heading into the Reagan years.
Ha! Just last night, we watched “Bullit,” starring Steve McQueen, on Amazon.com. I remarked, at about the 10-minute mark, that it captured San Francisco just before it was ruined by hippies. The movie depicts 1967 SF and, strangely enough, it’s filled with mostly mature, sober people. No kids! No teens! No adolescents! And it seems that the only people who owned new cars were Lt. Bullit and the bad guys! Even the cops were driving cars that were a few years old!
“Big Wednesday” uniquely captured the early-60s surfer ethic of my youth, with its hedonism and proto-new-age quasi-pantheistic spiritualism. It also captured my memories of the Selective Service dance we all had to perform, as well as the comic opera of the LA armed forces induction center.
The original version of The Taking of Pelham 123 is very 70′s NYC.
Slapshot. Nothing says the ’70′s like Flyers-like goon hockey and polyester leisure suits.
“On Any Sunday” 1971. Motorcycles, motor oil and gasoline. Steve McQueen again.
You left out “Startup.com” (2001), about a bunch of guys racing to set up a website where users can pay a traffic ticket or apply for a fishing license on-line. About half an hour into the movie, I realized that these guys weren’t comedy actors, they were actual dot-com founders who had invited filmmakers to document their glorious rise to riches.
You’re right –and I saw Startup.com when it played in Palo Alto back then. It really does sum up the excesses of the wild west days of the early dot.com era perfectly.
“Tony Rome” captures the atmosphere of ’60s Miami. It still feels like the seasonal resort town it was a few years before, but the modern metropolis it will be is already showing.
What about “American Graffiti”? I graduated from high school in 1962 – the summer in which it was set – and the time was presented totally truthfully. To see it only eleven years later was nostalgic but also painful. How much, sadly, we had lost in such a short period of time.
I have a long-standing affection for ‘The President’s Analyst’, a remarkably self-aware encapsulation of everything that we remember as defining the 60′s.
“Juggernaut” perfectly captures the malaise mentality of the mid-70s, and it’s also a ripping good yarn.
Helter Skelter, and the Deliberate Stranger (Ted Bundy). Beyond the funny clothes, note the pay telephones, no CSI glamour, and NO COMPUTERS. Amazing.