Old movies can be inaccessible to a modern audience for a number of legit reasons. The pacing can be uncomfortably slow, the graphics archaic, the acting a touch too dramatic, the relationships impalpable to 21st century sensibilities. There's also a pretentiousness around watching them, which I know I risk entering by writing this.
They're much harder to swallow than an old book, I think, because the medium of film/TV changes with relentless pace. Old movies are clearly old. A book, on the other hand, is the same word-on-paper format whether it's 10 or 1000 years old. The words may make the age obvious, but at a sensory level there's no difference between the two. You read and imagine with the turn of a page.
But there are old movies that can seem strikingly contemporary in theme and content. I think the first one I ever saw where I felt that way was Taxi Driver. It follows a reclusive, disillusioned, alienated guy driving a taxi in NYC. I was shocked by how similar this character is to school-shooter types littered around today, how in line it was with the current loneliness epidemic in the wealthy world. Though the prominence of such fringe members of society may be uniquely modern, the presence of them isn't new at all.
I've written on this before, about the clutch of recency bias, how pretty much everything that's happening on a macro, thematic level, and even more so everything about human nature, has happened before. Nothing new under the sun, as they say. I think I've come to a point where I can get past the outdated parts of old movies to recognize the commonalities between our times.
Two I recently watched: Chinatown and The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Chinatown is about this PI in LA who gets embroiled in a deep web of corruption that, in timeless fashion, is about water rights and money. There's injustice and the weight of history and the hopelessness of fighting power--it's dark in the way we expect only of our jaded coevals. Both it and Taxi Driver were made during the decay of the 70s, so they're not that old, but 50 years is a long time to still be relevant in the mechanized era.
The other, The Bridge, is about a captured British battalion in WWII tasked with building a railroad for the Japanese in Burma. This one's got all the classics of mankind--pride, masculinity, honor, control, dominance. The same sort of movie could be made today to rave reviews, I think. Some things never go out of style.
