Two relics from the mists of the 20th century made me think about time, fashion, taste and cultural norms...
Silk Stockings 1957 musical in the classic musical style, with tremendous hoofing (no other word is right) from Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse - he's a Broadway song & dance man, she's a humourless Soviet cultural commissar, they meet in postwar Paris and fancy each other. Apart from some standard-issue 1950s American Red-baiting, and Cyd C being magically transformed into a lighthearted skittish ballerina by her first luxurious touch of French lingerie, the romance isn't too obnoxious. The dance sequences themselves are terrific - that woman was a Goddess. The rest is mostly filled in with Hollywood in-jokes about how musicals are declining, how the movie industry is dying, how "swim queen" movie stars now have to find new fans, how audiences just move on to the next fad etc etc ... watching Fred Astaire trying to do a "rock n roll" number is just painful, and ironic too, and you get the feeling he knows it. There's some great support work from Zero Mostel and others as a trio of Russian roué artistes desperately trying not to get recalled to spend time in Siber-ee-eer-ee-eer-ia. For a bit of blatant Cold War propaganda full of sexist rubbish, I really really loved it.
Sliver 1993 - a movie from back in the days when Sharon Stone was a starlet,
Unfinished Sympathy was not yet a raging cliché for a soundtrack, and concerns about privacy / voyerurism / electronic surveillance / sex tapes were a bit edgy rather than the stuff of everyday life and conversation. (William Baldwin did have a funny squashed-in face even then though.) Plot is some sort of bobbins about a mysterious young millionaire with a voyeuristic streak spy-camming all his tenants - and remember, children, back then, this was considered a bit out of order, not a standard use of technology.
I hadn't realised this was based on a novel by the same guy who wrote Rosemary's Baby and the Boys from Brazil - so I suppose he knows a thing or two about the mass market. It's a tacky, meretricious, mostly woman-hating, toecurlingly pretentious 'erotic thriller' with not much suspense to the thrills or art to the shocks. But fun to watch and remember that Polly Walker wasn't always the 'spoilt posh middle class lady' stereotype she plays in history-telly-tosh these days, and fun to giggle over all the ridiculously passé soapbox preaching about Voyeurism is Bad, No Substitute for Real Life, Images Aren't Real, etc etc etc, when the last 20 years have moved the world so incredibly quickly in the other direction.
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