By Joe George
Whenever someone says, “They wouldn’t make that movie today,” it begs the inevitable question, “Why?”
Sometimes, the person making the observation just notices how tastes and technologies alter over time. After all, big glossy musicals or lavish Westerns once filled screens, genres that get one or two Hollywood entries at best.
But in most cases, the person making the observation implies that mores and standards have changed so much that great movies couldn’t happen anymore. Furthermore, that person often makes the observation with an air of resignation, as if shifting social acceptance somehow harms great art.
Looking closer, one often finds that the offensive material never made the movies in question great. Instead, these much-lamented films have to overcome their lack of empathy or audacious content.
1. Blazing Saddles (1974)
Blazing Saddles might be the most infamous movie that wouldn’t see cinemas these days. The film’s sharp humor on racism seems dangerous even today, fifty years after the film’s release. As with Young Frankenstein, which he would release later the same year, director Mel Brooks brings a genuine love for the ‘50s Western, which gives his movie a strong structure on which he can hang gags. Many of those gags stem from Black sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little) and his outlaw sidekick Jim (Gene Wilder), who use the town’s overt racism against them.
Without question, Blazing Saddles has lots of frank and uncomfortable humor. But in a modern context, Blazing Saddles feels unnecessary. Although Brooks and his writing team, which included an uncredited Richard Pryor, include many wonderful gags, its observations about racism play as rather banal.
Today, a movie that seeks to shock viewers would have to do much more than just state that racism exists. And unless they had the same respect for genre and comedic skills as Brooks, these hypothetical filmmakers wouldn’t even generate laughs, let alone gasps.
2. The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Before anyone points out that a film called The Birth of Nation came out in 2016, it’s important to remember that the title refers to two very different films. The 2016 film uses the title as a knowing wink in its depiction of Nat Turner’s rebellion, but the 1915 film has no interest in such irony. In fact, director D.W. Griffith does nothing with irony, filling his three-hour epic with heart-wrenching melodrama. This is a problem because The Birth of a Nation also idealizes unrepentant white supremacist hate.
Based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, The Birth of a Nation traces the fortunes of two families after the Civil War. It portrays the Northern Stonemans as blinded by their progressive ideals and the Southern Camerons beset by ruin because of integration. Griffith goes to great lengths to ensure viewers that he draws from historical truth, a laughable claim given its extreme racism. While far too many Americans consider The Birth of a Nation accurate, no major studio would give a modern version the funding that made it a blockbuster hit.
3. Revenge of the Nerds (1984)
A broad comedy about rejects who form a fraternity at a fictional college, Revenge of the Nerds has tons of reprehensible material, including racism, homophobia, and lots of assault. Even if some of the jokes still hit, Revenge of the Nerds just throws unpleasant gag after unpleasant gag at the audience. But that’s not the reason that Revenge of the Nerds wouldn’t get made in 2024.
The biggest movies of 2024 include Deadpool & Wolverine, Furiosa, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, while X-Men ’97 and the video game adaptation Fallout rule television. Nerds no longer have to band together to escape bullying toughs, as portrayed by director Jeff Kanew and screenwriters Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai. Instead, they seem as cool as the rock band that Lewis (Robert Carradine) and Gilbert (Anthony Edwards) form at the end of the movie.
4. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom often shows up on lists of movies that people can watch no more than once, and with good reason. Adapted from the novella by Marquis de Sade and structured around the suffering of Dante’s Inferno, Salò plays like an onslaught of stomach-churning imagery and content. Then again, director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who co-wrote the film with Sergio Citti, wants to disgust his viewers.
Salò follows four powerful Italian men who devote themselves to inflicting all manner of horrors on young people from nearby villages. Pasolini created the film as an angry and unsubtle critique of fascism, trying to draw attention to real-world acts even more disgusting than those in the film. Given the level of vitriol directed at the far-less incendiary 2023 movie The Zone of Interest, it’s hard to see how something as direct as Salò could exist again.
5. Tootsie (1982)
Tootsie has one of the most unrealistic premises in film history. No, it’s not that no one would recognize actor Michael Dorsey, played by Dustin Hoffman, as actress Dorothy Michaels. Nor would anyone doubt that the abrasive Hoffman embodied an actor so arrogant and difficult that he could not get work. Rather, the idea that a middle-aged woman feels welcomed in shows business more than a man, no matter how difficult, strains credulity.
Beyond that absurd premise, Tootsie has a lot to offer, including great performances by Hoffman, Geena Davis, and Bill Murray. The screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal has many compelling observations, and Sidney Pollack gives the entire farce real humanity. However, a modern version of Tootsie would have to wrestle with the facts of sexism in the industry that the 1982 film, for all of its charms, cannot quite acknowledge.
6. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
The brainchild of England’s premiere comedy troupe, Monty Python’s Life of Brian hit resistance even before it came to theaters. Studios refused to touch it, so Python fan and Beatles legend George Harrison ponied up much of the initial cash.
When Life of Brian came out, people protested it and some countries outright banned it, all because of its sacrilegious content. After all, Life of Brian features Brian (Graham Chapman), the Jewish boy born in the manger next to Jesus, who accidentally gets followers and suffers crucifixion.
Shocking as that premise may sound, Life of Brian shows respect toward Christ himself. Instead, the film questions the very idea of radicalism, settling for a quite conservative rationalism, despite its reputation. While one might argue that modern audiences wouldn’t go for even the hint of religious critique (the recent The Book of Clarence suggests otherwise, though), the real problem with Monty Python’s Life of Brian is its stodgy politics.
In this age of increased hate and vitriol, the high-minded lack of passion advocated by John Cleese and the like seems like the coward’s way out.
7. The Toy (1982)
Given how many wonderful and thrilling films Richard Donner made throughout his career, one wants to give him the benefit of the doubt with The Toy. After all, how could the same man who made a film as wholesome as Superman: The Movie make a movie so wrongheaded as The Toy, in which rich white kid Eric (Scott Schwartz) purchases out-of-work Black man Jack Brown?
The answer might be that Donner liked the idea of a poor little rich kid, who needs a substitution for his absent father and bonds with a grown man who gives him attention. Donner’s film, written by Carol Sobieski and adapted from the French movie Le Jouet, has such heart-warming qualities. But despite some throwaway lines from various characters, the film never accounts for the optics of a white child owning a Black man, nor does it deal with the fact that it infantilizes an adult.
If someone remade The Toy today, they would have to address those issues and, unless they had talent greater than the great Richard Donner, would end up with a much lesser work.
8. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, A Clockwork Orange uses its shocking content to make a larger point. Based on the novel by Anthony Burgess and directed by the legend Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange spends half its running time depicting the violent actions of English toughs called the Droogs, led by Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). The second half depicts the greater brutality on the part of the state, which arrests Alex and brainwashes him by force.
As that description indicates, Kubrick takes a nuanced approach to concepts such as law and order. It weighs the chaos wrought by a small group of people against that of an entire government, all in a studio feature that made millions at the box office. Even though morally complicated movies continue to get made today, it’s hard to imagine Warner Brothers, the studio now better known for deleting movies to save money than for challenging audiences, to make it happen.
9. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)
As demonstrated by the non-video game-playing grown-ups who were thrilled about his return in Sonic the Hedgehog, people still love Jim Carrey. And his 1994 breakout Ace Ventura: Pet Detective might still best showcase the Canadian comedian’s rubber-face talents. Even thirty years later, Carrey’s mugging heightens the delightful absurdity of a too-serious man hunting down the missing mascot of the Miami Dolphins.
But the film’s plot hinges upon a transphobic joke that goes so much farther than the usual cross-dressing gags in Monty Python or Benny Hill. The final villain reveal hinges on the idea that a trans person is evil and disgusting, something that the film underscores with several minutes’ worth of reaction shots.
If today’s filmmakers had a lovable oddball comedian in the center and let them do bits with animals, then something like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective could get made, but it must have the good sense to leave such mood-killing hatefulness behind.
10. Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)
Issues such as the nature of marriage and age gaps between partners change over time as societies evolve. So while a relationship between a thirty-something man and a teen woman in Jane Eyre or the like might seem dated, it wouldn’t offend like it would today. Yet, even with such context in mind, no one can support Pretty Maids All in a Row, the sole cinematic screenplay by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
Directed by Roger Vadim and based on the novel of the same name by Francis Pollini, Pretty Maids All in a Row stars Rock Hudson as a high school gym teacher who has relations with many of his “liberated” female students. The film tries to undercut its salacious content with a serial killer subplot that involves Hudson’s character Tiger. But Vadim shoots the intimate scenes with such a leering look that it undercuts any half-hearted condemnation of the teacher’s abuse of power.
11. Soul Man (1986)
Some will rush to point out that Soul Man isn’t as racist as the premise suggests, which one would hope because it sounds very, very racist.
Soul Man features a white college student (C. Thomas Howell) called Mark who, desperate to please his parents and get into Harvard Law, poses as a Black person to win a scholarship for African Americans. The movie’s defenders do have a point, as the script by Carol Black and direction by Steve Miner does find Mark experiencing the micro and macro aggressions that Black Americans endure every day.
While that “walk a mile in another man’s shoes” premise may have its virtues, it still uses Black suffering as a means of white enlightenment. All of the racism in the film serves to make Mark a better person, thereby keeping the focus on him. In all honesty, a movie like Soul Man, with its mixture of shocking concepts and banal theme, might get made today. But by this point, audiences shouldn’t be impressed with such half-hearted life lessons.
12. Kids (1995)
Written by Harmony Korine and directed by Larry Clark, Kids launched the careers of stars Rosario Dawson and Chloë Sevigny. Kids also presented itself as the most controversial film of the mid-90s, thanks to its frank portrayal of the “real” lives of American adolescents. The movie earned an NC-17 rating and a notorious reputation, and many cinephiles still describe Kids as a trial that one endures instead of a film one enjoys.
In the modern age of social media and oversharing, Kids feels somehow both quaint and overheated. Without question, some of the behavior that the teens portrayed by Dawson, Sevigny, and others does get celebrated on Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms.
However, the overwhelming majority of teens share more human and wholesome content, from goofy dances to confessions of insecurity. With every year, Kids seems more and more like something adults made to scare other adults and less like a portrait of actual teens.
13. Rain Man (1988)
Where Tootsie just nabbed a Best Actor nomination for Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man got him the win for his portrayal of Raymond Babbitt. Moreover, Hoffman’s take on a brilliant but severely autistic man became a cultural phenomenon, inspiring thousands of parodies and impressions and, with them, a severe misunderstanding of the nature of autism.
At the time, Hoffman’s take worked great within Rain Man, a road dramedy directed by Barry Levinson and written by Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass. Hoffman has great chemistry with Tom Cruise, who plays Raymond’s vain younger brother, and the film builds to a cathartic payoff.
However, the public understanding of neurodiversity grows deeper with every passing year, rendering Rain Man retrograde less than 40 years after it was a sensation. Furthermore, the shifting reception to Rain Main highlights a bigger problem, revealing movies that romanticize different abilities as cloying and irresponsible.
14. Dressed to Kill (1980)
No one goes to a Brian De Palma film for subtlety or nuance. Rather, one goes to De Palma for dazzling visuals and audacious plots, as he heightens Hitchcock-style psychological thrillers to an outrageous degree, making obvious text things that the Master of Suspense left as subtext. On those grounds, Dressed to Kill satisfies, as do the lead performances by Michael Caine, Angie Dickenson, and Nancy Allen. With Dressed to Kill, De Palma borrows from Italian Giallo to put an 80s spin on Psycho, with all the absurdity that description implies.
However, Dressed to Kill also reinforces a common trope that presents trans people as troubled, if not insane to a dangerous degree. The film doesn’t lavish in its transphobia like Ace Ventura, but viewers today better understand the real-world harm done by such ideas. A brave filmmaker today can try to continue De Palma’s work by updating Hitchcock, but they should do so without reinforcing simplistic ideas about gender identity.
15. Love Potion No. 9 (1992)
On the surface, Love Potion No. 9 looks like a Hollywood romantic comedy as harmless as the 50s bubblegum pop song that provides its title. Written and directed by Dale Launer, the screenwriter of favorites My Cousin Vinny and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Love Potion No. 9 has the same basic plot as the song. Chemist Paul (Tate Donovan) purchases a love potion from a Romani woman and, after studying its properties, amplifies it to make himself irresistible to women.
In a better world, audiences could enjoy Love Potion No. 9 as a bit of nonsense, a harmless romp built on folktales and good-natured jokes. But in the real world, in which people use drugs to victimize others, the premise doesn’t inspire the laughter that the filmmakers intended.
16. Weird Science (1985)
As with Love Potion No. 9, one could imagine a reality in which the plot of Weird Science could be laughed off as the pathetic daydreams of straight teen boys. Writer and director John Hughes, one of the most successful filmmakers of the 1980s, indeed frames the story as the innocent work of two misguided but lovable nerds.
Yet, even if one could get past the idea of teens creating the “perfect” woman, a hurdle made easy to overcome thanks to Kelly LeBrock’s performance as Lisa, Weird Science finds other ways to irritate viewers. When Lisa takes her creators, Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith), to a local blues bar, the white boys imitate the Black patrons in an obnoxious manner.
While that might be a realistic look at the way guys like Gary and Wyatt would act in the situation, Weird Science isn’t going for realism in any other way. As a result, the film loses what little goodwill it earned.
17. American Beauty (1999)
When American Beauty won five Oscars at the 72nd Academy Awards, it seemed to secure its place as a trenchant look at the country’s malaise. Instead, it started a downward spiral for the film, one made worse by the off-screen crimes of its star, Kevin Spacey. What once felt like a powerful rebuke of consumerism has looked more and more like the self-indulgent fantasies of a middle-aged white man, most of which he inflicts on the teen girl over whom he lusts.
One almost hopes that American Beauty gets some form of remake because it does have its strong points. Everything with Annette Benning and Peter Gallagher plays like a sitcom satire, and director Sam Mendes has a skill that stands the test of time, as does screenwriter Alan Ball. Anti-suburban screeds will always have a place in pop culture, but no modern filmmaker would put a character like Spacey’s Lester Burnham at the center.
18. Stagecoach (1939)
Most of the movies on this list have their strong points, and Stagecoach is no exception. Even after decades of elaborate stunts and mind-boggling effects, the action sequences in Stagecoach still thrill all the same. Director John Ford, working from a script by Dudley Nichols, who in turn adapts the story The Stage to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox, sets the standard for the Westerns that follow, as does John Wayne as the archetypical cowboy hero.
However, no matter how much one tries to admire the craft of Ford’s film, no one can escape the fact that Wayne and the other heroes kill Indigenous people. Worse, Ford portrays the Indigenous as sub-human barbarians, who deserve to get gunned down by Wayne’s virtuous Ringo Kid. Movie makers today still learn from Ford’s blocking and camera work, but they know better than to replicate the insulting depictions in Stagecoach.
19. Last Tango in Paris (1972)
In recent years, much has been made of “intimacy coordinators,” people who work on movie sets to ensure that everyone shooting vulnerable scenes stays safe. Those who dismiss this new and necessary trend in movie-making often do so on the grounds they aren’t making a movie like Last Tango in Paris.
The provocative movie directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, who co-wrote the script with Franco Arcalli and got help with the French dialogue from Agnès Varda, has come to represent a movie made with reckless disregard for the well-being of its actors, specifically Maria Schneider.
Last Tango in Paris portrays the stormy, steamy relationship between American Paul (Marlon Brando) and French teen Jeanne (Schneider). In addition to its varnished look at acts between the two, including an infamous assault scene, Last Tango in Paris also involved carelessness behind the scenes, as Brando and Bertolucci pressured the teenaged Schneider into actions she found objectionable.
While films can still cover the same subject matter as in Last Tango in Paris, today’s filmmakers are learning how to depict assault without repeating it on set.
20. Freaks (1932)
Freaks is one of the most infamous horror movies of the 1930s, a decade dominated by Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein films. It comes from Dracula director Tod Browning, who works with screenwriters Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon’s adaptation of the short story “Spurs” by Tod Robbins.
Freaks takes place at a circus, where trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) and strongman Hercules (Henry Victor) conspire to kill little person Hans (Harry Earles) and steal his money. Cleopatra and Hercules suffer the wrath of Hans’s fellow sideshow performers, all played by actual people with disabilities.
Freaks would not get made today, for reasons both good and bad. On one hand, Freaks does treat the performers as freaks and asks the audience to fear and loathe them. On the other, Freaks often shows the performers as kinder and more humane than the attractive Cleopatra and Hercules, something that has resonated with disabled viewers. No matter how one responds to Freaks, it’s hard to imagine a modern studio greenlighting such a daring film.
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This post was previously published on Wealth of Geeks.
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