amen to everything you said, dannieboy.. I love these dated relics every bit as much as I do those pricelessly entertaining and stupefyingly bizarre sex ed films from the 1950s.. they are unintentionally funny/naive for the most part but they are still extremely important historical/cultural artifacts, not to mention powerful reminders of how fast our society and pop culture has evolved in the last half century.. and that cultural 'shift' you speak of is indeed one of the most violent social shifts in american history: segregation, homosexuality, interracial marriage, etc.. all highly taboo topics a mere 5 decades ago..
and indeed, a great deal of the oddity of the language 'code' used in these 'groundbreaking' films has to do with the incredibly taboo topics being addressed, often leading to hilarious results..
it seems there's a sort of 'collective fear' of change in our society, which means that no matter how fast some segments of said society may want to speed up the social evolution process, as a whole, we all seem to evolve by ridiculously cautios baby steps.. yet, in hindsight, the mid-century cultural shift seems almost meteoric compared to where we are now vis a vis our parents and our children..
that having been said, my mind reels at the mere thought of someone like joan crawford in the role of mrs. reynolds.. it would've been a whole different kind of 'entertaining' and likely been declared a 'cult film' by now.. ;-)
it wasn't the fall from her 16th-floor penthouse that killed her, it was the landing
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