What’s Aged the Worst?
The scene where Sundance makes Etta undress at gunpoint
In the discussion (4)
Approx. transcript time · 00:55:15Read transcript
- The scene where Etta is met: they appear to be strangers and Redford makes her undress at gunpoint, which reads like a date rape scene; today the reaction would be that it turns rape into something sexy and a woman's fantasy, and it would never be shot, much less released, though it was half a century ago and nobody is being blamed.
- The montages are weird and make it feel distinctly a 60s and 70s movie; the New York trip and the ship to Bolivia go on for a while and would be done better now, the one place surgery would be easiest.
- The opening credits' silent-film device is raised as possibly aging badly, since Goldman's original idea became convoluted; one host goes back and forth, forgets each time that the movie does not start the way he remembers, and still gives it an A for trying something new; starting that way made more sense in 1969, forty years after silent movies, than it would now.
- Goldman wanted them to watch a movie of their own lives, which does not land because we are not there yet, and the point was that this was not the old, old days; he argued with a studio executive over the bifocals line, saying these men were alive when his grandmother was, in the Edison era; the date rape scene is named the winner, and the film is called as close to perfect as the show may ever do.