Movies that were way ahead of their time
 

Mad Love (1935) Featuring Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre plays a mad scientist/doctor that transplants the hands of a dead knife throwing lunatic onto those of a piano player who's hands were crushed in an accident. He does it as a "favor" to the mans wife, who Peter Lorre's character has lusted over for years. The man realizes his new hands are not proficient at piano, but instead at throwing knives.

The most brilliant scene is when the pianist is confronted by the dead knife throwing lunatic Rollo, who was decapitated, but reveals to him that the doctor reattached his head, gave him metal hands and reanimated him.

Couldn't agree more. Repped.

also repped! good choice.

Back to The Future 2

Public Enemy. That predated mainstream grapefruit smashing by 50 years.

Public Enemy is a wonderful film. The end is so unsettling.

Here's another one:

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Very similar to the latter movie Cool Hand Luke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QvF2FZZftY

The end scene is a total classic, with our hero become anti-hero fading into the darkness in this beautifully eerie shot:

Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" - still hasn't been topped to this day.

iwill rent this tonight

Seconds (1966).

A company offers their wealthy clients a chance at a second life. They find a life that is what their clients would have wanted (artist, writer, politician), kill the person who is to be replaced and surgically alter their clients to take their places.

Genuinely disturbing. A great ending too.

yeah, i absolutely can't believe that movie was made in 1935. excellent film and if you look in yr rep box there's one from me as well.

i can't actually think of any off the top of my head though

Those are all great films, but (apart from Back to the Future 2 lol) why are they ahead of their time?

Morning demonrail! How's Ting Tings? :p

I said "Metropolis", because of it's futuristic dystopia theme (how many times has this been used again over the years). Also No Metropolis = No "Blade Runner" or "Brazil" or even "The Matrix"

you're spot on about that movie. excellent.

no 2046 without it either.

Fair enough, and on those grounds:

Psycho:

It took the horror film away from the clutches of vampires, mad scientists, zombies, etc, and into the hands of the quiet maniac that would eventually give us Halloween, Friday the 13th, and every other slasher movie since then.

Re How's Tings: Not good. I think I may have a trapped nerve or something in my neck; I can hardly move it and I have a real pain in my right shoulder that keeps waking me up at night.:mad:)

I agree with Metropolis.

Chris Marker's "La Jetée" from 1962 (the one that inspired T. Gilliam's "12 Monkeys") is a short film, consisting mostly of photographed stills, but was also very ahead of its time, I think, if only for its themes: post-apocalyptic world, earth contaminated after WW3, people living underground, research on time travelling, and all the story about this man obsessed with the vague memory of a woman at the airport beore the war...

Also, maybe Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima, mon amour", for its extensive use of flashbacks in 1959.

IMO Psycho is boring, really.

Metropolis.

19 years from now.

YOU WILL SEE.

Bladerunner

still wondering how this movie was possible in 1982

It travelled back in time from the future.

Un Chien Andalou
Dog Star Man
Tetsuo: the Iron Man
The Holy Mountain and El Topo
Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Blood Feast

Sorry to hear about your physical ails.

Psycho is ahead of it's time for many more reasons than the protagonist being a psycho. The use of the music, the way it involves us completely in a character's life just to kill her quickly, the whole psychological angle. It's more ahead of it's time for what it did for cinema as a whole than what it did for horror flicks. You actually kind of make an interesting case that it's influence on horror films might not have been all good if it devolved down to slasher bullshit!

I completely agree with Metropolis, though it should be noted that Lang actually borrowed heavily from the 1924 Soviet film Aelita, Queen of Mars, which also belongs in this category (though Metropolis isn't as dogmatic since Aelita had to have some workers revolution crap to get made).

Liquid Sky is one I would put ahead of it's time too, though it's new wavism does make it seem very much in it's time as well. Kind of the same thing with Slacker in the '90s. The basic idea is a major breakthrough that has a major permanent effect on how we view films, an yet it had to happen specifically in it's own time to even exist since it's essentially a document of '90s twenty-something culture. Of course you could say that about Metropolis too, that if it weren't a 1920s version of the future, we wouldn't see such images as "cool retro-futurism" the way we do.

I'd say many Hitchcock films were ahead of their time.

Good call on Metropolis. I'd add Der Golem and Haxan to the list... And even though I'm not a huge fan of it, Gummo is still ahead of its time.....

Well, Seconds is generally dystopian. Also as the storyline involves plastic surgery, it must have taken quite an imagination to write it when plastic surgery wasn't nearly as prevalent. There's also something contemporary about people wanting to become another person, and all of the metaphysical questions of 'identity' that it entails.

Shame it's impossible to find on DVD in The UK. I just remember watching it on BBC2 on a Saturday with an introduction by Alex Cox (can anyone remember the name of that show again? I think I asked demonrail in a thread about horror films but I've forgotton again).

Ah, yes, I forgot about "Un chien andalou" (even though in a way, it is also perfectly of its time as part of the surrealism movement).

Godard's A bout de souffle is a definite candidate I think. It's fair to say that prior to 1960 there really hadn't ever been a film quite like it, and yet you could point to so many films made since that owe almost everything to it.

Another one is Return of the Living Dead, which managed to anticipate that self-reflexive style of horror movie a good ten years before the likes of Freddy's Nightmare, Scream and (God help us) Scary Movie.

Hitchcock's Psycho is undoubtedly one of the best films ever made.

All of the mentions of Metropolis prompts me to remind that Mad Love director Karl Freund is the cinematographer on Metropolis.
Film critic Pauline Kael proposed in ther book Raising Kane that Welles' Citizen Kane borrows heavily from the look of Mad Love.
Rotten Tomatoes gives Mad Love a score of 100%.

My pick is from the following year in 1936, and it's The Petrified Forest. Rotten Tomatoes also gives it a perfect 100%. One reviewer describes the film as simply "Gangster Existentialism Deluxe" which succintly affords an apt overview and alludes to why I feel it is decidedly ahead of its time. It was adapted from Pulizer-prize winner Robert E. Sherwood's stage play and the action unfolds mostly in one diner scene. Bette Davis plays the enchanting waitress. Humphrey Bogart, to marvelous effect, makes his film debut as the desperate ringleader of a band of lamming outlaws. But the prime draw of the film clearly manifests in the ethereal Leslie Howard who plays a rather philosophical hobo who becomes caught up in the proceedings.

the trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbRH__KePbQ

Art direction, mood, and feel.

Mad Love is like a Cronenberg film made 50 years prior to Cronenberg's hey day.

Public Enemy was a very violent and dark gangster movie for the time in comparison to your other stuff and is still incredibly unique today.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang is a tail of the system corrupting an innocent imprisoned man into a wayward criminal.

Metropolis is an early Sci-fi film that is still relevant. Most sci-fi films of that time are just absolutely silly and not worth watching.

I've watched Metropolis like 15-20 yeas ago , and I wasn't very thrilled , to say the least.
I understand the historical interest , and it has probably opened the way to lots of sci-fi movies , but , let's say it hasn't age well.

That's how I feel about it. You can say what you want about it then, and its affects and stuff, but I did not enjoy it at all.

It certainly fits in this thread, though.

Hudson Hawk

I'll have to harmonize along with you, gualbert and acousticrock87.
In my entry above where I stated "all of the (predictable) mentions of Metropolis" I almost included the parathentical part because I've just found that Metropolis seems to be one of those movies that people always want to let you know that they know about.
Still, it's groundbreaking, no doubt about it, and aisde from the theme and tenor as the first sci-fi masterpiece, its acclaim is due to Freund & Co.'s cinematography.

The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Metropolis (1927)
L'Étoile de mer (1928)/La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928)
King Kong (1933)
Mad Love (1935)
The Petrified Forest (1936)
Modern Times (1936)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Princess Iron Fan (1941)
Bambi (1942)
Rope (1948)
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
The Seven Samurai (1954)
On The Waterfront (1954)
Rear Window (1954)
Night of the Hunter (1955)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Wild Strawberries (1957)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Vertigo (1958)
Psycho (1960)
Cape Fear (1962)
The Birds (1963)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)
The Incident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Targets (1968)
Take The Money And Run (1969)
Woodstock (1970)
Trash (1970)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
The Getaway (1972)
Mean Streets (1973)
The Conversation (1974)
Eraserhead (1977)
Annie Hall (1977)
Star Wars (1977)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Alien (1979)
Blade Runner (1982)
Videodrome (1983)
Brazil (1985)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
Akira (1988)
Roger & Me (1989)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
Waking Life (2001)

Well, I actually love the film a great deal, hence me mentioning it. No hipster-cred namedropping here, my man. :cool:

I wonder, what's the difference between being "ahead of their time" and "revolutionary"? A first step must always be made, but it might be made at the right time. In that case it isn't really ahead of the time, but just in time.

It doesn't much matter, but I was just thinking about it.

the 1932 horror film "The Freaks"...very weird!
Attachment 388

I expected to see a lot more films in this thread.
Two that spring to mind for me are:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Thanks to Arthur C. Clark's visions of the future for the most part) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979).

Oh, and Eraserhead.

Evil Dead

Hell yes.

Even though I think it was accidental.

Revolutionary sparks an immediate change in film.
Ahead of its time doesn't but is later recognized as highly influencial.

serendipity ftw.