Invisible Man is one of my favorite books. I've read all the short stories of John Cheever, 5 or 6 Bellow novels (Augie March is in my top 25), All The King's Men and The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, The Natural and A Death In The Family would all be in books I strongly recommend. But I'm a screenwriter and a novelist with an MFA from Columbia, so I suppose I'm an exception.
What I would say is that the 1940s and 1950s are outside of the living memory of pretty much anyone alive, and so the work from that long ago that lives on is exclusively what's truly canonical (I'd guess Invisible Man because of race pre-CRA; Augie March because of Mid-Century Jews, and maybe All The King's Men because of politics. Definitely Citizen Kane, 12 Angry Men, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Vertigo, Paths of Glory, and The Seven Samurai are all heavily referenced movies that most film fans are familiar with, if only because the structure and style of those films defines the decades of films that follow, more than the literature defines the subsequent books.)
If you look at the book sales data, the opposite is the actual problem: contemporary novels are selling worse than any contemporary novels have, and you could probably make the same claim about film. The mania amongst young film buffs around the Criterion Collection and Letterboxd suggests a contemporary obsession with nostalgia (for great work, no doubt!) that is particularly novel to this moment. The problem seems to be not that we are forgetting too much, but that we are not in fact creating enough. If you look forward a few decades from the 40s and 50s--say the Boomers' adolescence and salad days--you'l find that this work is still hugely influential on the culture. PTA is adapting a Pynchon novel for his newest picture; many young film buffs prefer Space Odyssey, Godfather, Star Wars and Jaws to anything contemporary. Philip Roth is still considered the Jewish writer par excellence, Joan Didion the female writer, and James Baldwin the Black writer. As long as some of the audience that experienced the work in the moment is still alive, it is nearly as vital and part of the cultural consciousness as when it was first released.
Great mini reading list! Invisible Man is a wild ride of a book and I feel sorry for people that don't realize what an amazing writer Ellison is. The Heart is a Lonely hunter was one of the best reading experiences I had going to high school, it effected me strongly back then so I need to re-order this classic! And of course being from Chicago, I obviously dug Bellow more than most authors! Will clearly need to buy Cheever in the near future!
Most people who know about pre-war jazz know of me as the former bassist with the Jim Cullum Jazz Band, the host band for the (now retired) public radio series "Riverwalk Jazz." These days I live in Soutwest Florida and work mostly with bands and singers of the Great American Songbook. A few years back, during a vacation to New York, I was invited by Jon-Erik Kellso to play one of the Sunday afternoons at the Ear Inn on the Lower West Side. I had lots of fun with Jon's "Ear Regualrs." The clarinet player, Dennis Lichtman, invited me to hear his Tuesday band at Mona's on the Lower East Side. My girlfriend and I found ourselves among the few people in the place with grey hair. The dominant style of jazz I heard was pre-war Swing. At midnight the jam session began, and there was a long line of young players waitng their turn to sit in. I heard very little post-war style jazz, and most of it was just swingin' like crazy. I was very happy to know that such a righteous bastion of pre-war jazz existed and was thriving. I hope it's still going strong.
And now I'm encountering quite a few youngsters interested in the old, Jurassic stuff. A cadre of 20- and 30-somethings in Austin led by cornetist David Jellema. The Parker Jazz Club donwtown run by a guy who remembered me from his High School days in San Antonio and visits to The Landing where we played 6 nights a week (I was there for 19 years).
Currently I've been working in Naples Florida with 26-year-old Decyo McDuffie, a gifted singer consumed with absorbing vast quantities of Songbook masterworks, interpreting them through the lens of his hero, Nat Cole. The group of us working with and mentoring him are all in our 60s and 70s. Last week Decyo led us in a Nat tribute in a nice auditorium in Ft. Myers. We got a standing ovation and played an encore.
Netflix has not erased Casablanca and Citizen Kane. They’re both available on Amazon Prime Video at a reasonable price, as are very many B&W movies of the 40s and 50s. That said, I do worry that what is available to us in the age of streaming is determined by the whim (or business plans) of these corporate behemoths. So get the (‘obsolete’) DVDs while you can!
The Criterion Channel is a streaming service with rotating offerings of quality older (and newer) classic, independent, foreign, etc films throughout the year. I’ve found it’s worth it to give up several of the popular streaming apps for that single subscription.
> Netflix has not erased Casablanca and Citizen Kane. They’re both available on Amazon Prime Video
So, Netflix has in fact erased them... *from it's catalog*. It's not like Ted here meant you can't buy the DVDs or find them in this or that other platform anymore. But for a huge chunk of platforms like Netflix, it's as if those movies never existed...
Of course close to nobody under 40 has a DVD player... and nobody under 25 has ever seen a DVD after their teens
I think that is very wise advice (to get DVDs) if you love (and you should!) these classics. Amazon will probably endure as a company so digitally buying from them is probably a safe bet if you do not have a physical DVD.
There’s a danger in “buying” the digital editions, even from a company like amazon that will no doubt persist long past its deserved expiration date: you aren’t actually buying those digital products, you are licensing them, and that license is revokable. See the case of the edition of Orwell’s 1984 that disappeared from purchaser’s kindle libraries, or the edits made to Roald Dahl works. The only way to make sure you can hold on to a book or movie (in its proper version) you really like is to own a physical copy. We aren’t (yet) at the point where they will break down the door to your home to revoke or alter physical media.
hah! But yes I think that people are really starting to worry about really keeping their purchased goods in the digital age because in the analog age once we got that vinyl in our hands it stayed in our hands!
Dear Ted -- Though I'm with you most of the way here -- and ALL the way, for huge chunks -- I just gotta say that great authors, musicians, and filmmakers go out of print all the goddam time. And what was best-selling in any given week will most likely be forgotten three decades hence, if not three weeks or months.
Hell, half the greats we DO remember today weren't remotely hits when they first came out. Meanwhile, unexpected crazes for shimmering gems of old get launched almost coincidentally, whenever someone starts spelunking around in the past and goes, "Oh my goodness!" or "Holy shit!"
From there, it all comes down to preservationists giving a hoot. For them, I thank God. And also, thank YOU!!!
Or look at a great book like Moby Dick. It was only a modest seller when it first came out but fans of good literature eventually rediscovered it and it now is regarded as a great book. Actually much of it was before its time so great books can defy that darwinian effect!
For one, it isn't dumbed down. Second, if too many people saw the great movies (from all over the world), the music, the comedians (Mort Sahl, etc)., then they'd ignore whatever is going on today.
It might take some getting used to but I think real movie fans who don't want just entertainment but a deeper experience that great films bring, they will appreciate these black and white classics! Hitchcock, Welles, Capra and many other classic directors made their best stuff in black and white!
One reason they wont get it is that no mainstream platform or institution or even parents told taught them to "get it".
They shouldnt be "introduced" now as adults, they should have been shown them growing up, as part of a classical well rounded entertainment. Instead they're told that anything released 2 years ago or more is "antiquated".
When Paramount+ first debuted, it was delightful! Full of old movies. Then, in June of 2023, they took almost everything pre-1980 off the platform, wiping out 90% of my watchlist and leaving me with Sunset Boulevard and a handful of John Wayne movies. Now, it's even worse. Sunset Boulevard and John Wayne are gone, and the oldest title I can find is Perry Mason.
Amazon Prime is the only major streaming service with old movies now. And they only have a handful of silents. There are some free services with old stuff, like Plex and Tubi, and the Public Domain website, and some truly random Roku apps like Silent Movie Classics. And YouTube has a lot of silent movies, too.
I've been building up my collection of DVDs/Blu-rays. I currently have 563 titles in my library, 295 of which are pre-1975, and I will buy almost anything I find if it's in black and white, frankly.
You're right! I forgot about them because they don't have a standalone service, you have to add it to something else.
And to be fair, I did also forget HBO Max, but it's because I'm still mad at them for changing their UI and getting rid of the hubs, making it harder to find the good stuff.
And hopefully they will continue to invest in that service. The problem with Google/YouTube or Netflix is they are do not seem to be consistently able to show older content and with YouTube, you have to rely on users who upload content. What happens when those users get a DMCA takedown notice? Right, it gone!😕
Yes! There's always that! The thing about silent films, though, is that at this point most of them (the ones we still have) are in the public domain (most films from 1929 entered the public domain this year, and that about covers the bulk of silents since sound took over rapidly in the late 1920s), so I'm very happy to see anyone uploading those anywhere they can. It's not foolproof, obviously, for a lot of reasons, but it's something.
Yep, there is this. I don't consider that a major streaming service, though. Just my opinion, but I see CC (and the TCM add-on) as niche options for movie lovers, and the fact that classic cinema is getting siloed out of the major players is a net loss in discovery and availability terms.
Around the turn of this century (I don't recall the exact date), there was a short-lived opera company in the Berkshires of western Mass. (It was the precursor of the Berkshire Opera Festival, which began in 2015.). They did a wonderful presentation of Menotti's "The Consul." I recall the main set, which was a floor-to-ceiling array of filing cabinets (paintings, not real ones), to imply the stifling bureaucracy. I've suggested to various people that our current political moment would be a good time to revive that opera, but no takers so far.
I recall seeing Menotti's "The Saint of Bleecker Street" on TV once, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.
That period does seem a bit alien to us right now, especially since we don’t live in a “stable” consensus anymore
I actually find myself reading more and more modernist lit (1880s -1930s) now, like Robert Walser or Musil. Their anxious and lost sensibilities feel really contemporary
I was floored at age 45 to hear music from my youth on the Oldies station. They even played XTC (a college indie band from the 1980s) at the grocery store. Crazy.
It's when you don't hear "your" music on the Oldies station any more; then it's time to worry a bit.
You forgot your OWN 80-year-rule: 80 years after the premiere of an artist, the artist is forgotten.
The rule now applies to everything - unless it actually is a cultural or political icon (eg Louis Armstrong) as you have noted. The great works or people you mentioned, like Saul Bellow, happened 70-80 years ago. Only "Gone with the Wind" will survive, and that's unless it's described as racist.
Don't forget that some films are unknown because studios have clawed them out of the public domain. My understanding was that "It's a Wonderful Life" became such a huge hit in more recent years because TV stations discovered it was in the public domain and showed it on TV a lot. Then, if I understand it correctly, Sony took advantage of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act to claw it back out of the public domain.
I can't watch all the 1920s silents I want to, because in many of those cases, you have to subscribe to a streamer, like Amazon, and then subscribe to a substreamer, like Schnozberg Entertainment or something, that has added its own logo and introductory footage and thus "owns" films that had been out of copyright since the 20th century.
So I was shocked to see that your search results for Citizen Kane on Netflix failed to suggest Mank, the excellent David Fincher "making of" feature focused on Welles' screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. It is a Netflix Original, so it is malpractice that the algorithm didn't include it. But when I repeated your experiment, Mank was the first hit. Followed by: Trump: An American Dream; the 2018 Bille August adaptation of Lucky Per calmed A Fortunate Man; The Last Czars; and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
I absolutely agree with all of this. I will add the wrinkle that '50s abstract expressionism (de Kooning, et al.) and the Beatniks have possibly not lost their sheen of sexiness, though how much they're genuinely studied and appreciated versus nodded toward in a cheap interior decorating kind of fashion, I can't say.
Also and of course, Cheever, Bellow, and Updike deserve more deep study than Kerouac.
When I was in high school and college ('80s-'90s), we read a lot of work from the '20s and '30s — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. I had a whole upper-division English class devoted just to Hemingway and Faulkner. And the '20s — the Jazz Age — was fondly remembered a time American cultural flowering.
The WWII generation has sort of been skipped, despite the enormous historical events, possibly in favor of the '60s. My kid now in high school has a mostly familiar traditional curriculum that includes many books I read at her age. The main addition this year is a book about Vietnam. The boomers dominate the culture and their parents get passed over.
Cinema angle is a stretch. As others have mentioned, many of the other streaming platforms (Tubi ftw) carry a lot of the classics from that era. Honestly, it’s more that Netflix has become the worst major streaming platform for movies imo, especially older ones.
Invisible Man is one of my favorite books. I've read all the short stories of John Cheever, 5 or 6 Bellow novels (Augie March is in my top 25), All The King's Men and The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, The Natural and A Death In The Family would all be in books I strongly recommend. But I'm a screenwriter and a novelist with an MFA from Columbia, so I suppose I'm an exception.
What I would say is that the 1940s and 1950s are outside of the living memory of pretty much anyone alive, and so the work from that long ago that lives on is exclusively what's truly canonical (I'd guess Invisible Man because of race pre-CRA; Augie March because of Mid-Century Jews, and maybe All The King's Men because of politics. Definitely Citizen Kane, 12 Angry Men, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Vertigo, Paths of Glory, and The Seven Samurai are all heavily referenced movies that most film fans are familiar with, if only because the structure and style of those films defines the decades of films that follow, more than the literature defines the subsequent books.)
If you look at the book sales data, the opposite is the actual problem: contemporary novels are selling worse than any contemporary novels have, and you could probably make the same claim about film. The mania amongst young film buffs around the Criterion Collection and Letterboxd suggests a contemporary obsession with nostalgia (for great work, no doubt!) that is particularly novel to this moment. The problem seems to be not that we are forgetting too much, but that we are not in fact creating enough. If you look forward a few decades from the 40s and 50s--say the Boomers' adolescence and salad days--you'l find that this work is still hugely influential on the culture. PTA is adapting a Pynchon novel for his newest picture; many young film buffs prefer Space Odyssey, Godfather, Star Wars and Jaws to anything contemporary. Philip Roth is still considered the Jewish writer par excellence, Joan Didion the female writer, and James Baldwin the Black writer. As long as some of the audience that experienced the work in the moment is still alive, it is nearly as vital and part of the cultural consciousness as when it was first released.
Great mini reading list! Invisible Man is a wild ride of a book and I feel sorry for people that don't realize what an amazing writer Ellison is. The Heart is a Lonely hunter was one of the best reading experiences I had going to high school, it effected me strongly back then so I need to re-order this classic! And of course being from Chicago, I obviously dug Bellow more than most authors! Will clearly need to buy Cheever in the near future!
I’m like you & with you on all this. We will continually try to reinvent the wheel in our headlong pursuit of the endless NOW.
Most people who know about pre-war jazz know of me as the former bassist with the Jim Cullum Jazz Band, the host band for the (now retired) public radio series "Riverwalk Jazz." These days I live in Soutwest Florida and work mostly with bands and singers of the Great American Songbook. A few years back, during a vacation to New York, I was invited by Jon-Erik Kellso to play one of the Sunday afternoons at the Ear Inn on the Lower West Side. I had lots of fun with Jon's "Ear Regualrs." The clarinet player, Dennis Lichtman, invited me to hear his Tuesday band at Mona's on the Lower East Side. My girlfriend and I found ourselves among the few people in the place with grey hair. The dominant style of jazz I heard was pre-war Swing. At midnight the jam session began, and there was a long line of young players waitng their turn to sit in. I heard very little post-war style jazz, and most of it was just swingin' like crazy. I was very happy to know that such a righteous bastion of pre-war jazz existed and was thriving. I hope it's still going strong.
And now I'm encountering quite a few youngsters interested in the old, Jurassic stuff. A cadre of 20- and 30-somethings in Austin led by cornetist David Jellema. The Parker Jazz Club donwtown run by a guy who remembered me from his High School days in San Antonio and visits to The Landing where we played 6 nights a week (I was there for 19 years).
Currently I've been working in Naples Florida with 26-year-old Decyo McDuffie, a gifted singer consumed with absorbing vast quantities of Songbook masterworks, interpreting them through the lens of his hero, Nat Cole. The group of us working with and mentoring him are all in our 60s and 70s. Last week Decyo led us in a Nat tribute in a nice auditorium in Ft. Myers. We got a standing ovation and played an encore.
Crazy, baby!
At least we can hear greats like Nat King Cole on YouTube, his performance of Nature
Boy is a true earworm, especially if you love piano!
Netflix has not erased Casablanca and Citizen Kane. They’re both available on Amazon Prime Video at a reasonable price, as are very many B&W movies of the 40s and 50s. That said, I do worry that what is available to us in the age of streaming is determined by the whim (or business plans) of these corporate behemoths. So get the (‘obsolete’) DVDs while you can!
The Criterion Channel is a streaming service with rotating offerings of quality older (and newer) classic, independent, foreign, etc films throughout the year. I’ve found it’s worth it to give up several of the popular streaming apps for that single subscription.
Love that channel.
> Netflix has not erased Casablanca and Citizen Kane. They’re both available on Amazon Prime Video
So, Netflix has in fact erased them... *from it's catalog*. It's not like Ted here meant you can't buy the DVDs or find them in this or that other platform anymore. But for a huge chunk of platforms like Netflix, it's as if those movies never existed...
Of course close to nobody under 40 has a DVD player... and nobody under 25 has ever seen a DVD after their teens
I'm very encouraged that at least some fans of music and movies are getting analog gear like turntables, maybe DVD's will be next for a mini revival!
I think that is very wise advice (to get DVDs) if you love (and you should!) these classics. Amazon will probably endure as a company so digitally buying from them is probably a safe bet if you do not have a physical DVD.
There’s a danger in “buying” the digital editions, even from a company like amazon that will no doubt persist long past its deserved expiration date: you aren’t actually buying those digital products, you are licensing them, and that license is revokable. See the case of the edition of Orwell’s 1984 that disappeared from purchaser’s kindle libraries, or the edits made to Roald Dahl works. The only way to make sure you can hold on to a book or movie (in its proper version) you really like is to own a physical copy. We aren’t (yet) at the point where they will break down the door to your home to revoke or alter physical media.
hah! But yes I think that people are really starting to worry about really keeping their purchased goods in the digital age because in the analog age once we got that vinyl in our hands it stayed in our hands!
Dear Ted -- Though I'm with you most of the way here -- and ALL the way, for huge chunks -- I just gotta say that great authors, musicians, and filmmakers go out of print all the goddam time. And what was best-selling in any given week will most likely be forgotten three decades hence, if not three weeks or months.
Hell, half the greats we DO remember today weren't remotely hits when they first came out. Meanwhile, unexpected crazes for shimmering gems of old get launched almost coincidentally, whenever someone starts spelunking around in the past and goes, "Oh my goodness!" or "Holy shit!"
From there, it all comes down to preservationists giving a hoot. For them, I thank God. And also, thank YOU!!!
Some work is great in its day because it speaks profoundly to audiences of the day.
The process of learning what is great because it speaks to audiences generations later is harshly darwinian.
Or look at a great book like Moby Dick. It was only a modest seller when it first came out but fans of good literature eventually rediscovered it and it now is regarded as a great book. Actually much of it was before its time so great books can defy that darwinian effect!
But fun to watch, when it works!
For one, it isn't dumbed down. Second, if too many people saw the great movies (from all over the world), the music, the comedians (Mort Sahl, etc)., then they'd ignore whatever is going on today.
Maybe, when I introduce people to classic black and white films people view them with a lot of trepidation, fearing they may not get it.
Right. They become scared!
It might take some getting used to but I think real movie fans who don't want just entertainment but a deeper experience that great films bring, they will appreciate these black and white classics! Hitchcock, Welles, Capra and many other classic directors made their best stuff in black and white!
One reason they wont get it is that no mainstream platform or institution or even parents told taught them to "get it".
They shouldnt be "introduced" now as adults, they should have been shown them growing up, as part of a classical well rounded entertainment. Instead they're told that anything released 2 years ago or more is "antiquated".
Yes and people are surprised that they are not weird or esoteric, but actually very engaging.
And Lenny Bruce of course!
When Paramount+ first debuted, it was delightful! Full of old movies. Then, in June of 2023, they took almost everything pre-1980 off the platform, wiping out 90% of my watchlist and leaving me with Sunset Boulevard and a handful of John Wayne movies. Now, it's even worse. Sunset Boulevard and John Wayne are gone, and the oldest title I can find is Perry Mason.
Amazon Prime is the only major streaming service with old movies now. And they only have a handful of silents. There are some free services with old stuff, like Plex and Tubi, and the Public Domain website, and some truly random Roku apps like Silent Movie Classics. And YouTube has a lot of silent movies, too.
I've been building up my collection of DVDs/Blu-rays. I currently have 563 titles in my library, 295 of which are pre-1975, and I will buy almost anything I find if it's in black and white, frankly.
TCM streams old movies.
You're right! I forgot about them because they don't have a standalone service, you have to add it to something else.
And to be fair, I did also forget HBO Max, but it's because I'm still mad at them for changing their UI and getting rid of the hubs, making it harder to find the good stuff.
But TCM is part of HBO Max remember
It is hard to keep a spreadsheet on what is bundled with what. This is intentional and in the end all about $$$.
It also depends on who your cable provider is. My is unfortunately Verizon.
And hopefully they will continue to invest in that service. The problem with Google/YouTube or Netflix is they are do not seem to be consistently able to show older content and with YouTube, you have to rely on users who upload content. What happens when those users get a DMCA takedown notice? Right, it gone!😕
Yes! There's always that! The thing about silent films, though, is that at this point most of them (the ones we still have) are in the public domain (most films from 1929 entered the public domain this year, and that about covers the bulk of silents since sound took over rapidly in the late 1920s), so I'm very happy to see anyone uploading those anywhere they can. It's not foolproof, obviously, for a lot of reasons, but it's something.
cool!
Also, check out the Criterion Channel’s streaming service and app.
Yep, there is this. I don't consider that a major streaming service, though. Just my opinion, but I see CC (and the TCM add-on) as niche options for movie lovers, and the fact that classic cinema is getting siloed out of the major players is a net loss in discovery and availability terms.
Around the turn of this century (I don't recall the exact date), there was a short-lived opera company in the Berkshires of western Mass. (It was the precursor of the Berkshire Opera Festival, which began in 2015.). They did a wonderful presentation of Menotti's "The Consul." I recall the main set, which was a floor-to-ceiling array of filing cabinets (paintings, not real ones), to imply the stifling bureaucracy. I've suggested to various people that our current political moment would be a good time to revive that opera, but no takers so far.
I recall seeing Menotti's "The Saint of Bleecker Street" on TV once, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.
That period does seem a bit alien to us right now, especially since we don’t live in a “stable” consensus anymore
I actually find myself reading more and more modernist lit (1880s -1930s) now, like Robert Walser or Musil. Their anxious and lost sensibilities feel really contemporary
And yet our politicians seem hellbent on returning to some sort of 1950s America…
Except the whole socialist federal programs part, which they deny was effective governance.
Not to mention the 90+% maximum marginal personal income tax rate.
I was floored at age 45 to hear music from my youth on the Oldies station. They even played XTC (a college indie band from the 1980s) at the grocery store. Crazy.
It's when you don't hear "your" music on the Oldies station any more; then it's time to worry a bit.
Mr. Giola,
You forgot your OWN 80-year-rule: 80 years after the premiere of an artist, the artist is forgotten.
The rule now applies to everything - unless it actually is a cultural or political icon (eg Louis Armstrong) as you have noted. The great works or people you mentioned, like Saul Bellow, happened 70-80 years ago. Only "Gone with the Wind" will survive, and that's unless it's described as racist.
Don't forget that some films are unknown because studios have clawed them out of the public domain. My understanding was that "It's a Wonderful Life" became such a huge hit in more recent years because TV stations discovered it was in the public domain and showed it on TV a lot. Then, if I understand it correctly, Sony took advantage of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act to claw it back out of the public domain.
I can't watch all the 1920s silents I want to, because in many of those cases, you have to subscribe to a streamer, like Amazon, and then subscribe to a substreamer, like Schnozberg Entertainment or something, that has added its own logo and introductory footage and thus "owns" films that had been out of copyright since the 20th century.
So I was shocked to see that your search results for Citizen Kane on Netflix failed to suggest Mank, the excellent David Fincher "making of" feature focused on Welles' screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. It is a Netflix Original, so it is malpractice that the algorithm didn't include it. But when I repeated your experiment, Mank was the first hit. Followed by: Trump: An American Dream; the 2018 Bille August adaptation of Lucky Per calmed A Fortunate Man; The Last Czars; and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
And it didn't even suggest "Citizen Ruth" instead of "Citizen Kane," either.
I absolutely agree with all of this. I will add the wrinkle that '50s abstract expressionism (de Kooning, et al.) and the Beatniks have possibly not lost their sheen of sexiness, though how much they're genuinely studied and appreciated versus nodded toward in a cheap interior decorating kind of fashion, I can't say.
Also and of course, Cheever, Bellow, and Updike deserve more deep study than Kerouac.
When I was in high school and college ('80s-'90s), we read a lot of work from the '20s and '30s — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. I had a whole upper-division English class devoted just to Hemingway and Faulkner. And the '20s — the Jazz Age — was fondly remembered a time American cultural flowering.
The WWII generation has sort of been skipped, despite the enormous historical events, possibly in favor of the '60s. My kid now in high school has a mostly familiar traditional curriculum that includes many books I read at her age. The main addition this year is a book about Vietnam. The boomers dominate the culture and their parents get passed over.
Cinema angle is a stretch. As others have mentioned, many of the other streaming platforms (Tubi ftw) carry a lot of the classics from that era. Honestly, it’s more that Netflix has become the worst major streaming platform for movies imo, especially older ones.