|
In The Best Old Movies for Families, film critic and father of two Ty Burr has compiled an impassioned and readable guide to help wean your kids off Hollywood junk food and introduce them to the classics. From Action/Adventure to Comedy to Musicals, Burr covers dozens of suggestions in the book, which we've condensed here into an easy starter kit. Click on the links below or scroll down to browse his recommendations, then pick a movie, grab the popcorn, and launch your family's cinematic adventures!
Movie recommendations for kids, ages:
4-6 | 7-8 | 9-10 | 11-12 | 13-15 | 16-18
AGES 4-6
Bringing Up Baby
A crazy heiress (Katharine Hepburn) takes a nerdy zoologist (Cary Grant--yes, Cary Grant) on a series on a misadventure that causes kids to go nuts with both apprehension and delight. Contains two leopards, one pesky dog, one dinosaur bone buried in the backyard, and a collapsing brontosaurus skeleton.
Singin' in the Rain
Infectious, colorful, sprightly, and fun, this is the musical to start a lifelong love of musicals. It has a likable hero in Gene Kelly, a sly goofball in Donald O'Connor ("Make 'Em Laugh," he sings, and he does), and a half-witted villainess (Jean Hagen) whose hilariously nasal screeching your kids will imitate until you beg them to stop. Oh, and Princess Leia's mother (Debbie Reynolds) plays the good girl.
The Adventures of Robin Hood
Fast-paced, brightly colored, and funny, this is the most exhilarating version of the Robin Hood legend committed to film. Your children will immediately understand what star quality is when Errol Flynn's Robin Hood walks into the castle feast and throws a deer down at nasty King John's feet. The climactic duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone will cause an immediate uptick in living room swordplay: Hide the shishkebab skewers.
AGES 7-8
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Idealistic, wholesome, and hugely entertaining, Frank Capra's film features James Stewart in a role that perfectly captures the star's appeal--his naïve senator Jefferson Smith is a child's own stand-in as he takes his faith in the rightness of things to the Capitol, where it dovetails with the ideals of the founding fathers.
It's a Wonderful Life
More Stewart and more Frank Capra Capra-corn. Maybe it's familiar after decades of Yuletide airings, but there's something to be said for watching the movie through a child's fresh eyes. Moving and reassuringly optimistic, It's a Wonderful Life teaches your children to appreciate what they have and who they are.
Some Like it Hot
There's a lot to love here: cross-dressing men (including Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis), beautiful women (including Marilyn Monroe in her finest performance), ridiculous hijinks, and a run from the mob. Some people think this madcap comedy is the funniest movie to have ever come out of Hollywood. They're probably right.
AGES 9-10
North by Northwest
Introducing Alfred Hitchcock. North by Northwest is Hitch's greatest wind-up toy and the best entry point for young viewers, as it's the most playful variation on his eternal theme of "the wrong man." Cary Grant's hero isn't a CIA agent, but everyone thinks he is, so he embarks on a cross-country journey from New York to Mt. Rushmore with a master spy on his tail and a shady lady at his side. Watch out for those bi-planes.
The African Queen
Kate Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart play two archetypal characters your kids will immediately recognize: the priss and the slob. As they travel down a river in Africa the mismatched pair grows closer, falls in love, and takes on the German army. It's the closest Bogart and Hepburn came to playing cartoons of themselves, but that's what makes it work for children and many grown-ups.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Probably the best first science-fiction movie for children. It has an alien who looks like us, a ginormous robot who doesn't, a grand philosophical point, and a boy at the center of the action with whom young viewers will easily identify. Gort, Klaatu barada nikto.
AGES 11-12
Metropolis
The first epic sci-fi film--one that prefigures everything from Bladerunner to The Matrix--Metropolis still packs a punch strictly on the dreamlike power of its visuals. Full of iconic characters behaving in mythic ways, this dystopian tale is accessible to both kids and teens. Or as the author's daughter says, "It's really cool."
White Heat
A great late-period gangster movie featuring Jimmy Cagney in one of his most astonishing roles: Cody Jarrett, a vicious killer with a mama complex. The fiery finale is movie legend.
The Shop Around the Corner
Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan play shopclerks who hate each other at work but love each other in their anonymous pen-pal letters. It's the basis for the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan You've Got Mail but the original's both funnier and more tender. Co-starring Frank Morgan, the Wizard of Oz himself.
AGES 13-15
Leave Her to Heaven
This story of a gracious, soft-spoken psycho nut-job (Gene Tierney) who'd do anything to keep her husband's love--including murder. An easy sell to jaded teenagers, with outrageous Technicolor lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous sets and a plot that's enjoyably corny until it suddenly gets very, very weird.
Psycho
In 1960, Psycho was so discombobulating as to seem almost obscene. Today, of course, it looks quaint. Its maliciously playful sensibility and primordial scares make Hitchcock's classic the modern horror movie blueprint--ground zero for every slasher movie that came after.
Rebel Without a Cause
It remains the most emotionally bruised and most honest depiction of what it's like to be young in America, with James Dean and Natalie Wood achingly real. Widescreen and filmed in rich, emotional colors, it's the movie equivalent of "The Catcher in the Rye," and still strikes home with adolescents fifty years after it was made.
AGES 16-18
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
This is the movie to show a teenager who has begun to realize the grown-ups have no idea what they're doing. Dr. Strangelove will confirm his or her paranoia as well as introduce the radical and liberating idea that paranoia can be funny. A satire about nuclear war with Peter Sellers in three different roles, Strangelove is for adolescents who want to challenge themselves (and everyone one around them) by thinking about the unthinkable.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The first, greatest, and scariest of the alien-attack movies, it leaves almost everything up to the imagination. The citizens of a small California town look the same but are suddenly acting like soulless automatons, making Body Snatchers an unexpectedly sharp metaphor for teenage alienation.
On the Waterfront
An opportunity to see Marlon Brando--without whom Johny Depp, Russell Crowe, or whoever your kids' favorite actor is wouldn't exist--at the peak of his powers. Brando won his first Oscar as a washed-up prizefighter who becomes an outcast after testifying against mobsters. Does Waterfront lionize the moral courage to stand up for what's right or defend ratting out your friends? Discuss.
|
