Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Social class in English language movies

I was asked recently to help identify a few movies in which social class plays a significant part.  While there are many, here is a short list (with dates) of some movies that I know.  Some go back a ways, like My Man Godfrey (1936), and some are more contemporary, like Crash (2004).

Feel free to add movies to this list by sending in a comment. I am sure there are many more films from around the world that contain social class as a significant theme, so with your help we can create a more global list.

An Officer and a Gentleman 1982
Breakfast Club 1985
Breaking Away 1979 
Clueless 1995
Crash 2004
Down and Out in Beverly Hills 1986 
Driving Miss Daisy 1989
Educating Rita 1983 
Erin Brockovich 2000 
Five Easy Pieces 1970
Good Will Hunting 1997
Gosford Park 2001 
Great Gatsby 1974
Hoop Dreams 1994
In Time 2011 (Courtesy of Emma Mentley)
Love Story1970 
My Fair Lady 1964
My Man Godfrey 1936
Mystic Pizza 1988 
Norma Rae 1979 
Ordinary People  1980
Pretty in Pink 1986 
Pretty Woman 1990
Rocky I 1976
School Daze 1988
Sense and Sensibility 1995
Six Degrees of Separation 1993 
Slums of Beverly Hills 1998
Swept Away 2002, 1974
The Graduate 1967
The Talented Mr. Ripley 1999 
Titanic 1997 
Trading Places 1983
Wall Street 1987 
Working Girl 1988

I want to thank David Seiler who helped get the dates for many of these. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You can add just about any British costume/historical drama, particularly those based on 19th and 20th century literature -- authors like Thackeray (Barry Lyndon), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Jane Austin (Sense and Sensibility), the Brontës (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights), Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Forster, Chesterton, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, etc., etc. Even in "classless" Australia, social class crops up in just about every film made there.