- answering the phone with some variation of "helliew, Mayfair 623487?"
- eulogising war, the military-industrial complex, petroleum derivatives ("plastics, I tell you, plastics! they're the future!")
- punctuating almost any activity with a drink from a hipflask
- outrageously bad back-projections and a stationary car + actor being 'an action sequence'
- referring to younger women as "[adjective] little things" ('she's a sweet little thing if you have the patience' etc)
- beating children with hard wood-based implements
- kindly but firmly ordering the working class characters about (it's the only language they undestand, after all)
- moaning about the servants
- patronising the proletariat
- grotesquely racially stereotyping everyone south of Rome and east of Moscow
- raping a woman and finding it leads to her being eternally grateful and eager to start a longterm 'romantic' relationship
-referring to a woman as 'it'
- custard pies in a non-pr)0n context
but also, on a much less negative note:
- the proper use of hats.
of course it's just too easy to find old-school films abounding with outdated prejudices and poor personal health habits ... but some things which we've supposedly 'moved on' from just weren't depicted in their real-life horror even in films of the time. The two which spring to my mind most readily are homophobic abuse (? so incredibly commonplace it wasn't worth mentioning? or was the fear that even mentioning homophobic terms/acts might turn people gay?) and litter/trashing the environment. In series 1 of MAD MEN we were all meant to notice and titter (from our 00's viewpoint) about how blase the Drapers were about going on a picnic and just leaving all their plastic litter in the park ... ha, ha, we'd never do that now ... but I can't recall seeing people gaily littering even in original 30s/40s/50s films. Mind you of course, you never saw them making an effort to pick anything up either.
