It’s not youth that passed us by, but adulthood.

From Against Eternal Youth by Frederica Mathewes-Green. She discusses the stark contrast between the way adults are portrayed in movies today versus in the 1930-50's.

I grew up in Sweden in the early 1970's when there were only two TV channels, both government owned, both operating for only a few hours a day. Even such a restricted schedule posed a challenge as to how it might be filled given a limited budget. The answer was to purchase very cheap content which meant American movies from the 1900s to the 1940's, avant-garde films from various Western European countries (avant-garde meaning state produced films of such intellectualism and sophistication that they had never been viewed by anyone outside the immediate family of the actors and producers), and existential cartoons from Soviet Bloc countries such as East Germany, Poland, and Bulgaria.

This, by the way, in combination with dark and inclement weather for nine months of the year, is an excellent, though hard to replicate, regimen for encouraging people to become enthusiastic readers.

As a consequence of such circumstances, I was reared on such classics as Arsenic and Old Lace, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, etc. I understand exactly what Mathewes-Green means.

The adults in these films carry themselves differently.

They don’t walk and speak the way we do. It’s often hard to figure out how old the characters are supposed to be — as though they were portraying a phase of the human life-cycle that we don’t have any more.

and

Characters in these older movies appear to be an age nobody ever gets to be today. This isn’t an observation about the actors themselves (who may have behaved in very juvenile ways privately); rather, it is about the way audiences expected grownups to act. A certain manner demonstrated adulthood, and it was different from the manner of children, or even of adolescents such as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

Today actors preserve an unformed, hesitant, childish quality well into middle age. Compare the poised and debonair Cary Grant with Hugh Grant, who portrayed a boyish, floppy-haired ditherer till he was forty. Compare Bette Davis’ strong and smoky voice with Renée Zellweger’s nervous twitter. Zellweger is adorable, but she’s thirty-five. When will she grow up?

Finally,

Future historians will have to sort out our plight — how a whole generation could forget to grow up, while still attempting to raise a younger generation and lead the most powerful nation in the world through times of war and terror. The skills of adulthood are not ones we know how to use. Being kittenish, or obscene, or adorably perplexed — we can do that. But gathering the gravity and confidence that signals full maturity is beyond our capabilities. It’s not youth that passed us by, but adulthood.