Edit: the reason your sample film looks so bad is a combination of it being originally shot on much poorer quality film and process than would have been used for the cinema at the time, then poorly preserved over time allowing it to accumulate dust and the sprokets to wear creating judder, then converted to video using a very poor quality process (perhaps even analogous to "point camera at screen") and compressed for the web using a poor quality process. If you dug up the original master somewhere and it'd been sufficiently preserved, it should not look like that.

Any sufficiently preserved film should not look very different now to when it was new, unless it's been poorly preserved, or you're watching a bad/early film-to-video transfer of it, or something like that. You may get some color fading in some circumstances, and wear and tear on the sprockets may make it jump around a bit, but then you can always get another print made from a master and it'll be mint-condition.

If you're seeing specks and blurring in an old film, then something else is wrong - film whether it's shot in 1955 or 2005 should not have specks and blurring if it's in good condition. You may have seen poorly preserved or heavily worn/used film, or an early transfer to video (telecine).

The thing is, there were a great many different film formats and stocks, everything from ultra-clean ultra-sharp 70mm film (the likes of Ben-Hur or South Pacific) down to cheaper and more portable 16mm film which was used for newscasting and (since then) for some inserts in television like when filming outdoors.

Ben-Hur would have looked about as as crisp and clean as a modern film-based Imax film (albeit a different aspect ratio, it was very "widescreen"), and much crisper and cleaner than an average 35mm film (any normal film 10 years ago). In fact it would have looked so much better to cinema audiences in 1959 than to audiences who saw it on home video or television in the 80s or 90s or even DVD in the 90s or 2000s, simply because that film format is superior to all those subsequent small-screen formats and the methods of transferring to them from film.

Anything originally shot on 35mm film would look comparable to most modern 35mm films. It should not be blurry by any means but will have visible grain - this grain might be easier to control with modern films but is still present. Modern pre-digital films like American Beauty, The Matrix or Fight Club have a lot of grain if you look in particular places, and in a way older films tended to shoot in brighter lighting conditions which minimised grain.

We've now fully entered the digital era - which is a much bigger change than the evolutionary changes from the 1950s up until 10 years ago. The difference between a film shot digitally in 2013 and a film shot on 35mm film in 2005 will be a lot more than the film in 2005 and a film in 1960. Digital did have a shaky start but anything in 2012 or later will have much reduced grain, fogging and judder than film while still having decent dynamic range - pretty much an absolute upgrade.

Evolution in film means that colour improved and so did sensitivity, allowing shooting in nature/outdoors and night with less light and/or less grain. But even by 1955 film was already at a relatively advanced stage.

When you see a blu-ray release of a classic film and the picture is so much cleaner and crisper than you ever remember seeing it on video or TV, it's simply because they've gone back and re-digitised a well-preserved film print of the original. Sure you can run video through de-noising or speck removal but this is no substitute for actually going back to a well-preserved print directly from film.

A lot of the time you see old film footage and it looks really poor, it's because:

• It's newsreel type footage which used much poorer film than cinema in the first place
• It's taken from a worn-out print that has been heavily used - dust all over it and very worn in the sprokets, maybe even scratched - as opposed to a clean master print that should be locked in a cupboard
• It's an older film to video conversion (telecine) which sucked a lot of quality out of the picture

I'm no historian but I studied film theory and film history at one stage.

The film used in the forties onward was already a fairly mature technology, not immensely distinct from the monochrome film emulsions that we have today. This particular footage however was shot for television, so I'm not familiar with the technology. UPenn's archives website is also not doing us the favour of informing us what the actual format they have in storage, if any, or what and how that copy was digitised. Since this is a television show, it may have been shot on a television camera and transferred to film using a kinescope, for example.

But the short answer is: No, film would not have looked blurry or indistinct back then. Assuming it was shot on equipment that was modern for the time, black and white films would have more or less the same level of clarity that modern films do, though cinematographers at the time were much more tolerant of film grain. Colour film would have had very different colours, but in terms of resolution and clarity, no issues either; while the colour processes used at that time still had kinks to work out, particularly in low lighting and with darker or less saturated shades, the way films were shot at the time ameliorated or sidestepped those issues.

Something I've always been somewhat curious about is old television kinescopes (the 1950's equivalent of using your phone to record television) and whether or not they could be "upconverted" to what they would have looked like when first broadcast.

For example, here is a very high quality capture off (I assume) the original 2" quad tape of part of a Tonight Show episode from 1964:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkeqkEg2SiI

I always wondered if it would be possible to run this clip through a kinescope to compare "broadcast vs. kinescope" and then devise some filter or program or something to colorize and correct the framerate on existing kinescopes.

To give somewhat of an answer for the second part the closest I can think of is the good German which was filmed using 1940s lenses and techniques. However they used other modern technology so it does not fully work. The only case of film makers using old technology is Lumière and Company a 1995 series of short films using 1890 s cameras