0022: So You Want to Be a Film Fanatic - The Best of the Best
Submitted by lbangs on Tue, 02/20/2001 - 09:21
Tags:
- The Gold Rush (Chaplin) - 1925
- The General (Keaton) - 1927
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dryer) - 1928
- The Blue Angel (Sternberg) - 1930
- City Lights (Chaplin) - 1931
- M (Lang) - 1931
- Duck Soup (McCarey, Leo) - 1933
- It Happened One Night (Capra) - 1934
- Top Hat (Sandrich) - 1935
- Grand Illusion (Renoir) - 1937
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand) - 1937
- The Adventures of Robin Hood (Curtiz) - 1938
- Bringing Up Baby (Hawks) - 1938
- Gone With the Wind (Fleming) - 1939
- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra) - 1939
- The Rules of the Game (Renoir) - 1939
- Stagecoach (Ford) - 1939
- The Wizard of Oz (Fleming) = 1939
- His Girl Friday (Hawks) - 1940
- Citizen Kane (Welles) - 1941
- The Maltese Falcon (Huston) - 1941
- Sullivan's Travels (Sturges) - 1941
- Casablanca (Curtiz) - 1942
- The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles) - 1942
- Double Idemnity (Wilder) - 1944
- The Children of Paradise (Carne) - 1945
- The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler) - 1946
- Red River (Hawks) - 1948
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston) - 1948
- The Third Man (Reed) - 1949
- Rashomon (Kurosawa) - 1951
- Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock) - 1951
- High Noon (Zinnemann) - 1952
- Singin' in the Rain (Donen / Kelly) - 1952
- From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann) - 1953
- Tokyo Story (Ozu) - 1953
- La Strada (Fellini) - 1954
- Lola Montes (Ophuls) - 1954
- Rear Window (Hitchcock) - 1954
- The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa) - 1954
- The Searchers (Ford) = 1955
- Some Like It Hot (Wilder) - 1959
- Breathless (Godard) - 1960
- Psycho (Hitchcock) - 1960
- Jules and Jim (Truffaut) - 1962
- Lawrence of Arabia (Lean) - 1962
- 8 1/2 (Fellini) - 1963
- Tom Jones (Richardson) - 1963
- Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick) - 1964
- The Godfather (Coppola) - 1972
- Chinatown (Polanski) - 1974
- The Godfather Part II (Coppola) - 1974
- Nashville (Altman) - 1975
- Schindler's List (Spielberg) - 1993
Author Comments:
A friend of mine recently looked at the first tier for this list. He liked it, but he had a few criticisms. He wanted to it be more user-friendly to new film fans who really were interested in learning about the art. He felt that it was a bit too long and that the list should only be about 50 films. He also thought that putting the list in chronological order would be much more interesting and informative to new viewers. So, cheating a bit (I could only chop the list down to 54), I created this new list. I hope you enjoy!
Oh, and I've already started work on the second tier in this series...
This isn't a criticism, but this list, to anyone reasonably familiar with cinema history, is very much a list of established classics. And I expect you know that there are people who would despise this list simply because they oppose, on principle, whatever is established. To me, the very fact that there can be established classics is philosophically interesting as it tends to give the lie to rampant relativism. The most interesting sort of classic would be one that was able to achieve such status in the widest range of cultures over the longest time. Which film on your list might be or become such a classic do you suppose?
My candidate is THE SEVEN SAMURAI.
Yeah, this list is pretty much a distillation of the film canon as it currently is usually envisioned. Perhaps I should release these as a series of videos, "Great Films of the Entire World."
I won't get into the entire relativism debate, but as you mentioned, the films listed above, for whatever reason, are indeed the films most often considered great by english-speaking film critics (my lack of foreign language expertise prevents me from saying more than that). Interestingly enough, on the larger list, there are films from China, India, and Japan listed, which seems to mean either A) many directors in these countries were deliberately making films for a Western audience, where the bigger bucks were, or B) the idea that the East and the West are still entirely alien cultures is usually greatly over-stated. Or, of course, as I suspect, both could be true.
As for a classic that might endure over years and country borders, I may be boring, but I'd put some good money on Citizen Kane. Several Kurasawa films might also be safe bets, along with Tokyo Story, a few Fritz Lang films (M is on here), and, well, perhaps I should stop there.
Shalom, y'all!
L. Bangs