This list is chronological, although if there are multiple entries for a given year I have ranked those entries, beginning with my favorite among them. The list reflects my one hundred favorite English-language films, then—at a particular moment, that is, on a particular day.
Again, one hundred is a finite, unforgiving number, and everything including the kitchen sink dramas from England can’t make it in.
Here are the one hundred films, then, by year, through 2007.
1914
1. HIS MAJESTY, THE SCARECROW OF OZ. One of a number of silent films that the author of the Oz books wrote and produced, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz was also directed by L. Frank Baum. Light and airy, it’s pure enchantment. Unlike the lumbering, unimaginative Wizard of Oz (1939), His Majesty doesn’t make us feel nostalgic for our childhoods; rather, it permits the adult viewer to enter a child’s world of unfettered fancy. There’s no place like Baum, there’s no place like Baum.
The story, of course, is fabulous, and the filming, liltingly magical. Baum’s cinematic guide is Georges Méliès, who in France had already taken his Trip to the Moon (1902) and made his Impossible Voyage (1904) and Conquest of the Pole (1912). These and other Méliès films helped fill Baum’s wondrous bag of camera tricks. But Baum’s sprightly humor is all his own. For instance, Scarecrow’s squaring off and dance with Giant Crow in a field is hilarious.
There is a remarkable passage in which Old Mombi assaults Scarecrow and tears the straw of life out of his chest as he lies on the ground. Seamless editing replaces the actor playing Scarecrow with a real scarecrow, permitting a scene of truly gripping witchly frenzy and scarecrowly vulnerability. More marvelous still are scenes on the barge as Dorothy and her companions pursue their plan to dispose of King Krewl. At one point Scarecrow is left behind, stuck on his pole in the water, and, looking for a way out, he goes into the depths of the sea, encountering a whole other realm. Later, the group on their barge goes up and comes back down the Wall of Water—one of the most deliriously beautiful passages in all of fantastic cinema.
There isn’t a moment of this film that doesn’t delight.
1922
2. NANOOK OF THE NORTH. Robert J. Flaherty is the “father of the documentary,” not because he invented filmed documents (cinema’s earliest incarnation, in fact), but because he invented documentary films—thematically unified works including instances of documented reality.
Flaherty staged things, having actual people in their usual surroundings—natives in primitive environments—“perform” what they routinely do or what ancestors did. His persistent theme is humanity in Nature—humanity endangered by Nature and by the intrusion of mechanical apparatus into their fragile world, including, ironically, the motion-picture camera that Flaherty brought in in order to document these disappearing cultures.
Shot in the Canadian Arctic, Nanook follows a family of Itivimuits (Eskimoes). The opening is unsurpassable cinema. From a boat, two tracking shots extend over stretches of water dotted by ice floes while a sterile sun illuminates a frigid no-man’s-land. Nanook, a fur trader, appears to be standing guard at a lower corner of expository title cards, following which closeups introduce him and Nyla, his wife, prior to a thematic integration of all that we have thus far seen: Nanook in his canoe on the water, poised to provide for himself and his family—an Itivimuit in the wild.
Cultural anthropologists may gripe at Flaherty’s “enactments,” but in this “reconstructed reality” how wondrously Flaherty, as artist, shows humanity’s resourceful adaptation to an almost inconceivably harsh environment. Indeed, Nature proves Flaherty’s assistant in the savage snowstorm that threatens to engulf the Itivimuit family. Only luck saves them, in the form of an abandoned igloo—a set!—they supposedly chance upon on their way home. Upon their dogs outside the igloo, though, the snow falls and falls—this conclusive shot an associative reminder of the precariousness of the family’s own existence.
1924
3. GREED. Erich von Stroheim’s Greed was 9½ hours long. The version that MGM released, though, is two hours and twenty minutes. In 1957, after 33 years of suppression (to mark Hollywood’s crucifixion of artists?), the excised footage was blithely destroyed by the studio. Stroheim died that same year. There is no possibility, therefore, of restoring Greed to any kind of fullness.
Based on Frank Norris’s McTeague, the butchered Greed is nevertheless immense: a richly detailed, teeming canvas where highly specific yet almost primitive characters are enmeshed in a number of American landscapes, among these, at the last, Death Valley, where, shackled to one another, two greedy men unconsciously parody American myths: liberty, independence, rugged individualism. Greed holds up a mirror to America, clarifying, for instance, the parochial nature of American life, the dogged self-interest and tendency toward self-protection of those who are perpetually terrified of being cast adrift. The most memorable character is Trina (ZaSu Pitts, tremendous), daughter of immigrants, whose luckily gotten loot—she wins a lottery—is her single anchor to a sense of being in a compulsively busy but essentially empty country that swallows up identities whole and spits out skeletal remains in a configuration of shibboleths: sanctified by manifest destiny, individualism amidst endless opportunity—all together, the great American hoax. Animating Trina are the gold coins she feverishly fingers in secret; her despair translates into hope, hope into despair—America’s psychic seesaw negotiating between golden myths and shackling realities. Adding nothing and leaving her with nothing, the coins patch over a void of marital disappointment and absence of genuine community. Trina’s mental and moral disintegration, echoed in the fates of Marcus and McTeague, the two men ultimately bound together in Death Valley, is America’s story, which Stroheim, brilliantly alert, follows like a snake.
4. SHERLOCK JR. Sherlock Jr. is Buster Keaton’s freshest, most captivating comedy. Keaton directed from an inspired script by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell. He also starred and edited. More than any other American film, Sherlock Jr. tests cinema’s capacity, by tricks of editing, to delight audiences by seeming to obliterate confinements of space and time.
The character Keaton winningly plays—for want of another name, let’s call him Buster—is a projectionist who seems flypapered by bad luck, including in romance. One day at work, in order to solve the crime in the movie he is running and thus prove his prowess, he walks into the screen and becomes part of the movie’s action. Buster is now Sherlock Jr., master detective.
By skillful use of back projection, director Keaton zaps Buster from one setting to another in an instant. He has Buster, being chased, jump head-first into an outfit and emerge fully dressed, in disguise, as a woman; and he devises what remains to date the most exhilarating road chase in all of cinema.
Above all, Buster wants to impress his girl. What’s an inexperienced boy to do when he wants to kiss his girl? At the close of the film, when Sherlock Jr. is back to being Buster in reality and Buster is running another film, a romance rather than a detective mystery, he gets timely help. A love scene in the film-within-the-film offers pointers and lends courage. As he makes his big move, Buster’s eyes dart back and forth between the educative image onscreen and his beloved in his arms—for us, also a screen image. Art imitates life imitates art, and the movies have helped one more soul disclose his feelings and realize his dreams.
How to kiss? Sherlock Jr. has cracked another case!
1925
5. THE GOLD RUSH. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #20.
1926
6. THE GENERAL. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #26.
1927
7. THE WIND. In his great Swedish films, Victor Sjöström had probably done more than any other artist to establish the expressive visual vocabulary of film. In Hollywood, he made two films with Lillian Gish, the brilliant star of Way Down East (1920) and numerous other films by D. W. Griffith: The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1927). Gish, magnificent as Hester Prynne, is superb again in the latter film, playing Letty, a Virginian girl who moves in with a cousin of hers who lives in the southwestern prairie, a region beseiged by wind storms—a projection of the dissatisfaction with American life that in fact had prompted Letty’s westward move in the first place. The piercing symbolism of The Wind addresses the paucity of choices available especially to women.
Wind and sand, sand and wind: Letty’s turbulent soul, her sense of wanting self-determination, become startlingly visible in Sjöström’s visionary work. Her cousin’s wife bitterly resents Letty’s intrusion into their home. Sjöström’s portrait of their relationship glistens with thematic relevance. While the wife must cut a carcass for food, drenching herself in blood, Letty, neat and clean, wins the affection of the woman’s children by leading their recreation. Implicitly, Letty’s cousin’s wife is also dissatisfied with her lot. Continuing the irony, when she tosses Letty out, Letty ends up marrying a farmhand whom she doesn’t love—again, a reflection on the circumstance she and her cousin’s wife share. What a concentrated, resonant film about American life this is.
Letty and her husband achieve genuine complicity as a couple only when he buries all traces of her having killed an attacker. He thus becomes his wife’s buttress against the wind, underscoring her vulnerability and her reliance on marriage to help her navigate an inhospitable culture and nation.
8. UNDERWORLD. A powerful melodrama of primitive emotions, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld launched the cycle of Hollywood gangster films.
Sternberg’s own background of poverty—his family, which emigrated from Austria when he was eight, struggled in New York tenements—brings conviction to such tawdry settings as the Dreamland Café, where characters play out makeshift lives. Shadowed by death, which it attempts to block out by creating its own insular space, here is a world of much bravado but no real happiness.
An enormous clock, superimposed on the opening action, sets the time at two in the morning, when sleepless criminals are at work. It also conveys a sense of mortality’s pressure. Later, a jewelry store owner is shot to death during a daytime robbery as he attends to a clock in his shop. The invisible phantom gunning him down is Bull Weed, gang leader, out to steal a bauble for girlfriend Feathers McCoy. The headlong shot (with Weed excluded) is framed to make the victim appear as his assailant’s reflection. Time is also running out for Bull Weed.
McCoy is perpetually garbed in a gaudy mass of feathers, giving her her nickname. (This is a film of nicknames—symbolically, this cloaking of identity yet another attempt to elude death and the fear of death.) Throughout, the feathers slightly molt, this shimmering loss marking the transience of human life. A feather floating downward in space is, in fact, our introduction to Feathers, whose youthful sensuality, tarnished and endangered by her surroundings, comes to embody human vulnerability—a point punctuated by her near rape.
Underworld is beautifully acted, its three stars—Clive Brook as Rolls Royce (called so for his silence—his unwillingness to “squeal” and betray), Evelyn Brent as Feathers, and George Bancroft as Bull Weed—all giving their finest performances.
9. SUNRISE. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s first American film, Sunrise, is cherished for its lyricism and transplanted German expressionism. A critics’ poll in the 1990s voted it the greatest movie ever made.
The marriage of a young farm couple, splintered by the husband’s dalliance with a vampish visitor from the city, becomes whole again as the two become reacquainted—ironically, in the city. The film delights with its symphonic visual beauty and highly expressive technique. Murnau employs the liberated camera that distinguished The Last Laugh (The Last Man, 1924) back in Germany, as well as the most accomplished subjective use of back-projection in cinema. As the couple walk, the background—their surroundings—magically transforms correlative to shifts in their feelings. There is also a tram ride they share that lyrically condenses the whole course of their relationship.
Even with its cribbing from Theodore Dreiser’s much greater novel, An American Tragedy, and although a tad heavy, Sunrise is irreplaceable. It certainly seemed to predict Murnau’s success in Hollywood. But the film, while applauded by critics, was a popular failure. The first year of the Oscars, Sunrise won for “artistic quality”—a category subsequently canceled, ostensibly not to confuse the American public with two “best picture” prizes (Wild Bill Wellman’s Wings took the other, familiar one), but really so as not to encourage art over profitable entertainments. The fact that there were two such prizes in 1928 was an acknowledgment of the difference between art and manipulative entertainment, between individual expression and committee-determined commercialism. The dropping of the “artistic” prize was tantamount to a declaration of war on art and artists in the maniacal pursuit of quick, enormous profits. The industry ordained the sun should set on Sunrise.
Only it didn’t. It hasn’t. Who today, given the choice, would go with Wings rather than take in Sunrise?
1928
10. STEAMBOAT BILL JR. Home from college in Boston, Willie isn’t the son his seaman father bargained for. He is wearing an unmanly hat (a beret) and totes a sissy musical instrument (a ukulele). On top of everything else, Willie falls in love with his father’s rival’s daughter. Can Steamboat Bill make a sailor out of his Willie? Can Willie somehow prove himself to his father?
Yet again Buster Keaton turns adolescent fantasy into brilliant cinema. It is Nature, in the form of a cyclone, that puts Willie to the test—and the boy succeeds with flying black-and-whites. Keaton’s deadpan persona becomes the hilariously impassive eye of the storm as all sorts of destruction and devastation befall the boy, who remains oblivious when he is not seemingly unconscious of events, including the whole front of a house falling down on his location but leaving him unscathed. (The façade’s open window miraculously falls on the spot on which Willie is standing.) No other comedy employs such wondrous special effects and requires from its athletic star such precision placement and timing to ensure his survival. Steamboat Bill Jr. drops the jaw and crashes the funny bone, achieving a degree of visual splendor worthy of the director of Sherlock Jr. (see 1924) and co-director of The General (see 1926). This film completes Keaton’s trio of masterpieces.
However, Keaton, who co-authored the script, isn’t, officially at least, the director on this occasion. Charles F. Reisner is the one who is credited. But the film is Buster’s from prissy start to flamboyant finish, where he saves his future father-in-law from drowning, as well as the preacher who will marry him and his girl.
1930
11. CITY LIGHTS. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #32.
1933
12. DUCK SOUP. Hail, Freedonia!
Duck Soup is the funniest, most anarchic of the zany comedies made by the Marx Brothers. Moreover, it remains the most brilliant political satire in American cinema.
The same year as Hitler’s appointment in Germany, Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) is appointed Freedonia’s ruler. Attending the ceremony in his honor in the national palace, he wakes up with a cigar in his mouth and descends from his bedroom via a firefighter’s pole. His mistress is the widow of Freedonia’s previous leader. Firefly is a fascist. He orders execution for anyone who is found displaying any sort of pleasure in public. As he puts it: And pop goes the weasel! (Patriotic American tunes and historical allusions reveal the real identity of Freedonia.)
Meanwhile, Harpo and Chico Marx play bumbling spies for Sylvania, with which Firefly goes to war.
In perhaps the greatest comical set-piece the Marx Brothers ever devised, Groucho-as-Firefly finds himself facing another Groucho-as-Firefly in an empty space in the palace that, to shield himself from discovery, the mimic (Harpo) tries to convince him is a mirror. A series of duplicated gestures extends the illusion, which is, however, broken when the two mirror-images pass through and around the presumed barrier of the looking-glass. Thus conformity is deconstructed into individualism before our very eyes—one of many blows to fascism this hilarious film effortlessly delivers.
Nominally directed by Leo McCarey, Duck Soup, a financial flop, ended the Marxes’ association with Paramount, which had allowed their inspiration freer range than timid, selfconscious M-G-M would. The American public, absorbed by the Depression, would not be interested in the issues raised by the film until it found those issues at its front door.
Today, Duck Soup is universally cherished as a near-masterpiece.
13. KING KONG. Blondes are scarce around here.
King Kong is a movie about the making of a movie titled King Kong. Carl Denham takes his Depression-era crew deep into Africa to locate the gigantic gorilla that is worshipped by natives as a God. Eventually he captures Kong, with his golden leading lady as live bait, and takes it back to New York City in chains, to display it in a stage show. God, as “another roadside attraction,” as Tom Robbins would say: this is one of the themes of King Kong, to whose story Edgar Wallace contributed. The directors are Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the documentarians who made Grass (1925).
The film explores the difference between the kind of wonder that inspires religious faith and the more secular kind associated with such technology as the motion-picture camera. Along the way, it takes us civilized folk back into the past, where the pterodactyls flew and the dinosaurs roamed. It provides a thrilling adventure. Everything resonates within the framework of its thematic intentions; even the film’s semi-sensational nature reflects on humanity’s appetite to reduce the irreducible to manageable, and manipulable, proportions. The image that gloriously encapsulates this is, of course, terribly ironic: the (relatively) tiny blonde goddess in Kong’s enthralled paw.
This film is awesome in its power. When it was first released, my mother and her sister Estelle went to see it. My poor aunt! She screamed in such terror that the theater manager had the projectionist stop the show. Today, there would be no such accommodation for intense human emotion. Thus, the whole point of the film has been lost. This is not to the detriment of the film but to the detriment of the rest of us.
1934
14. MAN OF ARAN. One of American filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty’s works of “re-created everyday life,” Man of Aran documents the harsh existence of island villagers thirty miles off the western Irish coast. Using sparely lit interiors and the rough sea outdoors to stress the isolation of the villagers, Flaherty further “isolated” them—not in space but in time, and even, existentially, from themselves—by immersing them in an elaborately staged shark hunt as it would have been executed a century earlier. The result is cunning and complex; for this ploy places the villagers at something of a remove from their own lives comparable to their remove, in the present, from us. The “performance” accomplished another feat: these nonprofessionals could portray their perilous circumstance with reduced selfconsciousness. Finally, Flaherty was thus able to commit to film a practice from the past—in its particulars, an activity that has vanished.
Even balking purists, whose literalism may prevent their grasp of an immense gain of truth at the forfeit of a bit of reality, should find exemplary the film’s technical coup: Flaherty’s use of the telephoto lens, by which, miraculously, he is able to stay, simultaneously, both “inside” and “outside” the action of the hunt—this ability itself a metaphor for his involvement in the life of the village, where he lived for a while in preparation for the film.
Flaherty’s spouse, Frances, assisted him in cinematographing in starkly beautiful black and white (Flaherty had had a small processing laboratory built on the island), and his brother, David, was another member of his group. What, together, they achieved is Flaherty’s most poetic film, a work of timeless, haunting visual grandeur.
15. THE LOST PATROL. Lost in the Mesopotamian desert, a First World War British battalion are being picked off one by one by the unseen enemy.
One of the combatants notes there is no real reason for the Arabs to be taking up arms against them. But the truth of this cuts both ways. In an instant, another one of the soldiers, delirious from heat and a protracted sense of danger, shoots at his own shadow in the sands only seconds before being shot by an Arab. This tragic mistake—it is the sound of the first shot that clarifies the target for the second, fatal shot—identifies each side with the other. Later, two soldiers are sent out to try to find the brigade that can rescue them. When the two return from their failed mission, they are shot dead by their comrades, who fatally mistake them—and, by extension, themselves—for the enemy.
The enemy’s invisibility helps demonstrate the process of dehumanization that results from the mortal dread that war instills.
A saber becomes the secular marker for the graves of fallen soldiers. The combatants’ religious feelings have been projected onto their chaplain, Sanders, in whom they seem to reside in excess. Yet Sanders’ presence reminds us that the soldiers are Christian and that theirs is a Christian nation’s incursion into a non-Christian place. What we are observing, then, is a “holy war,” like the Crusades, only one given the trappings of modern secularism. In his astonishing The Lost Patrol, John Ford reveals the sublimation of the religious in modern secular war, which in turn implies the religious basis of modern war, which the British deny because it threatens to expose the connection between World War I and past barbarous wars likewise fought in the name of civilization.
16. TWENTIETH CENTURY. Frank Capra’s wonderful It Happened One Night won 1934’s best picture Oscar, but, that year, Howard Hawks made a sharper “screwball” comedy: adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from a Charles Bruce Millholland play, Twentieth Century. Hawks continued to excel in this genre: His Girl Friday (1940), I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Monkey Business (1952) and, to a lesser extent, Bringing Up Baby (1938).
The plot involves an egotistical theatrical producer and his increasingly egotistical star, brilliantly and hilariously played by John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. Much of the film’s most interesting material whirls around the lead characters, in particular, during a transcontinental trip aboard the train the Twentieth Century; for Hawks, in a darker vein than one might think that the plot would allow, explores issues of the Depression. For one of these, imperiled finances, the unpredictability of theatrical fortunes provides an apt enough occasion. But there is onboard the train, escaped from an insane asylum, a former corporate head who is now a pauper prone to writing bad checks and pasting onto windows and passengers’ apparel, without their knowledge, a sticker that reads, “Repent! The time is at hand.” This apocalyptic message reflects the uncertainty of the times and, also, the nutty allure of religion as antidote to that uncertainty. Two other passengers are European actors who star in a play based on the Passion of Christ; stranded in America, they beg for money because they want to go home. If they are to starve to death, they would prefer it to happen in familiar surroundings.
Twentieth Century, for all its frantic comedy, is as much a descent into torment as Hawks’s Scarface (1932) two years earlier.
17. THE BLACK CAT. Grim, remorseful, Viennese-born Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat is a meditation on the human cost of the First World War in Europe. The war cast a psychic shadow, creating a group of survivors who regarded themselves as “the living dead.” (Hence the spate of vampire and quasi-vampire films in Germany, France and the U.S. in the 1920s and early 1930s.)
The film unfolds in a mountainous stretch of Eastern Europe. Its protagonist is Hungarian psychiatrist Vitus Verdegast (Bela Lugosi, brilliant), a prisoner of war who, since his release from the Russian internment that—these are his words—slowly killed his soul, has been seeking his former commander, Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff); for Poelzig, a traitor to the Austro-Hungarian cause, sold his troop to the Russians in the war, and he also appropriated Verdegast’s young wife. Verdegast has tracked down Poelzig to the very site of the fort that became a field of slaughter because of Poelzig’s betrayal. An architect, Poelzig has built a twisted, modernist mansion on the site, a projection of the tormented soul of Europe, in whose basement the beautiful women he has murdered for the religious rites of the satanic cult he heads are preserved, each suspended in a glass case. This transfigured catacomb—each case is lit from below to render the preserved corpse “spiritual”—becomes the film’s most entrancing visual disclosure of Europe’s doomed attempt to repress, transform and transcend a horrible past. The eerily forward-moving, seemingly floating camera as Poelzig takes Verdegast on a tour of this lowest level of the mansion, with Poelzig’s disembodied grave voice directing the tour, precedes the disclosure of Verdegast’s dead wife in one of the upright, transparent tombs.
Here is a horror film of profound import, climaxed by Verdegast’s skinning Poelzig alive, shown in ghastly silhouette.
1935
18. THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN. I kissed you because I loved you—for a minute.
Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich made seven films together. The best are the first and the last: from Germany, The Blue Angel (1930) and, from the U.S., The Devil Is a Woman, from a novel by Pierre Louys that Luis Buñuel would later film as That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). As Concha Perez in turn-of-the-century Seville, a woman who treats men as puppets on a string, Dietrich acts magnificently, giving a great comedy performance.
However, while Concha inhabits an ironical comedy, two of the men who love her, best friends, inhabit a different universe, one that veers between poles of melodrama and tragedy owing to their self-importance and self-pity.
Much of the narrative consists of Pasqual, a retired army officer, trying to convince Antonio, a young revolutionary fleeing authorities, not to keep his assignation that night with Concha because of his own bad luck with the woman, which flashbacks relate. Pasqual’s wealth and self-involvement, though, distort aspects of his recollections. For instance, all the women in the sweat-shop where Concha works smile at their labor in seeming contentment—a discrepancy underscored by the fact that Pasqual is part of an official contingent investigating labor practices at this cigarette factory. Similarly, Pasqual appears oblivious to the nature of the place where he later discovers Concha working: a bordello. All that concerns him is that Concha manipulates him to have him buy her way out of her contractual arrangement with the madam running the place. Sternberg creates a complex vision of how men easily discount female poverty and desperation, and of what women may be driven to do in order to survive.
The devil is a woman—so long as a certain kind of man tells the tale.
19. THE INFORMER. Dublin, 1922, during the Irish Rebellion. In with the fog is Frankie McPhillip, I.R.A. member on whose head the British have set a £20 bounty. He is informed on by Gypo Nolan, who, court-martialed out of the Organization months earlier, hasn’t been able to earn money, the British and the Irish both mistrusting him. During the long, dark night, Gypo spends the money, leaving a trail of the evidence that convicts him at the secret court of inquiry into Frankie’s murder.
John Ford’s tremendous The Informer, from Liam O’Flaherty, generates compassion for Gypo, whose consignment to a no-man’s-land prompts his betrayal of his best friend after his girlfriend wishes aloud for £10 so that they can book passage to America. Ford excels at his portrayal of a fear- and shadow-ridden police state and of the poverty and oppression that trample hope and encourage desperate, morally clouded acts. Redeeming Gypo is his guilty regret. Shot by the Organization to ensure its survival, he stumbles into church and confesses his crime to Frankie’s grieving mother, who forgives him. With his last breath he addresses the image of the crucified Christ: “Frankie, do you hear that? Your mother forgives me!”—one of the most moving finishes in cinema.
Drawing upon German expressionism, The Informer is highly poetic and, at times, almost dreamlike, as in the case of the blind man, propped by his cane, whose path keeps crossing Gypo’s, embodying both his shame and his doom.
Victor McLaglen is more than twice the right age to play Gypo, but his phenomenal acting won him an Oscar. Ford’s direction, Dudley Nichols’s script and Max Steiner’s music also won Oscars. Because Mutiny on the Bounty won the top prize, Ford quipped, “They liked everything about the picture except the picture.”
1936
20. MODERN TIMES. A comic strip of a movie, Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times satirizes industrial capitalism and its mania for efficiency, and the dehumanization and exhaustion these foster. At film’s end Charlie is on the road, accompanied by a gamin, searching for the home in America that hopefully lies somewhere ahead.
The film opens with a full-screen clock approaching six o’clock, the morning hour that sets American blue-collar workers into motion for the daily grind. An overhead shot of penned sheep forced through a chute dissolves into another overhead shot, of a pack of factory workers, on their way to work, moving up into the street from a subway station—a mechanical routine these souls passively enact.
Whether as factory assembly-line worker, shipyard worker, night watchman on perilous roller skates, or singing waiter whose “song” is utterly nonsensical, Charlie tries his hardest. It’s on the assembly line—Henry Ford’s invention—that we meet him. Electro Steel’s maniacal surveillance and control of its workers define his workday. Charlie’s single small job is to tighten nuts, with two wrenches, on every unit that passes him on the conveyer belt. Increased productivity has transformed the workplace into a torture chamber. Lunch is on the way out, given the Billows Feeding Machine that’s tested out on poor Charlie: an automated system for speeding up workers’ lunch time. Rather than providing him with a restorative respite, his “lunch break” now intensifies the degree to which Charlie is a slave to the factory’s drive for profits, no matter the cost to employees. Having thus psychologically “merged” with factory apparatus, Charlie, back on the assembly line, ends up being “eaten up” by the machinery after falling onto the conveyer belt, becoming literally a cog in the gear-turnings: an hilarious metaphor for the mental battering factory workers experience.
21. THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS. Various departments of the U.S. government routinely churn out documentary, propaganda and training films of one kind or another, but, for a brief spell during the Depression, thanks to documentarian Pare Lorentz, there existed what might be called a national American cinema. Heavily influenced by silent Soviet cinema, The Plow That Broke the Plains is nevertheless darker and more self-critical than that visual influence suggests. The film is too weather-beaten to be celebratory.
Its subject matter is land erosion; Lorentz’s film might be called a deconstruction of the Great Depression, at least from the point of view of topography and agriculture. What can we learn from the crisis our nation and its people is currently enduring? Granted, aspects of the crisis were always out of our control; but what have we done wrong that has contributed to the crisis?—what might we have done differently?
The Plow That Broke the Plains is also a piece of poetry, finding in the topic of land erosion an implicit metaphor for America’s torn, beaten, eroded spirit. Its awesome view of a ravaged Great Plains shows the need for remedial federal activism (the Leftist cause it is promoting), which would come in the form of the National Recovery Administration. Thus government, the repository of the people’s hope and enlightened behavior, would help repair both eroded land and eroded lives. Responsive, coordinated federal action might make America whole again.
For all its measure of hope, however, this remains a bracing film. Through a succession of finely etched, powerful black-and-white images, Lorentz’s Plow amasses an overwhelming record not only of Nature’s assault on humanity but also of an irresponsible people’s complicity.
22. SWING TIME. Fred Astaire is Lucky, dancer and gambler, and Ginger Rogers is Penny, dance instructor, in their most brilliant musical, Swing Time.
Having been tricked by fellow performers, who don’t want him to leave their show and cost them their jobs, Lucky misses his wedding; and he and his new girl, Penny, lose their first chance to dance together professionally—as it were, Lucky loses his new lucky Penny—through the fault of neither, although Penny, in denial over how unlucky Lucky (and, by extension, she herself) is, chooses to blame him nevertheless. Everything seems topsy-turvy. Once frowning, a wall portrait now smiles. What can be counted on? During the Depression countless people felt the same way.
The film, of course, ends happily. Penny and Lucky are about to marry—“I guess so,” is how Penny, laughing, puts it, upholding some piece of uncertainty to the last. The two then, in front of a vast, sky-high window, duet harmoniously as snow turns to sunlight in a heartbeat.
In Swing Time, the Astaire-Rogers cycle reached a luminous and—courtesy of Jerome Kern’s music—melodious peak. The songs by Kern and lyricist Dorothy Fields, including “A Fine Romance” and the incomparably beautiful (and Oscar-winning) “The Way You Look Tonight,” are magical—as are the dances, by Astaire and Hermes Pan. These include, intricate and deft, the “Waltz in Swingtime,” and the glittering, dramatic dance to “Never Gonna Dance”—for me, also the best song. (When this dance lamenting hopeless romance quickly breaks into and out of a reprise of the hopeful “Waltz,” it’s a point through the heart.) Grounded, precipitous, delicate, robust, and shimmeringly mysterious, the “Never Gonna Dance” dance haunts with its grand passion, its soulful defenses against time. Astaire and Rogers astound.
George Stevens directed.
1937
23. THE RIVER. Consisting of photographs he had collected and captioned, Pare Lorentz’s book The Roosevelt Year: 1933 established his concern with the social and political problems with which the New Deal in its first year had tried to grapple. Lorentz was also a political columnist for King Features until William Randolph Hearst pinkslipped him for a piece praising Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture. The Department of Agriculture, planning to make films to generate support for the administration’s environmental programs, hired the thirty-year-old West Virginian in 1935, making him the New Deal’s official documentarian. This led in 1938 to the formation of the United States Film Service under the auspices of the National Emergency Council. When Congress withdrew its funding two years later, Lorentz resigned as director. A commissioned officer in the Air Corps during the war, Lorentz produced training films for pilots. After the war, he directed the filming of the Nuremberg trials.
Produced by the U.S. Farm Security Administration, The River follows the Mississippi and its tributaries, disclosing land and people devastated by floods, in the process conveying their joint and inseparable destiny, and suggesting that “the river,” properly harnessed, is the nation’s unifying lifeblood. Moreover, the film extols the redemptive possibilities of federal action, here in the form of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Inspired by Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens’s The New Earth (1934), The River is a work of national purpose—hence, a kind of epic. Also, it’s a thrilling record of humanity’s struggle against calamitous Nature.
Lorentz’s film represents the lyrical apogee of American cinema. His orchestration of the film’s elements, including beautiful black-and-white cinematography by Floyd Crosby, Stacy Woodard and Willard van Dyke, and his own peerless editing—achieved a result that continues to indict the U.S. for failing to develop and maintain a national cinema.
24. THE SPANISH EARTH. Men cannot “act” before the camera in the presence of death. — from Ernest Hemingway’s commentary in The Spanish Earth.
Text and meta-text. First, text.
The most moving American documentary ever, by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, begins with two panning long shots: a painterly sky; an expanse of parched earth. The scene is the Spanish village of Fuenteduena, between Valencia and Madrid. Two parallel themes will come together: a project to irrigate the land, to raise food to feed Republican soldiers opposing Franco’s fascists and foreign cohorts—Nazi Germany; Fascist Italy—during the Spanish Civil War; the raging war itself, in and near Madrid, including the Republican effort to secure the bridge between Valencia and Madrid.
There are no reconstructions here. We see war—actual soldiers as they steel themselves for battle; fresh bodies of killed soldiers and civilians. The villagers succeed with their irrigation project; Republican soldiers secure the bridge.
Meta-text. Republicans, we know, will lose the war. How on earth can we watch this film today without bringing to it our knowledge of this bleeding history? Ivens made a hopeful film, but reality subsequently canceled hope. This cancellation, a gargantuan defeat for humanity in the twentieth century, is forever, now, a part of The Spanish Earth.
1939
25. STAGECOACH. John Ford’s Stagecoach corrals American optimism while redefining the western genre as other than trivial or nostalgic. For Depression audiences, its weary past was recognizable, and they identified with the young outlaw couple’s quest for peace, safety, financial security. While dangerous, the landscape, fresh and wild, offered hope of renewal.
The Ringo Kid has escaped prison to avenge the murders of his father and brother. A primitive character, Ringo acts gallantly towards Dallas, a prostitute who has been run out of town.
Ford’s images engage the analytical mind. Twice, while haranguing about “law and order,” a banker about to abscond with bank funds appears against a diffuse, shining cross on his office wall, the result of sunlight pouring in through a latticed window. Hollywood’s most legendary atheist here scores a visual coup at the banker’s expense. Touting “values,” this pillar of society cloaks his corruption and greed in an upright posture and in staunch rhetoric, while the chance symbol of Jesus behind him slyly digs at his hypocrisy, reminding us how often those in positions of authority and power sanctify villainy with religiosity.
Later, the shadowy darkness that accompanies the ostrasized prostitute to her pitiful shack—the boy she loves is about to learn her business—projects not only Dallas’s shame but also society’s tendency to relegate awareness of its exploitative nature to hidden outposts of the communal psyche.
Except for a plot-driven big Indian attack, Stagecoach is lustrous with meaning and thematic purpose—and irony. The action closes with Dallas and Ringo fleeing to another country, Mexico, in order to have a chance at realizing the American Dream.
Claire Trevor and John Wayne are wonderful as Dallas and Ringo, and John Carradine is superb as an elegant, morally complex gambler-assassin—a character presaging Paladin on television’s Have Gun, Will Travel.
1940
26. THE LONG VOYAGE HOME. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #41.
27. THE GREAT DICTATOR. Achingly funny, The Great Dictator finds Charles Chaplin belatedly letting into a film of his more than just a trickle of sound—and now, not to skewer a pompous politician (as in City Lights, see above) or to ridicule the intrusiveness of sound in cinema (as with the nonsense song in Modern Times, see above), but to excoriate Adenoid Hynkel’s—Adolf Hitler’s—messianic rants. At least on film, Hitler doesn’t stand a chance.
Chaplin directs from his own script, and his double role here—as Tomania’s anti-Semitic dictator who rules under the sign of the Double Cross, and, in the Ghetto, a polite, humane Jewish barber, a tad shell-shocked from his First World War experience (more or less, the Charlie who is familiar to us)—results in a split performance of sheer brilliance. There are any number of high points: the hilarious discrepancy between Hynkel’s angry, vicious speeches in gibberish-“German” and their official translations into mild, conciliatory English; exposing megalomania, Hynkel’s private ballet with a balloon globe of the world that he hopes to conquer, the ball bouncing off his head, arms, hip and buttocks; mistaken for Hynkel, the barber giving a speech that discloses his own loving heart rather than Hynkel’s foul hatred. The last yields to an image of the barber’s beloved Hannah (Paulette Goddard, irresistible), now in a concentration camp, perhaps telepathically hearing his words and looking up at the sky: a deeply moving finale.
Chaplin, the conscience of American cinema, could not fully imagine Nazi Germany’s brutality or evil; the concentration camp here is a detention camp, not a death camp. But who knows what it cost the world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wedded to a policy of neutrality, kept Chaplin’s film from being made for two years?
28. THE GRAPES OF WRATH. During the Depression, the Joads and their extended family leave Oklahoma for California, the new Promised Land. Sharecroppers, they’ve been displaced by Nature and inhuman nature—dust bowl erosion and a foreclosing bank. They embody the hardships and aspirations of a people.
The Grapes of Wrath opens with young Tom Joad, paroled from prison, halted in the road on his way home. The film (apart from a sentimental scene the studio attached) also ends in the middle of things, with Tom having killed another man, a civilian “cop” who bludgeoned to death a friend of Tom’s, a former preacher-turned-laborist who had been working to counter the local exploitation of homeless workers. In an eternizing long shot, Tom walks across the horizon. Whatever in his journey on the lam he can do to help the oppressed, the downtrodden (“. . . since I’m an outlaw already . . .”), he will do. But his solitariness will be less a political opportunity, which John Steinbeck’s novel reduces it to, than endless heartache. Tom and his family will likely never reunite.
John Ford’s imagery is brilliant. Superimposed Caterpillar tractors razing homes from which tenant farmers have been evicted appear alien, to underscore the unnaturalness of farm equipment’s use against farmers—an instance of withering visual irony. Later, a traveling shot into a migrant camp finds faces and forms listlessly passing before the camera. They appear worn, depleted, ghostlike—a reflection of hopelessness among the dispossessed.
Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad is insolent, embittered, selfish, loyal to family and friends, struggling to understand what’s happening to himself and others, noble, unselfish and caring at times—a tangle of human contradictions. An Everyman precipitously poised at crossroads where great decency and great viciousness seem equal possibilities, he is the stirring quintessence of human possibility.
29. THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER. Having just made the heavenly Ninotchka (1939), highlighted by one of the greatest comedy performances in cinema, Greta Garbo’s, Ernst Lubitsch now made a charming, funny, warm, delicate and, surprisingly, deeply moving romantic comedy, The Shop Around the Corner.
The setting is Matuschek’s, a bourgeois gift shop in Budapest in the early 1930s. Two of the employees, Klara Novak and Alfred Kralik, constantly bicker. What Kralik doesn’t know is that he is in love with Klara. They are anonymous pen-pals. Will the two come together in one another’s arms or forever conduct their romance through the post office?
The title sets the universal tone of the piece. It also distances the time of its activities from the time when the film was made and released. The world that Lubitsch so lovingly details is just out of reach—“around the corner.” The agent of change in Europe has been Adolf Hitler. In the guise of light romantic comedy, Lubitsch’s Shop is his lament for the Europe that he remembers, the Europe that has vanished. A Berliner, Lubitsch also was Jewish, and this deepens his lament. The tenderness with which he gazes at the interconnected lives at Matuschek’s is an index of the keen sense of loss he feels. They are a kind of family. This film is unique in Lubitsch’s canon; it is emotionally full.
Actors are indispensable to Lubitsch. His star, sherry-voiced Margaret Sullavan, is wonderful as Klara, hilarious, poignant; James Stewart is good as Kralik; and the European-born Jewish actors in the supporting cast, Joseph Schildkraut, Frank Morgan and Felix Bressart, are excellent.
Along with Lubitsch, we all end up missing Matuschek’s. And we miss his glowing film, until we pop it back in the machine and it breaks our hearts all over again.
30. POWER AND THE LAND. The bread we eat and the milk we drink depend on Bill and Hazel Parkinson . . . and their farm and how they’re making out.
Produced by the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Power and the Land opens with a long shot of rural America: a great expanse of sky beneath which trees and a house appear tiny. Birds fly through. Brilliant Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens holds the shot long enough so we take in the pertinent fact: No power lines interrupt this vast, open space. Why? Voiceover commentary—this is, otherwise, almost entirely a silent film—explains, “Power companies want a profit,” and this they can make in cities but not in the country, where returns cannot overcome the cost to them for equipment and service. “The farms are left in the dark—[in 1940,] three out of four farms are left in the dark in this big, inventive country. Seems wrong somehow.”
In 1935, the REA was set up to remedy this situation by offering low-interest loans to cooperatives of farmers, who then collectively own the means for generating power they themselves have bought and installed. An Ohioan family whom the film chronicles, the Parkinsons, become members of the Belmont Electric Cooperative. First, the film shows the daily hardships that the want of electricity imposes. A passage shows farmers in the area harvesting corn together; this spirit of cooperation at work leads to the formation of their electric cooperative, to make work easier. The film then catalogs numerous ways in which electricity makes life easier for Bill and Hazel Parkinson and their children.
Hearteningly, Power and the Land thus finds a space in American life (already inhabited by the U.S. postal service) amenable to socialist ideas.
1941
31. CITIZEN KANE. See 100 Greatest Films, elsewhere on this site, entry #15.
32. THE MALTESE FALCON. By hardboiling French poetic realism, John Huston invented American film noir. The occasion was The Maltese Falcon, from Dashiell Hammett.
Here is a seedy, absurd world of intrigue, deception and betrayal played out, mostly by transients, in hotel rooms, dark, deserted streets, and private detective Sam Spade’s San Francisco office. It’s a blend of frayed and world-weary though persistent humanism, mordant wit, existentialism, cruelty and precise psychology, all unfolding in a landscape pitched between reality and nightmare.
Spade and Miles Archer are partners in a shoestring operation. Suddenly Archer is dead, the result of a tangled case of theirs involving a beautiful, slippery client, Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Spade seduces Brigid, whose character riddles, play-acting and tricky machinations intrigue and delight him. In her he has found his purest partner, someone as treacherous and dangerous as himself. Brigid falls in love with Sam but also plunges him into a whirlpooling abyss whose bottom is the gallows, in order to escape from which, at the last, Spade sacrifices her and, with her, all hope of love’s redemption: the most shattering conclusion in American cinema.
Spade’s “code of honor” is pure rationalization. Spade says a man must do something when his partner is killed. However, he himself wanted Archer dead. Thus O’Shaughnessy’s mere presence would taunt Spade with his sense of complicity in his partner’s death. Brigid might also murder him. Moreover, she has introduced him to a trio of homosexual adventurers who have tested the tight fist of his sexual discomfort. Sam Spade must destroy Brigid O’Shaughnessy to confirm, for himself, his heterosexual identity: a breathtaking analysis of American misogyny. He must feel a lover’s pain, and to feel it he must sacrifice his beloved. He turns her over to the police.
Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor give electrifying performances.
33. SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. Hey, am I laughing?
John L. Sullivan, heavyweight champion from Boston, met his match, decades after his demise, in another John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea, wonderful), the successful Hollywood musical-comedy director in Sullivan’s Travels whose masquerade as a hobo, intended to bring authenticity to his planned foray into socially committed cinema (O Brother, Where Are Thou?), reverses the boxer’s ascension from poverty to celebrity. Our John L. ends up in a brutal prison while the nation thinks him dead. (His butler warned him this would happen!) That’s life in socioeconomically topsy-turvy America.
Following his glorious romantic comedy The Lady Eve (1941), this time writer-director Preston Sturges gave romance a back seat, allowing it in at all only because “there is always sex in a picture,” and dedicated Sullivan’s Travels to clowns and buffoons—those who make us laugh. In turn, his Swiftian road comedy makes us laugh aplenty—until, that is, Sullivan’s suffering becomes all too real. Sullivan’s middle initial, we discover, stands for Lloyd, not Lawrence—a witty reference to Lloyds of London: as rich as this man is, his firsthand study of American injustice makes him uninsurable!
After his ordeal and resurrection, Sullivan decides against making a film about the beseiged underclass in favor of another hilarious trifle; the poor need to laugh more than anyone, he reasons. This lame conclusion—in truth, what the poor really need is more systemic justice so that they have less need for antidotal laughter—matters little, because the weight of the film documents Sullivan’s descent into America’s underbelly, where a tramp is mowed down on the tracks after robbing his play-acting surrogate. Critic Andrew Sarris nails the Social Darwinian metaphor: the derelict “is trapped in a metal jungle of switch rails, and is unable to avoid an oncoming train.”
1942
34. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #42.
35. I WAS A FIREMAN. Released in 1943 in a shortened version titled Fires Were Started, I Was a Fireman is a documentary reconstruction; actual firemen play firemen like themselves battling and quelling an enormous fire, the result of German aerial bombing of London during the Blitz. At Y substation, Precinct 14, men arrive from home and civilian jobs; the film will span 24 hours, dawn to dawn, siren alert to all-clear. These homefront warriors prepare for battle and do nighttime battle modestly, uncomplainingly, untouched by the bombast of a Hitler—or a Churchill. The film stays with the men, except for contextualizing snippets showing staff who are also in the system. No Luftwaffe plane is ever shown.
Detailed as to individual characters and firefighting preparations and procedure, this film by Humphrey Jennings shows British citizens united in labor and by a common cause: the war effort. Blending dramatic enactment and stock footage, the firefighting scenes are the most brilliant and thrilling of their kind.
But the film is also poignantly ironical. It opens on a frieze of ancient soldiers. Script introduces a backward glance—winter/spring 1940-1941. A new member of the squad, Barrett, who works in advertising, must be brought into the fold. Banter amongst the men, for the most part genial, occasionally lights (and as quickly exits) an edgier note pertaining to class division. War brings these men together in both senses, but war reconciles their differences only in its own moment. Robert Browning: “. . . the good minute goes.” Success: the warship moves out at dawn. Its immediate destination is combat; its ultimate destination, the past, leaving Britain to her future. How much at home will remain resolved after the war?
I Was a Fireman is a compounded epic, expressing at once the aspirations and the anxieties of a people.
1943
36. SHADOW OF A DOUBT. Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite among his films, Shadow of a Doubt peers behind the façade of an “average American family” and their small town. Uncle Charlie, Emma Newton’s brother, visits her and her family. Unbeknownst to the Newtons, Charles Oakley is the serial murderer of wealthy widows, whose jewels he confiscates. Hitchcock views Oakley’s sociopathic antimaterialism as the extreme reactive consequence of the social and corporate preoccupation with wealth and profit—money—that grips the land. The film’s symbolical vortex, captured by a low-hung, upwardly tilted camera, is the BankAmerica tower that pierces the sacramental heavens, setting Mammonism above spiritual values even in Santa Rosa, California. When Young Charlie alone comes to realize that her uncle is a killer, he tries several times to dispatch her. Eventually, though, she dispatches him in a struggle, and the town, without knowing its source, is the beneficiary of the blood-soaked philanthropic fund that Oakley had established.
In a way, Oakley is the celebrated American loner and rugged individualist pushed to the extreme of dementia. He suggests the mortal fear that American cultural and political myth works mightily to suppress—a fear that also accounts for American eleutheromania and money-mania. His sister, who dotes on him, embodies those nostalgic ties that impose limits on our lives, in her case, setting limits on her marriage to which her spouse, Joe, has had to adjust. Meanwhile, Joe’s dull, demeaning job in a bank inspires his hobby of imaginary murder.
Teresa Wright’s Young Charlie is a fetching portrait of innocence as it stumbles into lethal experience. But it is Patricia Collinge whose inspired acting as Emma deepens Shadow of a Doubt’s undertow of melancholy, helping Hitchcock most of all to balance the beauty of kindness and affection against the tragic frailty of human existence.
1944
37. HENRY V. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #44.
38. MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. Vincente Minnelli’s musical Meet Me in St. Louis chronicles the Smith family through one seasonal cycle at the turn of the century. The most emotionally rich and turbulent of all his films (including the melodramas), it juxtaposes stability and flux—the things in our life, such as family, that appear to be rooted but are at constant risk for change, and the things, such as romance, that seem too fragile not to dissolve but which become the repository of our future hopes.
We never do discover whether Esther Smith (Judy Garland, glorious) marries her boyfriend. Uncertainty, anxiety, the inability of the strongest human emotions to stabilize our lives in the powerful current of time’s passage: Minnelli has staked out a tremendous theme. Moreover, he explores its most problematic material. Lon, Esther’s brother, and John, her boyfriend, resemble one another; their names rhyme. What is “the boy next door,” after all, but a brother with an extra wall in between? Indeed, the inwardness of American family life, incestuous nostalgia, and the appetite of family to incorporate non-family all come together in a phenomenal set-piece. John is unable to take Esther to a Christmas ball because his tuxedo is locked up at the cleaner’s; so her grandfather steps in as her escort, telling her how much she resembles his late wife. We see the dancing couple disappear behind the enormous pagan Christmas tree, but, when they emerge from behind it, Esther is no longer in her grandfather’s arms. Miraculously, John, in the correct attire, has replaced him. Turn your mind around all the ramifications of that!
There is a reverse traveling shot to die for in the thrilling Halloween passage, and the songs are wonderful, especially “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” with its profound melancholy.
1945
39. SAN PIETRO. Narrated by the director, John Huston’s San Pietro documents the costly battle to capture and liberate a strategic Italian village forty miles southeast of Rome in 1943. The version we have, about a half-hour long, is one-third of the length of Huston’s cut; the U.S. government slashed it for being antiwar. Huston’s famous response to the American High Command: “If I ever make anything other than an antiwar film, I hope you take me out and shoot me.” (Some of the censored material is included in the DVD of Huston’s 1948 Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)
The film’s opening surveys the valley at whose threshold San Pietro is located. It is a place of devastation and desolation because war has prevented the planting and tending of grapes and olives, which normally make the region lush. Huston explains that the elevated area beyond the valley had to be taken hill by hill. We glimpse American soldiers as Huston explains in detail the plan for taking San Pietro. The most ferocious, trenchant battle footage ever, some of it hauntingly shot through fluttering leaves of trees, is punctuated by montages of human death. A stunning passage: Soldiers wrapped in snow-white shrouds. A montage of enemy deaths also grips. More battle footage; more deaths. In all of the passages essaying American deaths, the corpses include soldiers we earlier saw alive, socializing with comrades. Huston informs us that many of the survivors of the Battle of San Pietro whom we are watching have since, in fact, joined their fallen comrades.
The film closes with wonderful shots of the liberated villagers. This conclusion is sober, heartrending—not exultant. Huston at least holds out hope that the children will rebound. I’m not so sure. See Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1947).
1946
40. NOTORIOUS. Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, from Ben Hecht’s script, is about how love blinds.
Two postwar U.S. spies, a misogynist and a dipsomaniacal libertine, are in Rio de Janeiro on assignment. The daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, Alicia Huberman has been newly recruited by the O.S.S. to keep tabs on Alex Sebastian, another Nazi spy. Alicia is in love with her operative, Devlin; Alex is in love with Alicia. Alex proposes to Alicia, who accepts, believing this is what Devlin wants, and not caring enough about herself to realize how “notorious” this will confirm for Devlin she is. When Sebastian discovers his wife is an American spy, he poisons her with arsenic.
Devlin has only to speak up, to protest the hellish intrigue into which the O.S.S. is prepared to plunge the woman he loves, to show her the depth of his feeling. Instead, he protests the assignment only behind her back. He is like stone to her, demanding she make up her own mind, oblivious to the fact that she isn’t practiced, like him, in compartmentalizing duty and feelings. In effect, Devlin allows Alicia to become a whore for Uncle Sam in order to prove to himself she is a whore. He is blaming Alicia for her misguided attempt to please him, and she nearly loses her life as a result. The finale, when the two escape Sebastian’s clutches, is sorely ironic. Devlin will likely prove a possessive mate. Moreover, Sebastian’s tragic fate, implicit in the film’s last shot, ruthlessly engineered by the film’s ostensible hero, adds yet another wrinkle of moral ambiguity to the mix.
Hitchcock’s liberated, expressive use of the camera is at a new peak, and Cary Grant, beauteous Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains all give the performances of their lives.
1947
41. MONSIEUR VERDOUX. Henri Landru had been guillotined for murdering eight women. Fifteen years later, in 1937, Henri Verdoux met the same fate, with half a dozen more victims to his credit—or debit. From the grave, this “mass killer” speaks to us as disembodied voiceover, describing himself as having been “for thirty years an honest bank clerk until the Depression of 1930, in which year I found myself unemployed. It was then I became occupied in liquidating members of the opposite sex. This I did as strictly a business enterprise, to support a home and a family,” that is to say, his wheelchair-bound wife and young son. This modern Bluebeard, actually, juggled numerous marriages simultaneously, all to those whom he murdered for their money so that the only marriage and family that he cared about could survive in these “desperate times.” Henri was too old to find other employment.
From an idea by Orson Welles, Charles Chaplin’s tartly funny black comedy, with slapstick interludes, reflects on the recently ended Second World War; looking ahead ten years past Verdoux’s execution, it assumes the form of a political statement. Its centerpiece is yet another of Chaplin’s dazzlingly brilliant performances, this time as a dapper, world-weary cynic who ultimately believes that he did not murder enough people, because, as he puts it, “[n]umbers sanctify.” Through Verdoux, Chaplin is taking aim at war, in particular, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Relatedly, he is aiming at capitalism, which ruthlessly cuts employees loose when it has no further use for them. Business and war are combined in an unseen figure in the background of the plot: a munitions manufacturer.
“I’ve never had rum!” En route to his beheading, Henri thus has a new experience: Chaplin’s quiet affirmation of the beauty of life.
1948
42. LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN. In Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, Lisa Berndl’s hopeless love for her idealized concept of the womanizing Stefan Brand is due the tremendous feeling it attracts because of the historical—and, for Ophüls, highly personal—allegory it conjures. The film’s subjectivity, encapsulated in Lisa’s emotions, is inextricable from the objectivity of European history.
The author of the story on which the film is based, Stefan Zweig, committed suicide over the course of the Second World War. Like Zweig, Ophüls was Jewish. The emotional brilliance of his beautifully acted film (Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Marcel Journet, etc.) derives, I believe, from the weight on his heart of Jewish deaths and the destruction of the Europe he remembers.
We “hear” the letter that Brand reads hours before his duel with Lisa’s husband as a bodiless voiceover, which begins: “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead.” He and this woman were once lovers and have recently re-met, without Brand’s remembering her. A typed message at the end of the letter, from hospital staff, indicates the patient’s death.
Memory is the repository of our humanity. Through the anonymous letter—the film’s extended flashback—Lisa consummates their relationship spiritually by giving Stefan, from the grave, her own memory. This is the redemption of self-absorbed Stefan Brand.
Zweig’s suicide echoes the Holocaust in advance, something peculiarly possible because the Holocaust itself echoes past devastations of the Jewish community. Zweig’s suicide asserted his will when everything seemed out of his hands and to the detriment of Jews and other civilized elements of Europe.
Lisa’s idealization of Brand and her imaginative memory become the means by which Ophüls dreams himself, the European Jewish community to which he belongs, and indeed Europe itself whole again.
43. THE QUIET ONE. Ten-year-old Donald Peters lives in a Harlem tenement with his maternal grandmother. His father is out of the picture (dead, or just plain gone), and his mother, whom he adores, is busy with her new life—boyfriend and baby. Starved for affection, impressed by poverty, unable to read, Donald frequently skips school and takes to the streets, getting into trouble; his grandmother knows of no other way of dealing with him than with a belt. Donald is sent to a country school for delinquent boys, where his healing process begins. Gradually, after great effort by himself and staff, he ceases to be a baby, as the film puts it, and becomes a child.
The Quiet One, directed by Sidney Meyers, blends fictional and documentary elements. The boy and his family members are enacted roles, while the other detainees and staff members really belong to Wiltwyck School. The film is presented as a psychiatric case study, soberly, patiently; it is untouched by the sensationalism of the pseudo-clinical Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) and The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak, 1948). We do not see the actual psychiatrist, but we purportedly hear his account of Donald’s homelife, case and progress. This voiceover narration, steady and restrained, was written by James Agee, no less, and is read by actor Gary Merrill.
One of the alleged liabilities of cinema is its inability to penetrate a character’s interiority. Yet the combination of image and commentary accomplishes that task in relation to this boy. To an extraordinary degree, the film discloses Donald’s spiritual constraint and disturbed emotions. It is also, visually, a starkly beautiful, intense, poetic black-and-white film.
Shot in 16mm on a shoestring, it inaugurated the New York school of filmmaking. John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959) exists in the shadow of The Quiet One.
1950
44. WAGON MASTER. John Ford’s Wagon Master perfectly projects the idea that virtuous attainment in the American social and political landscape requires ordinary people to pull and work together. Indeed, another group joins the primary group so that both may successfully “go their own way.” One group is Mormon; the other, a theatrical troupe. Both, ostracized, have been “invited out of town.”
Wagon Master shows how difficult it may be for disparate groups to consolidate given their different agendas, and how much more difficult it may be for each to prevail because of the forces arrayed against them. Ford’s conviction that consensus-building and activism are necessary helps make Wagon Master one of his most affirmative films.
Of all Ford’s great films, this is the most formally relaxed and given over to (instead of rhetoric) naturalistic poetry; its characters seem to breathe the air of ordinary life as well as inhabit the space of myth. Morally rigorous and solemn in tone nevertheless, the film follows a band of Mormons as they trek westward, uprooted visionaries in search of a home. Ford is deeply sympathetic, but at the same time their religious certainty—recall Ford’s bone-deep atheism—tellingly comments on the American “manifest destiny” that their mission in a diminutive and diminished form reflects.
The group is imperiled, by Nature and by the evil Cleggs. Contesting their adversaries, the Mormons draw their inspiration from their sense of community and their hopes for the future—the peace, bounty and liberty to which they feel entitled (the faith of Ford’s own Irish Catholic ancestors) by surviving the ordeals of harsh terrain, bigotry and violence.
At his most accessible here, Ford beautifully balances history and mythopoiea, finding in the imaginative space where these merge perhaps his richest, most sustaining definition of America.
45. SUNSET BOULEVARD. Billy Wilder’s celebrated film noir about the rapacious, destructive nature of Hollywood is, among other things, probably the funniest American film of the sound period. The comedy, though, is very dark, the laughs accompaniment to something close to horror.
Gloria Swanson’s playing of Norma Desmond, a has-been former silent screen star who has deluded herself into believing she can make a comeback, may bewilderingly resemble Charlie Chaplin in drag, but the crux of the piece is William Holden’s brilliant performance as Joe Gillis, the young scenarist who becomes Desmond’s kept boy—a withering, nuanced portrait of a man sinking by degrees into prostitution and self-contempt: a metaphor for the price that the motion-picture industry exacts from people with talent and artistic ambition. The largest sphere of reference here, of course, is American capitalism.
Film critic Andrew Sarris has noted that Sunset Boulevard seems much more realistic than it did in 1950, when its Gothic elements came to the fore, like Desmond’s servant’s white-gloved hands on the organ, swollen in the foreground of one of the film’s most chilling, brooding shots. (Desmond’s servant, incidentally, was once the first of her three husbands—and the director who made her a star.) Indeed, the Gothic touches themselves are absorbed by the film’s psychological realism because they are all correlative to Desmond’s delusional world, into which Gillis is steadily drawn, his snappy cynicism, it turns out, insufficient protection against his Hollywood fate.
Gillis narrates the film from the swimming pool into which his corpse fell after Desmond shot him, twice in the back, once in the stomach. In effect, Sunset Boulevard represents Gillis’s finest script. With different collaborators, Wilder’s scripts for Double Indemnity (1944) and this film may be the two finest ones ever written in Hollywood.
1951
46. THE RIVER. From Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir and color cinematographer Claude Renoir, his cousin, made their beauteous The River.
The setting is Bengal, in postwar India, although the film is structured as the reminiscence, years later, of Harriet, the eldest daughter in a British family. Harriet’s father has one eye, and the American boy with whom Harriet falls in love, one leg, the maiming in both cases from combat. In the course of the film, three adolescent girls fall in love for the first time, a boy dies, and Harriet’s mother gives birth to another child.
In numerous shots, the wide river on whose banks Harriet’s family lives appears either at the fore or in the background. Fishermen fish in the river; people bathe in it. It is life-giving and eternal (it comes, the voiceover says, from the “eternal snows” of the Himalayas) and, symbolically at least, it also carries people away, to their ends (and rebirth).
Harriet and friend Valerie become rivals for Captain John’s attentions. But it is their Anglo-Indian friend, Melanie, who falls for him hardest, although she keeps her feelings closeted. What can she give to a partner when she doesn’t feel herself whole? Melanie feels she is straddling a fence each side of which is a different culture. “Why do we always quarrel with things?” she asks.
A great set-piece portrays Diwali, for five consecutive days in autumn the Hindu Festival of Lights. In this celebration of “the eternal war between good and evil,” a candle is lit for each life that has been lost, turning each night, especially, into a great and grave spectacle. The River is a film about war. Melanie’s father laments that the world isn’t made safe for children: “We catch them in our wars . . . and we kill them.”
47. EUROPA ’51. Following her son’s suicide, an American living in Rome abandons an empty, wealthy lifestyle and, choosing to live among them, helps the poor instead, prompting her spouse to commit her to an insane asylum. Because Irene’s pilgrimage ends rather than begins in confinement, Europa ’51 is a kind of Stromboli (1949) in reverse. Politically, the film confounds; for Roberto Rossellini finds the one possible solution, Communism, a fraud, thus implying for Europe endless tragedy.
Irene (Ingrid Bergman, superb) is a dauntingly independent, secular saint who falls in battle only from lacking the sanctioning armor of political and religious institutions whose own “good works” proceed from aims perhaps too divided to redeem a broken Europe. To be sure, Irene may in some sense prevail in her imprisonment, a sign of the cost of reactionary thinking, but Europe may prove the loser for marginalizing her and limiting her sphere of influence.
Rossellini may have made the couple American to reflect the Americanization of Europe that had begun as the United States helped to rebuild Europe. Also, this choice contributes to the film’s persistent sense of Italy’s—and Europe’s—confusion of identity. What is “Europe” now, and what does it mean? How, if one is uncertain about this, can people aim at creating, or re-creating, Europe?
Moreover, the implacable cruelty of Irene’s husband, an American businessman, implies America’s incapacity to offer any kind of assistance except on its own calculating, self-serving terms. Indeed, underscoring the theme of American encroachment of Europe is the casting, in the role of Irene’s husband, Alexander Knox, the actor famous for playing Woodrow Wilson (Wilson, Henry King, 1944), the U.S. president who commandeered demands on Germany following the First World War that helped sow seeds of European discontent and economic ruin that contributed to the next world war.
48. THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD. From the 1938 story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, The Thing is a terrifying blend of horror and science-fiction. It launched a cycle of fifties films involving belligerent creatures, linked either to atomic bomb use or tests or the Cold War being waged then between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The Thing centers on conflicts between the military and science. Specifically, an Air Force captain and a Nobel scientist, each the leader of his own contingent, lock horns over the discovery at an Arctic research center of an alien creature that, ejected from an alien spacecraft, has become frozen in a block of ice. The scientist wants to study the being; the captain wants only, instead, to follow orders. Each is, in his own way, monstrously extreme. The scientist embodies a reckless pursuit of knowledge; the captain, an utter lack of curiosity about anything beyond his ken. When the alien, a beast that has an insatiable thirst for human blood, accidentally is thawed, its danger challenges the capacity of the opposing camps to come together as a team.
It turns out that, on whatever planet “the thing” comes from, plants have undergone an evolution similar to what animals have undergone on earth. The monster is a vegetable—a gigantic carrot, if you will.
Many interpret the film as a veiled allegory of Soviet danger to the U.S. Since the danger comes from a vegetable, however, the film seems to argue that we would do better to release our minds from the box that neatly identifies our current bogeymen.
Ravishingly cinematographed in black and white, The Thing was produced by Howard Hawks, who probably worried about working in a disparaged genre. No matter the directorial credit given, every shot is Hawks.
49. THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT. Sidney Stratton gets moony-eyed when he imagines what he could do with “a modern laboratory—a proper laboratory.” When the textile mill for which he works discharges him because of his unorthodox experiments, he steals into a rival’s superior facilities and invents a fabric that repels dirt and never wears out. The mill’s ownership and unionized labor unite against him since his discovery will curtail garment sales and cost workers jobs. In his luminescent white suit poor Stratton becomes a hunted man through Wellsburrough’s nighttime streets.
Alec Guinness is heavenly as the young scientist whose tunnel vision banishes the claims of his fellow humanity, whose lives will be upheaved, even casually destroyed, by the obsessive “progress” that the twentieth century inherited from the Victorians as a secular holy principle. “What am I going to do?” a struggling neighbor, who takes in laundry to help her survive, asks him. Stratton’s humane expression shows that he cares; but still he persists with his blasted science! Not to worry: Capitalism will suppress his invention as it does all “better mousetraps”—as it has, for instance, razor blades that never lose their edge.
Science’s moral irresponsibility; the dogged pursuit of self-interest by both capital and organized labor; society’s reluctance to depart from the status quo: it’s all here, and with such visual fluency and grace one can hardly believe that Alexander Mackendrick’s film derives from a play. The script is by the playwright, Roger MacDougall, John Dighton and Mackendrick.
This British marriage of satirical comedy and science-fiction recalls H.G. Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles (Lothar Mendes, 1937), but with an orientation more social than metaphysical. Here is one of the most riotously funny films in creation—a rival to Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953).
1953
50. VOYAGE IN ITALY. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #51.
