The End of Cinema

On The Artist

2012-02-01T22:56:00.000-08:00

It'd be really easy to get all worked up about how bad this is, how it distorts not only the aesthetics of silent cinema but history itself in order to tell a pretty simple (yet still largely nonsensical) story, about how the decontextualization of of pastiches like this are indicative of the modern world's haphazard approach to history, of the elevation of ignorance to a virtue in the name of an all-out assault on elitist experts who have the temerity to know things about things.

I could complain that the movie seems to have been moved forward in time two years for the sole reason that the director seems to think it'd be funny for the lead's final silent film to be released the same day as the stock market crash. By 1927, when the film begins, talking pictures were widely seen as inevitable. Certainly by 1929, when the lead declares them a passing fad, they were an inescapable, established fact. Less egregious is the film's closing tap dance number, scored to a "Sing, Sing, Sing" style Swing number in 1932, a few years before one could reasonably expect to hear Swing music, certainly outside a Harlem club. I could also get worked up about the fact that the only sung song in the film is "Pennies from Heaven" , a wonderful song from 1936. The weirdest thing about the film is that it exists entirely in its own universe: there's never any mention of any actual films, people, studios, music, anything. It doesn't take place in our world, but one of those vaguely real counterfactual places you get in an essay by a terrible history student.

Lots of people get worked up about the Vertigo music used in the film's dramatic climax. Kim Novak got worked up about it and used the word "rape". The music is jarring, it doesn't fit the mood of the scene, though it would if the film was going in a different direction entirely, a more specific Hitchcock kind of thing where the girl is a creepy stalker or something. It would be less jarring if the rest of the score was made up of references to other movie scores, but the rest of it is just stuff that sounds vaguely like older movie scores, not the thing itself. That stuff could bother me as well, but I'd be more upset about the resolution of the scene, which goes for the tasteless Spielberg fakeout where you think something terrible is going to happen but it turns out to be a joke instead (think the shower scene in Schindler's List).

I could get worked up about the total lack of motivation for the main character, that he deals with the transition to sound in a wholly irrational way for no apparent reason. He doesn't have an obstacle to overcome, his career flounders because he refuses to make sound movies. But there's no reason for that. We're not told he has a weird voice or thick accent, which was the main reason many silent film actors couldn't make the transition. The film just assumes that silent stars couldn't be talking stars, which is simply false (one of the film's in-jokes is a quote of the famous Greta Garbo line "I want to be alone" so obviously the filmmakers are aware that there were actors who were big in both silents and talkies). A possible motivation might be an Erich von Stroheim-style ego meltdown, that he is an "Artist" who refuses to compromise his art with sound and creates a giant flop that ruins his name in Hollywood. This appears to be the approach, but we see no artistry at all in the guy's films. They appear to be nothing but silly (anachronistic, as this wasn't a genre at the time, but apparently a reference to the director and star's OSS movies) spy movies (at one point we see footage of Fairbanks's Zorro with our hero clumsily spliced in, but making him a Fairbanks figure doesn't do much for the uncompromising artist angle (Fairbanks's decline had to do with middle age and bad movies, not an unwillingness to adapt the purity of his vision (which he never really had to begin with))).

Anyway, I could get all worked up about all of that, but there's really no reason to. It's a light, at times effervescent film with some really wonderful moments (the Borzage-referencing jacket scene is one of the loveliest things I've seen in quite awhile) and what appears to be a genuine affection for film history. It's a pleasant, cute film with some charming actors and a talented dog and to call it any less than that is to judge it as something it's not intended to be. There's no reason to get worked up about it because there's no reason to take it that seriously. No one takes it seriously, right? Right?

Top 5 Lists for Each Decade, Because Why Not?

2012-01-27T20:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't gotten around to ranking the 1890s yet. Maybe by the end of this year. I did Top 50s for each decade a couple years ago (index here). Here's a new stab at it:

1900s:

1. A Corner in Wheat (DW Griffith)
2. A Trip to the Moon (George Melies)
3. The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter)
4. The Pan-American Exposition by Night (Edwin S. Porter)
5. The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edwin S. Porter)

1910s:

1. Intolerance (DW Griffith)
2. The Musketeers of Pig Alley (DW Griffith)
3. The Immigrant (Charles Chaplin)
4. Regeneration (Raoul Walsh)
5. Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade)

1920s:

1. Sunrise (FW Murnau)
2. The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg)
3. The General (Buster Keaton)
4. Sherlock Jr (Buster Keaton)
5. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov)

1930s:

1. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
2. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey)
3. Stagecoach (John Ford)
4. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)
5. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)

1940s:

1. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
2. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
3. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch)
4. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne)
5. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)

1950s:

1. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
2. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. The Searchers (John Ford)
4. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
5. Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)

1960s:

1. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard)
2. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)
3. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy)
5. Playtime (Jacques Tati)

1970s:

1. Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
2. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick)
3. Manhattan (Woody Allen)
4. F for Fake (Orson Welles)
5. Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman)

1980s:

1. Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
2. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
3. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
4. Sans soleil (Chris Marker)
5. The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer)

1990s:

1. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai)
2. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)
3. The Big Lebowski (The Coen Brothers)
4. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch)
5. Rushmore (Wes Anderson)

2000s:

1. The New World (Terrence Malick)
2. Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
3. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai)
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson)
5. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

2010s:

1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
2. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
3. Oki's Movie (Hong Sangsoo)
4. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
5. Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

Movie Roundup: The Last Six Months Edition

2012-01-24T10:55:00.000-08:00

There's simply no way I'm going to be able to write about this massive backlog of movies I've watched over the last six months. And since I'm trying anyway to transition from writing a little bit about every movie I've watched to writing a lot about the movies that most catch my interest, it seems kind of foolish to keep this list of films staring at me, waiting for me to write about them and judging me when I don't. So I'm just going to list them here, along with their current ranks in The Big List. Since my current plan for The BIg List is to have updatable entires for every movie in every year (I've done the first two already), these will all eventually get written about, at least a little, someday far into the distant future. Some I hope to write about in more depth, I have ambitions of posts about King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Satyajit Ray and pre-Code films dancing around my head, laughing at me.

Cabiria - 1,1914
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - 4, 1921
The Phantom Carriage - 7, 1921
Camille - 9, 1921
He Who Gets Slapped - 4, 1924
The Thief of Bagdad - 6, 1924
The Sea Hawk - 8, 1924
What Price Glory? - 2, 1926
The Scarlet Letter - 4, 1926
The Wind - 4, 1928
Two Tars - 6, 1928
Show People - 10, 1928
Spione - 11, 1928
Un chien andalou - 2, 1929
The Broadway Melody - 7, 1929

People on Sunday - 3, 1930
Not So Dumb - 13, 1930
Street Scene - 3, 1931
One Way Passage - 5, 1932
Three on a Match - 15, 1932
American Madness - 16, 1932
Payment Deferred - 30, 1932
White Zombie - 35, 1932
Wild Boys of the Road - 9, 1933
Man's Castle - 10, 1933
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse - 12, 1933
Heroes for Sale - 22, 1933
Heat Lightning - 14, 1934
Carnival in Flanders - 5, 1935
Annie Oakley - 16, 1935
She - 23, 1935
Things to Come - 14, 1936
The Plough and the Stars - 17, 1936
History is Made at Night - 7, 1937
Swing High, Swing Low - 16, 1937
A Damsel in Distress - 19, 1937
Pygmalion - 12, 1938

Night Train to Munich - 19, 1940
Son of Fury - 17, 1942
Passage to Marseille - 9, 1944
Jammin' the Blues - 11, 1944
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes - 18, 1945
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House - 27, 1948
The Black Book - 7, 1949
I Was A Male War Bride - 12, 1949
Colorado Territory - 17, 1949
A Woman's Secret - 28, 1949

Born to be Bad - 24, 1950
Annie Get Your Gun - 26, 1950
The Crimson Pirate - 23, 1952
Blackbeard, the Pirate - 25, 1952
Night and Fog - 16, 1955
The Curse of Frankenstein - 22, 1957
The Music Room - 6, 1958
Elevator to the Gallows - 12, 1958
Jazz on a Summer's Day - 12, 1959

Les bonnes femmes - 8, 1960
The Innocents - 11, 1961
Mahanagar - 6, 1964
Charulata - 10, 1964
Journey to Jerusalem - 21, 1968
Paper Moon - 10, 1973
Edvard Munch - 13, 1974

Mon oncle d'Amérique - 5, 1980
Sherman's March - 22, 1986
All for the Winner - 24, 1990
God of Gamblers 2 - 26, 1991
God of Gamblers 3 - 38, 1991
The River - 13, 1997

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench - 12, 2009
Alamar - 22, 2009
Another Year - 8, 2010
Boxing Gym - 17, 2010
Film Socialisme - 18, 2010
The Trip - 31, 2010
Bill Cunningham, New York - 33, 2010
Senna - 38, 2010
Tiny Furniture - 44, 2010

Drive - 2011
The Muppets - 2011
Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown - 2011
Hugo - 2011
Moneyball - 2011
Super 8 - 2011
Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films - 2011
Don't Expect Too Much - 2011
Page One - 2011
Rango - 2011
These Amazing Shadows - 2011

Annie-thing You Can Do I Can Do Worse: On the Two Annie Oakleys

2012-01-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

Knowing nothing about Annie Oakley, either the true story or the legend, but always up for a musical or a Barbara Stanwyck film, I watched two versions of her story a couple weeks ago, thanks to the good people at TCM. The first was a musical version, Annie Get Your Gun, based on a hit Broadway show that starred Ethel Merman and featuring songs by Irving Berlin ("There's No Business Like Show Business" and "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" being the two big hits). The film adaptation stars Betty Hutton, who I'm almost completely unfamiliar with, I liked her in Preston Sturges's Miracle at Morgan's Creek, which is the only other movie I've seen her in, and Howard Keel, a giant ham whose hand-on-his-hips pomposity I've come to find quite endearing in films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Kismet and one of my favorite musicals, Kiss Me Kate. The director of that last film, George Sydney directed this one as well, and I've generally found his films (Anchors Aweigh, The Harvey Girls) to be pleasant if unexceptional (my Kate love notwithstanding), so all things considered, my hopes were relatively high. Instead, I found Annie Get Your Gun to be an abomination.

The film starts reasonably well, but takes a drastic turn for the worse the moment Hutton appears, bug-eyed and dressed like one of Peter Pan's lost boys exclaiming her dialogue in a ridiculous accent at an incredible volume, like a ten year old girl doing a Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel impression in a wind tunnel. Hutton's Annie is a great marksman who takes up the challenge of dueling the star attraction of Buffalo Bill's traveling Wild West show, Howard Keel's Frank Butler. However, the moment she sees Butler, she's stunned into mouth-agape lust at his beauty. Setting that aside for now, she wins the contest and joins the show. As the months go on, Butler becomes increasingly distressed that Annie's a better shot than he is, which complicates their budding romance. Annie learns to read and be more ladylike (wearing dresses, taking baths). Eventually, Butler leaves her after Annie performs a breathtaking stunt in the show, proving that she is the bigger star. The two are apart for awhile, with Butler having joined a rival show, but come together again in the end after a grudge match Annie throws, allowing Butler to be proclaimed the best sharpshooter in the world. Running alongside the love story plot is Annie's relationship with Sitting Bull, the great Sioux Indian chief who was part of the Buffalo Bill show.

There's three things that offended me most about the film. The first is on the basic level of craft, and by this I don't just mean Hutton's performance. Ethel Merman originated the role on Broadway, and I can see how she would work playing the role this big: Merman was a titanic force of nature, everything she did was huge. Hutton though, seems like she's playing at being big and every note comes out false. Judy Garland was originally going to star in the film, and her unique dramatic intensity would probably have made the film work. I certainly can't imagine her mugging about the way Hutton does. This was pretty much the end of the line for Garland as a major star though. During this time she was replaced in The Barkleys of Broadway and Royal Wedding was released from her MGM contract. At age 28 her film career, aside from a brilliant performance in George Cukor's A Star is Born and an Oscar nominated, supporting role in Judgement at Nuremburg, was essentially over.

Be a clown by tobiagorrio

Garland wasn't the only person fired from the film though. It was originally directed by Busby Berkeley, who was replaced by Charles Walters, who was then replaced by George Sydney. There's a hint of Berkeley left in the film in the final shot, an arial view of dancing horses forming one of Berkeley's trademark geometric patterns, but for the most part the film feels completely generic. More than that though, there's an incongruity between the apparent attempt at verisimilitude in the directing and the other major elements of the film. Not just Hutton's performance, which is jarringly unnaturalistic next to the supporting performances by Louis Calhern, Keenan Wynn and Howard Keel (none of whom were ever particularly notable for their restraint, this is a side effect of Hutton's egregious broadness), but also in the musical numbers. Some of Irving Berlin's music, especially the film's signature song "There's No Business Like Show Business" indicate an artificiality in the production. They seem to acknowledge that they exist as a part of a musical comedy on a Broadway stage. But in the film, they take place entirely in natural settings. Actors singing about Broadway while on a dusty Indianapolis fairground is just weird, which can be a virtue, but Sydney never develops the incongruity in any way. This should be as playful a film as Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate, where Garland and Gene Kelly's performances, along with the screenplay and Minnelli's direction of the musical numbers create a constant back and forth between fantasy and reality which leads to a fundamental, ecstatic declaration of the joy of performance at the film's climax with Cole Porter's "Be A Clown". I'm not sure exactly whose fault this is, but Sydney did a fine job walking this tightrope in Kiss Me Kate, another musical written by Cole Porter that plays with the conflict between performance and reality. I guess, then, the issue is not so much a matter of Sydney's inadequacy for the material (though Berkeley and Garland might have made something of it) but rather simply the difference between Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.

The next two major issues I have with the film are political in nature, and I'm not sure which is more off-putting. The first is the inherent sexism of the story. Annie is the best sharpshooter in the world, but she can't have the man she loves because his ego demands that he be superior to her in every way. The conflict in the film is her independence, and only when she throws a final match to him, allowing him to be the dominant, superior one can they live happily ever after. The parallels to the post-war issue of men returning home only to find their wives occupying the workforce, and the need therefore to assert them back into the home via a hollow ideology of male superiority are obvious and needn't be lingered on. Suffice it to say that the fact that we are expected to cheer and swoon with romance when Annie finally puts herself in her proper place is nauseating at best.

The racism in the film is only slightly less obvious, and has to do with the way it treats its Indian characters. A couple weeks ago I ranted about the way the documentary These Amazing Shadows used John Ford's The Searchers to show the negative ways in which Hollywood has portrayed Indians throughout the years, despite the fact that The Searchers is itself about that very issue and is very much against it. They should have used Annie Get Your Gun instead. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, in reality, had a fairly complex relationship with Indians. On the one hand, the shows itself generally cast the Indians in the role of villain, with big set pieces wherein Indian attacks are fought off by settlers and cavalry. On the other, Bill encouraged the Indians to set up traditional camps, which onlookers could walk through and see the people as they actually lived. (See his wikipedia entry: "He called them "the former foe, present friend, the American", and once said, "Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government."') None of this tension is present in Annie Get Your Gun. The Indians are presented as cartoons on-stage, with Sitting Bull as goofy comic relief, and even worse off-stage. Our first introduction to them has them destroying a train car for no apparent reason (literally, the shot foregrounds an Indian meaninglessly tearing apart a seat cushion with a tomahawk). When they go to France they destroying a pastry shop devouring eclairs left and right. The Indians in the film are children at best, monsters at worst. That the best they come off is in the goofy, casually hideous "I'm an Indian Too" number is saying something. That this film was made the same year as Anthony Mann's defiant Devil's Doorway, two years after John Ford's nuanced yet damning Fort Apache, and was more popular than either is appaling.

Fortunately, all these issues are resolved in an earlier version of the Annie Oakley story, directed by George Stevens and starring Barbara Stanwyck, though it is by no means a perfect film. To begin with, Stanwyck, in my opinion the greatest star in motion picture history, was constitutionally incapable of giving a false performance, one without nuance or intelligence or, most in contrast to Hutton's work, dignity. The contrast between her Annie and Hutton's is apparent from the very start. Hutton literally walks out of a bush, Stanwyck lives in a town, a small town, but one populated by recognizable human characters. She has a mother, a wagon, dresses and washes like any other human and can even read and write. In other words, she's just a small town girl who knows how to shoot, rather than a freak of nature (a competent woman? Egads, how bizarre!) Stanwyck too falls in love at first sight of Buffalo Bill's star sharpshooter (here renamed Toby Walker for some reason, Frank Butler was the name of Oakley's real-life husband), and their first contest proceeds along the same lines as in the musical. But, after seeing how good Annie is, the crowd begins to heckle Toby and Annie misses on purpose to let him save face. Afterwards, she's quite open about her throwing the match (to everyone, including Toby), but Bill hires her anyway and she joins the show. The vital difference here is that as Annie and Toby fall in love, he insists they pretend to be rivals for the sake of showmanship. In reality, he doesn't care one bit that's she's a better shot than he is, in fact, he's quite proud of her skill, but he understands that the audience is more likely to be hooked if he plays the role of the villain. In other words, Toby is a recognizable human being, well-rounded and thoughtful, whereas the musical's Frank Butler is defined only by his one neurosis (along with his prettiness and height). Also, this construction of the plot sets up a tension between reality and performance that the musical could have profitably explored.

Similarly, the Indians fare much better in Annie Oakley than they did in Annie Get Your Gun. Sitting Bull still functions as comic relief, though his cultural misunderstandings are far fewer here and less signs of his own idiocy than the fact that he just doesn't particularly care about white people's sense of propriety. Sitting Bull here is almost a tragic figure, played by Chief Thunderbird, a Cheyenne actor and technical advisor (the musical cast J. Carrol Naish, an Irish-American actor who played General Sheridan that same year in John Ford's Rio Grande) as a man out of step with reality, but determined to survive regardless of how ridiculous or bleak his and his people's situation becomes. This is nowhere more apparent than at the film's climax, where Sitting Bull on his horse looks into the crowd and sees Toby (he and Annie have broken up over a misunderstanding, and he's left the show to run a shooting gallery in New York City). Toby knows he's been spotted and takes off, with Sitting Bull in hot pursuit. He tracks him through the city streets, creating a wonderfully incongruous image of an Indian chief in full regalia stalking through a modern metropolis.

Annie Oakley is a flawed film. The plotting is full of the kinds of conflicts that would easily be resolved if only everyone let everyone else speak. In fact, the big dramatic scene that causes Annie and Toby's breakup is a textbook example of this kind of lazy screenwriting, as Annie is literally interrupted by everyone every time she tries to explain what actually happened. But still, given just how purely awful my experience of Annie Get Your Gun was, watching it was a revelation. I'm not sure if this is always the case with 1950s remakes of 1930s films. Both John Ford's Mogambo and George Cukor's A Star is Born build on their antecedents (Victor Fleming's Red Dust and William Wellman's A Star is Born, respectively) in interesting and thoughtful ways. But the parallel I'm best able to draw between what 1950 did to the 1935 Annie Oakley story is the contrast between the two film versions of Show Boat. The first, by James Whale from 1936 is a nuanced portrait of a racially complex society, with dignified performances from its minority characters (including the electrifying Paul Robeson) which is turned into a much simplified musical starring Howard Keel and directed by George Sydney.

Best of 2011

2011-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

An annual tradition here at The End, here are my favorite movies I saw for the first time over the past year, excluding newly released films:

1. La Commune (Paris 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000)
2. The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
3. Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer, 1983)
4. Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931)
5. Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957)
6. Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty, 1948)
7. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1983)
8. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1958)
9. Run of the Arrow (Samuel Fuller, 1957)
10. Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
11. The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, 1960)
12. An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)
13. Gone in 60 Seconds (HB Halicki, 1974)
14. The Mission (Johnnie To, 1999)
15. People on Sunday (Siodmaks, Ulmer & Zinneman, 1930)
16. Mahanagar (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
17. Culloden (Peter Watkins, 1964)

18. The Black Book (Anthony Mann, 1949)

19. Wild Boys of the Road (William Wellman, 1933)

20. Street Angel (Frank Borzage, 1928)

21. One Way Passage (Tay Garnett, 1932)
22. Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
23. The Sign of the Cross (Cecil B. DeMille, 1932)
24. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)
25. Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933)

26. The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972)

27. Kiss Me, Stupid (Billy Wilder, 1964)

28. I was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks, 1949)

29. The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950)

30. The Indian Epic (Fritz Lang, 1959)

31. The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer, 1981)
32. Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915)
33. Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder, 1935)
34. History is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)
35. Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929)
36. Two Tars (James Parrott, 1928)
37. The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, 1976)
38. Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka, 1937)
39. There was a Father (Yasujiro Ozu, 1942)
40. What Price Glory? (Raoul Walsh, 1926)

41. Bonjour tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)
42. Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960)
43. My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (Eric Rohmer, 1987)
44. The Masseurs and a Woman (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1938)
45. Mon oncle d'Amerique (Alain Resnais, 1980)
46. My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine, 1955)
47. Socrates (Roberto Rossellini, 1971)
48. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
49. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921)
50. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)
51. Avanti! (Billy Wilder, 1972)
52. Jazz on a Summer's Day (Aram Avakian & Bert Stern,1959)
53. Election (Johnnie To, 2005)
54. The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965)
55. Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941)
56. Leaves from Satan's Book (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1921)
57. The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick & Buster Keaton, 1928)
58. The Prowler (Joseph Losey, 1951)
59. The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)
60. He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjöström, 1924)

61. Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949)
62. American Madness (Frank Capra, 1932)
63. The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926)
64. Colorado Territory (Raoul Walsh, 1949)
65. Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard, 1938)
66. Full Moon in Paris (Eric Rohmer, 1984)
67. God of Gamblers (Wong Jing, 1989)
68. Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943)
69. Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)
70. The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
71. Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)
72. The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)
73. A Good Marriage (Eric Rohmer, 1982)
74. Heat Lightning (Mervyn LeRoy, 1934)
75. Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964)
76. Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)
77. Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976)
78. The Only Son (Yasujiro Ozu, 1936)
79. Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958)
80. Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)
81. Run for Cover (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

82. A Damsel in Distress (George Stevens, 1937)
83. Spione (Fritz Lang, 1928)
84. The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (Robert Siodmak, 1945)
85. The Moon is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953)
86. My Young Auntie (Lau Kar-leung, 1981)
87. Midnight Mary (William Wellman, 1933)
88. HM Pulham, Esq. (King Vidor, 1941)
89. Mademoiselle Fifi (Robert Wise, 1944)
90. Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)
91. The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)
92. The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929)
93. Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914)
94. Night Train to Munich (Carol Reed, 1940)
95. The Pajama Game (George Abbott & Stanley Donen, 1957)
96. A Hero Never Dies (Johnnie To, 1998)
97. Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932)
98. September Affair (William Dieterle, 1950)
99. Camille (Ray C. Smallwood, 1921)
100. Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949)
101. The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1956)

102. Drunken Master (Yuen Woo-ping, 1978)
103. Born to be Bad (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
104. The Plough and the Stars (John Ford, 1936)
105. All for the Winner (Jeffrey Lau & Corey Yuen, 1990)
106. Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)
107. Free and Easy (Edward Sedgwick, 1930)
108. The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957)
109. Blackbeard, the Pirate (Raoul Walsh, 1952)
110. The Tale of Zatoichi (Kenji Misumi, 1962)
111. Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
112. Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974)
113. The True Story of Jesse James (Nicholas Ray, 1957)
114. Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
115. Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967)
116. Samson and Delilah (Cecil B. DeMille, 1949)
117. What! No Beer? (Edward Sedgwick, 1933)
118. Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)
119. A Woman's Secret (Nicholas Ray, 1949)
120. Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)
121. The Lady Hermit (Ho Meng Hua, 1971)

Top 20 Albums of 2011

2011-12-31T15:11:00.000-08:00

These were my favorites:

1. Hilary Hahn & Valentina Lisitsa - Charles Ives: Four Sonatas
2. Oregon Symphony - Music for a Time of War
3. Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson - Berlioz: Les nuits d'été - Handel: Arias
4. Radiohead - The King of Limbs
5. Lise de la Salle - Liszt
6. TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light
7. Various Artists - Jonathan Harvey: Bird Concerto with Pianosong
8. Thomas Gould & Aurora Orchestra - Nico Muhly: Seeing is Believing
9. Hélène Grimaud - Mozart
10. The Decemberists - The King is Dead
11. Tom Waits - Bad as Me
12. Béla Fleck & The Flecktones - Rocket Science
13. John Adams - Son of Chamber Symphony & String Quartet
14. Alexandere Desplat/Various Artists - Tree of Life Score/Soundtrack
15. Various Artists - The Muppets Soundtrack
16. Los Angeles Philharmonic - DG Concerts: Adams: Slonimsky's Earbox - Bernstein: Symphony No. 1 "Jeremiah"
17. Okko Kamu & Lahti Symphony Orchestra - Sibelius: The Tempest; The Bard; Tapiola
18. Stephen Malkmus - Mirror Traffic
19. Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi - Rome
20. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts

On These Amazing Shadows

2011-12-30T23:53:00.000-08:00

A run of the mill advertisement for the National Film Registry, which is an admirable foundation (a subset of the Library of Congress) with a fascinating group of films covering a surprisingly wide range of American film. The doc is all talking heads and movie clips, but the clips are great and some of the heads are inspired (Nina Paley!, The Self-Styled Siren!, George Takei!). Unfortunately, the last 20 minutes devolves into a minority roundup, with boxes checked for marginalized groups the Registry recognizes: documentaries, animation, experimental film, women directors, African and Native Americans, etc. This wouldn't be so bad, merely plainly schematic and a bit pandering, if they didn't pair The Searchers with The Birth of a Nation as racist films that are countered in turn by The Exiles and Boyz N the Hood. Setting aside the fact that Boyz N the Hood is a pretty lame film, the mistreatment of The Searchers is criminal. And it's not just the filmmakers at fault, though they include clips from the film taken out of context to prove how racist Hollywood was against Indians (which is kinda the point of the film but never mind), they get a Native American studies professor to talk about it, though it's unclear if they've misedited him. No, the worst is Charles Burnett, director of the marvelous Killer of Sheep, talking about how he never knew how racist The Searchers was until he watched it with a friend who walked out in the middle of it. When he asked her what was wrong, she asked "Can't you see all the racism?" I don't know which is worse, Burnett for not realizing the film was about racism despite seeing it several times, or the woman drawing such an extreme conclusion after walking out halfway through. I don't know how this idea that one of the most complex, powerful and moving indictments of racism ever to come out of Hollywood was in fact racist itself merely because it showed acts of racism in all their ugliness, but this kind of thing has got to stop. And equating this with one of the most vile perversions of the art form in its history? Unconscionable.

On Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy

2011-12-29T12:49:00.000-08:00

Vincente Minnelli's 1956 adaptation of the play Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson necessitated a few changes in order to make it past Hollywood censors. As a result, the film is often derided as a watered down version of the original, another casualty of a culture that sought to systematically tame the daring and provocative in the name of of bourgeois morality. On the contrary, I think the film as is is much superior to the play, that the censor-forced changes Minnelli and Anderson made make the film a simultaneously broader and deeper work, with a more nuanced view of human sexuality and relationships. The film as Minnelli made it is one of the great melodramas of the 1950s, and one of the key works in this brilliant director's career.

This synopsis from the questionably named All Movie Guide provides a reasonable example of the general attitude toward the film, as well as a decent summary of the plot:

1956's Tea and Sympathy is a diluted filmization of Robert Anderson's Broadway play. The original production was considered quite daring in its attitudes towards homosexuality (both actual and alleged) and marital infidelity; the film softpedals these elements, as much by adding to the text as by subtracting from it. John Kerr (Tom) plays a sensitive college student who prefers the arts to sports; as such, he is ridiculed as a "sissy" by his classmates and hounded mercilessly by his macho-obsessed father Edward Andrews. Only student Darryl Hickman treats Kerr with any decency, perceiving that being different is not the same as being effeminate. Deborah Kerr (Laura), the wife of testosterone-driven housemaster Leif Erickson, likewise does her best to understand rather than condemn John for his "strangeness." Desperate to prove his manhood, John is about to visit town trollop Norma Crane. Though nothing really happens, the girl cries "rape!" Both John's father and Deborah's husband adopt a thick-eared "Boys will be boys" attitude, which only exacerbates John's insecurities. Feeling pity for John and at the same time resenting her own husband's boorishness, Deborah offers her own body to the mixed-up boy. "When you speak of this in future years...and you will...be kind." With this classic closing line, the original stage production of Tea and Sympathy came to an end. Fearing censorship interference, MGM insisted upon a stupid epilogue, indicating that Deborah Kerr deeply regretted her "wrong" behavior.

The changes from the original play occur mainly at the beginning and end of the film. In the beginning of the play, the event that touches off the bullying Tom receives is that he's caught swimming naked with a (male) teacher. The teacher is fired and Tom becomes an assumed homosexual and his every action (the way he walks, the way he cuts his hair, the music he listens to) is used as further evidence of his deviance. In the film, the inciting incident is much less obvious, Tom is espied one afternoon sewing with Laura and some of the other older women, instead of playing sports and roughhousing with the other boys on the beach (the homoerotic elements of the "straight" boys' play is apparent but not emphasized, one of the many ironies Minnelli plays with in the film). For this, he is taunted as "Sister Boy" for the remainder of the film, which follows the events of the play more or less closely until the end. By making the inciting incident less sexual (sewing is hardly akin to skinny dipping), the film muddies up the question of Tom's homosexuality. Indeed, for most of the film, it's unclear if Tom has any sexual inclinations one way or the other (or both).

For Nathan Rabin, this makes the film a necessarily flawed work. He writes at The AV Club:

Simultaneously bold and a cop-out, Tea And Sympathy is a film divided against itself, a drama about a young gay man’s awkward, fumbling initiation into the adult world of sexuality that doesn’t have the courage to embrace its destiny as a groundbreaking queer film. (Unsurprisingly, the film features prominently in the stellar film and book The Celluloid Closet.) Yet this subtext makes the film even more poignant during its many subdued scenes where John and Deborah Kerr talk around what they’re really feeling because they can’t come right out and say what’s on their minds. Like the film’s troubled protagonist, Minnelli simply made the best out of an impossible situation with this flawed, fascinating time capsule.

On the contrary, the film as is is not a failed attempt at a "groundbreaking queer film", but rather it is queerer than Rabin realizes. For queer doesn't simply mean "homosexual", but rather a rejection of the dominant image of sexuality, that of the middle class heterosexual masculinity of the 1950s which was seen as the only viable option for a man to be a productive member of society. Minnelli has taken a play that appears to be about sex (gay kid gets teased, may sleep with Deborah Kerr) to one about sexual identity and its relation to social codes. In the film, there's every reason to believe that Tom is gay, but he's just as likely to be a straight kid who just happens to like to sew and listen to classical music, or even a straight kid who doesn't like sewing at all, but is just pretending to so he can hang out with the older woman he's passionately in love with. Or all of the above. The point is that none of those things (sewing, classical music, Deborah Kerr) prove anything definitive about Tom.

Tom's relationship with Laura is highly ambiguous: he may see her as a friend, another lonely person who needs someone to talk to (Laura's husband is cold and distant towards her, and is explicitly identified throughout the film with Tom, especially in his youthful love of classical music (to which he regresses in the end) and the bullying he received when he was Tom's age for that non-conformity, thus her husband can be read as a homosexual who has been closeted since his late teens); a mother figure (Tom's own mother abandoned the family when he was very young, Laura throughout the film is wearing earth tones, greens and yellows (Tom always wears light blue: powder blue for his effeminacy or baby blue because he has not yet matured into a proper man) and Tom first sees her in her garden and their sexual encounter takes place in an Edenic, womblike forest (in the play, it takes place in Tom's dorm room, I believe), Minnelli thus identifies her with Nature, whether that is Mother Nature, or a comment on her effect on Tom's true nature (fulfilling it if he's straight or repressing it if he's gay) is undetermined); or a potential lover (this is apparently what Laura believes: he is acting strange because of his burning unrequited passion for her, by sleeping with him, Laura is helping Tom "become a man" in the sense of maturation, not repression).

The film's epilogue settles none of this. Here, Tom receives a letter Laura has written him after confessing her infidelity to her husband. The husband is wrecked and alone (listening to classical music), Laura is apparently also alone, and Tom is a successful writer, married with children. Suffice it to say, being married and having children in the 1950s says very little about one's "true" sexual orientation, so even this tacked on, mandated-by-censors ending solves none of the ambiguities Minnelli has opened up. Far from dividing the film against itself, the epilogue concludes the film in the same variable state the rest of the film has occupied.

The film rejects the idea that Tom can be defined by any of the usual methods we use to identify someone as "gay" or "straight" and in so doing undermines the very idea that people in general can be so defined. The truth is, we don't know anything about Tom's inner life, all we ever see are outward manifestations that we then choose to interpret one way or the other. By making those outward clues more ambiguous and potentially contradictory than they are in the play, the film opens up more possibilities for Tom's sexuality, and forces us to consider whether he really is gay or not, and what it is that makes us think so and why. Thus the film, instead of being merely an admirably pro-gay melodrama is instead a deeply subversive work, one that undermines not only homophobia, but all of our assumptions about what it means to be a "man" (non-biologically speaking, of course) as well as the very idea that we should have such definitions to begin with. It's a wholesale rejection of heteronormativity in the name of non-definitional ambiguity.

Thematically, this ties in with a recurring strain in Minnelli's films, one that it is very tempting to read as autobiographical (though we should probably refrain from such things). That is the story of an artist's struggle to fit into or escape from a constricting social environment. Tom's ambition in life is to become a folk singer (very prescient for a film from 1956, a full five years before Dylan showed up in the Village). He also reads poetry, likes to listen to classical music, and by the end of the film has become a writer. His troubles in school arise largely because his artistic inclinations are read as "gay" by the other kids at school (as well as his father). The film is therefore not only about a sexually ambiguous man struggling against social mores, but also about a society that reads "art" as "deviance" and attempts to repress its manifestations. Tom therefore joins other Minnelli heroes like Tootie in Meet Me in St. Louis, Manuela and Serafin in The Pirate, Jerry in An American in Paris, Van Gogh in Lust for Life and Dave in Some Came Running (along with many others) as artists trying to remake the world match their vision of it, despite all the pressures of social obligation and expectation weighing them down, repressing them. The results aren't always the same: in Minnelli's dramas, the artist usually fails and ends in tragedy (Tom can be read as either fully closeted or finally free); in the musicals, the artists usually triumph -- after all, what is a musical if not a fundamental subversion of restrictive social codes (it is highly improper to just start singing and dancing whenever you feel like it). The conflict is uniquely sexualized in Tea and Sympathy, but Minnelli's goal, and his hero's, remains the same: the breaking down of normalcy in the name of a freer, more open world full of possibilities.

1902

2011-12-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

1. A Trip to the Moon - Possibly the first great narrative film, George Méliès loosely adapted Jules Verne and HG Wells into this film about a group of bearded scientists shooting themselves to the moon in a giant cannon, where they take a nap, assassinate the King of the Moonmen then make their escape back to Earth. The parallels with European colonial adventures are obvious. The wonder of the film though is its ambition: Méliès weds the stop motion magic tricks he perfected through the first 6 years of cinema to fantastical, multi-layered and interactive set design, elaborate costumes and a cast of dozens to create a unique cinematic world, one that, for one of the first times in movie history is less a recorded artifact of a stage performance and more its own creation. The movie starts a bit slow, as the scientists pose for an interminable group photograph, but once they change into their space suits (really just suits) and get loaded into the cannon by what appear to be a phalanx of chorus girls, the film piles mind-blowing image upon image. My favorite: that the moonmen, after what must have been millennia of evolution prove vulnerable only to that most dangerous weapon of all: the umbrella.

2. Gulliver's Travels - Another Méliès literary adaptation, though a much less successful one. Rather than a coherent narrative in its own right, this is more a set of illustrations of scenes from the book. The best part is a tour de force bit of double exposure split screen action at the center of the film, where Gulliver is served a meal by the Lilliputians. Méliès almost seamlessly integrates the two images (filmed on separate sets with the camera at different distances, to create the size distortions, it looks like) in a way that remains marvelous even to modern eyes.

1901

2011-12-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

1. The Pan-American Exposition By Night - Directed by Edwin S. Porter and James Blair Smith, working for the Edison company, this one minute film consists only of a slow pan across the eponymous exposition. Midway though, the shot fades to black and returns, only now it is nighttime and the exposition is lit by the wonder of electric light. As cinematic miracles go, this is about as simple as it gets, but it's a miracle nonetheless.

2. Excelsior! The Prince of the Magicians - Magician Georges Méliès uses the power of editing to create a magic routine greater than any possible in continuous reality. Some of the edits are pretty obvious, but the speed and abandon with which Méliès commits himself makes it all work.

3. What Happened on Twenty-Third Street - A cute little joke movie, anticipating a certain iconic Marilyn Monroe image by over 50 years. Edwin Porter directs what appears to be a documentary street scene that turns risqué when an actress comes onscreen.

4. The Devil and the Statue - Another Méliès magic movie, though much clunkier and pedestrian than Excesior!.

On The Spanish Earth

2011-12-15T17:54:00.000-08:00

Is it just me or does the Hemingway narrator in everyone else's head always sound like Orson Welles? Anyway, Welles narrates Hemingway and Jon Dos Passos's text in this documentary film, made in the midst of the Spanish Civil War by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. As if that wasn't enough star power, the musical score is by Marc Blitzstein (Cradle Will Rock) and Virgil Thomson, one of the first great American classical composers (along with Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and George Gershwin). Thomson won a Pulitzer for his score to Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story, and while this isn't that good (there's a lot of pastiche Spanishness to it, as opposed to Thomson's usual all-American style), it's still pretty charming. The film is newsreel-style footage with sound effects and voiceover added later, but Ivens has an eye for striking images and some of his editing is quite clever (a particular cut from a gun firing to a hole of sunlight peeking through the crook of a soldier's elbow comes to mind).

Set during the fascists' march on Madrid, the film splits the focus onto two stories, that of the capital's populace preparing themselves for the eventual attack (evacuating children, forming militias out of soccer players and bullfighters) and a nearby village's construction of an irrigation ditch to turn their unoccupied waste land into crops to feed the to-be-beseiged city. The script throughout is filled with pithy Hemingwayisms, sounding at times like the parody Hemingway in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. My favorite: a post-battle riff on how sixes went out and only twos and threes came back. The farm scenes are OK, but they pale in comparison to the similar construction effort in King Vidor's communitarian classic Our Daily Bread, released three years earlier. Perhaps the final scenes of water flowing to relieve the parched Spanish earth (get it?) would have had a more triumphant effect if we didn't already know the ultimate fate of the Loyalists and those farmers. Then again, that adds an unintentional poignancy to the whole film, and Vidor's communist farmers likely didn't end up much better off when McCarthyism and groups like Vidor's own Randian anti-Communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals got ahold of them.

There's something that continues to fascinate me about this war. Unlike the fascist takeovers in Germany and Italy, it wasn't a matter of an evil political party capitalizing on social conditions to get itself elected to power. Unlike totalitarianism in France and Russia it wasn't the byproduct of a revolution corrupted by its own power. Like many dictatorships, this one began with a coup, but only a partially successful one. Instead of creating a military junta overnight, which could then proceed to its dastardly ends (purging the population, annoying and/or allying with US corporations, etc), the Spanish coup only managed to split the country politically in half, between the Monarchists and Fascists on the right and the Republicans, Communists and Anarchists on the left. And so the war makes manifest, in a way no other conflict does, the divide between the political left and right in Western politics. World War II, for example, wasn't a fight for Democracy against Totalitarianism, it was a fight against territorial aggression by rogue nations that happened to be totalitarian (with one of Democracy's key allies, the Soviet Union, being itself a totalitarian state). But the Spanish Civil War was a real left vs. right conflict, where the political rhetoric of the most extreme elements of both sides for once became a reality. The idea that these arguments between Left and Right really could degenerate into the kind of civil war Spain went through is an idea that seems wholly alien to us (though it can be found in many political films of the 1930s, particularly those of Frank Capra, which I think are greatly enhanced by seeing through the politics of the time, where Democracy was an existential choice and not merely a platitude), where our political parties throw around words like fascism and socialism with little regard to their actual meaning or their relevance to the people being so accused. No one really believes Dick Cheney would organize a military coup to overthrow the elected government of the United States, nor does anyone serious believe that Barack Obama is plotting a government takeover of American industry or a mass collectivization project.

It is this seemingly obvious fact that Ivens's documentary makes clear to me: that this was a war fought by actual people who actually believed in and put into action the most extreme variants of modern political theory. He focuses on the Left, the loyalist side with its poor folks banding together in a communitarian ideal to protect themselves from the invading fascists (helped, he repeatedly notes, by the foreign influence of the Germans and Italians, the assistance the Loyalist side received from the Soviets goes unmentioned), but in seeing those Loyalists as individuals, the fact that the fascists were also a mass movement becomes clear. We don't see them in The Spanish Earth, I imagine Ivens would prefer to see the fascists not as individuals but as abstract forces of evil, but in their conspicuously off-screen existence, their presence, their threat, is inescapable. Spain didn't have its democracy stolen, or totalitarianism imposed upon it: a sizable portion of the Spanish population wanted to live under dictatorship so much that they fought and killed and died for the right to create a fascist state. I find that truth to be absolutely terrifying.

On a much lighter note, this was the first film my daughter watched, and she made it almost the whole way through its 55 minute runtime. I don't know what exactly about it fascinated her so much, she usually prefers color images and flashier editing, and has very few interesting opinions on politics or history. Maybe it was the score (she's heard a lot of Thomson over her 13 1/2 weeks of life), or maybe she just likes Orson Welles's voice (who doesn't?). Regardless, she was rapt with attention until she slumped over asleep. As far as she knows, the war had a happy ending.

2011-11-30T21:10:00.000-08:00

2011-11-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

On the Late Films of Buster Keaton

2011-11-22T03:44:00.000-08:00

In May of 1928, Buster Keaton released Steamboat Bill, Jr, one of his greatest films, with perhaps his most elaborate and memorable stunt work, featuring the facade of a house falling on top of him in the midst of a hurricane, a small window clearing his body with inches to spare, the difference between comedy and death. It received mediocre reviews and failed to do much at the box office. For almost a decade, Keaton had functioned autonomously in Hollywood, with complete creative control of his films, first producing a remarkable string of 19 short films, then a series of 10 wildly innovative features, work that by itself has earned him the status of one of the single greatest filmmakers in history. But after Steamboat Bill, Keaton signed with MGM, the biggest, most powerful studio in town. In September of 1928, he released The Cameraman, made at the studio, but under his own system. Within a year, the studio would take over supervision of his features, leading to a series of popular, but highly mediocre films that, combined with a couple disastrous marriages and a bout of alcoholism nearly meant the end of one of the greatest talents Hollywood has ever known. Keaton survived, eventually kicking alcohol and finding a stable apparently healthy marital relationship, and his career continued in bit parts and TV and writing gigs until his death in the late 1960s. In the end, he left us with 19 feature films, half of which are the highest example of what a true artist can do with the medium, and half of which are a textbook example of the money-making blandness corporate bureaucracy would prefer the medium to produce.

(That it all happened within 15 years (about the length of Wes Anderson's career) surely says something about art and bureaucracy as well. The great artistic peaks of the 20th Century all occurred in a remarkably compressed amount of time. The Beatles and Bob Dylan from 1962-70, Jean-Luc Godard from 1960-67, DW Griffith from 1909-19 and so on. Keaton's run from 1920-1928 ranks with any of them.)

Over the last few weeks, I've managed to catch all the Buster Keaton sound films thanks to TCM. Knowing the backstory made me apprehensive, and for the most part my fears were confirmed. These are simply not very good films. But I like to think that there are good things to find in just about any movie, and when a filmmaker and performer is as brilliant and gifted as Buster Keaton is it is almost impossible for them to do nothing interesting over the course of a feature film. So in watching these movies, with low expectations and the understanding that not a single one of them can be considered anything like a masterpiece, the viewing experience changes, or rather, it shifts into what it probably should be all the time, but usually isn't. Instead of being carried away by the film, either by the artistry of its visual style or the cleverness of its screenplay and story construction, or the emotional implications and philosophical or political ideas it is trying to convey, I find myself instead waiting for the moments of inspiration, the small gestures or expressions or moments of balletic grace that transcend the surrounding mediocrity and where we can catch a glimpse of the buried genius within. Watching the late Keaton films is not to be swept away by the fulfillment of a cinematic vision, but instead to be reminded that artistry can be found in the most unlikely places; that though it can be incredibly fragile, it is more indestructible than we think.

The Cameraman - The last true Buster Keaton feature has a bit of an out-sized reputation. It is not at the level of his greatest films, Sherlock Jr or The General or Steamboat Bill, but it's pretty good nonetheless. He plays a photographer who tries to become an MGM newsreel photographer to impress a girl. There are some very good bits: a recurring gag with Keaton breaking an office window is a bit obvious, but nicely built, a pool changing room sequence that, like many of Keaton's best and worst routines, feels more like a record of a historic vaudeville performance than a comic innovation, a rousing climactic gang war in Chinatown, with Keaton (and a monkey!) finding himself perilously close to the action as he attempts to film it. Most magical of all is a sequence where Keaton finds himself alone on a diamond and he plays an imaginary game of baseball.

Spite Marriage - This was Keaton's last silent film, and it's more or less a whimper. He plays a sap who idolizes a stage actress who ends up marrying Keaton to spite (get it?) an actor who rejected her. There's a great scene of Keaton trying to put his passed-out-drunk wife to bed on their wedding night, and the first of what would become a recurring trope in Keaton's MGM films: the destruction of a serious theatrical production by Keaton's cluelessly chaotic behavior.

Free and Easy - Taking that last idea and running with it through early sound era Hollywood makes this my favorite of the Keaton talking pictures. He plays a slow-witted but well-meaning small town type who accompanies a young lady and her mother to Hollywood, where the girl will attempt to become a star. She ends up dating Robert Montgomery, and Keaton destroys a number of film projects, most memorably when he's cast in a small part in a Fred Niblo costume picture (his repeated inability to enter a scene without destroying the entire set is a masterpiece of slow-burning slapstick). Somehow, Keaton and the mother end up with major parts in Montgomery's film, which is apparently a musical, while the girl (played by Anita Page, who was excellent the year before in the Oscar-winning The Broadway Melody, and who would also star with Keaton in Sidewalks of New York) decides she'd rather be a housewife than an actress. There are a couple of fine comic musical numbers: the first a duet with Keaton and the mother that harkens back to vaudeville, the second a big group production number featuring a slick little dance by Keaton to the film's catchy title song.

Doughboys - Basically a comic version of King Vidor's The Big Parade, except not as funny as the original (which isn't particularly funny). Keaton plays a rich guy who accidentally joins the army, goes through basic training and gets shipped off to World War I. During all this, he falls in love with a girl who is not Clara Bow, as impossible as that may sound. It's about as funny as your average Beetle Bailey strip. Someone had to invent all the comic tropes we know and hate about army life (the mean sergeant, peeling potatoes, guard duty in the rain), I really doubt this is that ur-Army film, though it does provide a thorough survey of everything you've seen before. There is a really cool musical sequence with Keaton, Cliff Edwards and a ukelele.

Parlor, Bedroom and Bath - This is a prime example of one of the worst trends in the MGM films, which is the stupidification of the Keaton character. In his own films, Keaton always played a reasonably intelligent ordinary little guy, generally unlucky with love and machinery, often a fish out of water. By the end of the film, though, he would have learned to master his environment (a ship or a train or a house, etc) and would win the girl through acts of bravery and physical competence. In the MGM films, however, Keaton increasingly plays a character (seemingly always named "Elmer" for some reason) for whom a developmental disability is a very real possibility. It's not that he's an ordinary guy who finds himself out of his comfort zone: he's an incompetent with no discernible skills who manages to survive to the end of the film not through learning to master his surroundings, but through sheer dumb luck. For example, in this film, Keaton plays a guy who gets hired by rich people to pretend to be a womanizer in order to attract the attention of the older sister of the girl Reginald Denny wants to marry (it's a Taming of the Shrew type scenario). The twist is that Keaton knows absolutely nothing about women, apparently only discovering their existence some 15 minutes into the film. This remarkable ignorance leads Denny to hire a giantess to teach Keaton the ways of romance, leading to some occasionally inspired chaos (despite the complete lack of believability of anything any of the characters do) during a series of unmaskings and a wild chase at the film's climax that is the only sequence in the film where Keaton's genius peeks through, despite the horrific material he's given to work with.

Sidewalks of New York - Just like the film above, but instead of rich swells, Keaton stars with a bunch of proto-Dead End kids. He's a rich guy who tries to start a community center for the inner city youth in order to impress a girl. But the kids would rather join gangs instead and keep beating Keaton up. One of the kids gets mixed up with a grown up gangster and there's some cross dressing and eventually a chase in a mansion that's so uninspired you can hardly believe it stars the same man as The High Sign. The only high point is a boxing match with Keaton and a goon he's hired to throw the fight that double crosses him, but even that looks lame in comparison to Charlie Chaplin's boxing match in the same year's City Lights. In fact, that should give a good idea of where Keaton and Chaplin were at this point in their careers: Chaplin making arguably his best film, Keaton his worst.

The Passionate Plumber - With this we have the unlikely pairing of Keaton with comic Jimmy Durante. The two make an amiable, if totally mismatched duo, but they probably had a lot of fun during the shoots. Unfortunately, on-screen, they're a mess. As with Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, MGM cast Keaton in a remake of a play that had already been adapted for film, and again the material is completely wrong for him. He plays a plumber/inventor who gets mixed up in the tedious love lives of the rich, and fights a duel with someone for some reason (he invented a kind of gun or something). I was wrong before: this has got to be the low point of Keaton's career. Or maybe not, I'm having trouble remembering anything else about it.

Speak Easily - A slight improvement is this return to the magic of Free and Easy, with Keaton joining a terrible traveling acting troupe (led by Durante) and bankrolling their production on Broadway (to impress a girl, naturally) while under the mistaken impression that he (an oblivious college professor) has inherited a fortune. The film is pretty lackluster (though Durante gives a much more interesting performance here, he got lost in the European setting of The Passionate Plumber, but we get the full Schnozzola here, and there's a fun sequence of Keaton getting drunk with a scheming actress played by Thelma Todd), at least until the end, where Keaton again works his chaos magic on a stage performance, his unintentional nuttiness driving the audience wild and saving the day. Again, this is in distinction to the arc of his silent features, when the Keaton character would save the day not by accident, but because he had learned to master the machines and environments that he'd found himself so comically mismatched with at the beginning of the film. In the silents, he overcomes obstacles through his bravery and ingenuity. In the MGM films, a bunch of random stuff happens and sometimes it's funny.

What! No Beer? - Surely one of the all-time greatest film titles deserves a better movie than this. Under the mistaken impression that Prohibition has been lifted, Keaton and Durante go into the beer-brewing business, inadvertently underselling the local bootleggers and inspiring a gang war. Again, the Keaton character is pretty dumb, his interactions with the women in the film are ridiculously juvenile (Keaton was 38 years old at this point, did the studio really expect us to take him as so seriously, ignorantly virginal?). The best visual sequence in the film is an homage to/rip-off of the famous boulder chase scene in Seven Chances, this time with Keaton fleeing a bunch of beer barrels. A comparison of the two would show the obvious superiority of the silent version, as it not only exists on a bigger scale (dozens and dozens of boulders on a massive hillside vs. a handful of barrels quickly rolling down a couple city blocks) but lasts longer and is filmed so as to maximize the visceral impact of the chase (whereas the beer barrel sequence is filmed mostly in long shot, keeping us at a respectable distance from the danger). Still, at least Keaton gets a suitable finale in this film, as he manages to come up with a brilliant plan to save his crew from a police raid on their brewery by getting the entire town drunk on free beer. Despite its shortcomings, this does manage to be the second-best talking film of Keaton's MGM career.

2011-11-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

2011-11-09T19:15:00.000-08:00

2011-11-02T18:50:00.000-07:00

2011-10-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

An Index

2011-10-26T00:52:00.000-07:00

This is an index of the longer, non-list, non-capsule review pieces I've written here at The End of Cinema, as well as at the Metro Classics website.

The End of Cinema:

Highway ∞ Revisited: Conversion Of A Lynch-Hater Feb 17, 2007
The #54 War Movie Of The Last 50 Years May 16, 2007
Man Of The West, Revisited June 13, 2007
Coen Fatigue Jan 02, 2008
Movie Roundup: Schizopolis vs. Reservoir Dogs Edition, Part One Mar 03, 2009
Movie Roundup: Schizopolis vs. Reservoir Dogs Edition, Part Two Mar 03, 2009
Movie Roundup: The Virgin Suicides vs. Schindler's List Mar 17, 2009
Movie Roundup: VIFF '09 Edition Apr 11, 2010
Movie Roundup: SFIFF Edition Part One July 19, 2010
Movie Roundup: SFIFF Edition Part Two July 27, 2010
VIFF '10: Wrap-up Oct 11, 2010
Quick Thoughts on The Tree of Life June 26, 2011
On the Late Films of Buster Keaton Nov 22, 2011
On The Spanish Earth Dec 15, 2011

Metro Classics:

All About Bette Aug 17, 2009
A Short History Of The Western Genre, And Why The Wild Bunch Was Ahead Of Its Time Sept 07, 2009
A Short History Of The Musical Genre, Towards Defending As Essential The Arguably Extraneous Dance Sequence At The End Of Singin' In The Rain Oct 02, 2009
Clint Eastwood And The Myth Of The Last Golden Age Oct 26, 2009
A Filmography Of Wong Kar-wai In Eighteen Images (Or, Yay! Pretty Pictures!) Nov 09, 2009
Why Charlie Chaplin Is Better Than Buster Keaton Nov 16, 2009
Disjointed Musings Somewhat Related To Gone With The Wind Dec 01, 2009
On Eric Rohmer Jan 12, 2010
Following Up On Eric Rohmer Feb 01, 2010
Pre-Game Warm-Up: Gloria Swanson Edition Mar 22, 2010
What If Double Feature: Meet Me in St. Louis Aug 22, 2010
What If Double Feature: All That Heaven Allows Aug 30, 2010
Hell is Other Movies: Children of Paradise Feb 23, 2011
Hell is Other Movies: Irma Vep Mar 01, 2011
Hell is Other Movies: Leaves from Satan's Book Mar 04, 2011
Hell is Other Movies: One Week of Hitchcock Mar 07, 2011
Hell is Other Movies: Chimes at Midnight Mar 15, 2011
Hell is Other Movies: One Week with Nicholas Ray Mar 29, 2011
Hell is Other Movies: Seven Samurai for Seven Samurai Apr 12, 2011
Eric Rohmer: Comedies and Proverbs Aug 23, 2011

Movie Roundup: 52 Movies To Go Edition

2011-10-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs - Ho hum, another great Japanese movie about the miserable life of a woman/prostitute. The main character of this one, Keiko, played by the great Hideko Takemine, isn't exactly a prostitute, but rather a bar hostess, whose job it is to be charming and entertaining to the male customers, but not actually sleep with them. She wants to open a bar of her own, but the economics of mid-century Japan make that extremely difficult for women, and director Mikio Naruse examines in great detail the complex maneuvers and moral compromises Keiko must go through to try to realize her dream. This is my first Naruse film, and he has an elegant visual style that isn't as immediately idiosyncratic as his contemporaries Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, but is quite lovely nonetheless. The jazzy score is pretty great, as are supporting performances from big stars like Tatsuya Nakadai and Masayuki Mori (at least one of the Seven Samurai shows up as well). Despite its thematic similarity to many a Mizoguchi film, it feels completely fresh and modern, and more humane for the lightness of its touch and story construction relative to the more schematic Mizoguchis like Street of Shame or The Life of Oharu. The #6 film of 1960.

Midnight Mary - Loretta Young plays a poor orphan girl who gets mixed up with gangsters after spending three years in prison for a crime she didn't commit. One day, she meets rich lawyer Franchot Tone (who continues to do no wrong in my eyes) who falls in love with her and tries to reform her. But when she's recognized by a cop, she pretends she never loved him and goes back to the gangsters (after another little stint in jail). Eventually, the lead gangster tries to kill Tone and Young kills the gangster instead. This is all told in flashback as Young is awaiting sentencing for murder. This pre-Code William Wellman film is a solid bit of salacious melodrama and it is brisk and efficient in telling its wildly improbable, coincidence-driven story. That speed, and the excellent performances, make for a fine, if not revelatory, experience. The #16 film of 1933.

Mademoiselle Fifi - You know how John Ford's Stagecoach is actually based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant? Well, this is based on the same story, along with another of his short stories. A variety of characters are sharing a coach through Occupied France during the Franco-Prussian War. Each character represents a social type: nobility, businessmen and their wives, a political agitator, a priest and a laundress (played by the Cat Person herself, Simone Simon). When the coach stops in a town controlled by the German Army (led by the scary Lieutenant with the title nickname), everyone eats with and fraternizes with the Germans except the laundress, who sticks to her patriotism. The Germans won't let them go until she changes her mind, leading to much in-fighting exposing the cowardice and avarice of the upper classes. The political message is inescapable, the film being made in 1944, and Simon makes a particularly appealing symbol of Nazi defiance, her halting delivery effectively expressing the laundress' humility and hard-headed simplicity. Made at RKO under producer Val Lewton and directed by Robert Wise, it's not as visually interesting as the films made there by Jacques Tourneur, but I suspect it would have been impossible for the Lewton unit to make an ugly movie. The #13, film of 1944.

Socrates - Another of Roberto Rossellini's fascinating "History Films", albeit one that did not make it into the recent Eclipse box set devoted to them (it's available on Hulu). Like The Age of the Medici, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV and Cartesius, Socrates recreates in great detail the world of a major historical figure, in this case sticking close to the events of the Socratic Dialogues as recorded by his disciple Plato. In addition to various philosophical arguments, these follow the course of Socrates's condemnation, trial and execution for the crime of corrupting the youth by trying to lead them away from the gods. Seems he has the audacity to point out that nobody knows anything, prove it by taking apart everyone else's arguments, then claim to be no more knowledgable than they are. Socrates's real crime was thus being passive-aggressive. Like the other History Films, Rossellini cuts out all the extraneous things that get in the way of the ideas and the story and the audience: acting, character, fancy directing, etc. That's not to say the films are boring or ugly, on the contrary, every shot is carefully and classically framed, and Rossellini makes the most of his European TV-level budgets in terms of costume and set design and his actors are competent, if not emotive (they exist somewhere on the Robert Bresson end of the scale, though filtered through a few levels of dubbing). What is left in the end is the pure expression of information, and in submitting to that we experience a deeper, more engrossing involvement in the events on-screen. Not one that gives you emotional highs and lows, or that shocks and thrills you, but one that manages to create a sense of. . . well not really reality (it's too obviously composed and performed for that) but of the actuality, almost tangibility of the ideas and the people (not characters) that espouse them. They tend to make all other historical films or biopics, which invariably alter history for the sake of melodrama and "plot", look silly, if not outright imbecilic. The #5 film of 1971.

Midnight in Paris - A much more playful approach to history, from a director who, with a few exceptions, enjoys the silly as much as anyone. Owen Wilson plays a writer with an obnoxious fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and obnoxious future in-laws. They're all in Paris for some reason, and Wilson, wrapped up in the romance of the city finds himself transported back to the 1920s, where he hangs around with Ernest Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Salavador Dali, Gertrude Stein and Marion Cotillard. Wilson is a great avatar for Allen's dialogue, his laid-back delivery making him seem like less of an impersonator than most of the actors who star in his films. The movie's a great deal of fun, Allen's most purely entertaining since Mighty Aphrodite (another film that mixed the past and the present to great effect) and its opening sequence, a montage of Parisian sites set to Sidney Bechet, is one of the loveliest sequences of his career (that it is an obvious homage to his own Manhattan makes it no less charming). The moral of the story is a bit forced, as Wilson learns that there's wonder and romance at every time in history, if you know where to look for it (like used record stalls at flea markets, apparently, though this is wholly counter to my experience of such places). Things would have been more interesting if the McAdams character was the least bit sympathetic. As is, we have no doubt that Wilson is better off abandoning his life for the sake of supernatural adventures.

2011-10-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

Movie Roundup: 55 Movies To Go Edition

2011-10-19T01:14:00.000-07:00

Meek's Cutoff - A group of settlers making their way through the Oregon Territory break off from their main group to follow a mountain man named Meek's shortcut. When we join them, they appear to be most definitely lost, though Meek, in a well-mumbled performance by Bruce Greenwood, insists he knows exactly where they are and where they are going. As the settler's distrust of Meek grows, and their water supply dwindles, they come across a lone, silent Indian. Led by Michelle Williams, they slowly take their faith away from Meek and place it onto the Indian, who claims (wordlessly) to be able to lead them to safety but may very well be leading them to their doom. A major step up from director Kelly Reichardt's last film, Wendy and Lucy which, despite an excellent performance from Williams I thought was a little lacking in the plot motivation department. Reichardt films in 1.33, an aspect ratio that not only recalls the classical Western, of which this is in many ways a subversion (there's an interesting compare and contrast to be made here to Ford's Wagon Master) but also mimics the POV of the women in the group, their heads bound by 19th Century bonnets, their blinder-vision making palpable both the claustrophobia of their place in society and the group's limited knowledge of where they are going and the world around them. It's a movie about faith and feminism, about a group of women learning to reject the authority of their alpha male and place their trust in a despised and mysterious other, with no assurances that their new guide will be any better. One of those movies whose resonances grow the more I think about it. The #4 film of 2010.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams - The consensus line on this Werner Herzog documentary about cave paintings is that it's the best argument to date for 3D cinema and I'm not going to disagree with that. The paintings, found in pristine condition in Southern France, are the earliest yet discovered and Herzog examines them in exhaustive detail. His narration, as always, is a blend of sardonic rationality and breathless cheesiness, but it's the images that are unforgettable. Because the cave walls and ceilings are contoured and uneven, and because the paintings were made with these surfaces in mind, the 3D camera brings them to life in a way that would be impossible with a conventional film. We can see the ripples of the limestone and the way the uneven surface serves to almost animate the images on the walls, especially when combined with the flickering shadows that must have accompanied their ceremonial use as religious totems. Herzog, as usual, doesn't so much have an idea about the paintings as he has a dozen questions to which he poses possible answers. Who made the paintings and why and what does that say about us, about the urge to create? His speculations lead him, again as usual, to some strange places, but any film that starts with 30,000 year old cave paintings and ends with albino alligators has to be doing something right. The #14 film of 2010.

The Tale of Zatoichi - The first of a massive series of films about a blind samurai (charmingly played by Shintaru Katsu) who solves crimes (or something, this is the only one I've seen), its debt to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo is obvious. Like in that film, a wandering ronin comes to a town and is hired by one side of a local gang war. The ronin here is blind, a masseur (a common profession for the blind in Japan, in the movies if not in reality) who is both jovial and cunning (he repeatedly plays on other people's underestimation of him due to his blindness, not only in swordplay but in everyday tasks like gambling as well). Unlike in Yojimbo (itself indebted to Dashiell Hammett), the ronin does not play both sides of the war against each other, instead he bonds with the ronin the rival gang has hired (who is dying of tuberculosis) and the two stand apart from the petty criminals who employ them by their samurai codes of honor and dignity. That doesn't prevent them from fighting, of course. Zatoichi very much lives in the same world as Yojimbo's Sanjuro, but he's a bit more amoral and a little bit more sentimental. But the major difference between the two films is in the visual style, where Kurosawa's meticulous genius imbues every shot with meaning and purpose and Zatoichi director Kenji Misumi performs a competent job filming his actors in a noiry, occasionally flashy black and white. The #16 film of 1962.

The Pajama Game - Doris Day becomes a union leader at a pajama factory and attracts the eye of the company's superintendent John Raitt (looking like Rene Auberjonois as a Lifetime movie villain). Their romance complicates union negotiations, as the uppity Miss Day won't know her place as a proper 1950s housewife. Until she does when Raitt proves the company had been ripping off the workers even more than was previously thought. The workers get their little raise, Day goes home to raise Raitt's kids and everyone lives happily ever after. The plot manages to combine the glories of capitalist patriarchy with all the excitement of union negotiations. Ah, but there's music. A couple of pretty great numbers, choreographed by the man who can do no wrong, Bob Fosse. The standout is Broadway actress Carol Haney (she danced with Fosse in the memorable number in Kiss Me Kate) and her two big numbers here, "Steam Heat" and "Hernando's Hideaway", which ends up somewhere between the finale from The Gang's All Here and the "Bohemian Rhapsody" video, are exceptional. In general though, this was a big disappointment coming from director Stanley Donen. I'm going to blame his co-director George Abbott. The #26 film of 1957.

Wait Until Dark - An effective thriller with a somewhat perplexingly out-sized reputation. Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman who's apartment accidentally contains a MacGuffin wanted by a gang of criminals led by Alan Arkin. The crooks play on her blindness in an attempt to either find the object or get her to give it to them, and there are plenty of solid suspense sequences built by director Terrence Young, the man behind two of the better James Bond films (From Russia with Love and Thunderball). But other than that, there's not a whole lot to appreciate here. The plot rests on a card house of contrivances, which wouldn't be too bad if there was more going on underneath. This is the fundamental difference between Hitchcock and his imitators: with Hitch, the suspense was never enough, there was always another layer, a set of meanings beyond the visceral experiences technique and construction can provide. Neither of Hepburn's Hitchcockian films (this and Charade, which is much more fun, one of the most charming movies ever made) have the depth of even a middling Hitchcock. Without that, there's nothing to see here but a very frightened woman. The #16 film of 1967.

2011-10-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

Movie Roundup: Four DeMilles and a Lang Edition

2011-10-09T03:29:00.000-07:00

Samson and Delilah - Victor Mature plays Samson and Hedy Lamarr Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's way way way overblown biblical epic. Samson is the popular Jewish judge from the tribe of Dan who is engaged to a pretty young Philistine (played by Angela Lansbury). But he attracts the eye of Lansbury's sister, Delilah, a vicious, lusty girl who sets a riot in motion at their wedding feast which leads to Samson killing a bunch of people and Lansbury herself getting killed. Samson becomes an anti-Philistine revolutionary cutting down bad guys left and right armed with a jawbone. The local ruler, played by George Sanders, of course, conspires with Delilah to capture Samson. She seduces him and gives him a haircut. Brought to the Philistine temple in chains, Samson is tortured until he brings the whole thing crashing down in a spectacular finale. The whole thing is pretty ridiculous, yet the sheer perversity of the Samson/Delilah relationship is fascinating. Unfortunately, it all has to be sold by Lamarr, who is certainly up to the task, but Mature, in trying to portray Samson as the ultimate square, sacrifices the seediness he brought to another twisted relationship, that between him and Gene Tierney in Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture. It's important, of course, that Samson be virtuous and upstanding, but without the spark of illicit uncontrollable desire for Delilah, his actions come off as just plain stupid, rather than tragic. It's probably my least favorite DeMille film, feeling more like a dry run for the corny greatness of The Ten Commandments, and a far cry from the potent mix of religion and sex of his thirties bible movies. The #24 film of 1949.

The Sign of the Cross - This is much more like it. Not technically a bible movie, as it takes place during the early years of Christianity, when the small cult was trying to grow within the Roman Empire under Nero. Frederic March plays a Roman prefect who becomes enamored with a young Christian girl named Mercia (really), despite his long-standing relationship with Nero's wife Poppaea. When March releases a couple of accused Christians on the girl's behalf, Poppaea (played by Claudette Colbert at her most amorally luscious) arranges with a rival prefect to have the girl and the other Christians attacked and arrested. March saves the girl, barely (the sequence of the soldiers descending on the large Christian prayer meeting is all the more terrifying for the very real feeling of persecuted brotherhood we get right before the arrows start to fly), and proposes to her, but she accuses him of just wanting her for sex. Somehow they all end up at an orgy, which has some creepy and intense dance sequences as March tries and fails either to get Mercia to loosen up or face his own evil lusts and convert to her religion. In the end, Nero, played by Charles Laughton as an imbecilic lunatic, has the Christians fed to the lions (and various other animals) in another spectacular finale. This is probably DeMille's greatest blend of the sacred and the profane, as sequences like a lesbian orgy dance and Claudette Colbert nude in a milk bath are balanced by scenes of genuine Christian belief and piety. The mixture is as self-contradictory as it gets, at least if you happen to belong to the particularly prim version of Christianity that got the film banned and censored for years and years. For the rest of us, it's a whole lot of fun, and might reasonably be seen as an attempt to resolve the tension between body and spirit that has been so fundamental to the religion for two thousand years. That, or DeMille is just a huge hypocrite: he wants us to root for both the Christians and the lions. The #5 film of 1932.

Cleopatra - A less successful DeMille/Colbert collaboration tells the familiar story of the Egyptian queen and her two Roman lovers. From the first meeting with Julius Caesar (smuggling herself in a carpet), to his assassination, to her affair with Marc Antony, the film offers few surprises, other than making Cleopatra a much bigger part of the story than she really was (it's her who has a vision of Caesar's impending death, for example). Colbert is fine, but Warren William (as Caesar) and Henry Wilcoxon (as Antony) are pretty dull. Actually, I'm having trouble remembering any real differences between this version and the Joseph L. Mankiewicz version with Elizabeth Taylor, other than that one is more than twice as long. For once, someone topped DeMille in the overblowing department. The #14 film of 1934.

The King of Kings - This film though is much different from its early 60s remake, which was directed by Nicholas Ray with Jesus as a Martin Luther King-style non-violent revolutionary. HB Warner plays Jesus here, and DeMille plays the Passion story absolutely straight, except for a little prologue where we see Mary Magdalene being all whorey (kind of like in Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, except more flapperish). Other than that, the film follows the various events pretty closely (many of the intertitles are direct quotes from the Gospels): Jesus performs some miracles, enters Jerusalem, gives some speeches, gets betrayed by Judas (who in this version is a monarchist who hopes to make Jesus King and conspires with Caiaphas and the Romans to have him arrested), meets with Pontius Pilate (always a great sequence, and here is no exception as Jesus calmly freaks Pilate out) is crucified and rises again (in Technicolor!). It's a heartfelt, moving and reasonable telling of the story, DeMille reportedly went out of his way to tone down the anti-Semitism that had been a fundamental part of Passion stories for centuries. Though Caiaphas and the rest of the evil Jews are shown to be largely to blame for Jesus's execution, DeMille goes out of his way to show that they were not representative of the Jews as a whole. HB Warner, who played the druggist in It's a Wonderful Life 20 years later, brings a real otherworldly quality to Jesus, which, along with DeMille giving him a heavenly glow in every scene, manages to be both ridiculous and totally convincing. The #6 film of 1927.

The Indian Epic - In the late 50s and early 60s, massive costume epics by great old directors like William Wyler (Ben-Hur), Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments), Howard Hawks (The Land of the Pharaohs), Nicholas Ray (The King of Kings), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Cleopatra), Anthony Mann (Spartacus, until he got fired), etc were all the rage. The trend even spread to Germany, where Fritz Lang returned after almost three decades in Hollywood and managed to top them all with this film, a totally different kind of epic from a totally different kind of filmmaker from the DeMille films I've been discussing. This two-part film (The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb are the two titles, based on a novel by his ex-wife Thea von Harbou that had been previously filmed way back in 1921 by director Joe May from a Lang and von Harbou script) is about a German architect who is hired to build a temple for the local maharaja. On the way, he meets a dancer and saves her from a tiger. He and the dancer, played by Debra Paget, fall in love, but she belongs to a religious order and will be given to the maharaja. After various intrigues and setup and a sexy dance sequence, the two escape and are recaptured in the desert. Brought back to the palace, they're imprisoned just as the architect's sister and her husband show up. They in turn try to solve the mystery of her missing brother. More intrigue, some mazes, another, sexier dance and wild animal attacks follow. It's a fantastic film, in the sense that all kinds of crazy things happen (at one point the lovers are saved by a helpful spider) and in that it's just a tremendous amount of fun. It's the ultimate expression of Fritz Lang's comic book side (and I don't just mean the cartoonish version of India that probably should never be taken to have any relation to reality), where evil geniuses develop elaborate schemes for power and revenge, while young lovers struggle not merely to understand the nature of the trap they're in, but that they're even trapped at all. The #9 film of 1959.

Movie Roundup: 66 Movies Behind Edition, Take Two

2011-10-08T22:17:00.000-07:00

That's right, due to various factors, I've fallen a full 66 movies behind in rounding up what I've watched. The last time I actually wrote one of this roundups (not counting the one that just disappeared into the internet when I was almost finished) was way back in June, and I was plenty far behind then. Ugh. I will catch up at some point as life around here starts to settle down. For now, I'll just have to plow through as best I can.

First up, I wrote about Eric Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs series over at the Metro Classics website. You can read about those there, and here are their various Movies of the Year rankings:

The Aviator's Wife - 3, 1981

A Good Marriage - 6, 1982

Pauline at the Beach - 3, 1983

Full Moon in Paris - 8, 1984

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend - 3, 1987

My Sister Eileen - Somehow, everything Bob Fosse touches turns to magic. Betty Garrett and Janet Leigh play sisters who move to the big city and get a basement apartment in Greenwich Village. Leigh tries to make it as an actress, wherein she is wooed by Fosse's soda jerk and a journalist played by Tommy Rall (the two of them have a memorable dance-off, another standout sequence from Fosse, who continued the ridiculous roll he'd been on since 1953's mesmerizing trifecta of Kiss Me Kate, Give a Girl a Break and The Affairs of Dobie Gillis). Garrett is an aspiring writer, and sells Jack Lemmon, a publisher who she also wishes to date, on a story about her sister, by claiming it is autobiographical. Somehow Dick York is involved as a wacky neighbor. It all comes to a head with the Brazilian Navy and all of the Village uniting to convince the girls that city life is really swell after all, in one of the most glorious musical sequences of the 1950s. Directed by Richard Quine, who I've been lukewarm on in the past, with a screenplay by Blake Edwards. The #11 film of 1955.

Regeneration - An early film from director Raoul Walsh, and the prototype for many a gangster film that would follow over the next few decades. Rockliffe Fellowes (what a name!) stars as a young man, orphaned and forced to live out on the streets who grows to become the head of the local mob. One day, he meets a saintly social worker (Anna Q. Nilsson, one of the bridge players in Sunset Blvd.) who teaches him to read. He tries to reform himself, but his old cronies keep pulling him back in. Shot on location in The Bowery and Hell's Kitchen, suing local bums, whores and gangsters as extras, Walsh, in addition to kind of inventing the gangster melodrama (with all due credit to DW Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley, released three years earlier), also sets a standard that would be picked up again in the 1940s and be called neo-realism. Or rather, the film is a prime example of a strain of American filmmaking that would largely disappear as the Hollywood studios gained near-monopoly power in the late teens and 20s and that would then be rediscovered in the 40s. The #1 film of 1915.

Going Hollywood - Walsh seems largely out of his element here though, directing Bing Crosby and Marion Davies in a would-be screwball musical comedy. Crosby is a big movie star, and Davies a schoolteacher who's obsessed with him. She goes out to Hollywood, gets a job in the chorus of his latest movie and ends up taking the lead role when her rival for his affections and costar Lili Yvonne (played by Fifi D'Orsay, seriously) walks off the set. It's a pleasant enough film, but it lacks the fire of the really great comedies and musicals being made elsewhere at the same time. I don't know if the blame belongs to Walsh, the actors, or screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart (one of the better writers of the 30s). I really like Crosby in the Father O'Malley films he made 15 years later for Leo McCarey, but this is the first I've seen of Davies. The #29 film of 1933.

HM Pulham, Esq - Mid-life crisis, 1940s style. Robert Young plays a wealthy Boston businessman who leads a regimented, extremely dull life. One night, while organizing his 25th anniversary college reunion, he reminisces about his youth as a young go-getter who got to hang out with Hedy Lamarr drinking, smoking and working in advertising in the days before World War I. A lengthy flashback ensues, as we see Young and Lamarr's romance grow and then fizzle when she refuses to relinquish her independence to his family's patriarchal traditions. So instead he marries boring Ruth Hussey and leads a life of luxury. Returning to the present, Young looks up Lamarr and the two consider having another go at it, but this being 1940s Hollywood, he can't abandon his marriage. Instead, Hussey agrees to try to loosen up a bit. A very solid film from director King Vidor, lying somewhere in between his political extremes of the socialist Our Daily Bread and the Ayn Rand adaptation The Fountainhead (which I'm still not convinced is not a self-parody). It never quite rises to the level of William Wyler's Dodsworth, another film about a rich guy's mid-life crisis that is both more pointed in its indictment of the upper class and more romantic in the relationship between said rich guy (Walter Hutson) and the independent woman he meets (Mary Astor). However, that film is completely lacking in Hedy Lamarr, both her magnetic on-screen presence and her proto-feminist character. The #16 film of 1941.

Street Angel - Another transcendent love story from director Frank Borzage, following up the previous year's Seventh Heaven and reuniting that film's stars, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. Gaynor plays a young woman who attempts to prostitute herself to pay for her dying mother's medication. She fails (of course) and is arrested. Escaping from the police, she joins a circus where she meets Farrell, an aspiring painter. The two fall in love and move back to the city, with Gaynor ever-fearful that her past will catch up to her. When it inevitably does, she convinces the cop who's found her to give them one last night together, sparking one of the all-time heart-breaking film sequences as the two share a big meal and a bunch of wine in what only Gaynor knows will be the last time they will ever be happy. Of course she's wrong, the movie must have its happy ending, but there's a whole lot of darkness before that can happen, as Farrell turns into a dissolute drunk before their inevitable reunion. Like with Seventh Heaven (and Murnau's Sunrise) Borzage creates a believable world of petty crime and poverty on a soundstage and then infuses it with expressionist romanticism, an always intoxicating mixture. The #5 film of 1928.

2011-10-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

2011-09-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

2011-09-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

2011-09-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

2011-09-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

My Top 1000 Films of All-Time: 1-100

2011-09-04T06:33:00.000-07:00

This is part five, the Top 100 of my Top 1000 films of all time. Other entries: 101-200, 201-500, 501-750, 751-1000, honorable mentions. Disclaimer: list-making like this is completely ridiculous for many reasons. It's arbitrary, dependent on personal whims and whatever mood I might be in at the time of ranking, the imperfections of my memory (growing more imperfect by the year), the limitations of what movies I have and haven't seen, the vagueness of the criteria I use to rank them (there really aren't any), and simply because the very idea of saying one film is 10 (or 50 or 200) better than another is completely absurd. But lists are fun and can occasionally be useful.

1 Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

2 Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)

3 Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

4 Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

5 Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952)

6 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (FW Murnau, 1927)

7 Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)

8 Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

9 The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

10 The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

11 Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

12 Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

13 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

14 The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger, 1948)

15 Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

16 Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

17 Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

18 All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

19 The Big Lebowski (The Coen Brothers, 1998)

20 Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

21 The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)

22 Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

23 The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

24 Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945)

25 La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000)

26 A Canterbury Tale (Powell & Pressburger, 1944)

27 Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

28 North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

29 Miller's Crossing (The Coen Brothers, 1990)

30 Sherlock, Jr (Buster Keaton, 1924)

31 I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)

32 City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)

33 It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

34 Dazed and Confused (Rochard Linklater, 1993)

35 Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

36 Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001)

37 Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

38 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

39 Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger, 1947)

40 The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)

41 Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

42 Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

43 Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

44 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

45 Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957)

46 A Matter of Life and Death (Powell & Pressburger, 1946)

47 Late Spring (Yasujirô Ozu,1949)

48 The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

49 All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)

50 M. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)

51 A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)

52 F For Fake (Orson Welles, 1973)

53 The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

54 Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

55 Hard-Boiled (John Woo, 1992)

56 Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

57 The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926)

58 Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

59 Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

60 The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

61 The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 1978)

62 Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)

63 Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)

64 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)

65 An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)

66 Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991)

67 The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

68 Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)

69 The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)

70 Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)

71 The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

72 Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936)

73 Psycho (Alfred HItchcock, 1960)

74 The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1938)

75 Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

76 Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)

77 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)

78 L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)

79 Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

80 Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

81 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

82 Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964)

83 The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

84 The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, 1986)

85 Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

86 The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968)

87 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 2004)

88 The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)

89 The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

90 Airplane! (Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker, 1980)

91 The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953)

92 Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

93 Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

94 Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006)

95 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

96 Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Anderson, 2003)

97 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)

98 Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

99 Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (FW Murnau, 1931)

100 Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)

My Top 1000 Films of All-Time: 101-200

2011-09-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

This is part four. Previous entires can be found here: 501-750, 751-1000 and honorable mentions, along with the usual equivocations.

101 Young Mr. Lincoln
102 Andrei Rublev
103 The Wind That Shakes the Barley
104 Dragon Inn
105 The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
106 Intolerance
107 Rushmore
108 Three Colors: Blue
109 In the Mood for Love
110 Hiroshima, mon amour

111 Modern Times
112 Tokyo Story
113 Fantasia
114 Last Life in the Universe
115 Hannah and Her Sisters
116 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
117 The Life of Brian
118 Charade
119 Irma Vep
120 Fallen Angels

121 Big Night
122 L'Atalante
123 Sans soleil
124 The Awful Truth
125 Shanghai Express
126 LA Story
127 The Strawberry Blonde
128 Lola (1961)
129 Ghost Dog
130 Anatomy of a Murder

131 Raiders of the Lost Ark
132 Make Way for Tomorrow
133 Rashomon
134 The Manchurian Candidate
135 Pulp Fiction
136 A Touch of Zen
137 Don't Look Back
138 My Night at Maud's
139 Les amants du Pont-Neuf
140 Jaws

141 House of Flying Daggers
142 Do the Right Thing
143 Steamboat Bill Jr.
144 Chinatown
145 Sleeping Beauty
146 Cat People
147 Double Indemnity
148 8 1/2
149 Tropical Malady
150 Eyes Wide Shut

151 L'Avventura
152 Letter from an Unknown Woman
153 Monty Python and the Holy Grail
154 Apocalypse Now
155 The Empire Strikes Back
156 Brief Encounter
157 Lawrence of Arabia
158 Red River
159 Cops
160 Japanese Girls at the Harbor

161 Goodbye, Dragon Inn
162 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
163 Meet Me in St. Louis
164 Crippled Avengers
165 The Battle of Algiers
166 WALL-E
167 Kiss Me Kate
168 The Outlaw Josey Wales
169 People On Sunday
170 The Pirate

171 Ruggles of Red Gap
172 Kill Bill Vol. 1
173 Sita Sings the Blues
174 Trouble in Paradise
175 The Double Life of Veronique
176 Louisiana Story
177 Notorious
178 Amadeus
179 The Wizard of Oz
180 Satantango

181 Harvey
182 Rome, Open City
183 Cleo from 5 To 7
184 Ikiru
185 Gunga Din
186 In a Lonely Place
187 Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
188 Inglourious Basterds
189 True Heart Susie
190 Breakfast at Tiffany's

191 McCabe & Mrs. Miller
192 7 Women
193 My Winnipeg
194 All That Heaven Allows
195 Day of Wrath
196 Star Wars
197 The Music Room
198 Oki's Movie
199 I'm Not There
200 PTU

My Top 1000 Films of All-Time: 201-500

2011-09-03T15:52:00.000-07:00

This is part three. Previous entires can be found here: 501-750, 751-1000 and honorable mentions.

201 Spirited Away

202 The Purple Rose of Cairo

203 La Danse

204 Some Came Running

205 Oxhide II

206 Blow-Up

207 The Shining

208 Three Times

209 Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)

210 Three Colors: Red

211 Throne of Blood

212 Hallelujah, I'm a Bum

213 The Big Red One

214 Exiled

215 El Dorado

216 His Girl Friday

217 The Lady from Shanghai

218 Boogie Nights

219 Gun Crazy

220 Mahanagar

221 Cabaret

222 Killer of Sheep

223 Unforgiven

224 Advise and Consent

225 Kicking and Screaming

226 Contempt

227 Heaven's Gate

228 The Blues Brothers

229 One Week

230 Madame de. . .

231 The Lady Vanishes

232 Wild Grass

233 Charulata

234 42nd Street

235 Barton Fink

236 Limelight

237 Mean Streets

238 No Greater Glory

239 What Time is it There?

240 Petulia

241 Cranes are Flying

242 The Godfather Part II

243 Sunset Blvd.

244 The Princess Bride

245 The French Connection

246 Park Row

247 My Darling Clementine

248 Night of the Living Dead

249 Pauline at the Beach

250 Murder By Contract

251 Top Hat

252 The Musketeers of Pig Alley

253 Police Story

254 The Seventh Seal

255 Claire's Knee

256 Pennies from Heaven

257 The Mission (1999)

258 Paths of Glory

259 There's Always Tomorrow

260 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

261 The Dawn Patrol

262 An Autumn Afternoon

263 The Steel Helmet

264 Seventh Heaven

265 Vampyr

266 On the Waterfront

267 Mon oncle d'Amérique

268 To Have and Have Not

269 Carlos

270 Trainspotting

271 Drunken Master II

272 The Last Waltz

273 Scarlet Street

274 Fantastic Mr. Fox

275 Written on the Wind

276 Shall We Dance

277 Frankenstein

278 The Last Temptation of Christ

279 Broadcast News

280 Days of Being Wild

281 The 400 Blows

282 Laura

283 The Young Girls of Rochefort

284 Before Sunrise

285 Exit Through the Gift Shop

286 Henry V (1989)

287 Age of Consent

288 Alien

289 The Gold Rush

290 The Road Warrior

291 City Girl

292 Dangerous Liaisons

293 Archangel

294 Fort Apache

295 Taxi Driver

296 Unfaithfully Yours

297 The Last of the Mohicans

298 The Man with a Movie Camera

299 Kiss Me Deadly

300 Dodsworth

301 There Will Be Blood

302 Now, Voyager

303 The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

304 Glengarry Glen Ross

305 Ed Wood

306 Fucking Åmål

307 A Christmas Tale

308 Taste of Cherry

309 Rebecca

310 Golddiggers of 1933

311 The Godfather

312 Dawn of the Dead

313 Fight Club

314 The Scarlet Empress

315 Stromboli

316 The Puppetmaster

317 The Exterminating Angel

318 When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

319 Happy Together

320 Don't Look Now

321 The Immigrant

322 Alice in Wonderland (1951)

323 Baby Face

324 The Gang's All Here

325 Run of the Arrow

326 The Gay Divorcee

327 The Palm Beach Story

328 Leave Her to Heaven

329 Six Degrees of Separation

330 The Sword of Doom

331 Under Capricorn

332 Ivan the Terrible Part 1

333 Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

334 Early Summer

335 Metropolitan

336 Shoot the Piano Player

337 Centre Stage

338 Lola Montes

339 The River (1951)

340 The Goat

341 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

342 Mon Oncle

343 Under the Roofs of Paris

344 The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums

345 Winchester '73

346 Empire of the Sun

347 Godzilla (1954)

348 Sleeper

349 The Atomic Café

350 The Matrix

351 Curse of the Cat People

352 Bitter Victory

353 Yojimbo

354 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

355 Spring in a Small Town

356 Alexander Nevsky

357 Bottle Rocket

358 The Big Heat

359 Ninotchka

360 Remember the Night

361 Culloden

362 April Story

363 King Kong (1933)

364 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

365 Jour de fete

366 The Set-Up

367 The Circus

368 Diary of a Country Priest

369 Lost Highway

370 To Live and Die in LA

371 A Corner in Wheat

372 Aguirre: The Wrath of God

373 Fist of Legend

374 The Leopard

375 Seven Men From Now

376 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

377 Once Upon a Time in China

378 Suspicion

379 Going My Way

380 Harakiri

381 Footlight Parade

382 Masculin feminin

383 Orlando

384 Morvern Callar

385 Masque of the Red Death

386 Sanjuro

387 The Wind

388 Hero

389 Portrait of Jennie

390 Midnight

391 A Trip to the Moon

392 Groundhog Day

393 High and Low

394 Sansho the Bailiff

395 Ratatouille

396 The Flowers of Shanghai

397 Breathless

398 Pickpocket

399 Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

400 The Age of the Medici

401 Street Angel (1928)

402 Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl

403 Scarface (1932)

404 Ashes of Time

405 Badlands

406 New Rose Hotel

407 Some Like it Hot

408 I Walked with a Zombie

409 The Grand Illusion

410 The Maltese Falcon

411 The Magnificent Ambersons

412 Mogambo

413 The World

414 Design for Living

415 Anchorman

416 Bull Durham

417 Bend of the River

418 The Mortal Storm

419 Nights of Cabiria

420 Still Life

421 Pinocchio

422 The Killing

423 The Shanghai Gesture

424 The Best Years of Our Lives

425 The Last Days of Disco

426 Army of Shadows

427 Three Comrades

428 The English Patient

429 Paisan

430 The Right Stuff

431 Clerks

432 Mr. Arkadin

433 Force of Evil

434 Europa '51

435 Les bonnes femmes

436 Bad Day at Black Rock

437 Give a Girl a Break

438 Socrates

439 History is Made at Night

440 The Passenger

441 Kind Hearts and Coronets

442 The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

443 Picnic at Hanging Rock

444 The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

445 Love Me Tonight

446 Meek's Cutoff

447 Hell in the Pacific

448 Bullitt

449 One, Two, Three

450 My Girlfriend's Boyfriend

451 The Long Goodbye

452 It Happened One Night

453 Ivan the Terrible Part 2

454 Pi

455 All Quiet on the Western Front

456 Magnificent Obsession

457 Sparrow

458 Band of Outsiders

459 The Passion of Joan of Arc

460 Barry Lyndon

461 Air Force

462 The African Queen

463 Man of the West

464 Stalker

465 Bonjour Tristesse

466 On Dangerous Ground

467 True Romance

468 The Killer

469 The Thin Man

470 Aliens

471 My Life to Live

472 Night and Fog

473 Judge Priest

474 Moonrise

475 Tokyo Chorus

476 The Indian Epic

477 Evil Dead II

478 Last Hurrah for Chivalry

479 Matinee

480 Simple Men

481 The Tarnished Angels

482 The Last Command

483 Searching for Bobby Fischer

484 Wings of Desire

485 Zelig

486 Private Fears in Public Places

487 Lancelot du lac

488 Cabin in the Sky

489 The Letter

490 Shadow of a Doubt

491 Alphaville

492 The Last Laugh

493 The Naked Spur

494 Bigger than Life

495 Goodfellas

496 Heaven Can Wait (1943)

497 A Star is Born (1954)

498 Sullivan's Travels

499 The Black Book

500 The 39 Steps

My Top 1000 Films of All-Time: 501-750

2011-09-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

Here's the second part of this year's big list. Numbers 751-1000 are here. Honorable mentions are here, along with the usual mumbo jumbo about how silly this all is.

501 Les vampires
502 Point Blank
503 Battleship Potemkin
504 I Love Melvin
505 Metropolis
506 Walkabout
507 Le samourai
508 Woman in the Dunes
509 The Asphalt Jungle
510 Humanity and Paper Balloons
511 For a Few Dollars More
512 The Ghost & Mrs. Muir
513 Floating Weeds
514 Blissfully Yours
515 Donovan's Reef
516 Cave of Forgotten Dreams
517 Fireworks
518 The Barefoot Contessa
519 Simon of the Desert
520 Platform
521 The Big Parade
522 The Bells of St. Mary's
523 Imitation of Life
524 The Naked City
525 The Savage Innocents

526 The Long Voyage Home
527 Gertrud
528 The Tai Chi Master
529 Ecstasy
530 Happy-Go-Lucky
531 The Phenix City Story
532 A Story of Floating Weeds
533 La Collectioneuse
534 The Wind Will Carry Us
535 Rebel Without a Cause
536 JFK
537 From Russia with Love
538 A History of Violence
539 The Departed
540 Wagon Master
541 Le cercle rouge
542 Guys and Dolls
543 The Social Network
544 Love and Death
545 The Affairs of Dobie Gillis
546 The Play House
547 You, the Living
548 How Green Was My Valley
549 The Heartbreak Kid
550 Close Encounters of the Third Kind

551 Devil's Doorway
552 M
553 À nous la liberté
554 A Man Escaped
555 Destry Rides Again
556 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
557 Flight of the Red Balloon
558 AI: Artificial Intelligence
559 Late Autumn
560 Syndromes and a Century
561 The Sting
562 They Were Expendable
563 L'Argent (1928)
564 Monsieur Verdoux
565 Die Hard
566 Broken Blossoms
567 Raising Arizona
568 Goodbye South, Goodbye
569 Grindhouse
570 I Know Where I'm Going!
571 My Fair Lady
572 After Hours
573 The Great Escape
574 Reservoir Dogs
575 Stolen Kisses

576 Princess Raccoon
577 Election (2005)
578 Regeneration
579 Sisters of the Gion
580 Caddyshack
581 Our Daily Bread
582 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
583 I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
584 Waterloo Bridge (1940)
585 The Aviator's Wife
586 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
587 The Devil is a Woman
588 The Pan-American Exposition by Night
589 Ghostbusters
590 Infernal Affairs
591 Elena et les hommes
592 A Married Woman
593 Mad Detective
594 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
595 The Taking of Power by Louis XIV
596 Close-Up
597 The Girl Can't Help It
598 The Apartment
599 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
600 Bunny Lake is Missing

601 The Illusionist (2010)
602 Le procès de Jeanne d'Arc
603 Greed
604 Stray Dog
605 The Loyal 47 Ronin
606 The Lineup
607 It Should Happen To You
608 Man Hunt
609 New York, New York
610 An Affair to Remember
611 The Sweet Smell of Success
612 True Grit (2010)
613 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
614 Kings and Queen
615 Detour
616 The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk
617 Film Socialisme
618 Wee Willie Winkie
619 Climates
620 To Be or Not To Be
621 The Fellowship of the Ring
622 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days . . .
623 Blast of Silence
624 The Limits of Control
625 Un chien andalou

626 Earth
627 Crimes and Misdemeanors
628 Strangers on a Train
629 Red Dust
630 The Kid
631 Sabrina
632 Summer Hours
633 Howl's Moving Castle
634 The Age of Innocence
635 Kung Fu Hustle
636 Jezebel
637 Senso
638 The Color of Pomegranates
639 This is Spinal Tap
640 Viridiana
641 The Furies
642 Week End
643 The Blue Angel
644 The Tall T
645 Enter the Dragon
646 Muriel
647 Night and the City
648 St. Martin's Lane
649 When We Were Kings
650 The Road Home

651 Ordet
652 The Verdict
653 Orphans of the Storm
654 Election 2
655 Easy Living
656 Party Girl (1995)
657 A Hard Day's Night
658 The Naked Kiss
659 The Conformist
660 Hahaha
661 Nanook of the North
662 Black Swan (2010)
663 A Letter to Three Wives
664 A Time to Love and a Time to Die
665 Easter Parade
666 35 Shots of Rum
667 No Country for Old Men
668 Underworld
669 Passion
670 Back to the Future
671 The Prowler
672 The Small Back Room
673 Le jour se leve
674 Amelie
675 Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

676 Lone Star
677 The Naked Prey
678 A Bridge Too Far
679 Bonnie and Clyde
680 Dave Chappelle's Block Party
681 Full Metal Jacket
682 Day and Night
683 Animal House
684 Down By Law
685 Shaolin Soccer
686 The Iron Horse
687 Drugstore Cowboy
688 Ishtar
689 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
690 Kill Bill Vol. 2
691 A Better Tomorrow
692 Dial M for Murder
693 The Last Seduction
694 Blonde Venus
695 Sherman's March
696 The Black Stallion
697 Tokyo Twilight
698 Woodstock
699 Still Walking
700 Samurai Rebellion

701 Thomas Mao
702 Rebels of the Neon God
703 The Bitter Tea of General Yen
704 Joe vs. the Volcano
705 Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring
706 A Serious Man
707 Pickup on South Street
708 Nashville
709 Friday Night
710 Red Cliff
711 Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque
712 Wallace and Grommit: The Wrong Trousers
713 The Mission (1986)
714 Dirty Harry
715 Gremlins
716 Tokyo Drifter
717 Twentieth Century
718 Almost Famous
719 Yi yi
720 Chop Shop
721 Fast, Cheap and Out of Control
722 Bambi
723 Come Drink With Me
724 Bound
725 His Kind of Woman

726 Odd Man Out
727 Eat Drink Man Woman
728 Hoosiers
729 As Tears Go By
730 Animal Crackers
731 Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
732 Existenz
733 Rosemary's Baby
734 Rancho Notorious
735 Beauty and the Beast (1946)
736 What's Up, Tiger Lily?
737 Fargo
738 Das Boot
739 Nightfall
740 The Thing from Another World
741 My Sister Eileen
742 Passing Fancy
743 Holiday
744 Caught
745 Ornamental Hairpin
746 A Night to Remember
747 Written By
748 Exotica
749 Hoop Dreams
750 Jackie Brown