Top 25 + 1 Movies I Love

© 2004 by John Varley; all rights reserved

I have had a Top 10 list of movies floating around in my head for at least three decades now, and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten it down to fewer than 15. Finally I’ve given up and decided to go with a Top 25. Who said Top 10 was sacred, anyway?

Things have shifted here and there, the criteria for inclusion have changed, and once in a very great while a new movie gets added. At one point I decided that several of the films on the list were films that I somehow thought ought to be on the list: the ones they show you in film schools as examples of “great” films. And I realized that, while I could appreciate their greatness, or at least their craft, I didn’t really like them. Raging Bull is a good example. Many critics chose it as the best film of the '80s, and it is a massive achievement and a very daring film, choosing to tell the story of a man with no redeeming qualities at all, a man not even his mother could love. I am in awe of it, but I don’t love it. It’s not on my list.

The rules for getting on this list are fairly basic, fairly simple. Sometimes they may even be contradictory. I don’t care.

I must genuinely love the film. Sometimes because it stunned me, awed me, when I first saw it ... and every time thereafter. Other films are here because they delighted me, made me happy to be alive, gave me joy that such a movie could even exist. Sometimes a film is here because it did both things. Some films are here because they ... well, they tore my guts out. They made me cry, and will make me cry again the next time I see them.

Basically, the film must be as near perfect as a human enterprise can be. There must not be a single thing I would change, if I were given the chance to do it myself. Not a sequence, not a shot, not a frame.

... except for a few where I make allowances for the time they were made, and the different standards of cinema prevailing then. (See The General.) But I have been stingy with my exceptions, and that has had a surprising result. A lot of the wonderful films of the '30s to the '50s, which I love, are not here because of some element that probably worked fine at the time, but doesn’t now. Musicals, which I also love, were hit hard by this rule. Most of the great old musicals were, at base, extremely silly once they stopped singing and dancing. Did any sailor in the history of seafaring ever behave with the childishness of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and most especially Jules Munshin in On The Town? I think not. At that time there was this cinematic fiction that our servicemen were basically just overgrown kids. Aw, shucks! We all know what sailors ashore want, and the Empire State Building ain’t on the list. The singin’ and dancin’ are terrif, but the basic premise is stupid.

There are a large number of movies on this list from the 1970s. Many critics, and myself, now view this as a “Golden Age” of cinema. Movies were emerging from the strictures of sexual repression, writers and directors were pushing the boundaries, and studios were willing to fund these revolutionary concepts. Then as we moved into the '80s and '90s the deal makers took over and clamped down a form of repression different from that exercised by the old studio moguls, but just as stultifying. Of course some truly wonderful movies have been made since then, but most of the money has gone into stuff that is guaranteed to appeal to a target audience whose age and attention span is dwindling. So far no movie of the '80s has hit me hard enough or stuck with me powerfully enough to dislodge the ones you see here. It can still happen; sometimes a movie plays better in retrospect.

As for the '90s, and the 21st Century ... I will not put a movie on this list until it is at least 10 years old, preferably 20. If you go to the Top 250 Films at the Internet Movie Database, you will find it is top heavy with films of the last 10 years. That’s only to be expected; many of the voters are still in their twenties. What encourages me is that some films like The Seven Samurai and Casablanca are still in the Top 10. So there are still people who are looking at all that wonderful old stuff.

Having seen how a movie actually get physically made (a bad movie, I admit, but the process is exactly the same for a good movie), from the first storyboard sketch and the first nail driven on the first set, to the editing and looping and Foley work, I have chosen to include along with the director and writer and producer (who is much more important than most people realize), the art director and the cinematographer of these movies, and usually the composer of the music. The art director is in charge of creating everything visual in the film. The cinematographer is responsible for how it all photographs. These are incredibly important to how the film comes out. And most films would just not work without the music.

I welcome seeing the top lists of visitors to this site. I always enjoy hearing about the movies that other people love to distraction.

Movies are listed in chronological order. No way I can rank them best to ... least best.

So with the very first film I almost violate one of my rules. The one element of The General that I don’t like is something that was very much a part of its time, which is the predilection of making the South the sentimental favorite in dramas, and also maybe because of the American tendency to root for the underdog. Many Americans still thought of the Johnny Rebs as honorable gentlemen, spoke of the “Lost Cause,” and forgot about or just didn’t care about the rotten, festering heart of the Confederacy. Just about everybody did it, from the horrible masterpiece The Birth of a Nation to the tacitly racist Gone With the Wind. Happily, that trend is just about gone. Cold Mountain shows the war from the Southern point of view, but Inman is deserting, and we are encouraged to root for him.

Buster Keaton’s first feature-length movie was The Three Ages, in 1923. You really can’t compare two- and three-reelers against what we’ve come to think of as features (Cops was 18 minutes, which would make it a short today), though half a dozen of Keaton’s and even more of Chaplin’s shorts are masterpieces. When Keaton really got rolling at full-length (and before sound killed his career), I think he made more great movies even than Chaplin. I’m thinking of amazing stuff like Our Hospitality, The Navigator, College, Steamboat Bill, and The Cameraman.

But The General is the best. I remember laughing until I hurt during the chase, as he comes up with one ruse after another to steal his beloved locomotive and girl back from the Yankees. Keaton was the master of the visual joke, and he did it all without ever changing expression. Chaplin had 100 faces to wring our hearts with; Keaton had to make one face work for everything ... and he did!

And I can still recall the awe with which I watched the bridge collapsing under the train engine (a scene that was filmed in Oregon). I honestly don’t think there was a single shot to compare to it until 1956: the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments. And Keaton didn’t use any special effects. IMDb.com
 

Sometimes I think The Gold Rush should be on this list. Sometimes I think maybe Modern Times. And of course there’s The Great Dictator. Shorts? The Cure, The Rink, The Tramp, One A.M., The Immigrant, Shoulder Arms. Chaplin made 33 two-reelers just in 1914.

But none of them have the heart of City Lights. If you just outline the plot, it sounds silly. A blind girl mistakes Charlie, the tramp, for a millionaire. He keeps the illusion going. He manages to get the money for an operation to restore her eyesight, goes to prison, emerges even more raggedy-ass than he was; really down and out. He encounters her. Will she recognize him?

She says, “You?”

He nods. He says “You can see?”

“Yes. I can see.”

She smiles.

Roger Ebert thinks the smile is one of acceptance. I think the smile is at least as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa. The camera lingers on it a moment, and I am never sure just what she is thinking. Of course, it’s tough to see, because my eyes are always full or tears at that moment.

Okay, Chaplin could be hopelessly sentimental, and so can I. As always with Charlie, the movie is so much more than that. It contains some of his best slapstick, funny situations, physical comedy, sly observations, even satire. The sound era was already in full swing, but he deliberately made it silent, and probably only Chaplin could have gotten away with it in 1931. But he was right. IMDb.com
 

The Ideal was a little movie theater around the corner from the 5&10 cent store my grandfather managed in Corsicana, Texas. This theater wasn’t much; there was another place in town with pretensions to being a movie palace. The Ideal had none. My grandmother's name was Mae Van, but we all called her Nina (NIGH-na, not NEE-na), don’t ask me why. For all I know she may have been a big movie fan in the '30s and '40s, but I’d never seen her go to a movie when I was a child. Then one day a poster went up for The Grapes of Wrath at the Ideal. Nina got very excited. She and some of her friends were going to see it, and she invited me along.

This was maybe 1958, ‘59, in there. (The theater had whites on the ground floor, “colored” in a wrap-around balcony, like in To Kill a Mockingbird, that’s how long ago it was!) The movie was at least 18 years old, and they had all seen it several times, this in a day when people just did not go to see movies repeatedly. I was 11 or 12. I knew nothing of the Depression, or Okies. Corsicana is in northeast Texas, not far from Dallas, on the edges of the Dust Bowl. I can see now that this movie was important to these women because they had been there. Not as desperate as the Joad’s, I don’t think, but it was hard times for everyone.

They all cried at the end. And though I tried to hide it (boys don’t cry, especially at the movies), I cried, too, only the second time I had ever cried at a movie (first: Bambi). I still do, every time I see it. IMDb.com

Ben Hecht was a very prolific screenwriter from the '30s to the '60s, with over 140 credits. You look at the list and it seems he at least had a hand in half the good movies that came out in that time, often uncredited. His most durable play was The Front Page, which has been filmed or televised six times, of which I’ve seen four.

In 1931 it starred Adolph Menjou and Pat O’Brien as editor Walter Burns and star reporter Hildy Johnson (whose name I stole for my novel Steel Beach). Hildy is leaving the paper to get married; Walter has no intention of letting him do so. He throws every obstacle he can think of in the way of the happy couple, secure in his knowledge that Hildy will never be happy unless he’s out there in pursuit of the news. The film is amusing, but slow and static, because sound was new and movies couldn’t move around very much. It ran 101 minutes

In 1940 Howard Hawkes changed Hildebrandt to Hildegaarde, cast Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, and did it again.

In 1945 and 1948 it was staged for television. I’d sure love to see either of those. (One was for the BBC.) Television in 1945! Very, very primitive.

In 1974 Billy Wilder changed Hildy back again, into Jack Lemmon, and paired him with Walter Matthau. It works okay, but is slow. It took Wilder 105 minutes to tell the story.

In 1988 it was updated to television news, they changed all the names, but the Hildy character is played by Kathleen Turner. It runs 105 minutes and doesn’t really work.

Now back to 1940.

Howard Hawks made it as a screwball comedy, and called it His Girl Friday. That was a type of romantic comedy that Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to make, to its loss. (About the most recent mostly-successful example I can recall is Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc?) The genre was pretty much invented by Frank Capra with It Happened One Night, and developed by such greats as Leo McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, and Preston Sturges. All it took to turn The Front Page into a screwball comedy was the stroke of genius of changing Hildy’s sex. The play is funny enough as written, but adding the sexual tension moves everything up a level.

And Howard Hawks did the whole thing in 92 minutes.

Watching it, it’s easy to see how he did it. There is seldom a moment when somebody isn’t talking. Talking? Rattling, chattering, shouting, hollering! Talk about a talkie! This is a movie about talking, wisecracks, putdowns, all played broadly with never a pause to catch your breath. That’s how he did it. How he made it work is the wonder. Many directors have tried it and hundreds have failed. But I can never take my eyes from Cary Grant and Roz Russell, they might have invented the word “chemistry,” and they seem to hate each other, and they hardly ever even touch each other. And it doesn’t dissolve, in the end, into a sappy lovefest; these people just aren’t like that. No, the best they can achieve is a recognition that this is who we are, so we might as well get used to it and go on together, because nothing else will work.

Two little bits of business: At one point Grant is describing Hildy’s fiancée to a thug he has hired to plant counterfeit money on him. “He looks like that actor fellow ... Ralph Bellamy.” Guess who is playing the poor schmuck?

And one line of Cary’s dialogue goes like this: “The last man that messed with me was Archie Leach ...” Which was the name of the poor but attractive cockney lad who came to Hollywood to seek his fortune and was named Cary Grant by the studios. IMDb.com

I came a little late to this movie, considering that I’d become a student of film during my brief time at college. At the film society I learned that Charlie Chaplin was not this shuffling little doofus, seen in 5-second clips, but a great artist, maybe the best cinema has ever seen. At the art houses around East Lansing I learned there were foreign films that didn’t star Brigitte Bardot. Some good ones. And in film classes I was shown the evolution of cinema, from The Great Train Robbery (1903) right on into the '50s. We saw films that remain masterpieces, and others that were interesting mostly from an historical perspective. In film class you watch The Birth of a Nation to learn how that old racist D.W. Griffith pretty much invented the epic form, and many of the basic editing techniques still in use today. You watch Battleship Potemkin to see how Eisenstein cut shots to distort time when the sailor dashes the maggoty meat to the deck, how he distorted space with the brilliant Odessa Steps sequence. You watch The Triumph of the Will to see really brilliant propaganda. You watch Un Chien Andalou and The Passion of Joan of Arc and Wild Strawberries and La Strada for basically academic, educational reasons. I watched them all, and was stunned and amazed by most of them, learning just how much I did not know about movies. But I didn’t love many of them.

I was absent the day they showed Citizen Kane. I read the book on it. Apparently it was important, cinematically, because Orson Welles put ceilings on his sets. I thought back, realized that rooms in most films of that era had high, high walls, so high you never saw the ceilings. That’s because there were lots of lights up there. I remember having it pointed out that during the silent era the camera was very mobile, and being shown a very stagey film from around 1930 where the camera was nailed in place, because of the newfangled microphone, like the wonderful business where they’re trying to film The Dueling Cavalier in Singin’ in the Rain. With ceilings, Welles could use dramatic low angles, and was impelled to invent innovative lighting.

Okay.

Years went by. One late, late night in San Francisco I saw Citizen Kane was going to be on TV. What the hell. I started watching it, looking for the ceilings. Almost at once I wasn’t thinking “technique” at all. That all came later, on subsequent viewings, when I noted things such as the fact that the reporter’s face is never shown full-on, and that no one is in the room when Kane whispers “Rosebud.” That night I was pulled in, utterly entranced, by one of the best stories I’d ever seen, told in a way that is still stunning today. I saw a marriage dissolve in about 90 seconds over a series of breakfasts. I saw people living in rooms that would have given an elephant agoraphobia. I saw a woman’s nervous breakdown in successive operatic scenes ... well, if you haven’t seen it, you are not a serious student of the cinema. And you’re missing one of the greatest films of all time. IMDb.com

Realizing the importance of the case, my men are rounding up twice the usual number of suspects.

I don’t mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one.

How extravagant you are, throwing away women like that. Some day they may be scarce.

And what in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?

My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

Waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.

I was misinformed.

I stick my neck out for nobody.

Because, my dear Ricky, I suspect that under that cynical shell you are a sentimentalist.

What is your nationality?

I’m a drunkard.

Play it, Sam. Play "As Time Goes By.”

I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray. You wore blue.

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

You played it for her and you can play it for me.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

I am making out the report now. We haven’t quite decided if he committed suicide or died trying to escape.

Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.

You’ll have to think for both of us. For all of us.

Ricky, I’m going to miss you. Apparently you are the only one in Casablanca who has even less scruples than I.

And remember, this gun is pointed straight at your heart.

That is my least vulnerable spot.
 

If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

We’ll always have Paris.

I’m not good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

She did her best to convince me that she was still in love with me, but that was all over long ago.

Major Strasser’s been shot! ... Round up the usual suspects.

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

If most of this dialogue doesn’t ring a bell ... you haven’t seen Casablanca enough times. IMDb.com

This is another “film school” movie, another one I missed during my college days, used as an example of post-war Italian Neorealism. Categories like that put me off. I like to judge a film by its individual merits, if possible. I hesitate to watch movies I’m supposed to admire. I have admired, for instance, many films by Ingmar Bergman, but I have never loved a single one of them.

This one I love. De Sica was a leader in the neorealist movement. These guys rejected the traditionally structured stories and settings that audiences loved so much but so often had little to say about real life. So he chose a very simple story and populated it with real people; none of the main characters had ever acted in a movie before, and none of them went on to very big careers afterward. This is particularly impressive in the case of Enzo Staiola, who was eight. Take a look at child actors in contemporary Hollywood films, the stilted, corny dialogue, the self-consciousness, the downright bad acting. With a few talented exceptions, most child actors before the 1970s or so were pretty awful, and directors had no idea how to coax a great performance from them. These days they use new methods, and convincing child performances are common. Not in 1948.

The story is so simple. A man in postwar Italy gets a chance at a job putting up posters. To do it, he needs a bicycle. The family pawns their bedding to get his bike out of the pawnshop and he sets happily to work. The very first day, the bike is stolen. The next day he and his son set out to find it.

There is no way to describe what happens during that day without giving away too much. It is hopeless, then there is a ray of hope ... and then ... the last scenes are of awful revelation, choking sorrow and shame, and are indelibly etched in my memory. IMDb.com
 

Kurosawa and Kubrick present a big problem to someone like me putting together a Top 25 list. You can’t put all their films on the list. It’s probably best to limit yourself to one movie per director (and I couldn’t, with Kubrick). So, which one? Ran? Rashomon? Stray Dog? The Seven Samurai? Kagemusha?

I’m going with Ikiru. I doubt you’ve ever seen it, unless you’re as rabid a Kurosawa fan as I am. It made something of a splash when it debuted in America, way back when. It is available on video. I strongly urge you to seek it out and rent it.

The great Takashi Shimura stars as Kanji Watanabe, a bureaucrat in post-war Japan. (To show you the guy’s range, in Shichinin no samurai he plays the part Yul Brynner took in The Magnificent Seven.) He does literally nothing but shuffle papers. He is just barely alive. Then he learns he really is dying. He has cancer, less than a year to live.

He goes on a bender. He curses his fate. Then he decides to accomplish one thing, just one thing before he dies. A group of mothers approaches him after having been shuffled through the bureaucracy, trying to get a dangerous garbage dump cleaned up in the neighborhood where their children play. He decides to help them.

Cut to his funeral.

Whoa! This is about as startling as Janet Leigh dying in Psycho (which would have been on this list, except for the dreadful last 10 minutes). His co-workers gather to get drunk and reminisce. Nobody really knew him; none of them really know each other. Their lives are as empty as his was. Then people begin to drop in. A neighborhood cop. The women. They are devastated. Kanji was a miracle worker to them. The story of his last days comes out in flashbacks, and the last scene will linger in my mind forever. IMDb.com
 

This was another tough call. I’ve seen almost all of Hitchcock’s films, including some very early silents. There’s a lot of great ones: the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest. It came down to this one or Vertigo. Both star Jimmy Stewart as a troubled man. Both are profoundly disturbing, not so much from the suspense elements as for the psychology: obsession in Vertigo, voyeurism in Rear Window. In the end I went with this one because, while there are many good films about obsession, there is nothing quite like the claustrophobia in Rear Window. It is in a class by itself.

I recall seeing a trailer (we called them “previews” back then) for Rear Window when it was just coming out. I believe it featured Hitchcock himself, and he was showing us around his huge indoor set, which was really the star of the show. But I didn’t see the film itself at the time. Then it vanished into the vaults, along with three other films, and when video came along some sort of contractual dispute kept those films off the market. Then they went into limited theatrical release to coincide with the video appearances. I saw them all on video (rediscovering The Trouble With Harry, which I did see when it was new), and then Lee and I and her daughter Annie went to see Rear Window on the big screen in a little revival theater called the Roseway out on Sandy Boulevard in Portland. I was knocked out.

I’m not a victim of acrophobia, so even the famous dolly/zoom shots in Vertigo didn’t affect me with any real feeling for Scotty Ferguson’s affliction. I’m not very claustrophobic, either, but Jeff Jeffries dilemma being cooped up in that apartment that he couldn’t leave affected me a lot. The camera never leaves the apartment. (Okay, there’s one brief shot from outside at the very end, when Jeffries himself is dangling from his windowsill.) After a while I can feel the walls closing in.

Roger Ebert pointed out that there is something very attractive about voyeurism for most people. I’m one of them. I have never window-peeped, but it is fascinating to do it looking over someone’s shoulder, see the lives unfolding all around while yours is on hold. Hitchcock draws us in so gradually, at first we think Jeffries is just paranoid. Then the suspense builds and builds, until it’s hair-raising. IMDb.com
 

(There is a spoiler at the end here, but it’s not something you can’t see coming a mile away.)

Giulietta Masina was married to Federico Fellini for 50 years, and she died within five months of him. She starred in three of his best films: La Strada, Le Notte di Cabiria, Guilietta degli spiriti; also in Ginger e Fred, which I didn’t care for much. In fact, I am not a huge Fellini fan. I love 8 1/2, Variety Lights, and the aforementioned three. The rest are often visually stunning but empty. For me. Cabiria is the best of the bunch.

If you’ve never seen it, it was adapted, sort of, as a musical under the title Sweet Charity. Now, I’m not putting the musical down. I’ve seen it on Broadway and I’ve seen Bob Fosse’s movie of it, and I love it. Some titanic talent there with Fosse and Neil Simon. But it is a pale, pale shadow of Cabiria. For instance, “Big Spender” is one of the finest moments I’ve ever seen on stage ... but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been staged on the streets of New York by prostitutes instead of a dime-a-dance club that, frankly, just isn’t too believable. Cabiria was a prostitute, a streetwalker, and not even a very pretty one. Her life was hard. She owned a house of which she was very proud, and it was nothing but a pile of concrete blocks out past the gas works. But hey, it could have been worse. Some of her friends were sleeping on the street.

“It could be worse” pretty much sums up Cabiria’s life, and what makes the story so strong. She is forever hopeful in the face of setbacks and betrayals that would stagger a saint. In the musical, Charity is betrayed by Oscar because he can’t face the fact of her profession and her friends. In Cabiria, Oscar was out to get her money in the first place, he cleans her out of every penny, and doesn’t push her off a cliff mostly because he’s too chickenshit to do it, not from any real compassion.

This could almost have been a silent movie. Giulietta Masina’s face is so mobile that she can go through half a dozen expressions in a few seconds, each of them crystal clear without being in any way mugging. I got some proof of this a few days ago when we rented a wretched public-domain copy from the library (they misspelled the title on the box, if you can believe that, “Caberea,” and it wasn’t a librarian’s typo, it was a printed cover) where the subtitling was spotty, to say the least, and sometimes almost unreadable ... and I always knew what was happening. Of course, Italians can say plenty with just gestures, and hers are exquisite.

The entire move is wonderful, but like with City Lights and Ikiru, it is the last shot that haunts. Cabiria is broke, dirty, heartbroken, she has just pleaded with her traitorous lover to kill her. She is walking down a road. A group of young people appear, laughing, singing, far too young for heartbreak. As the tears leak from her eyes, Cabiria begins to look around at them and smile. And for a brief moment she looks right at us, and that look says so many things I can’t even begin to describe them. It would take five pages of prose, and Fellini and Masina do it all in about 48 frames. IMDb.com
 

I don’t know if Lee will ever make a Top 25 Movies list, but if she does, the only movie on my list that I am sure will also be on hers is this one. Casablanca? Almost certainly. Nights of Cabiria? The Bicycle Thief? Maybe. But this quiet little masterpiece will definitely be there.

Usually, when I start off on a tirade on what rotten scum lawyers are, Lee reminds me of Atticus Finch. Was there ever, in real life, a man as good as Atticus, much less a lawyer? I don’t know, probably not, but the fictional character serves as a good reality check. It makes me remember that, no matter what scumbags some lawyers are, we do need them, and they do good work. The alternative is anarchy, every man for himself and the strongest one wins every time, or totalitarianism, the State does absolutely anything it wants to do. Sure, the strong usually do still win (the rich, in this case), and sure, the government still can screw you badly, usually with the help of lawyers. But if you ever get in trouble, either innocent or guilty, you will want the toughest legal eagle you can find on your side.

I first saw this film in a little theater on Powell Street in San Francisco with my first wife, who was from Long Beach. She had a highly developed sense of injustice, and could hardly believe it when the jury found Tom Robinson guilty. Later, outside, she simply could not understand that Robinson’s guilt or innocence had never really been in question in that jury room. The important thing was to make sure that when a white woman, no matter how trashy or how obviously a liar, made an accusation against a nigger, he had to be convicted. It wasn’t about justice; it was about control.

This film is one of the most faithful adaptations of a book ever made. You’d think that, when Hollywood buys a wonderful book, they’d try to make the movie as much like the book as possible. We all know that seldom happens. In this case Horton Foote, a southerner himself, turned in one of the best screenplays ever by simply using the scenes and dialogue provided to him by Harper Lee. IMDb.com
 

If you tortured me, if you tied me to a chair and showed me videos of George W. Bush for three days straight, if you forced me to choose my favorite film of all time ... it would probably be Tom Jones.

John Foreman once told me that movie magic consists of moments. The one he used to illustrate it was from The Man Who Would Be King, which he produced. They are exploring Alexander the Great’s treasure room and Sean Connery holds up a ruby the size of a baseball. “Look at the size of that ruby!” he whispers. Michael Caine holds up one the size of a softball. “Here’s a bigger one.” John felt that movies should do that: show you something wonderful, and then top it.

I feel movies are about magical sequences. If a movie has one magical sequence that you remember forever, it’s a damn good movie. Tom Jones has a dozen. The one everybody remembers is the eating/seduction scene in the inn at Upton. But Tom Jones begins with a magical sequence, right out of the box. In about two minutes Tony Richardson manages to summarize about 100 pages of the novel (which I’ve read, and it’s fairly heavy going) and make me laugh half a dozen times. Then there is the women fighting in the church graveyard, the race to save Tom at Tyburn, Tom wooing Sophie with his arm in a sling without a word being spoken, the sword fight, Squire Western pigging out at the table, the pursuit of the escaped thrush ... many others.

My personal favorite is the hunt. Squire Western is grabbing every woman present, everyone is pouring ale down their gullets. The dogs are released, we follow in a helicopter, then down, then in among the riders. The camera puts you in so close to the dogs that you want to wipe off the slobber. Sedate Messrs. Thwackum and Square are in the thick of it, riding hard. The whole community is out, risking their lives, tearing up the countryside. At the end Squire Western holds up the bloody head of a deer, savage and pleased as a caveman. It is all very politically incorrect, I know; I’d never be able to participate in a bloodfest like that ... but the movie makes me want to. These people devour life, they live hard, they eat up every moment.

Richardson uses every trick in the book, like Richard Lester, including asides to the audience. The movie feels real. It is dirty, sometimes dark, sometimes beautiful. Sophie has smudges of mud on her and doesn’t mind it. The whole thing is narrated rather primly, and hilariously, asking the audience to make allowances for our incorrigible hero ... then follows him lasciviously through all his amorous and disreputable adventures. And in the end, courage is rewarded, evil punished, and true love triumphs.

The music is simply perfect. Usually you don’t want to be too aware of movie music, but this stuff is so catchy and so historically appropriate you might figure it was written by Handel (that newfangled fellow that Squire Western hates), and it enhances every scene. The harpsichord is the featured instrument, and it’s played like a 17th-century banjo; just lots of fun. John Addison won an Oscar for it.

The movie ends with these words, which it would be well to remember when you’re wasting time:

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own.
He who, secure within, may say:
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today! IMDb.com

Directed by Stanley Kubrick Produced by Stanley Kubrick, Victor Lyndon & Leon Minoff Screenplay by Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick & Peter George Based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George Original music by Laurie Johnson Cinematography by Gilbert Taylor Production design by Ken Adam

Stanley Kubrick is the only great director who, in my opinion, never made a bad film. All the other greats, Hitchcock, Ford, Scorsese, Preston Sturges, Capra, Fellini, even Kurosawa, made a stinker or two. Of course, he only made 13 films. Fear and Desire (1953) is only available on bootleg DVD. Of the other 12, I’ve seen Killer’s Kiss (1955) twice, and it’s pretty good, and all the others multiple times.

Eyes Wide Shut and The Killing and The Shining have flaws, but are still wonderful films. Spartacus is the best wide-screen epic of its day. Lolita and Full Metal Jacket just miss greatness. And Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon are full-blown masterpieces.

I already broke my one-film-per-director rule twice here, with Kubrick and Lester, and I was severely tempted to include three or even four films by Stanley. Barry Lyndon missed out by this () much. And how can I exclude Paths of Glory, which absolutely shattered me the first time I saw it?

In the end I had to include 2001, and for the second one I picked the one that made me happy. What an odd thing to say about a movie dealing with nuclear war ... but of course everything about Dr. Strangelove is weird from the git-go. Just look at the character names, for chrissake: Generals “Buck” Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper, Premier Alexei Kissov, Colonel “Bat” Guano, President Merkin Muffley (a merkin is, believe it or not, a pubic wig, and also the redneck pronunciation of American: ‘Murkin). Burpelson Air Force Base.

There are dozens of things I could talk about in this film, but I will limit myself to one: what may be the single best bit of casting in the history of cinema ... Slim Pickens as Major T.J. “King” Kong. And it so happens, as often is the case in the movie biz, that it almost didn’t come to pass. Peter Sellers was going to play it as his fourth part in the movie, but he had trouble getting the accent right and then he broke his leg. Kubrick decided to go with an authentic cowboy. He never showed the script to Slim, and didn’t tell him it was going to be a black comedy, “Just play it straight.” And thus was born one of the best comic performances I’ve ever seen, and one of the iconic images of the 20th century: Major Kong riding the H-bomb down to the end of the world as we know it.

P.S. Oh, yeah, and you want realism? The Air Force wouldn’t let Kubrick see the inside of a B-52, so they made it up ... and it was so accurate the AF was sure they’d stolen classified information.

P.P.S. Though Sellers didn’t know it at the time, there really is a condition called Alien Hand Syndrome (now called Dr. Strangelove Syndrome) whose symptoms are exactly like what Strangelove suffered in the film. IMDb.com
 

This is certainly the quirkiest selection on my list. Few people have heard of The Knack, (The Knack, and How to Get It, is the tacked-on US release title), and I’m not even sure it would make Richard Lester’s Top 10 list of his own films. But what the heck. This is my list; make your own, and put your own obscure film nobody else likes on it. You’ll be surprised how good it makes you feel.

It’s 1965. It’s black & white, like A Hard Day’s Night, Lester’s previous film. Michael Crawford (in his pre-Phantom of the Opera days, back when he was a lanky, awkward, high-pitched nerd), is Colin, who wants to get laid. His roommate is Tolen (one name, “Like Mantovani,” Nancy observes), who literally has women lined up on the stairs for admittance to his bedroom. He is planning to get all his women together to adore him, and figures the Albert Hall will be about the right size. If Tolen were any cooler, he’d freeze solid. Colin wants Tolen to let him in on the secret of how to get babes.

Awkward, not very pretty country girl from Cardiff, Nancy Jones (Rita Tushingham), comes to swingin’ Mods ‘n’ Rockers Carnaby Street London looking for the YWCA. She gets entangled with Colin and Tolen. Nancy turns out to be the one babe Tolen can’t get. Colin gets her. End of story.

With Lester, it’s often more about how the story is told. He got his early training in television and commercials, and was innovative there. The Beatles picked him because he had a twisted sense of humor and could be as outrageous as they were. He is willing to use anything to punctuate his story, including editing effects like stop motion and running the film backwards. He wants you to always be aware you’re watching a movie. In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum there is a musical number, “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” where Phil Silvers, Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, and Michael Hordern are singing and dancing in a chorus line. The camera moves to the side, then slightly behind them, and we see the empty streets they are playing to.

The play, which I’ve never seen, is full of that sort of dialogue Brits are so good at, where they make one or two words stand for whole sentences. All through the film oldsters on the street are commenting on the scandalous behavior.

What The Knack is best at is reveling in the new freedom of the 1960s. Nothing was impossible, anything was worth a try. This film takes me back there more than anything except the music of the Beatles themselves. IMDb.com
 

One of only two science fiction films on my list, and the only movie I’ve ever seen that was virtually a religious experience. I’m not talking about the psychedelic ending, though that was marvelous, like every frame of this film. No, the awe for me began with the first chords of Also Sprach Zarathustra, that little bit of music by Richard Strauss that has since become such a cliché but which I was hearing for the first time, with the curtain still down in the Golden Gate Cinerama theater in San Francisco. The woofers made the whole theater vibrate. Something was moving on the screen as the curtain rose. It was the moon, very close. And then the sun burst out, behind the rising Earth! I was crying. I’d been dreaming of this scene since well before Sputnik. Praise Kubrick! Shout out the holy name of Clarke!

With the state of SFX in movies today, it’s hard to explain to a new generation the shattering impact of seeing, for the first time, what outer space would really look like. I sat in awed puzzlement, like everybody else, as the apes discovered the black slab, learned to kill, wondering how Kubrick got monkeys to act so well. Then the ape threw the bone in the air and there was the famous 3-million-year cut in 1/24th of a second ... and that’s when the hallelujah brother! really began. That’s when I saw Jesus, as it were, that’s when I watched in helpless ecstasy as scene after scene took me into a world that I had imagined many times, reading books, or simply daydreaming, but had never seen! Can I hear you say Amen!

My understanding is the first showing of 2001 left most of the critics scratching their heads, many of them hating it. Kubrick went back and cut seventeen minutes. I would give a lot to see that uncut version, because the only thing I didn’t like about the movie was that it ended! I left