An Immodest Proposal

Making a quick perusal of the Academy's Oscar nomiees this morning http://www.oscars.org/awards/81academyawards/nominees.html , I cannot help but note that, once again, this American institution is in its usual delirious thrall to the what is quaintly called The Continent. Viz: Slumdog Millionaire's position as Best Picture nominee.

Others include The Duchess in the Achievement in art direction and Costume Design categories; The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) and Encounters at the End of the World under documentary; Slumdog again, for Editing, Original Song, Achievement in Sound Mixing (what?) and Adapted Screenplay; La Maison en Petits Cubes, Lavatory—Lovestory and Oktapodi for Animated Short Film; and Auf der Strecke (On the Line), Manon on the Asphalt, New Boy, The Pig and Spielzeugland (Toyland)—not an American entry among them—under Live Action Short Film.

The Academy's love affair with All Things European began fairly early in its history: under actors, see Emil Jannings (1928), George Arliss (1929) and Charles Laughton (1933). The situation normalized a bit after Oliver's win in 1948 for Hamlet, with Americans holding sway until the early 1960s. Victor McLaglen won in ’35 and Robert Donat in ‘39, but at least those were for performances in American movies. We have to wait awhile—until 1961—for another non-American actor (Maximilian Schell) to win, but by 1982 the Brits and their various progency begin to trickle in, eventually becoming a virtual cascade: Ben Kingsley, Daniel Day-Lewis (twice), Jeremy Irons, Anthony Hopkins, Geoffrey Rush and Russell Crowe, with Roberto Benigni thrown in for good (bad?) measure along the way.

Our native female actors do rather better, at least until Louise Rainer captures the crown, (twice in a row), followed by Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman, Leigh (again), Anna Magnani, Bergman (again), Simone Signoret, Sophia Loren (the first foreign language winner), Julie Andrews, Julie Christie, Maggie Smith (twice), Glenda Jackson (ditto), Jessica Tandy, Emma Thompson, Nicole Kidman (getting an award, solo, that should have been shared with Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore), Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren and Marion Cotillard. Clearly, we suffer in inferiority complex on the distaff side.

On the “supporting” front: Joseph Schildkraut, Donald Crisp, Charles Coburn, Barry Fitzgerald, Edmund Gwenn, George Sanders, Hugh Griffith, Peter Ustinov (twice), John Mills, John Gielgud, Haing S. Ngor, Michael Caine (twice), Sean Connery, Jim Broadbent, Javier Bardem, Katina Paxinou, Miyoshi Umeki, Wendy Hiller, Margaret Rutherford, Ingrid Bergamn (again!), Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith (again), Peggy Ashcroft, Brenda Fricker, Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Cate Blanchett.

Best Picture winners remained the provenance of Americans until Hamlet, but held on until 1963, when Tom Jones captured the brass ring—er, I mean statue. A couple of decades passed until the deluge: Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, Shakespeare in Love and The Lord of the Rings (Return of the King).

Now, I’m not suggesting that the actors cited above are necessarily unworthy; as an example, I consider Vanessa Redgrave the greatest actor in the English speaking world. Further, most of these winners were awarded for their performances in American movies. But, at the risk of being accused of xenophobia, may I make, as Uriah Heep might have said, an 'umble suggestion and request the Academy to limit the nomination of non-Americans to the Foreign Film category if their work was not done for American-made, or at least (as in the case, say, of Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and The English Patient) American-produced, movies?

The British Academy often honors Americans as well as thespians of the Isles, but might it too benefit from being a bit more parochial? I doubt very much we’d see the French acknowledge non-Gallic performers or directors—but perhaps that’s a poor example, the French despising pretty much everything that doesn’t originate inside the borders.

Personally, I dislike awards of this sort on general principles. It seems to me perverse, if not downright sadistic, to pit artists against one another. (I would say this yearly obsession with being “The Best” is a peculiarly American one, if the rest of the world didn’t seem determined to follow our lead.) And in the case of the Oscars, there’s so much pressure and publicity attendant on the ceremonies that the old canard “It’s an honor just to be nominated” is pretty much a joke. No, the honor is in winning; otherwise, you’re just a sad, pathetic loser. Not only that, but a loser being photographed as you lose.

Nor am I arguing that the Oscars have any particular merit as a yardstick to artistic accomplishment. As Billy Wilder once quipped, “How can you take them seriously? After all, Louise Rainer won two!” The list of jaw-droppers and utter outrages is a long and glorious one, and you can add your own personal favorite ignominities to it. (Did they really give Best Picture to Rocky? It took how long for Martin Scorsese and Sean Penn to get theirs? Why did Jake Gyllenhaal rate a “supporting” nomination when he was in just as much of Brokeback Mountain as Heath Ledger? And will I be able to bear it if Mickey Rourke wins this year, or should I stick my head in the oven now and avoid the rush?)

I don’t know precisely why I let this idiot ceremony get under my skin. Actually, I do know: because the rest of the world cares so damn much about it. So why can’t the rest of the world give its actors their own awards? I’ve never been an America Firster, but just occasionally a line ought to be drawn somewhere.

The calla lillies are in bloom again...

Okay, I don't know whether they really are or not. But even if not, they should be, just for today. Because this is Katharine Hepburn's 100th birthday. (And the old dame damn near made it to 100 herself.)

There is much about Miss H. to raise one's eyebrows over, her public persona being, as she herself admitted, a "thing" she invented. (See William Mann's new biography for more details.) She wasn't "Kate" to her family and close friends — she was "Kathy" or "Katie" — and the whole Tracy-Hepburn symbiosis is largely myth (again, see Mann) but when you're as gifted as she was, does it really matter? Could we imagine anyone else as Alice Adams? As Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, exhorting James Stewart with that irresistible phrase "Put me in your pocket, Mike" — which we all did, willingly? As Pat in Pat and Mike (occasioning Tracy's immotal observation "Not much meat on her, but what's there is cherce") or Amanda in Adam's Rib? Would we want to see any other woman coaxing and cajoling Bogie to take the African Queen down the river? Could anyone else have chilled us as much, or broken our hearts so thoroughly, as Mary Tyrone, smashing a plate while all but screaming "I — hate — DOCTORS!" in Long Day's Journey into Night? Who but The Great Kate could so incomparably have limned all of the slippery contours of that other great lady, Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter? Or have simultaneously twitted and buoyed up poor old Hank Fonda On Golden Pond? What a career! What glories!

The other Hepburn was, arguably, the most wonderful movie star, but this damn Yankee was the best of the lot. A prickly soul, not warm or cozy perhaps, but non pariel. As James Stewart so memorably observed in The Philadelphia Story, she — no less than Tracy Lord — had "hearth-fires and holocausts banked down inside" her.

So carry a single calla lily in your heart today for Katie, the greatest actress in American movie history.

On Completing "Bleak House"

This morning over coffee I finished reading Bleak House, Charles Dickens’ great, dark satire on the Court of Chancery. What a truly satisfying experience it’s been, reading this novel: seldom have nearly 1,000 pages of narrative prose passed through my eager fingers with such ease and enjoyment. The book places neatly with titles like The Magnificent Ambersons, East of Eden, The Eighth Day and The Dark Tower series among the great readings of my life. I have seldom encountered a novel I loved in quite this way; I am completely sated, as opposed to completing Nicholas Nickleby and feeling, however emotionally moved, rather over-fed.

Dark, sometimes brooding, often wonderfully comic, and shot through with a feeling for people and their essential humanity, so that even such a redoubtable figure as the ornately and foolishly pompous, stern, dragon-like Lord Dedlock winds up surprising us, and himself, with real and unexpected compassion... awoken too late, alas, to stop the dire fate of Lady Dedlock, who (I presume) thinks she knows him so well that she can never find forgiveness in him, which shows—again I think—that he has hidden his true feelings so well that even his wife cannot guess at them. And then there is poor Richard Carstone, driven to a kind of hopeful madness by that dread legal joke of the Chancery court, the case of “Jarndyce & Jarndyce,” and utterly defeated when, at its close, there is only a void, legal costs having eaten the principle to nothing. The harried Mr. Snagsby, decent and kind-hearted but weighted down by his harridan of a wife. And poor Jo, the young crossing-sweeper, so ill-used by society and so unwittingly the cause of Esther Sommerson’s facial disfigurement. And of course, Lady Dedlock, shutting away all lightness and feeling to hide her guilt. Mr. Krook, whom one never quite gets the measure of and who is done in at last though Spontaneous Combustion(!) And Mr. Gridley and Miss Flite, each driven insane by the court of Chancery, Mr. Gridley to the extreme of breaking down entirely, Miss Flite to a genteel, kindly (yet all-too-knowing) madness.

Then, too, the unsavory (or at least, questionable) characters: Horace Skimpole, who does so much damage to others in his studied “infancy,” proclaiming he is wholly a child yet blithely taking as much from anyone as he can get; Mr. Vholes, ever with his “shoulder to the wheel,” grinding someone into dust; Mr. Guppy, who has no compunction against attempting an advantageous marriage or even blackmail as it suits him; Mr. Turveytop, so wholly concerned with his legendary (in his own mind) “Deportment” that the world must owe him a living (or at least, his poor wife, done to death by work, and his poor son Prince and daughter-in-law Caddy, equally yoked to his dancing school and the perpetual upkeep of his noxious self); Hortense, the haughty French maid—is there any other kind? —whose hatred undoes so many; Mrs. Snagsby, so determined to be injured by something her husband has done she becomes convinced he deceives her at every turn; Mr. Chadband the orating minister (whom the reader may be forgiven for wishing to strangle every time he speaks); Caddy’s mother Mrs. Jellyby, concerned only with her endless correspondence on Africa, to the complete ignoring of her distracted husband and house full of children perpetually falling down stairs; the miserly, decrepit Mr. Smallweed, who bounces pillows off the head of his senile old wife and whose grasping claws are into any and everything that can give him even a little profit; and finally the serpentine Mr. Tulkinghorn, who is responsible in one way or another everything that occurs and for whom no one weeps when he is found murdered.

And yet it is a book of lightness, too: Mrs. Rouncewell, the Dedlock housekeeper, who adds up to a great deal more than simple devotion to her employers; Mr. Bucket, the indefatigable police Inspector, who one begins with liking, moves to distrusting, and ends by appreciating enormously, despite his unwitting hand in the eventual death of poor little Jo; Mr. George, never worthy in his own eyes yet a fountain of solace to others; the wonderful Bagnets—“The Old Girl” who always sees the right path, and her husband, who declaims her worth behind her back but swears he never tells her to her face because “Discipline must be maintained!” and yet is constantly doing exactly that because he can’t help it (and asking the Old Girl to give out with “his” opinion on every matter); the occasionally apoplectic Mr. Boythorn, ever ready either to laugh or to damn; Charly, the orphan girl who takes on monstrous amounts of work without complaining and finally comes into grace; Mr. Woodcourt, the gentle doctor who quietly dispenses a healing balm of dignity and affection to everyone he touches; Esther, who loves without restraint and yet is wholly unable to see how much love she inspires in others; and dear, kind John Jarndyce, master of Bleak House—a misnomer if ever there was one—ready to flee at the first sign of a sign of thanks for any of the (multitudinous) good deeds he dispenses without a thought.

An incredibly rich gallery of characters, painted in marvelous hues of complexity and, occasionally, sheer giddy delight. I almost wish I had held off reading it, because there are so many other Dickens novels I hope to crack, and it would have been a lovely benediction to have beheld this one at the last.

Hello, Mr. Chips

Film Score Monthly, which releases a pair of remastered movie soundtracks on CD every month, recently issued a three-disc set of the 1969 Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Presumably this is due to its Leslie Bricusse score having been arranged and conducted by John Williams and, although I questioned devoting three platters to such an odd (and not terribly well-regarded) movie musical I dutifully plunked down the $35 and waited …

The discs arrived last weekend and, somewhat indifferently, I put them on while I puttered on my computer. What I heard was astonishing, and caused me to re-evaluate a movie I saw once, on television, in the early 1970s.

At the time of its release, it was invariably lumped with the many over-produced and ill-conceived movie musicals of the period and criticized as a minor “re-make” of the beloved 1939 Robert Donat-Greer Garson edition. (The story is, of course, an adaptation of James Hilton’s sentimental portrait of a rather unexceptional public school master.) Actually Bricusse did something with this Chips that I’m not aware was attempted on any previous musical—and none after it until Barbra Streisand’s lovely Yentl many years later: the musical numbers, with rare and pointed exceptions, were presented as interior monologues. This was no Hello, Dolly! with grandiose parades and elaborate song-and-dance routines, but a simple story told with a delicacy and restraint rare for the time.

After listening to these discs for the second or third time, I went to Pauline Kael for her review. It was, as I supposed, negative, but I was surprised that even she, so attuned to these things, didn’t see what the filmmakers were trying to do. It may be a small revolution as these things go, but a musical that eschews musical numbers is surely worth commenting upon. (Kael did love Peter O’Toole’s performance, which she regarded as the finest of its year.)

As to the cherished musical-comedy conventions: Yes, the producers (and the screenwriter, Sir Terrence Rattigan) altered Chip’s wife Katherine from a leftist nanny to a musical-comedy star and the time-frame was moved up, from the late 1800s through the 1930s to the 1920s through the 1960s. But, unlike say a Julie Andrews extravaganza of the time (no inherent criticism of Andrews, whom I adore—that’s simply what happened) this didn’t mean Katherine performed a variety of show-biz numbers. She had exactly one, as an introduction to us—and to Chips—plus a raucous but gently mocking school parody she performed with the boys at the Brookfield school. Okay, so some of Petula Clark's melismas are rooted in ‘60s pop. But it’s a voice I love; her rendition of “Old Devil Moon” in the movie of Finian’s Rainbow is one of the vocals I most cherish.

And yes, the filmmakers signed yet another non-singing star—in this case, Peter O'Toole—as their lead. But O’Toole wasn’t called upon to perform endless big numbers, and Bricusse (a past-master of the form, having written Rex Harrison’s Doctor Dolittle songs) composed them with an ear to Sprechstimme, and O’Toole’s vocals are lovely within their limited range, and quietly moving.

What’s especially striking now, at a 37-year remove, is the superb Williams orchestrations. The liner notes—and indeed Bricusse himself in quotation—regard this score as the first of Williams’ career to reflect his highly individual voice. And it’s quite true: you can hear Johnny Williams, the comedy composer, becoming John Williams, the master of orchestral color and dramatic intensity. Bricusse felt his score was not exceptional and that if it seemed so, it was Williams’ accomplishment and not his own.

I think Bricusse—and his legion of critics—are wrong, or at least under-appreciative. This really is a remarkable score. Deliberately pitched (with the exceptions noted above) to no particular time period, it doesn’t date or owe anything to that rather canned “Broadway” sound so prevalent in those days, and which Bricusse himself indulged in his Dolittle songs. (Although recently I was struck by how exquisite his partly-cut Anthony Newley-Samantha Eggar duet “Beautiful Things” is). It's a gentle, introspective set of songs, more like a collection of poems set to music than a big, roistering musical-comedy score. The recurring thematic motif of Chips is the Brookfield anthem, “Fill the World with Love,” and it is this song which has dogged and obsessed me since first hearing these discs a few scant days ago.

At first blush, it seems an odd choice of words for a public school emblem. I mean, fill the world with what?? But in context (as O’Toole explains in one of the on-location interviews included in the FSM package) that expression is used in its old-fashioned, humanistic sense: to do good in the world. The composition has a rangy, ecclesiastical sound that perfectly mimics such things, and the lyric is both simple and eloquent, building a progression from the word “ask” (The blessing I shall ask/Only God can grant me becomes The blessing I shall ask/Will remain unchanging and, finally, And the question I will ask/Only I can answer), one slight variation on the phrase “And to fill the world with love” (Did I fill the world with love?) and from childhood (When the world is new) to adult life (When the sky is blue) to old age (When the night is due).

It’s beautifully, hauntingly done, and it evokes such a strong emotional response it seems almost too profound for even this movie, which I think may well be eminently richer than it was given credit for, and than my own memory of it would indicate. It also strikes me as far less sentimental that the vaunted “original,” in which Greer Garson gives her only really charming, effortless performance but Robert Donat hams it up shamelessly when Chips is an old man, shuffling and nodding like a doddering fool. (And for this Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler lost the Oscar?) I can barely wait to see the DVD, reportedly now in production.

Ray Dooley as Cyrano

PlayMakers Repertory Company Review

Ray Dooley Gives PRC Patrons a Cyrano for the Ages

By Scott Ross
Triangle Theater Review

The critic John Simon once wrote that “Cyrano de Bergerac, is not a great play, merely a perfect one.” Simon’s reticence to giving Edmond Rostand’s self-named “Heroic Comedy” of 1897 that final push into the Pantheon stems from his feeling that the playwright does not address the most important themes of life, at least not in a manner that might leave us to grapple with his concerns. It is true, I suppose, that Cyrano is perhaps too pat and a shade too neatly constructed—but what construction! Each of its five acts adds a layer of irony, each ends on a high note that encapsulates (and comments on) the scene just played, and each leads us into the next with a precision and deftness of tone that few of Rostand’s descendants could, or can, achieve.

As for the question of its relation to the great human feelings, I think Simon may be too harsh. Rostand was surely no Shakespeare, and if Cyrano has a flaw it may lie in a certain sentimental indulgence. I use these qualifiers because, for me, Cyrano de Bergerac is a five-hanky exercise. I love few plays the way I love this one (in modern drama Uncle Vanya, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, Waiting for Godot, and Fifth of July come closest); and with a good production, I have enough tears for every act. Despite a few reservations about his English translation, it seems to me that Joseph Haj’s current edition written for PlayMakers Repertory Company, and playing April 18-23 and 25-30 and May 2-7 in the Paul Green Theater in the Center for Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is precisely that production.

I could not disagree more strongly, however, with Haj’s statement that “the success or failure of the play lies in the excellence of the ensemble.” Not discounting the need for strength of casting all around, Cyrano rises or falls on its central actor. A de Bergerac who excels in the physical qualities of the role but is less certain with the text (Gérard Depardieu comes to mind here) robs the role of its grace and poetry. Similarly, a Cyrano who acts, as Kenneth Tynan once said of John Gielgud, from the neck up, fails to make the character as dashing as he must be for his essential élan—what the character calls his “panache”—to astound. Only two such world performers of memory—Christopher Plummer here and Derek Jacobi in Britain—have been especially noted for nailing both prerequisites in their portrayals of the poetic cavalier with the outsized nose. Locally, Michael Cumpsty cut a fine, if rather youngish, swath at PRC 20 years or so ago; in Ray Dooley, now, we have a Cyrano for the ages.

Here are athleticism and erudition combined: the heights of poetry and rhetorical flourish matched by the requisite agility and relentless accuracy of swordsmanship. We no more doubt this Cyrano’s ability to extemporize those skeins of rhapsodic verse with which he makes love, in proxy, to the word-drunk Roxane on behalf of the tongue-tied Christian than we question whether he could indeed face a hundred assassins alone and triumph utterly. Dooley’s exquisitely proportioned performance makes us share every contour of the man’s eloquence: We smile at his wit when not laughing outright. We float on clouds of exhilaration at his every gesture and jocular aside. We wince at Roxane’s unwitting, simultaneous rejection of his face and joyous acceptance of the words she does not know are his. And we weep at his anguished torment—so near to Roxane and yet so unutterably far—both at its most ironically naked, as in a balcony scene second in fame only to Shakespeare’s and on the battlements at Arras, and at its most guardedly cloaked, particularly at Rostand’s bittersweet, duct-tickling finale.

“My elegance is draped across my soul,” Cyrano declares in Haj’s translation, and Dooley’s performance is shot-through with this elemental grace, even at its most heroic. (There is swagger to his de Bergerac, but you feel it’s honestly come by.) I have long believed that Ray Dooley is the most magnificently accomplished actor in the Triangle, perhaps in the state; and when I consider the theatrical moments I most treasure over the past few years, a lion’s share are his. Dooley’s Cyrano encompasses, and distills, everything this great and gifted performer can do, and do better than anyone.

Kate Gleason’s Roxane is ideal, as fetching in her person as she is winning in personality. The role is tricky; a poor Roxane risks making her insatiable desire for intellectual and poetic stimulation strident and her fixation on the physical aspects of her seemingly ideal lover merely fatuous. Gleason is so winning that her very impetuousness seems a virtue: you believe this woman would risk the battlefield for love. She is, rather like Falstaff, witty in herself and a cause of wit in others—or at least, in Cyrano.

The role of Christian is equally problematic. No mental or linguistic giant, he must nevertheless convince you that he can make a series of snide but clever puns on the subject of Cyrano’s proboscis, that his love for Roxane is as sincere as Cyrano’s own, and that there is within him a man capable of honor and complex emotion. In Steve Martin’s otherwise splendid variation Roxanne, “Chris,” as he is known, is lumpen to a point that would drive a dedicated Marxist into madness, and inconstant as well. This will not do, and in Grant Goodman’s lovely performance, never does. Compte De Guiche, Rostand’s Commander of Cadets, is the personification of the playwright’s generosity of spirit. Seemingly vain, pompous, authoritarian, even cowardly, De Guiche likewise proves his mettle, with disarming honor and decency, as the play moves toward a climax. John Feltch makes every act by this martinet possessed of surprising depth true and credible, so that he does indeed become a man haunted by “the sound of dead illusions.”

Jeffrey Blair Cornell, so fine in many previous PRC outings, is good at portraying Le Bret’s devotion to Cyrano but less felicitous in limning the kindred variety of that friendship. Joseph Bowen is properly orotund and swooning as the poetaster Ragueneau, and Julie Fishell makes her two roles so varied you’d swear you were watching not one actor but two; her Duenna is as deliciously common as her Mother Marguerite is gently benign.

Enough praise cannot be laid upon McKay Coble’s scenic design, which resembles a polished, two-tiered curio cabinet whose drawers may be opened, turned outward or removed to set each act. As the play progresses, these elements are gradually stripped away in a manner that is both ingenious and apt. This gradual dismantling accommodates each new setting—the theater, the bakery, Roxane’s balcony, the Arras battlefield, the abbey to which Roxane has retired—so that at the end only the superstructure is left. It’s a beautiful effect, so well-integrated into the arc of the play that it never smacks of simple gimmickry.

Marion Williams’ costumes are equally precise and, in their modesty, equally sumptuous, and her wigs are staggeringly good. Some might cavil at the simplicity of her designs for Roxane’s wardrobe, but Williams is canny and correct. There is always a temptation in period drama to over-embroider, and it should be remembered that Roxane is of the middle class, not the aristocracy. Justin Townsend’s intelligent, unobtrusive lighting reaches a spectacular climax in the fourth act battle before dissolving into the fifth act convent like a blissful, dying fall.

Joseph Haj, who previously directed the PRC production of Not About Heroes (which also starred Ray Dooley), has directed the very large cast of Cyrano with brisk and inventive command that never calls attention to itself conceptually—not mean feat, that. I was particularly struck by his staging of the balcony scene and the emotional climax at Arras; his placement of the actors, in relation to each other and the sentiments expressed, is masterly. My only quarrel is with some of his choices as a dramatic translator.

For many decades, the preferred translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was that of Brian Hooker (1923), which is highly readable but scarcely actable. Happily, it is being eclipsed by the Anthony Burgess adaptation of the 1970s and ‘80s (Burgess revised it considerably between the Guthrie Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company productions). Haj’s own transcription plays beautifully but runs to the occasional anachronism. Cyrano’s crying out “Please!” is a bit too contemporary, but “Not quite following the whole heart thing” is repugnant. Imagine Rostand’s hero saying such a thing! The play’s final line is a more debatable issue. Some versions use “My white plume,” which to Cyrano is the embodiment of his style but which may be a bit too vague for maximum impact. “My panache” has the virtue of being both idiomatic and expressive. Haj opts for the former, which is less problematic perhaps than his not translating the poem Cyrano extemporizes during his first act duel with Valvert. By failing to render the verse in English, Haj deprives us of Rostand’s effective, repetitive, and versified reminders to de Bergerac’s antagonist (“When the poem ends, I hit”). This seems a bit perverse.

Still, these are small matters overall. During the interval, one of my companions remarked that we’re lucky to have Ray Dooley. You may never see a finer argument in favor of that observation than this production; whether clothed with white plume or panache, this Cyrano nearly always hits.

50 Beautiful Flicks, 50

Herewith, an annotated list of my 50 favorite movies, which no one asked for. It’s divided in three parts: an alphabetical inventory of numbers 50-14 and 15-9; 10-6 in order of preference; and 5-1, ditto.

Far too many movies I love are missing from this list. To my chagrin there are no titles from Robert Altman, Blake Edwards, Woody Allen, Vincente Minnelli, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, John Boorman, Sam Fuller, Arthur Penn, Richard Brooks, Carol Reed, William Friedkin, John Schlesinger, Norman Jewison, Leo McCarey, John Sturges, Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich, Terry Gilliam, Fred Zinnemann, Anthony Manne, Clint Eastwood, Louis Malle, Sidney Pollack, Brian De Palma, Martin Ritt, James Whale, Joseph Losey, Joseph Mankiewciz, Jonathan Demme, Sidney Lumet, Hal Ashby, Robert Benton, Spike Lee, Raul Walsh, or William Wyler; nothing that stars Audrey Hepburn, Roddy McDowall or Paul Newman or the Marx Brothers; or was written by Paddy Chayefsky, Tennessee Williams, James Goldman or Larry Gelbart. Very little Jack Lemmon.

How could I not list How Green Was My Valley, Fiddler on the Roof, On the Waterfront, Night of the Hunter, All About Eve, The Third Man, Norma Rae, Gone with the Wind, Bride of Frankenstein, The Band Wagon, Harry & Tonto, Meet Me in St. Louis, Bite the Bullet, Apocalypse Now, Dumbo, 101 Dalmatians, The Lady Eve, An Unmarried Woman, The Outlaw—Josey Wales, All That Jazz, Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday, Rio Bravo, Red River, Young Frankenstein, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, North by Northwest, Adam’s Rib, Ninotchka, The Gold Rush, Greed, The Quiet Man, Bringing Up Baby, Duck Soup, Mikey and Nicky, Poltergeist, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, The Wizard of Oz, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Letter, The Best Man, Love in the Afternoon, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Irma La Douce, or even two of my “guilty pleasures,” The Great Race and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken?

I could have come up with 100 titles easily (I think I just did) but I have to do my work sometime.

[N.B. You’ll notice that I don’t use the word “film” as a descriptive term. I’m in agreement with the late Pauline Kael in her distaste for the word, which implies a kind of critical snobbism. “Movie” is a much more democratic word for what is, after all, the great democratic art form of the past century. To me, the use of “films” for the movies indicates a certain uneasiness in the user, as though you can only defend a popular art by slapping a fussy name on it.]

50. Ace in the Hole [1951] aka, The Big Carnival
Arguably Billy Wilder’s most scathing, incendiary movie. His follow-up to Sunset Blvd., it was dead on arrival at the theatres, but with every year its power grows. What is the tonal opposite of film noir? Visually the picture, set in New Mexico, is so bright it hurts. Thematically it’s about as dark as a movie gets; nearly every aspect of human greed, corruption and selfishness is explored in its tight running time. Inspired by the story of Floyd Collins, the spelunker who got himself trapped in a 1920s cave-in and became the center of a media circus, Wilder and his co-authors crafted an etching of complicity that reached the screen with the acid still wet. No other American movie has ever indicted the media so savagely—nor so fiercely broken the taboo against attacking the audience itself; the great sequence of the curious hordes arriving by bus and train is one of the most abysmally frightening ever captured on film.

49. Aliens [1986] Your basic bug-eyed monster story elevated to the level of art through the incisive screenplay and razor-sharp direction of James Cameron. An unnecessary sequel to Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon’s stunning 1979 original, this one foregoes the haunting atmospherics and elegiac horror in favor of mounting terror, aggressive action and staggeringly effective cutting. The so-called “Director’s Cut” [1992] adds an aching depth of feeling to Cameron’s conception of Sigourney Waver’s Ripley as well as illustrating how smart and adaptable Stan Winston’s aliens really are. With the always-splendid Lance Henriksen—who has one of the most interesting faces in American movies—as the android Bishop, and Michael Biehn, whose overbite is sexier than Mel Gibson’s ubiquitous ass any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

48. All the President’s Men [1976] Alan J. Pakula, working from a superb William Goldman screenplay, wrought the best newspaper movie of all in this marvelously detailed portrait of the two Washington Post reporters who first exposed the Nixon Administration’s petty chicanery. What makes the movie so absorbing is its documentary-like depiction of the sheer, mind-numbing meticulousness with which Woodward and Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, respectively) piece the story together. It’s a great tribute to a kind of dogged, perfectionist journalism that seems to have died with the Nixon Presidency itself. The movie is also a marvel in its singularly brilliant casting; every role, no matter how small, is cast to perfection. Jason Robards’ commanding Ben Bradlee leads the way, but look at this partial list of supporting players: Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Jane Alexander, Ned Beatty, Penny Fuller, John McMartin, Robert Walden, Nicolas Coster, Lindsay Crouse, Polly Holliday, James Karen, Neva Patterson, and (as John Mitchell, the voice on the other end of Woodward’s telephone) John Randolph. With Hal Holbrook in a rather terrifying performance as Deep Throat.

47. Almost Famous [2000] Probably the best rock’n’roll movie ever made. Cameron Crowe’s loving re-creation of his own adolescent experience as a fledgling reporter trailing a rising rock band is rendered with affection, expansive and good-natured humor, and a painful sense of innocence lost. Patrick Fugit, 18 when the film was released but looking more like 14, is stunningly good as Crowe’s alter ego. With Billy Crudup as the band’s somewhat amoral leader, Frances McDormand as Fugit’s smothering yet eminently likeable mother, Philip Seymour Hoffman in a couple of delicious cameos as the late rock critic Lester Bangs, and Kate Hudson, giving a luminous, revelatory and ultimately heart-ripping performance as the band’s notorious chief groupie, Penny Lane. Best seen in the expanded DVD release, Untitled: Almost Famous—the Bootleg Cut.

46. Anatomy of a Murder [1959] Otto Preminger’s legal drama, from a fine, meticulous screenplay by Wendell Mayes, broke a lot of taboos in its day. For the first time in an American movie, audiences heard words like “panties” and “spermatogenesis”—spoken by Jimmy Stewart, for god’s sake! But that’s not the reason to watch, and savor, this brilliant, understated look at the underbelly of American jurisprudence. Stewart’s “simple country lawyer” routine masks the nearly unflappable tenacity of a man who will do almost anything to win, yet never seems to be doing anything at all. Preminger and Mayes deliberately leave the movie’s ambiguous moral conundrums unresolved, which is what lingers in your mind long after the final credits have spun. With a superlative supporting cast including Lee Remick, Ben Gazarra, Arthur O’Connell, George C. Scott, Kathryn Grant, Murray Hamilton, John Qualen, Eve Arden, and, as the presiding magistrate, Joseph N. Walsh, the lawyer who used his own faux-naif shtick to help bring down Joseph McCarthy. Duke Ellington contributed a rare—and brilliant—score; the final, terrifying notes are as ambiguous as the finale itself. (He also appears on-screen, as the piano-player Pie-Eye.)

45. The Apartment [1960] Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s successor to Some Like it Hot is an excoriating expose of dirty little American business practices that was itself, amazingly (and rather hysterically) labeled smutty. Jack Lemmon has seldom been better than he is here, playing a nebbish who loans out the key to his apartment to his firm’s executive staff in hopes of bettering himself at the office. Shirley MacLaine is almost impossibly adorable as the elevator girl he pines for, and Fred MacMurray is used to unprecedented smarmy effect as the big boss who’s stringing them both along.

44. Citizen Kane [1941] If I have to bother introducing this one to you, you aren’t really interested in movies.

43. Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [1964] Stanley Kubrick, working from a script he concocted with Peter George and Terry Southern, made the ultimate black comedy on the ultimate subject: nuclear annihilation. There are so many memorably funny—and memorably disturbing—lines and images from this one you’d need a book to catalogue them all. (Many believe Terry Southern is the movie’s true genius, and it’s hard to deny that the movie’s total effect is not unlike one of Southern’s wild, pitch-black satirical novels—The Magic Christian comes to mind.) Peter Sellers is demented perfection in three roles. With two insanely, creepily funny performances, by George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden, as nightmare generals; Slim Pickens (never better); and Keenan Wynn confronting “perversion” as Col. “Bat” Guano.

42. Enemies, a love story [1989] Paul Mazursky had to appear on this list somewhere—every decade he makes at least one great, quirky comedy, and sometimes two or three in a row: Next Stop Greenwich Village, Harry & Tonto, An Unmarried Woman. So what better movie of his to list than this glorious adaptation of I.B. Singer’s exquisite comic-tragic novel about Holocaust survivors in New York? Everything about this one works, from the stunning art direction to Maurice Jarre’s klezmer-accented score. Working with a pluperfect cast (Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Malgorzata Zajaczkowska, Alan King and the luminous, haunted Lena Olin) Mazursky and his co-scenarist Roger L. Simon crafted a sublimely contoured slapstick tragedy—a movie that delights and haunts in equal measure.

41. The General [1929]/The Navigator [1924] Every list should include at least one Buster Keaton movie. I choose two: The General for its robust storytelling and evocative, Matthew Bradyesque photography; and The Navigator which, after the first Richard Pryor concert movie, ranks as the second funniest I’ve ever seen. Do not eat while watching this unless you relish choking on your food while doubled-over in helpless, aching hilarity.

40. A Hard Day’s Night [1964] Catching the Beatles at the cusp of their phenomenal popularity, Richard Lester and his screenwriter, Alun Owen, concocted a loose series of vignettes to showcase the boys, and it’s one of the most effortlessly charming movies ever made. You may find yourself smiling broadly from the famous opening chord of the title song to the final, good-humored insult.

39. Heat [1995] Michael Mann’s complex, character-driven heist movie has the texture of a sun-lit nightmare: L.A. as a warm place to die a chilly death. Carefully balanced between the action sequences—and they’re both technically brilliant and horrific in their depiction of wanton violence engaged in with cool aplomb—are two lives on parallel, descending arcs. Al Pacino’s driven cop and Robert DeNiro’s ruthless thief are two sides of a very similar coin, a device Mann makes beautifully concrete in the stars’ mid-point tête-à-tête in an off-highway restaurant. Heat is no Rafifi: the nature of the job De Niro’s gang pulls off is mutable—almost incidental; if one doesn’t pan out, there’s always another. What matters for them is performance; for the audience, it’s context. Pacino’s explosive single-mindedness makes it clear we’re lost in a universe with no clear ethical boundaries. Who the hell do we root for? The homicidal thief who approaches his profession like an artist, or the police detective who yells into people’s faces to unnerve them? (Pacino has a field-day with the shtick; when he hollers, “Because she’s got a great ass!” at a recalcitrant criminal the moment is both funny and appalling.) With Ashley Judd, spectacularly effective as Val Kilmer’s impatient wife, and Kevin Gage as Waingro, the scariest ex-con since Robert Mitchum menaced Gregory Peck in Cape Fear.

38. Hot Millions [1968] This movie is a sure test of any potential friendship. If I show it to a new acquaintance and he or she doesn’t love it, there’s no point in going any further. Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith, two of the most effortlessly charming performers who ever appeared before a movie camera, play a pair of painfully lonely misfits who connect in this charming comedy co-written by Ustinov (with Ira Wallach). He’s a bright, if unworldly, embezzler whose dream is to conduct a symphony orchestra. She’s his incompetent secretary, who happens to play the flute. Bob Newhart is the thorn in their side, and Karl Malden is surprisingly funny as the ulcer-ridden executive. (Robert Morley also shows up early on, and Cesar Romero has a hilarious cameo in the Rio airport.) The dialogue is refreshingly quirky, and every scene is a small gem of comic observation. The final freeze-frame is among the sweetest and most moving of any comedy.

37. It Happened One Night [1934] It shouldn’t have worked. Or if so, should only have been a routine little B picture. Instead, this little charmer of a road-comedy swept the Academy Awards, made Frank Capra's bones, turned Columbia Pictures into a respected studio, unofficially inaugurated an entire genre and almost put the American undershirt industry out of business. Robert Riskin’s screenplay contains all the screwball totems—runaway heiress, cynical reporter, impending marriage—and mixes them up with gusto and sophisticated wit; the humor is both sharp‑edged and gentle. This is probably the least pretentious of all Capra's sound comedies, and if it makes social points it makes them tangentially. The movie revealed Claudette Colbert as a beauty with brains and whip‑crack timing, and brought Clark Gable to a new level of audience appreciation, setting his persona and defining him as the era’s great masculine sex symbol: the sequence in which he strips off a shirt to reveal his naked chest caused undershirt sales to plummet. (His chewing of a carrot was also said to have inspired the creators of Bugs Bunny.) This may be the cheeriest of all Depression‑era comedies; the long bus sequence contains something many later screwball films omit: simple pleasure, and charm.

36. Jaws [1975] On the basis of this item alone, Steven Spielberg must be regarded as one of the most talented people to ever stand behind a movie camera. The source was pure potboiler, the shooting went on and on and on, the crew’s activities were stymied by a mechanical shark that couldn’t work. And out of this chaos, Spielberg delivered a masterpiece—in what was only his second theatrical feature. The time spent waiting for the shark to function added to the movie’s special quality of life observed: the co-scenarist, Carl Gottlieb (Peter Benchley did the first draft) was on hand to add punch to the script, and the actors spent so much time together that their relationships (and improvisations) made for an especially rich character palette. And, since a working shark was largely absent, Spielberg made a virtue from a deficit by not showing the monster fully until well into the picture—the unseen menace is much more terrifying. Side-note: Roy Scheider improvised the famous “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” line on the set. With Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Murray Hamilton, Lorraine Gary and John Williams’ spectacularly effective orchestral score.

35. The Maltese Falcon [1940] Many years ago a writer in Film Comment claimed this as John Huston’s best movie. Since it was also his first, I vehemently disagreed with the assessment. 25 years later I think there’s a lot of merit in that statement. Working from a script he essentially transcribed from Dashiell Hammet’s definitive detective novel, Huston produced a film noir avant la lettre. It’s all there: the dim light and shadows, the ethical loner caught between the cops and his quarry, the duplicitous femme fatale, the menacing thug, the smooth master criminal, the existentialist rue. Add Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, and—as the gun toting kid who’s probably seen too many gangster movies—the unforgettable Elisha Cook.

34. The Manchurian Candidate [1962] John Frankenheimer’s best movie, a dazzling adaptation of Richard Condon’s dark satire on American geo-politics (adapted by George Axelrod at his wittiest and most concise). Basically, the narrative is a reiteration of the old trope that the extreme right and extreme left eventually meet in the middle. But the execution of the material, the expert manipulation before and behind the camera, the stunning hints of incest and the black-comedy send-up of Joe McCarthy make this perhaps the ne plus ultra of early 1960s American cinema. Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury have their best roles, and Janet Leigh isn’t far behind. With John McGiver, dry as sherry, as a warm-hearted Republican moderate.

33. Matewan [1987] Arguably the best American movie of the 1980s. John Sayles wrote, directed, appears in, and wrote the union folk songs for, this small but immensely powerful evocation of coal-mining troubles in the West Virginia of the 1920s. Every scene, character, moment and performance is absolute and essential—there’s not a frame wasted nor a dramatic sequence dwelt on a fraction of a second longer than required. There haven’t been all that many serious fictional movies on labor issues made in the U.S., but this one ranks at the top of any list, however short. Among it smany pleasures are the performances of Chris Cooper, David Strathairn and James Earl Jones, and the wonderfully lived-in face of Mary McDonnel. (Matewan would make a fascinating double-bill with Norma Rae—made 50 years after the events depicted in Sayles’ movie and proving that the more things change …)

32. Notorious [1946] Alfred Hitchcock at the top of his game. A dark fantasy (courtesy of Ben Hecht) in which romance must accede to duty, even at the cost of personal integrity. Cary Grant, never darker or more conflicted, is attracted to Ingrid Bergman (as who wouldn’t be?) but distrusts her. When she agrees to woo and marry Nazi envoy Claude Rains in Rio as a kind of special agent for the American government, Grant’s growing disgust nearly destroys her—literally. Rains’ character is painted in surprisingly humane colors, and there’s a great scene of eroticism seldom equaled in the movies, as Grant and Bergman kiss their way from terrace to alcove in a Rio hotel room.

31. The Palm Beach Story [1942] Preston Sturges, at the crest of his astonishing run of great Paramount comedies. In this one, Claudette Colbert escapes from New York and day-dreamer husband Joel McCrae (to find financing for his engineering schemes), survives a night on board a sleeper train with the Ale and Quail Club, meets up with Florida millionaire Rudy Vallee and his lubricious sister Mary Astor, is pursued by McCrae … There’s a scorching bout of kissing between Colbert and McCrae, the wonderful Robert Dudley as “The Wienie King,” the unofficial Sturges stock company (Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest, Roscoe Ates and Chester Conklin) as the band of bibulous sportsmen, and Rudy Vallee confounding expectations with an expert comic performance as the prissy yet likeable money-bags. The usual, blissfully sparkling Sturges dialogue lifts the whole thing into the comedic stratosphere. It’s marred only by the depiction of Fred “Snowflake” Toones as a quintessentially eyeball-rolling, terrified “coon” in the train sequence. Billy Wilder was the era’s other pre-eminent writer-director, and you’d never see something like that in one of his movies.

30 Parting Glances [1986] Far and away the finest movie about gay life in America. This is the single work of the enormously gifted Bill Sherwood, who died from AIDS-related complications before he could make another. That’s a loss of almost incalculable magnitude, because Parting Glances is so rich, humane and witty it makes almost every other attempt at a gay story by mainstream moviemakers look like impotent flailing. Starring Richard Ganoung and featuring a breakout performance by Steve Buscemi.

29. The Philadelphia Story [1940] George Cukor and Donald Ogden Stewart’s sparkling adaptation of Philip Barry’s stage comedy is almost Lubitschean in its look, performances, dialogue, humanity, and wealth of comic detail. (Stewart wrote the screenplay, with an uncredited assist from Waldo Salt.) This is the one that rescued Katharine Hepburn from Hollywood exile and won James Stewart the Oscar many felt he should have gotten for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That he’s every bit as good here in what is, essentially, a supporting role—Grant’s was beefed up by combining aspects of two of the play’s major characters—gives lie to that claim and supports David Denby’s (and my own) contention that Stewart was the greatest actor American movies have ever produced.

28. Reds [1982] Warren Beatty’s huge, unwieldy paean to the radicals of the American left in the early part of the 20th century is energetic, intelligent, epic, rigorously fair, keenly observed and often exhilarating. It’s also mawkish, overfed, clichéd and goes on much too long. But it was a defining movie of my youth, and I still cherish its vigor, wit, honesty and underlying devotion to leftist principals. The famous framing device of assorted “witnesses” of the era shows Beatty in a gently loving mood—they’re just about the most wonderful old people anyone’s ever put on film. With Diane Keaton, Maureen Stapleton, a veritable who’s-who of great American character actors, and Jack Nicholson at his most astonishingly sexy as the young Gene O’Neill.

27. The Searchers [1957] John Ford’s magnificent, elegiac look at obsession and race-hatred, perfectly embodied by John Wayne’s astonishingly complex performance as a man on a fanatical hunt for a niece, kidnapped by Indians after a brutal massacre. A movie so rich in detail, so striking in composition and so disturbing in its moral complexities it’s been a beacon to any number of American filmmakers, many of whom have paid it homage in their own movies (George Lucas' depcition of the burning homestead in Star Wars being merely one). With a haunting musical theme by Max Steiner and one of the most memorable closing shots in all of movies.

26. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1948] The first of Ford’s so-called “Cavalry Trilogy,” and easily the best. This early exercise in Technicolor broke all the ever-fearful company’s established rules—when location filming was threatened by a possible desert thunderstorm, Ford kept right on shooting, and the resulting footage looks like life and nature caught on the fly. But what’s especially notable about the movie is its gentle, almost pacifist tone. John Wayne, playing a commander on his final mission, is so good it hurts. His reaction to the retirement gift his men present him is one of the great moments in movie acting, and his rueful powwow with the wonderful Chief John Big Tree as both old men try to avert a war, is among Ford’s finest sequences. With Victor McLaglen (overdoing it a bit in his comic drunk scenes), Ben Johnson, George O’Brien, Arthur Shields and the great Mildred Natwick.

25. The Shop Around the Corner [1940] Ernst Lubitsch’s utterly charming romantic comedy, based on the same source material later used in the adorable chamber musical She Loves Me and the recent Hanks-Ryan remake You’ve Got Mail. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are the lonely-hearts correspondents who ardent mail-affair is offset by the fact they’re, unknowingly, co-workers who despise each other. With a pitch-perfect screenplay by frequent Lubitsch collaborator Samson Raphaelson and a splendid supporting cast that includes Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut and Felix Bressart. The bittersweet aspects of this essentially sunny comedy include, for me, the knowledge that the looming world war will irrevocably alter the Budapest in which the characters live and work, and probably see the deaths of most of them.

24. A Star is Born [1954] What can happen when a great director, a great screenwriter, a great composer, a great lyricist, a great actor and the greatest female talent the musical movie has ever known collaborate. Ruthlessly cut and re-cut on its release, the current version painstakingly pieced together by the late Ron Haver is among the most toweringly effective musicals ever made, and (with Sunset Blvd. and Singin’ in the Rain) one of the greatest—because most subtle—satires on Hollywood. George Cukor contributed the exquisitely sensitive yet robust direction, Moss Hart wrote the eminently quotable script, and Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin composed the ravishing score. Jack Carson has his best-ever role as a smarmy, opportunistic yet comprehensible studio P.R. flack, James Mason exhibits a performance of such eloquent despair you almost have to look away, and Judy Garland gives to the role of a lifetime the performance of her life.

23. Star Wars—The Empire Strikes Back [1980]/Star Wars—Revenge of the Sith [2005] My favorite of the Star Wars movies has long been the second installment, due in large part to the rich screenplay (credited to Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, although Brackett contributed only a first draft before her death and George Lucas, generously refusing a credit in deference to the old veteran scenarist, collaborated with Kasdan), superb direction by Irwin Kershner, and a darkness of narrative and tone that deepened the characters even as it propelled the story forward. Empire has, finally, been matched by the final installment in the series, a movie whose overriding sense of ruefulness makes its predecessor look like a walk in the spring rain by comparison. The inexorable sense of doom, exacerbated by our knowledge of future events, makes Revenge of the Sith the most moving of all the episodes in the series, and arguably the most visually sumptuous. Ewan McGregor, eschewing mere imitation, becomes in this final chapter a subtly convincing shade of Alec Guinness’ original Obi-Wan Kenobi, and John Williams’ towering score is among his finest ever.

22. The Sting [1973] One of the best-cast American movies ever made. The pleasures of this quintessential caper-comedy (by David S. Ward under George Roy Hill’s stylish direction) are many, and not the least of them is the parade of great character actors, clearly having a ball. Along with a relaxed Paul Newman and a very appealing Robert Redford, there’s mob kingpin Robert Shaw, corrupt cop Charles Durning and a supporting cast to die for: Ray Walston, Eileen Brennan, Harold Gould, John Heffernan, Dana Elcar, Jack Kehoe, Robert Earl Jones, Avon Long, and the extraordinary Dimitra Arliss as a waitress who isn’t quite what she seems. The art direction by Henry Bumstead beautifully evokes the Depression Era, and Marvin Hamlisch’s use of the Scott Joplin songbook, while technically anachronistic, perfectly captures, and reflects, the spirit of this sunny, cheerfully amoral comedy.

21. Sunrise [1927] F.W. Murnau’s stunning visual masterpiece—maybe the most beautiful of all silent movies; it’s one of the most exquisitely imagined movies of its already lush period. A deeply humane, expressionistic romance spiked with misery, fear, erotic obsession, guilt, murderous impulse—in short, love itself. George O’Brien is at his most ethereally beautiful, and Janet Gaynor personifies innocent vulnerability as the wife he plots to kill before recognizing the depth of his feeling for her. Carl Mayer wrote the broad but affecting scenario. The big city sequences are still staggeringly effective. With Arthur Housman and Gibson Gowland, the star of Erich von Stroheim’s aggressively butchered silent masterpiece Greed, in small roles. Full title, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

20. Sunset Blvd. [1950] Billy Wilder’s savage, yet deeply felt, black mass on the Hollywood he both loved and—on the basis of this one—must have loathed as well. Few talking pictures crammed in so many quotable lines, but the visuals are equally striking: William Holden, face-down in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool; the celebrated monkey funeral; Swanson standing up amid a projector’s beam and swirling cigarette smoke like some demented harpy direct from Hell; and that long descent down her mansion’s rococo staircase at the finale. William Holden’s performance as the doomed, tawdry screenwriter was his breakout, and 55 years later it’s still riveting. This was the movie that finally put an end to Wilder’s fertile partnership with co-scenarist Charles Brackett; D.M. Marshman Jr. shares a screenwriting credit, largely on the basis of having helped Wilder over a narrative hurdle by saying, “What if the old dame shoots the boy?”

19. The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers [1973/1974] A joyous collaboration between Richard Lester and the satirical novelist George MacDonald Fraser. One of the few times in movie history the assembling of an “all-star” casts wasn’t just a P.R. stunt: every actor in the picture is utterly right for the role, and they’re clearly having a blast, from Charlton Heston’s subtly duplicitous Cardinal Richelieu to the late Spike Milligan’s peerlessly pandering coward: wed to Raquel Welch, he’s so lust-smacked he actually vibrates. The tone is pleasingly light, the sets and costumes meticulously recreated, and the elaborate swordplay both comic and breathtakingly intricate. Starring Michael York as a sumptuously desirable D’Artagnon. With Faye Dunaway, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay and the great Roy Kinnear. Although released in two parts, it was filmed as a single, 4-hour epic. The first movie boasts a melodic and very witty score by Michel Legrand, reportedly written, under deadline pressure, in 7 days.

18. To Have and Have Not [1944] When I consider the movies that have entertained me the most, Howard Hawks is the name that—aside from Billy Wilder’s—most often recurs. This is arguably his most sheerly enjoyable movie, and manifestly more pleasurable than Casablanca, which enjoys the greater popularity. It's the one that introduced Bogie to Bacall, and you can actually see them falling in love as the picture unreels. Part intrigue, part action flick, part comedy, and perfectly integrated into one blissful package. With Hoagy Carmichael, Marcel Dalio and the peerless Walter Brennan, who asks the immortal question, “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?”

17. To Kill a Mockingbird [1962] It’s seldom a good idea to adapt great literature to the movies. But if you’re intent on doing it, at least hire Horton Foote to write the screenplay. Foote’s script distills the essence of Harper Lee’s wonderful novel, and that’s about all you can hope for in these things. Gregory Peck’s performance as the good man doing a difficult job probably inspired an entire generation of activists, and the children, Mary Badham and Phillip Alford are about as good as it’s possible to imagine. With a score by Elmer Bernstein that soars past genius and into something very much like the sublime.

16. Trouble in Paradise [1932] Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson made other movies together, but this is the top—the Coliseum, the Louvre Museum, the purple light of a summer night in Spain. Maybe the single most deft, sophisticated sex comedy ever made, it’s a virtual compendium of the things Lubitsch did best, and could do better than anyone else. Once you’ve seen it, you have a yardstick against which to measure romantic high comedy. Starring Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall as the libidinous Riviera thieves, Kay Francis as the mark who almost comes between them and, in a sparkling supporting cast, the great Charlie Ruggles—dithering as usual—and Edward Everett Horton as his fussiest.
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15. Chinatown [1974] L.A. noir via Roman Polanski and Robert Towne. One of the key American movies of the 1970s, this rueful evocation of a time, a place, and a real-life environmental scandal has lost some of its power to shock—that’s the trouble when your plot involves graphic nostril-cuttings and revelations of incest—but retains its ability to haunt. Jack Nicholson is impossibly beautiful as the private dick who’s unintentionally bitten off more than he can chew, and Faye Dunaway’s face is one of the great icons of modern American filmmaking. With John Huston as the most casually amoral of villains, and a great Jerry Goldsmith score.

14. City Lights [1931]/Modern Times [1940] I’m taking a leaf here from John Simon, who once said his favorite of these two “silent” masterpieces was whichever one he’d watched most recently. I often think City Lights has the edge, until I see Modern Times again, and then I’m not sure. The latter has Paulette Goddard at her most appealing, a beautifully composed finale, and Charlie performing French-laced gibberish as a singing waiter. But the former has a final shot that, as James Agee once said, constituted “the highest moment in movies.” If it fails to move you, your heart is a dishrag.

13. GoodFellas [1990] Martin Scorsese’s greatest movie, an exhilarating—and unflinching—look at the ineffable lure of crime. It’s an exuberant movie, full of great sequences and ebullient camerawork. A pitch-perfect cast (including Ray Liotta, Paul Sorvino, Lorraine Braco, Robert De Niro and a truly frightening Joe Pesci), a superbly layered screenplay (by Scorsese and Nick Pileggi, from the latter’s “true crime” book), and Scorsese’s patented brand of breakneck pace and audacious editing combine to make this the funniest, most shocking and, ultimately, most satisfying gangster picture of all time.

12. The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] If RKO had not cut, and then destroyed, 40 minutes of Orson Welles’ exquisitely imagined adaptation of the great Booth Tarkington novel, this would be Welles’ undisputed masterwork, and definitely among my five favorite movies. As it stands, it’s still astonishing, absorbing and deeply moving. The saga of a “great” family in a small town and the way time and progress passes it by is made an entrancing waltz of a movie though Welles’ unerring sense of place, timing, visual perfection and empathy. Tim Holt leads a perfect cast that includes Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Richard Bennett, and—supremely—the great Agnes Moorehead, giving the performance of her life as the family’s unloved, lonely, spinster aunt (although much too much of her performance was edited out in the final cut). Welles produced, wrote the elegiac screenplay, and provides the understated, ironic narration. The lovely, evocative cinematography is by Stanley Cortez, and Bernard Herrmann composed the rueful score.

11. Top Hat [1935]/Swing Time [1937] No one should be forced to chose a single Astaire-Rogers musical. Top Hat is probably the better movie: it’s swifter, more sparkling, lays some nice emphasis on those two incomparable sissies Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, and boasts a pluperfect Irving Berlin score that includes a title song that elegantly sums up the appeal of Fred Astaire—whom Graham Greene once called the human equivalent of Mickey Mouse. (That isn’t the insult it seems; in the early ‘30s Mickey was not yet the figure of respectability he became; he was rambunctious, elastic, mischievous, even slightly cruel—just like Fred.) Swing Time, despite its occasional longuers and a truly silly finale, has a Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields score that is just about the greatest of its kind, and inspired Astaire to one of his supreme achievements: the duet with Rogers on “Never Gonna Dance.” Shot in a single take, the final portion of this breathless medley of everything for which we love these two required endless re-takes, and somewhere in the middle of it all, Rogers’ feet started to bleed. A side-note: Astaire was one of the American songbook’s great stylists, but just compare the way he listens to Ginger singing with the manner in which she takes in his vocalizations. He smiles a lot but looks faintly bored; she hangs on every word whether she’s facing him or not, and always seems to be hearing them for the first time. She not only (in Sylvia Fine’s memorable phrase) “did everything Fred did, backwards and in heels”; she also acted him off the screen.
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10. Singin’ in the Rain [1952] The best musical ever made. Period. The screenwriters, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, had only one order: turn the Herb Nacio Brown Arthur Freed song catalogue into a movie. All they knew was “at some point, there’d be rain, and someone would be singing in it.” Their first notion, involving a singing cowboy to be played by Howard Keel, was thankfully overpowered by their second: a loving if satirical look back at the beginnings of Talking Pictures. Every sequence works, building on and then topping the one that came before. The repartee is as fast and crackling as a '30s screwball farce, and the musical numbers are so well integrated into the movie's themes and action as to be positively Hammersteinian: when Gene Kelly serenades Debbie Reynolds, he evokes the mood on a Hollywood sound stage and his riotous “Moses Supposes” routine with Donald O’Connor takes off from a pompous lesson in early sound elocution. The title number is without doubt the most joyous musical declaration of love ever filmed, and the massive “Broadway Ballet” is, seemingly, a satire on Kelly’s own American in Paris ballet of the year before as the actor-dancer and (nominal) co-director deliciously mocks his own egocentric grandeur—the ballet ends with an extreme close up on his hammy, grinning face. (Never mind that no sound movie of 1927 could have been that mobile.) Reynolds was never more endearingly spunky, and O'Connor out does Danny Kaye in his loony perfection. If only all concerned had dropped the fey costume parade number, which isn't all that funny anyway, and reinstated Reynolds' charming, cut rendition of "You Are My Lucky Star"—which also would have given the eventual singing of it by Kelly in the finale a greater emotional force. Directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen (who did most of it). Cyd Charisse, all legs and green stockings, is Kelly’s partner in the ballet. But best of all is Jean Hagen as Kelly’s impossibly thickheaded screen paramour. A true test of devotion is to imitate her saying, “And I can’t stan’ ‘im!”—those who don’t get it are probably not people you’d want to be around anyway.

9. The Thief of Bagdad [1940] Alexander Korda’s monumental Arabian Nights fantasy is one of the most enchanting movies ever made, and as the “little thief” Apu, the young Indian actor Sabu epitomizes the sunny exuberance of every small child in the audience. (When you’re older you may notice how stunningly beautiful he is; those thighs are a work of art in themselves.) The color cinematography is ravishing, the sets astonishing, and the movie contains the first—and in some ways, finest—of Miklos Rozsa’s film scores; the great Conrad Veidt as a villain so archetypal that the folks at Disney “borrowed” him for Aladdin; Rex Ingram as a deliciously devious djinn who utters what may be the most stirring cry of the pre-Civil Rights era (“Free! Freeeeee!”); and John Justin and June Perez are a dream-team of thoroughly embraceable lovers. That charming rotter Miles Malleson—who also worked on the screenplay—is the emotionally retarded rajah with a yen for exotic toys. Flying carpets, wise old Muslims, an ancient and supernally gentle spirit, a terrifying battle with a giant spider, and a Persian market so cunningly recreated you can almost smell the honey Sabu slathers on his pancake. If I ever become so jaded I don't find tears in my eyes at the mischievous smile on the ancient face of the old mountain spirit as he discreetly observes Sabu’s heartfelt disobeyance, I’ll know I’ve lived too long. (And no, that’s not a misspelling in the title.)

8. The Wild Bunch [1969] When I first saw Sam Peckinpaw’s brutal, elegiac western a few years back—mercifully in the reconstructed edition—it took me about a week to get over it. Only one other American movie has affected me in a similar way (see Number 2 on this list) and for completely different reasons. Was it the opening sequence, in which a gun battle between an inexperienced posse takes out more by-standers than criminals? The slow motion fall of the horses when the bridge is blown up? The iconic final walk of the Bunch down a Mexican street? The excruciating battle between the Bunch and the Mexican Army that perfectly reflects the opening image of a quartet of scorpions beset by a colony of ants? The agonizing regret on Robert Ryan’s face, or William Holden’s heartbreakingly life-eaten countenance? The answer, of course, is all of this. Taken together, these elements—and so many more—were mixed by a master filmmaker who was obstinately misunderstood by his critics and who seldom had the success he deserved. The trim, incisive screenplay is by Walon Green and the superb score is by Jerry Fielding.

7. Vertigo [1957] A commercial disappointment on its original release and never chosen by the casual movie-goer as a Hitchcock favorite, this great, sad rumination on obsessive love is one of the most original American movies ever made. It also contains what may be James Stewart’s finest performance in an unsurpassed career of great performances. Whether you respond to this tragic emotional statement—it’s certainly not a thriller—will probably depend on your own personal response to the loss of ideal love. Kim Novak is radiant as the woman in question and the late Barbara Bel Geddes a revelation as the commercial artist silently pining for Stewart. Bernard Herrmann, who for all of his facility with the action genre, responded especially deeply to stories of romantic inevitability, wrote what may be his finest score.

6. Lawrence of Arabia [1961] David Lean’s best movie is one of the few intelligent—even intellectual—epics. It’s certainly unique in focusing on an essentially unknowable protagonist. The movie is an overwhelming experience on the big screen, which is really the only way to see it; no matter how wide your television screen, this is the sort of movie for which Panavision was created. If you aren’t watching those vast expanses of sand or the train blown off the rails and heading pell-mell toward the camera on a huge canvas, you aren’t really seeing them at all. There’s a great cast (Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Jose Ferrer and Claude Rains), a literate screenplay (credited to Robert Bolt), an iconic score by Maurice Jarre, and best of all, Peter O’Toole’s stunning central performance. Among the movie’s many pleasures is what I consider the single finest edit in the history of the movies: Lawrence, in profile, blows out a match and Lean immediately cuts to a humbling vista of sun-drenched desert. It’s a thrilling moment, but only one of many to come.
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5. The Godfather/The Godfather Part II [1972/1975] Not really two movies so much as a single, long narrative in two parts, this is Francis Coppola’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker. Taken separately these movies constitute two chapters in a uniquely American tragedy. Seen together, they form an overwhelming mosaic, a grand and heartbreaking look at one man’s single-minded pursuit of his own destruction. The parallel narrative style of Part II, which juxtaposes the rise of Don Corleone (Robert De Niro) with the personal downfall of his son Michael (Al Pacino), constitutes an increasingly emotional diptych contrasting the subtlety and warmth of the father with the ruthlessness and frigidity of his son. (It also, in a curious way, keeps Marlon Brando alive.) Both movies feature superb performances, especially those of Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale and Talia Shire. The first is dominated by Brando’s indelible presence and the second gives us not only De Niro but also an almost shockingly great performance by Lee Strasberg. Nino Rota composed the famous score for the first movie and was abetted by the director’s father Carmine on the second.

4. Pinocchio [1940] Bar none the greatest animated movie ever made in this country, and the finest work of Walt Disney’s long career. Its failure, along with that of Fantasia, caused Disney to retreat from conscious art to conscious kitsch—one of the great tragedies in popular American art. Pinocchio has never been as popular in its various reissues as more comforting fare such as Cinderella, and it’s a dark movie, no question. The Pleasure Isle transformation of Pinocchio’s truant pal Lampwick into a donkey ranks among the most terrifying animated sequences ever created, and there’s a truly disturbing image of an axe hurled at an immobile marionette. But it’s an enchanting picture overall, from its great Leigh Harline-Paul Smith score to the inspired voice work of Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards as Jiminy Cricket. The movie has a deep, detailed look unparalleled in animated features and, in the whale chase, one of the most excitingly executed cartoon sequences ever put on film. I can’t hear Cliff Edwards’ pure, ethereal falsetto on the high notes at the end of “When You Wish Upon a Star” without chills running up my back.

3. Cabaret [1972] I said Singin’ in the Rain was the best musical ever made, and I meant it; Bob Fosse’s adaptation of the Broadway hit Cabaret is less a musical than a drama with musical numbers. Only one of them occurs outside the context of the creepily seductive Berlin nightclub where Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles performs, and that isn’t a production number (the movie doesn’t really have any) but an impromptu anthem by an angelic-looking Aryan Youth that builds into a terrifyingly musical mob statement of National Socialistic fealty. Based rather loosely by Jay Presson Allen on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret goes much further into the original’s slightly veiled sexuality than any other version of this material prior to the recent Broadway revival of the stage musical. (Isherwood famously described Michael York’s homosexuality in the movie as something undesirable and uncontrollable, “like bed-wetting” and was heard to say, after a screening, “It’s a goddamn lie! I never slept with a woman in my life!”) Is it condescending? I don’t think so. Fosse and Allen never condemn York’s bisexual adventures, and you have to take their version of Isherwood as merely a single variation on the original material. (Although Minnelli using it as a pretext against marrying York is a bit much; would the real Sally Bowles have cared?) In any case, the look of the movie is overwhelming—it’s how we now think the Berlin of 1929 must have felt—and Fosse’s editing style dazzles no matter how often you’ve seen the movie. York is sumptuous to look at and, with his slightly shy smile and Isherwood-like haircut, perfectly cast. Minnelli was never better, or more controlled, and Joel Grey’s Emcee becomes a truly Mephistophelean figure, commenting on the action and winking lewdly. With Helmut Griem as the sexy bisexual count who woos both Minnelli and York, and, memorably, Fritz Wepper and Marisa Berenson as the ill-met lovers. The faux-Kurt Weill songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb are about as good as you can get.

2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977] The most entrancing movie I’ve ever seen. I can vividly remember sitting in a crowded theatre in 1977, with almost no foreknowledge of the story, and feeling this great, empathic fantasy wash over me like annealing waters. Steven Spielberg may have greater audience popularity with Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park and won his Oscars for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, but Close Encounters is his masterwork. It’s the most benign alien-invasion movie ever made, and full of wonders. (The special effects look so natural because Spielberg shot them in standard ratio and then blew the images up to widescreen.) Richard Dreyfuss makes a perfect Everyman, Francois Truffault’s face shines with gentle passion, and little Cary Guffey is an absolute amazement. The perfectly integrated score is, of course, by John Williams.

1. Some Like it Hot [1959] My favorite movie, and arguably the funniest comedy made after the advent of sound. Billy Wilder and co-scenarist I.A.L. Diamond took an episode from a forgotten German comedy and expanded it into a breakneck farce that took in gangland massacres, sexual duplicity, homosexual implication and transvestitism, turning it into one of the cheeriest comedies in movie history. Marilyn Monroe, famously unreliable, is luminous—when she’s onscreen you can’t take your eyes off her. The only fault I can finds in Tony Curtis’ defining performance as an unrepentant heel is that, in the persona of “Josephine,” his falsetto was provided by Paul Frees. But it is Jack Lemmon, whooping it up as “Geraldine,” who gives the movie’s greatest performance. It’s so inspired it seems to have come (as Lemmon always claimed the character was anyway) from the moon. Lemmon was, and is, my favorite actor, and for all his fine work (in The Apartment, Irma La Douce, Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, “Save the Tiger,” The China Syndrome, Missing and Glengarry Glen Ross) I don’t think he was ever better than he is here. This is Billy Wilder’s ultimate masterpiece, the movie that summed up everything he could do without breaking a sweat. The great Joe E. Brown has the classic final line—which Wilder always claimed was written by Diamond.

John Williams: "Star Wars Epsiode III: Revenge of the Sith"

Professional film score aficianados are a curious breed, and they haven't been a bit happy with the closing installment of John Williams' magnificent magnum opus. "Too much of this, too little of that, he doesn't write new themes, whine whine whine."

Despite the purblind fan-boy carping directed at it, this is a score I've listened to repeatedly, with great emotion and a sense of awe at Williams' exquisite mastery. His choral work has become almost incredibly rich over the past few years (cf, "Duel of the Fates" in The Phantom Menace) and it reaches a true apogee here. His thematic use of motives has, of course, spread throughout the Star Wars scores, but in Revenge of the Sith this technique reaches unimagined heights. Williams' weaving of themes and variations is so subtle, complex and deeply felt it makes the score for what stands as the best of Lucas' "prequel" (horrible neologism) trilogy the second finest of the series, with The Empire Strikes Back its only competition.

Professional bitches have complained that the End Title medley is nothing more than a long recap of the series and a sort of "preview of coming attractions," suited more to the concert stage than the movie. I would argue that, aside from being a summing up and a look ahead, it is an almost overwhelming emotional journey through the series, reminding us (as Lucas himself does at the climax) what has passed and what pains, horrors and triumphs are yet to come for these beloved characters. I've found I can scarcely listen to it without misting up—maybe because I've lived with the series so long (I was 16 when it premiered in 1977) but largley due to John Williams' unparalleled artistry.

Star Wars changed the face of movie scoring; Revenge of the Sith shows us why it was Williams who did so.