By Nicholas Stix
For many years, I’ve been working on a project on the 100 Greatest Movies. The second half is a mess, and even this half gets messy towards the end. For instance, I haven’t seen the Charlie Chaplin silents since a Chaplin marathon on an old projector in a public school auditorium on Martha’s Vineyard in July, 1980, shortly before I left the country. So, I have to see them again, as well as just about everything on the second 50 list.
1. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2021/05/tonight-in-honor-of-memorial-day.html
2. Citizen Kane (1941)
Tied: 3. The Godfather (1972)
Tied 3: The Godfather, Part II (1974)
5. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
6. Shane (1953)
7. It Happened One Night (1934)
Tied 8: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Tied 8: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
10. The Third Man (1949)
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11. The Big Parade (1925)
12. On the Waterfront (1954)
13. Casablanca (1943)
14. All about Eve (1950)
15. The Last Emperor (1987)
16. Rashomon (1950)
17. Tied: Wild Strawberries (1957)
17. Tied: The Seventh Seal (1957)
19. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
20. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
21. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
22. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
23. La Strada (1954)
24. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
25. The Birth of a Nation (1915)
26. West Side Story (1961)
27. Smiles of a Summer’s Night (1955)
28. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
29. Bringing Up Baby (1938)
30. The Searchers (1956)
31. The Wild Bunch (1969)
32. Vertigo (1958)
33. Unforgiven (1992)
34. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
35. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
36. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
37. Tied: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
37. Tied: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
39. The Seven Samurai (1954)
40. Nosferatu (1922)
41. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
42. Doctor Mabuse, the Gambler, Part I (1922)
43. Doctor Mabuse, Inferno, Part II (1922)
44. Metropolis (1927)
45. City Lights (1931)
46. Modern Times (1936)
47. The Gold Rush (1925)
48. The General (1926)
49. GWTW I: Jezebel (1938)
50. GWTW II: Gone with the Wind (1939)
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5 comments:
Where is Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes," along with "The Thirty-Nine Steps"? Carol Reed's "The Fallen Idol"? John Ford's "Stagecoach"? Lamorisse's "The Red Balloon"? Clouzot's "The Wages of Fear" and "Diabolique"? Carné and Prévert's "Children of Paradise"? the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals "The Gay Divorce," "Top Hat," or "Swing Time"? John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon"? Cy Endfield's "Zulu"? Philippe de Broca's "That Man From Rio"? De Mille's 1956 "The Ten Commandments"? Wyler's "Ben-Hur"? Asquith's "The Winslow Boy," "The Browning Version," and "The Importance of Being Earnest"? Serge Bourguignon's "Sundays and Cybèle"? Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky"? the 1960 Russian "A Summer to Remember," a/k/a "Seryozha"? David Lean's "Great Expectations"? "A Christmas Carol" (1951) with Alastair Sim? "The Green Man" (1956)? "Kind Hearts and Coronets"? "The Lavender Hill Mob"? "The League of Gentlemen" (1960)? "Your Past is Showing" a/k/a "The Naked Truth"? Any of Disney's classics--"Snow White," "Cinderella,"
"Peter Pan"?
And that's just off the top of my head. You really ought to get around more, NS.
P.S.: I forgot to mention “Around the World in 80 Days” (1956), “A Tale of Two Cities” (1935), “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937), “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), and Claude Autant-Lara’s “The Red Inn” (1951).
Oops! Sorry about including "The Maltese Falcon" in my list. I couldn't edit it out after posting.
I couldn't have a top 50 list without "Cool Hand Luke" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" somewhere in the top 5.Yes,they're the same movie,but going against "the man" appealed to me in my 20s through my 40s.
That was then.T
The man"--these days--turns out to be a woman,a black,a queer,a Mex,a Muslim,a commie who is telling me to obey this new world order.
The more things change....
--GRA
Many - if not most - of the films in this list seem to be pre-1970/'80.
Always surprised not to see 'Raging Bull' (1980) appear in such rankings.
Inattentive observers either dismiss it as a violent, objectionable 'DeNiro boxing movie', or unfairly associate it with (rightfully) panned Scorcese productions - but neither are valid objections here.
At the core, it's a film about a rapidly changing NYC - observed against the self-destructive life of an unstable Bronx middleweight Jake LaMotta.
Arresting imagery abounds throughout: the public pools and walk-ups in the Bronx (before they were destroyed), local 'clubs' that were the haunts of the up-and-coming capos (before being overwhelmed by Puerto Ricans), the sparse apartments of the older Italian working class, etc.
Raging Bull was filmed in black and white, but the snippets of 'home movies' Scorcese splices in at points are all in color: a wedding reception filmed on a Bronx building rooftop (with the dense neighborhood as backdrop in the distance), Jake and Vicky after getting married moving 'up' out of the Bronx to their own starter brick home in Yonkers, later shenanigans around their own backyard pool.
These were wordless snapshots of a place that was already vanishing in the 1950's - and as such is a type of documentary of New York.
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