The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made

More canon fodder, courtesy of the New York Times. The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made! As these sort of lists go, it's a fairly inoffensive and safe one, covering all bases with popular and critical favorites, domestic and foreign classics, but like the AFI top 100 American list from some years back, it gives the silent era the cold shoulder. Films not included: Keaton's The General (although Boorman's is), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, The Gold Rush, Metropolis, Man with a Movie Camera and The Birth of a Nation (which people usually shy away from including in lists like this for its incendiary racism, but you can usually replace that with Intolerance so at least Griffith's influence can be acknowledged). I'm not exactly a silent movie maven, but anyone with a cursory knowledge of film history and its evolution knows of the importance of these films. Have silent films fallen so out of favor with critics and the popular consciousness that they are no longer acknowledged, much less considered part of the canon? In a half-hearted defense of the list, these films were probably never reviewed in the pages of the Times as, in those early days, "the paper of record" considered movies an amusement and not as an artform worthy of serious discussion (that is, if I'm assuming correctly that a review in the Times is a prerequisite for inclusion).

It's also interesting to note that George Romero's gut-chomping classic Dawn of the Dead was included in the hot 1000, as its original review in the Times by Janet Maslin is (in)famous for its snide and dismissive tone and the fact that Maslin, sickened by the film's brutality, walked out of the movie after only 15 minutes. It's also interesting that this original review is not directly linked from the best 1000 list, only this laudatory appraisal by Cavett Binion from the All Movie Guide.

Dementia / Daughter of Horror

Where do avant cinema and exploitation meet? Somewhere on the crusty margins of '50s Hollywood, perhaps. Consider the case of Dementia, written and directed by John Parker, shot in 1953 in poverty row studios in Hollywood, finally released in 1955 in a small art-house in New York after two years of censorship battles. Completely without dialogue, with only the eerie music of firebrand composer George Antheil and a sparse use of sound effects to accompany the images, a woman's descent into madness and dark isolation meanders with the dream logic and visual archness one usually finds in the "poetic cinema" of the period, although harsher and crueller than what you would find in Maya Deren.

Transparently Freudian in a way that belies its 1950s vintage, the film follows the "gamine" (as the young lady is called in the credits) as she saunters through the expressionistic skid row of Venice, California (with the long shadows and locations Orson Welles would appropriate with greater success in Touch of Evil). She accepts a ride from a cigar chomping fatcat, then retreats to a memory of an apparent patricide which takes place in a misty graveyard lorded over by a man with a black stocking mask. Then back to the here and now where our heroine watches in disgust as the fatcat noisily slurps and chomps on a chicken dinner. The gamine produces a switchblade and (in a really nice shot) the fatcat falls to his death several stories below. She finds her victim's body on the street surrounded by passersby, all wearing black stocking masks. The victim clutches her huge olympic sized pendant. She attempts to remove it but the death hand won't relinquish its grip. In a scene that upset the New York state censors, the man's lifeless head rocks back and forth while she saws his hand off with the switchblade. We follow her to a hepcat cellar where she unwinds to bebop provided by Shorty Rogers and his combo. Things get frenetic when her handless victim appears at the club's streetlevel window. She retreats to her dank noir apartment, where all is well, except for the man's hand writhing in a bureau drawer.

While the storyline seems grimly adolescent, one must remember that Dementia was shot in 1953 and that it was intended as an arty but earnest exploration of abnormal psychology. It's also not hard to see in its influences several antecedents from earlier avant garde films: the disembodied hand seems straight out of Luis Buñuel and Un Chien Andalou, the long shadows and harsh lighting from German Expressionism. Also, Dementia's composer George Antheil also provided the music for painter Fernand Leger's 1924 experimental smash Ballet Mécanique. Alas, this sort of pedigree does not usually spell boffo biz on Main Street America, or even on the piss scented streets of midtown Manhattan where it had a short-lived engagement (along with a co-feature documentary on Picasso) in 1955 at the 55th St. Playhouse After that, despite a glowing testimony from Preston Sturges (!)(who called the film "a work of art... It stirred my blood and purged my libido..."), the film known as Dementia simply disappeared, never to be seen again for decades.

Enter Daughter of Horror. Its history is pretty hazy, but, apparently, an outfit called Exploitation Productions Incorporated thought Dementia was just good enough to add some voice-over narration (courtesy of an announcer from Philadelphia named Ed McMahon), rename the effort Daughter of Horror, grind out a few prints and push them through the drive-in circuit. Once the prints have been too tattered and fried from way too many spook shows, Daughter of Horror would have been lucky to be shown on late night television.

Interestingly, it was its inclusion as the feature shown in the movie theater attacked by the blob in The Blob that may have saved Dementia/Daughter of Horror from complete ignonimity. Many fans thought the title on the marquee ("MIDNIGHT SPOOK SHOW - DAUGHTER OF HORROR also BELA LUGOSI") was some imaginary generic horror movie title dreamt by The Blob's makers, and discussions raged in the pages of early 60s horror movie magazines as to the film's existence.

It was probably an essay by Jim Morton in Re/Search's seminal Incredibly Strange Films book from 1986 that created a resurgence of interest in this little off-beat piece of marginal cinema. Until recently the film (as Daughter of Horror) was only availible as the crappiest of VHS dupes. Many thought that the original source of Dementia had been destroyed in the manufacture of Daughter of Horror. Fortunately, that was not the case. Indeed, the pristine original negative of Dementia had been unearthed and brought out by Kino in a very nice DVD package double-billed with a nice looking version of Daughter of Horror. Watched back to back (which is only recommended to the heartiest of souls), one finds that, except for the inclusion of McMahon's boogie-man narration and very short appearance in the beginning of the movie, the two films are essentially the same. It's interesting to ponder that the same film exhibited at a small Manhattan art house also played at drive-ins in the South and Midwest. Such is the strange democracy of cinema.

For more info on this film(s), Flickhead has a good piece, as does DVD Savant.

Adios Jingo!

Adios, Jingo! -- Happy Independence Day, everyone, both here in the states, and abroad as well. In honor of this patriotic holiday, I offer this humble list of 10 American films that best exemplify certain qualities that seem to me uniquely and terrifically American. Some of these may cast a critical and jaundiced eye on the various excesses of the American scene, and some may excorciate us for sins and transgressions, both past and present. But some also celebrate those things like tolerance and sacrifice that make the ongoing American experiment worth pursuing, and the "more perfect union" worth achieving. In this crucial political year, it's more important than ever to realize that patriotism is not the sole province of the lazy few who blindly follow leaders and swallow their empty platitudes. It's not a bad thing to be proud of your country, but it's also not a bad thing to question and criticize the direction and policies of your country. This list of movies is not a best-of list by any means, but these are movies that make me proud to be an American.

In no particular order:

Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz) -- I've always loved this movie. Early WW2 patriotism at its most transparent, yet at its most sincere. Cagney sings and dances, and still plays the lovable tough guy. FDR is shown in silhouette as he presents George M. Cohan a medal. Favorite scene: the older Cohan tapdancing down the stairs in the White House after receiving said medal.

The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola) -- The promise of America is expressed when the new immigrants pour to the side of the ship to catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty when the boat pulls into New York Harbor. The curse of American largesse is coldly seen in the last shot of the movie: Michael Corleone alone in his compound in Nevada, his power and wealth consolidated, yet his family and soul destroyed.

Blue Collar (Paul Schrader) -- Very few American films deal with the working class. Schrader's directorial debut is one of the few that do. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphett Kotto play work buddies who try to screw over the system. Ultimately, the system screws them over, playing the race card to divide them. It would be hard to see a movie like his be made nowadays, not unless it deals with Wal-Mart employees. Another plus: great American artist Captain Beefheart sings over the titles.

Nixon (Oliver Stone) -- A lot of people can't stand Oliver Stone. I find him one of our more interesting writer/directors, although he's in bit of a slump lately. His ham-fisted style is at its best and most garrulous in 1995's Nixon. Richard Nixon, as brilliantly portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, is ultimately a tragic figure, a man with a chip on his shoulder who attempts to control events but soon finds himself the victim of them. Not as overbearing and outrageous as J.F.K. or Natural Born Killers, but it still has that that visually excessive style that exemplified his filmmaking at the time. It's forever playing on cable. Give it a chance if you haven't already.

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero) -- The film's first shot is an small American flag fluttering in the foreground of a western Pennsylvania graveyard. The terrible strife of 1968 as horror film. Americans eat their own. Children kill and consume their parents. A crisis of leadership leads to the most pessimistic ending in any American film from the '60s. The monsters are us.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford) -- I'm not a big John Ford fan, but I really like this stark black & white western. Image and myth transcend truth and nuance. Its message seems more relevant today than it did in 1962. Too many legends becoming fact.

Nashville (Robert Altman) -- America as widescreen canvas. But instead of the grandeur of American landscapes, Altman concentrates on funhouse faces, dialogue bumping into dialogue, the carnival of politics, singers drowned out by the roar of automobiles, the sting and danger of celebrity. It's a long, meandering mess, heartbreakingly beautiful in places, uch like the country it both mocks and celebrates in equal measure.

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock) -- On the faces of great men scurry the small and insignificant, the merest of pawns in the grandest of geopolitical matches. "War is hell, Mr. Thornhill," cants the professor, played by Leo G. Carroll. "Even when it's a cold one." Cary Grant answers: "If you fellas can't lick the Vandamms of this world, without asking girls like her to bed down with him and fly away with him and probably never come back, perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars!" Simple decency butts against the imperatives of outfoxing your opponent, even when one's ideals form an obstacle. Hitchcock fought to retain these lines in the picture against the desires of the MGM brass. Heavy for a Hollywood movie in 1959.

Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner) -- Right wing poem on the thrill and glory of military victory and achievement, or ironic post-Vietnam rumination on the anachronism and utter absurdity of warrior-wise men in the age of automated war? Either way, it's simple but powerful cinema. At the film's end, Patton walks among windmills, too tired and resigned to tilt at them any longer as he may have in the past, aknowledging his day is done. The pastoral impulse need not be peaceful or gentle.

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone) -- Not American created, but this great western touches on all the great American themes of reinvention, the retention of perhaps outdated ideals, the usurping of the wild and unspoiled by creeping civilization. This movie is enriched by a great American cast (Fonda, Robards, and, yes, Bronson), and by Leone's first opportunity to shoot in Monument Valley and other locations in the USA. The great American film genre was never the same after Leone borrowed enough to create something bright and new.

R.I.P. Marlon Brando

R.I.P., Marlon Brando --

PLAYBOY: And you didn't feel that acting was worth while or fulfilling enough?

BRANDO: There's a big bugaboo about acting; it doesn't make sense to me. Everybody is an actor; you spend your whole day acting. Everybody has suffered through moments where you're thinking one thing and feeling one thing and not showing it. That's acting. Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage. . . . It's very difficult for people to have an extended confrontation with themselves. You're hiding what you're thinking, what you're feeling, you don't want to upset somebody or you do want to upset somebody; you don't want to show that you hate them; your pride would be injured if they knew you'd been affected by what they said about you. Or you hide a picayune aspect of yourself, the prideful or envious or vulnerable, and you pretend that everything's all right. 'Hi, how are you?' People look at your face and it's presentable: 'And I shall prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet.'

So we all act. The only difference between an actor professionally and an actor in life is the professional knows a little bit more about it--some of them, anyway--and he gets paid for it. But actually, people in real life get paid for acting, too. You have a secretary who has a lot of sex appeal and a great deal of charm and she knows it, she's going to get paid for that, whether she delivers sexual favors or not. A very personable, attractive young man, who reflects what the boss says, is smart enough to know what the boss feels and likes and wants and he knows how to curry favor . . . he's acting. He goes in in the morning and he gives him a lot of chatter, tells the right kind of jokes and it makes the boss feel good. One day the boss says, "Listen, Jim, why don't you go to Duluth and take over the department there? I think you'd do a bang-up job." And then Jim digs his toe under the rug and says, "Oh, gosh, I never thought, J. B. . . . Gee, I don't know what to say. . . . Sure, I'll go. When?" And he jumps into the plane and checks off what he's been trying to do for four years--get J. B. to give him the Duluth office. Well, that guy's acting for a living, singing for his supper, and he's getting paid for it.

From Brando's Playboy Interview, 1979.