Rick's 100 favourite movies: Part 1

I love movies. The film bug got me when I was 13. I was nursing a knee injury and looking for something to do that didn't involve playing football. I saw Star Wars, then not long afterwards On the Waterfront and Les 400 Coups, and that was that. Since then, my obsessions have moved from method-ish tough guys like Brando, John Garfield and Jean Gabin (and the juvenile delinquent poster boys such as Jean-Pierre Leaud), through the Empire, Leonard Maltin and Cahiers canons, to the current state of affairs, a heady, happy place where I can watch anything, enjoy the connections between everything, and mine whatever I like, lauding unheralded celluloid heroes like Lillian Gish and Jack Conway, trumpeting B-movie mystery-comedies from the 1940s (a constant and total favourite) and arguing the case for maligned or barely seen movies, whether it's MGM's "chocolate box" Little Women, Bernard Shaw's miraculous Major Barbara, or astounding arthouse movies such as The DreamLife of Angels and Seraphine.

As a massive nerd, I've always been an obsessive list-maker, as well as a journalist and writer, so I can tell you how many feature films I've seen (4,137), which ones I've seen on the big screen, and what the best movie I saw in 2011 was (Ghost World, again). Now and then I'll put together a list of my favourite movies. I have far more than a hundred favourites, but it's a fun game to play and hopefully representative of what I love about cinema: its ability to transport and transform, and its use as a crutch, a time machine and a tool for social change, in the best and worst senses of all those ideas. I created a new list this week (looking at the last top 100 I compiled, at the end of 2014, I've swapped out a quarter of the hundred), so I thought I'd share it with you here. Numbers 100-76 are below, with the others coming up soon. Did I mention that I love movies?

100. The Killer (John Woo, 1989)

Woo's A Better Tomorrow had as good a plot, and his Hard Boiled matched this one for action, but The Killer was by far the director's most effective marriage of the two, as noble hitman Chow Yun-Fat attempts to pay back the innocent woman caught in the crossfire, bringing him into conflict - and then partnership - with cop Danny Lee. It's full of breathtaking shoot-outs (yes of course with doves) and effective reflection, transcending its pulpy origins to become the definitive modern action film.

99. Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949)
A bewitching, exceptionally rewarding adaptation lit by Allyson's warm characterisation, O'Brien's lump-to-the-throat emoting and cinematography and music that - at least to me - seems perfectly pitched. Full review.

98. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen, 2013)
Unusually and arrestingly affecting. Perhaps my relationship with the Coens could yet blossom. Full review.

97. Forbidden Games (Rene Clement, 1952)
Its high points are so high, its view of childhood so arresting and deftly realised, that poorly-framed interiors and a handful of duff scenes seem a little beside the point. Full review.

96. Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954)
Is it better than Singin' in the Rain? Well, no, but this is 'favourites', not 'best'. Enrapturing and deeply moving, with an ending that destroys and exalts me every time. Watch 'The Heather on the Hill' here.

95. Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944)

Perhaps the best of Sturges' immortal satires, though they're all pretty special. He coached star Eddie Bracken intensely on both this and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and the results are astonishing.

94. The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970)
"Daddy! My daddy!"

93. Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)
A dazzling film, containing one of the three or four best female performances in American cinema in the shape of Judy Holliday's endearing, eye-wateringly hilarious Billie Dawn. Born Yesterday is a flawless metaphor about the working classes and the emancipating power of knowledge posing as an utterly delightful romantic comedy. Full review.

92. The Iceman Cometh (John Frankenheimer, 1973)
One of the great casts brings to life one of the great plays. I love the 1960 TV version with Jason Robards (who did more than anyone to reinvigorate interest in the work), and he's a better Hickey than Lee Marvin, but screen titans Robert Ryan and Fredric March are in sensational form.

91. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)
Appallingly and sickeningly misogynistic, but that opening 40 is like nothing else I've ever seen, an astounding meditation on the impermanence of memory and the fatal allure of the past. I was obsessed with watching the film as a teenager, and completely overwhelmed by it when I did.

90. My Life as a Dog (see below)

"This movie, directed and largely written by Lasse Hallström and released in 1985, when he was thirty-nine and I was sixty-three, made me like life and human beings much more than I had ever done before. Quite a favour!” - Kurt Vonnegut

89. A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)
Chaplin said this was the best movie ever made about America, and who am I to disagree? The pre-crash Monty Clift was surely the handsomest man ever to have lived.

88. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)
Probably Woody's best movie, though I have another of his films higher up since I watch it the most. Review.

87.Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
It's a shame I can't watch this any more because I hate Polanski so much (though I can watch Woody Allen films, apparently). Still, I know the script off by heart, so perhaps I can just say it to myself. In some ways it's the ultimate '70s movie, a paranoid howl of despair that explodes genre convention, but it's also a gorgeous homage to the '40s, full of the most extraordinary Robert Towne dialogue.

86. The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (Peter Godfrey, 1939)
Probably my favourite studio-era B-movie, though Confessions of Boston Blackie and The Saint in New York are up there too. A mixture of thriller tropes and screwball comedy, with Ida Lupino in incredible form as PI Warren William's dizzy new girlfriend, and Rita Hayworth as the femme fatale, just months from Only Angels Have Wings.

85. Séraphine (Martin Provost, 2008)

It’s such a different sort of movie: spiritually profound, quietly sincere, unusually yet perfectly-paced: not rushing to introduce its obscure, anti-social heroine, taking her faith seriously, and finding both humour and poignancy in her singularity and complete lack of interest in societal niceties or norms. Full review.

84. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)
A plotless ramble through the life of a 27-year-old dancer - who encounters assorted epiphanies and disappointments - shot like Woody's Manhattan or À bout de souffle, scripted with a nod to Whit Stillman and emanating its writer-director's usual good-natured angst, uncertainty about contemporary life and warm-hearted, off-kilter sentimentality. Full review.

83. Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936)
Renoir couldn't be bothered to finish this film because it kept raining. Review.

82. The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941)
Writer Lillian Hellman’s vision of America – imagined by Gregg Toland, enlivened by a killer ensemble, given order by the gifted Wyler – is far darker than anyone could have expected, the blanched Davis poisoned by greed, leaving goodness, humanity and virtue all gasping for breath. Full review.

81. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
This film is just so, so good. More than 20 years on, the freshness and effortlessness of it all is still astounding. Its vernacular. Its spiky, absurdist humour. Its moments of heart. Those long, wordless takes. The diner. The toaster. The watch up Walken’s ass. The legion of stylised lines that never feel mannered or forced. Actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Travolta and Uma Thurman producing performances from nowhere that continue to reward and astound. QT hasn’t done anything comparable since. Nowadays I will him to succeed – and with Django he did – but there was a brief time when all you could do was watch in slack-jawed amazement as he created dizzying, dazzling films that re-wrote the rules of genre cinema.

80. Another Country (Marek Kanievska, 1984)

"A sad, scintillating film." Full review.

79. A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965)
85% of this film resulted in outright, prolonged laughter. 60% visibly moved me. 100% of Robards' performance is beyond brilliant.

78. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)
"This is real life. But with better dialogue." Full review.

77. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
I had this in my previous two lists too.

76. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
Perhaps the most famous silent film of all, and one of the best, equipped with an emotional tractor beam too often absent from Murnau’s eye-wideningly inventive works. Full review.

***

Thanks for reading. The other 75 are coming up soon, here's the list so far:

Truffaut, Pulp Fiction and how to spot a psychopath - Reviews #218

Here are all the books and films I've consumed lately. And here's a piece I wrote about actor-director combos to flog tickets in my day job.



Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973) - I love François Truffaut beyond almost anyone else who has worked in the medium of film. There’s that quote – “I always loved the reflection of life more than life itself” – which seems to crystallise an essential truth about those of us who live through film, or have at one time or another. His movies radiate a love of cinema, its possibilities and its pleasures, its ability to transport us, bewitch us, change us. He also seems to have been invented to cater for my specific tastes: sentimental about love, art and childhood, whilst understanding and articulating the limitations of all three.

This film is the only one he made that’s explicitly about the movies, or as he put it: “The subject of Day for Night was, quite simply, my reason for living.” It’s a deceptively deep ensemble comedy-drama about the making of a melodrama, starring Truffaut himself as the director, his regular cinematic alter-ego Jean-Pierre Leaud as his callow leading man, and Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese and Jean-Pierre Aumont as the other principal cast members, each with their own insecurity, their own past.

Examining and celebrating the artifice, the potential for perfection and yet the compromise of cinema (a collaborative medium in which logistical improvisation is king), the film starts with a scene that needs to be retaken and goes on from there, tipping us a wink as it wheels out a gentle set-piece about a misbehaving cat or a hairy stuntman doubling for Bisset, tightening the knot in your stomach as a cast or crew member begins to go to pieces, and then slowly but surely revealing its subtle depths: an ability to move, enchant and beguile, as all truly great movies do.

It’s light and playful – impeccably constructed, as Truffaut’s roaming camera drops us into one conversation, one story, then another – but it’s also substantial, with myriad delights that encompass administrator Nathalie Baye’s abrupt, laidback seduction technique, montages of moviemaking that draw you in to a walled-off world, and a breathtaking speech by Truffaut to Leaud about the disparity between fantasy and reality that is one of the most affecting (and clearly autobiographical) things that the director ever did. As, in fact, is the dream sequence so tantalisingly previewed early on, and then revealed in its full majesty near the close.

Not every scene has the same emotional charge or conviction of performance as Truffaut’s urgent pep talk, but for fans of the director – or of cinema in general – it’s still a rare sort of treat: stuffed with in-jokes and fun nods to cinematic icons like Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Jean Vigo, but more importantly underscored by an implicit understanding of the responsibility of the filmmaker, the collision between art and life, and the joy of the film set itself: what Orson Welles once called “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had”. No-one else could have made this film. (3.5)

***


English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) - This film is just so, so good. More than 20 years on, the freshness and effortlessness of it all is still astounding. Its vernacular. Its spiky, absurdist humour. Its moments of heart. Those long, wordless takes. The diner. The toaster. The watch up Walken’s ass. The legion of stylised lines that never feel mannered or forced. Actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Travolta and Uma Thurman producing performances from nowhere that continue to reward and astound. QT hasn’t done anything comparable since. Nowadays I will him to succeed – and with Django he did – but there was a brief time when all you could do was watch in slack-jawed amazement as he created dizzying, dazzling films that re-wrote the rules of genre cinema. (4)

***



Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013) - A simply wonderful movie about journo Steve Coogan trying to trace the adopted son of Irish pensioner Judi Dench, a victim of the notorious Magdalene laundries. It’s often desperately bleak, but also unstintingly warm-hearted, full of the most brilliant jokes, and as emotionally and intellectually rewarding as anything I’ve seen this year. It’s also a little formulaic in structure, looks pretty much like every other British drama made in the last 10 years and has some final-reel villainy that’s a little too on-the-nose (not to mention hysterical), but the story is utterly fascinating, the acting and script exceptional, and its ultimate question of how best to move on is one answered with nuance, dignity and grace. (3.5)
***




Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) - Computer programmer Domhnall Gleason wins a company competition to hang out with Google-but-not-Google CEO Oscar Isaac in his remote headquarters, where he's introduced to an AI called Ava (Alicia Vikander), and encouraged to submit her to the Turing Test. But seriously, America, it's pronounced "Tyouring", not "Too-ring", show some fucking respect.

There are plot holes in Alex Garland's zeitgeisty thriller, along with a few obvious 'surprises' to go with the more novel ones, but it's an entertaining, immersive, quite thought-provoking film that maintains the courage of its convictions right up to a superb twisty-turny ending. And then carries on for another five minutes for absolutely no reason. (3)

***



The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) - I watched The Leopard Man for @ValLeween, the Val Lewton-based live-tweetathon that happens every Halloween (this reviews update has been a while in coming), and the whole thing was a lot of fun.

The film isn’t one of my favourites from the pioneering producer – this tale of a black cat terrifying a Mexican village is a little disjointed, with some iffy acting – but Lewton does a good job of creating a world through scripting, scoring and a handful of sets, and his horror high points are exhilarating, the moments of sustained terror as poetic, beautiful and self-contained as Astaire and Rogers dance numbers.

The blood under the door? Wow. (3)

***



The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999) - Soderbergh’s malevolently playful editing illuminates this brooding thriller, helping to turn it from a potentially straightforward Get Carter transplant into something rather more interesting, aided by an imposing central turn, intelligent use of footage of the star as a younger man – taken from Ken Loach’s debut film, Poor Cow – and a surprising, surprisingly affecting pay-off.

Terence Stamp is a seriously violent ex-con who comes to LA straight from the slammer, plotting revenge on the criminals what caused his daughter’s death, a group apparently led by counter-culture beancounter Terry Valentine (a perfectly cast Peter Fonda). Sometimes the script flounders, especially when resorting to cliché or having Stamp repeatedly use and then explain Cockney rhyming slang – he is a British character written for American audiences – but at other times it’s extremely strong, especially when Fonda is explaining the ‘60s (a speech that passes from the sort of platitudes you can basically mouth along to, to something poignant and surprising) or Stamp is lamenting his mistakes.

Where it really works, though, is in the presentation: fragments of action that drop us forwards or back in time, flashes of pathos at unexpected moments, action scenes that take place off camera or in the back of the frame, Soderbergh drawing thematic parallels like a young Terence Davies, or flicking between scenes in a way that recalls nothing as much as... Easy Rider: the film that launched Fonda and defined a generation, at least in cinematic terms. Stamp’s good too: some of his line readings seem wooden, but he catches the eye and holds it, and that scene in the warehouse still has the ability to shock and appal and rather worryingly excite. All together now: “Tell him I’m coming!” (3)

***



The Chocolate Soldier (Roy Del Ruth, 1941) - This wasn't the gay porn I thought I'd ordered.

Worse than that, it's not even a bona fide operetta. Though its songs come from the 1909 work, The Chocolate Soldier, the writer of the source story, George Bernard Shaw, objected to its being adapted, so they were grafted onto a play by the oft-adapted Ferenc Molnar, The Guardsman, occasionally intelligently, but more often completely incoherently.

Still, at least Nelson Eddy's here, right? A lot of people are sniffy about Nelson Eddy nowadays, in the unlikely event that they've heard of him at all, but I'm quite a fan. He was an underrated actor (catch his performance in Ben Hecht's liberal drama, Let Freedom Ring, for evidence of that) and a magnificent singer, especially vital and appealing when paired with regular leading lady Jeanette MacDonald.

What he wasn't, was a comedian. He proves that beyond any doubt here, playing a jealous husband who - in typical early '40s comedy style - tests his wife's fidelity by posing as an amorous Russian. That stock device of masquerade occasionally worked, but needed subtle writing and intelligent playing, neither of which it gets here. Eddy is so broad and flat it hurts, Metropolitan Opera diva Rise Stevens simply transmits none of the spark required for such battle-of-the-sexes comedy, and Nigel Bruce is really beginning to annoy me now.

The result is a pathologically unfunny film: bitter, laughless, joyless and sexless, with only a handful of reasonable musical numbers relieving the oppressive tedium. And no gay sex. (1)

***



Gunsight Ridge (Francis D. Lyon, 1957) - This atrocious oater plays rather like a parody of B-Westerns by someone who's hardly seen any, as Wells Fargo agent Joel McCrea tries to root out a highwayman in a small town and finds a frustrated pianist prone to fits of hysterical anger (Mark Stevens). Ernest Laszlo's photography is unusually handsome for a movie from a no-name studio, but the ageing stars can do nothing with the abysmal script from MGM veteran Talbot Jennings and his wife Elisabeth, which manages to be both clichéd and completely ludicrous, hopping from one silly scenario to the next with barely a credible line of dialogue to be heard. The great McCrea comes off merely as trivial and smug, but Stevens manages to set fire to the huge pile of goodwill left over from the bristling noir The Dark Corner, crossing over into ridiculousness early on, and never returning. The scene in which he is out-acted by a confused horse is a particular low. (1)

***

BOOKS

Fiction:



The Railway Children by E. Nesbit (1905) - This beloved children's story has a mother who's good to be true, some understandably stuffy contentions about the way the world works and a rather clunky writing style to which it takes some adjusting, but it's also full of vivid characters, fine sentimental moments and thrilling scenes of escapism and middle-class adventure: virtues that ultimately win out over its shortcomings. (3)



Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (1975) - I liked this kaleidoscopic portrait of early-20th century New York, drawn to its world, its scope, and its moments of terrible clarity (particularly concerning lovelorn depression and the everyday poetry of squalid urban life), but found its quasi-Hemingway, quotation-free style rather one-note, contrived and detached. (3)

Non-fiction:



Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford (1960) - This memoir from The Communist Mitford is good and sometimes brilliant, trespassing into the latter territory when it deals with family dynamics and human emotion, or when the author punctures pomposity with some lancet-like line. I admire Decca's perfectly pitched irony and sense of poignancy, borne of a complete lack of sentimentality. And I like her names for her siblings, such as Boud (Unity), Debo(rah) and the delightful Tudemmy (Tom). Her journey around America is ultimately a lot less interesting than what predates it, though, with many of the tales notably lacking a sufficiently strong punchline. But I'll now be reading absolutely everything about the Mitfords anyway, beginning with Decca's second volume of autobiography. (3)



Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson (2005) - More a collection of pre-9/11 features than a coherent work, but an immensely readable, blackly comic journey through the world of political and religious extremism that sees Ronson rubbing shoulders with Muslim fundamentalists, KKK members and David Icke, and finding that - hey guys, maybe you're not all so different after all. Which I suppose is heartening. In a way. (3)



The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (2011) - Ronson's study of psychology, psychiatry and psychopathy is fast-moving, consistently hilarious, and completely and utterly fascinating. It's also a little unfocused: a scattershot treatment of the subject in which his angle seems determined by the eccentric people he can find to interview, before he attempts to drag together some conclusions at the death. I did bloody love reading it, though, and I learned a lot: the revelation about the official classification of mental illnesses is absolutely astonishing. (3.5)

TV:



Parks and Recreation: Season 7 (2014-15) - I'm sad to see my favourite sitcom go, but it's probably about time, as towards the end this started to feel very familiar: at times fuzzily, more often in a rather worn way. These final 13 episodes kicked the story into 2017, a scenario occasionally exploited for poor non-sequitur gags about fictitious world events, but more often used to up the emotional ante, as in a genuinely affecting storyline about the estrangement between central character Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and her former boss, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman). Its flaws are evident, almost all the sign of an enterprise that's gone on for too long - the Johnny Karate novelty episode doesn't really work, Craig (Billy Eichner) remains a horrendously unfunny, one-note character, and the walk-ons by real politicians give the distinct impression that the programme is now on the inside (rarely the best place for a show with a satiric bent) - but it's still hard to say goodbye to a show that's given me so much joy, and which still makes me laugh out loud and tear up with some regularity, even in its seventh and final season. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.