Top Ten Movies: 1929

A popular observation made about silent films was that they had reached their pinnacle by the time sound was introduced. Recently watching Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde Man with a Movie Camera, it’s hard to argue with such a case. Often found on countless “greatest movie” lists, this culmination of the “city documentary” genre exceeds in just about every boundary imaginable. As Soviet montage formalism, Man’s impressive in its seamless control of actuality and subjectivity. As nationalistic propaganda, it deviates from shoving any set of rigid ideals and focuses exclusively on people behaving like people, effectively delivering its patriotic statement across humanistically. As a silent film overall, it tells the story of a whole nation without a single intertitle. Add to it its ingenius use of self-reflexivity—allowing to see a day in a life of an unnamed city and then watching as, brace yourself, the editor pieces the film for us to watch as an audience in the actual movie, and you’ve got a master at hand orchestrating a well-maneuvered requiem to a medium we had already bid farewell to. So at #1 Man with a Movie Camera goes.

1. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov)
2. Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel)
3. Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. Lucky Star (Frank Borzage)
5. A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith)
6. Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst) and Diary of a Lost Girl (G.W. Pabst)
7. Hallelujah (King Vidor)
8. The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch)
9. Spite Marriage (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton)
10. The White Hell of Pitz Palu (Arnold Fanck and G.W. Pabst)

You want to talk about unprecedented, Luis Buñuel did to experimental movies in less than twenty minutes what few—if any artists in that vein—could claim in a career’s lifetime. Then there are those films that treaded the line between silence and sound. I’ve had the fortune of watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail on the big screen with Anny Ondra driven mad by the word “knife.” It is said that a silent version of the film exists, but I can’t imagine its delivery being just as impactful. A Cottage on Dartmoor mirthfully plays with a scene mocking sound at a movie theater. But other than that, Asquith’s glum thriller is anything but playful. Vidor’s Hallelujah and Lubitsch’s The Love Parade take leaps by becoming some of the very first musicals in film. All the while, directors like G.W. Pabst and Frank Borzage presented works that were nothing less than masterpieces of the silent movement.

Those titles that just missed the ranks include a twofer from Dudley Murphy: Both St. Louis Blues and Black and Tan are nothing short of exceptional in conveying just what exactly the blues and jazz meant respectively at the time—not to mention becoming cinematic benchmarks on music history by preserving in film the enigmas that were Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington. Erich von Stroheim had his problem picture, Queen Kelly, with Gloria Swanson taking control midway and unfortunately losing the film’s focus; and The Marx Brothers debut was forever embedded in nitrate with The Cocoanuts. Notable performances—apart from Louise Brooks cementing a mother of a legacy in one year alone—include Helen Morgan in Rouben Mamoulian’s remarkably fluid Applause, Anna May Wong overseas in E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly, and Gary Cooper in Victor Fleming’s Wolf Song and The Virgininan; my argument for the latter being that while Cooper wasn’t the most versatile actor around, he had the aura of what I always found myself to believe was a true movie star. So… there you go.

Next time: 2006.

Top Ten Movies: 1952

When you think of the movies, chances are you probably conjure up images in your mind that include Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman bidding farewell one foggy night at the end of Casablanca, or Cary Grant running for his life while a crop duster tries to gun him down in the middle of nowhere in North by Northwest. But there’s no denying that among these iconic scenes also stands Gene Kelly’s famous dance number in Singin’ in the Rain. In fact, it is rumored that during this exhilarating and now quintessential musical sequence, Kelly himself was battling a fever of 103 °F. But you’d never guess it! The minute the film begins, it never lets go of its wondrous and bright momentum. Here was a prime example of what the Hollywood studio system could produce: a high-budgeted technicolor spectacle with stars, songs, and a happy ending. More often than not, it succeeded in telling a good story along with it all. But with Singin’ in the Rain, the system got something more; it got a film that dealt with the trials of the motion picture industry transitioning to sound while in the real world Hollywood was desperately trying to survive a new and imposing competitor: television. So musical numbers from forgotten movies were reintroduced, historical events were loosely incorporated, and the whole industry watched as a film steeped in its own celluloid past provided sheer fun and good laughs in a landmark that all other musicals continue to aspire to achieve today. Not surprisingly, over sixty years later, Singin’ in the Rain still provides those good laughs, as funny and joyous as they were in 1952. 

1. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)
2. Othello (Orson Welles)
3. The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
4. The Quiet Man (John Ford)
5. Limelight (Charlie Chaplin)
6. Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa)
7. Europa ’51 (Roberto Rossellini)
8. Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls)
9. The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray) and Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang)
10. Casque d’or (Jacques Becker)

As fragmented as Orson Welles’s Othello is, it’s this same crude element—due to a complicated production history—that enhances the movie’s temper, not to mention its brilliant use of wide-angle lenses to create a cavernous space of veils, bars, and shadows. Then there’s the spiritual odysseys embarked by the leading actresses in The Life of Oharu and Europa ’51, which allow their films to transcend into an other-world realm not often found in the cinema—a true rarity that makes the case for the movies as a medium that can attain a higher level of aesthetic beyond their entertainment value. The same can also be said about Akira Kurosawa’s heartbreaking portrayal of what extraordinary measures can result out of one dying man’s compassion for others. John Ford returned to his ancestry land to shoot one of his most strikingly lush non-westerns, while Nicholas Ray and Fritz Lang rodeoed their way down to ranch country in The Lusty Men and Rancho Notorious to dabble in Ford’s mastered genre.

Those that just missed the ranks include Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D., which, along with Europa ’51, demonstrated that Italian Neoralist films, although waning by the early 1950s, still had some influential titles left in their memorable movement. Gérard Phillipe channeled his inner Errol Flynn in Fanfan la Tulipe, Renoir worked with Magnani in The Golden Coach, and Gary Cooper duked it out on his own for a showdown (and a hit song) in High Noon. René Clément had the devastating Forbidden Games, while Fritz Lang also delivered another interesting genre picture: Clash by Night. Add a couple of other classic westerns in Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River and Howard Hawk’s The Big Sky, some taut B-noirs like Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin and Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential, and 1952 is beginning to look like quite the robust year for American cinema.

Next week: 1987. Offering a swan song of a movie as beautiful to watch as it to listen to—the dialogue, that is. Melodic. Like an old Irish standard.