Three Noirs by Anthony Mann

Renoir Noir

6.5/10 – Jean Renoir fled France in 1940 and spent seven frustrating years in Hollywood making five American films. The Woman on the Beach was his final Hollywood project, usually classified as a film noir, though it feels more like a psychological drama with norish elements. It’s an interesting but flawed endeavor that struck me as being bizarrely edited or even unfinished. It’s only 71 minutes long, for one thing. I began to suspect that there must have been some longer original version that the studio chopped up over Renoir’s objections. Turns out that the story of its production was a little more complicated than that.

There was a lot riding on the project, as Renoir’s earlier Hollywood films hadn’t done that well by commercial standards. Though he had struggled within the confines of the studio system, he enjoyed being in Hollywood and wanted to stay, so he was determined to make a successful movie. The story had a lot of potential. Here’s Richard Brody’s description: “A Second World War veteran (Robert Ryan) who suffers from post-traumatic stress, including nightmares of a torpedoed and sinking ship and his own near-drowning, works as a Coast Guard officer in a small seaside community. In his lonely waterfront wanderings, he meets, amid ruins, a glossy and brooding woman (Joan Bennett). There’s an instant erotic spark between them, and she invites him to her cottage. There, he meets her husband (Charles Bickford), a formerly well-regarded painter who is now blind—and who possessively brings the young man into the household for company. But the brewing romance between the youngsters (not to spoil the plot) is troubled by an ugly element of backstory between husband and wife.”

Renoir got along well with Joan Bennett, who spoke fluent French, and enjoyed working on the film. He felt happy with the results. But in September 1946, the movie was given a preview at the University of Santa Barbra, and the crowd hated it. Evidently, Renoir hadn’t followed the conventions of the mystery genre to their liking. There’s conflicting information now about what happened next, whether studio bosses ordered extensive changes or Renoir himself was responsible. In a later interview with Francois Truffaut, he claimed, “I was the first to advise cut and changes.” Obviously, his previous experiences with producer Daryl Zanuck and Renoir’s own desire to succeed may have prompted him to revise the film in a way he thought would please the studio. In any case, he wound up re-shooting between one-third and one-half of the film and completely re-editing it. Nothing helped. It failed miserably at the box office and received harsh criticism when it was finally released a year later. Unfortunately, there is no known copy of his original version, nor any surviving footage of that attempt. So we are left to wonder what might have been.

Even in its “mutilated” form, the film still has fans. Some, like French director Jacques Rivette, consider it a masterpiece. And Brody calls it one of his favorite films. For him, The Woman on the Beach “has a dreadful, oneiric allure that bursts with a dark brilliance into an emotional and artistic apocalypse. It’s one of the great endings, one that foreshadows, remarkably, that of another noir classic, ‘Kiss Me Deadly,’ directed by Robert Aldrich, who was Renoir’s assistant director.” I thought it had some fascinating moments and some potential in the plot. The fact that the husband in this tense triangle is a famous painter is certainly interesting, considering Renoir’s own background. The acting is very good throughout, and some of the moody photography in the abandoned ship along the beach is wonderful. But the writing itself, at least in this version, feels clunky and somewhat predictable, despite whatever Freudian allusions may be offered. It’s worth watching, primarily because it’s Renoir. But it doesn’t come anywhere near his great masterpieces, or even excellent work like The River, which would turn out to be his next project and helped re-establish his reputation after his difficult Hollywood sojourn.

I’ll let Renoir have the last word on The Woman on the Beach:

“Although I don’t regret my American films, I know for a fact they don’t even come close to any ideal I have for my work . . . they represent seven years of unrealized works and unrealized hopes. And seven years of deceptions too . . .”

Where Danger Lives (1950)

8/10 - Continuing with a series of Robert Mitchum noirs. His biographer calls Where Danger Lives “one of the darkest and most unrelenting examples of the film noir genre.” In this one, Mitchum plays a young doctor on the verge of great success, beloved by children and a pretty, understanding nurse. One night, as he’s about to go off duty, a suicide attempt gets rolled into the emergency room. She’s beautiful and mysterious! You can see the good doctor becoming entranced as he saves her life - while his devoted girlfriend nurse watches him during the procedure. But, come on, Bob, this dark-haired beauty just tried to kill herself! You don’t want to get mixed up with that! She’s also rich. With an abusive father. So, naturally, Mitch gets more and more involved, and you can only shake your head and say, "Bob, Bob, Bob... What are you doing?!" Then it turns out that her “father” is actually her husband! (Great smaller role for Claude Rains – I love Claude Rains). He tries to warn the young doctor that she’s crazy, and it’s so clear that there’s some seriously messed up stuff going on between this married couple. But Bob gets drunk – so torn up is he by this femme tres fatale. There’s a violent fight with Claude. Bob gets hit on the head with a fireplace poker. When he wakes up, Claude is dead and Bob has a major concussion. The woman says they have to run away to Mexico, and Bob, being groggy and not thinking clearly, agrees! So they start off on their dark journey to the border. Bob, being a doctor, realizes that his head injury is serious and that he could die at any moment! And everything is totally foggy and he can't think straight. It's like being trapped in a nightmare and not being able to wake up. He’s being chased by the police, hounded by a psychotic woman and making lots of bad decisions - because, he’s literally out of his mind. And it only gets worse...

The cinematography is by the great Nicolas Musuraca, who did Out of the Past, and the visuals are great throughout. (Mitchum said it was one of his many films “lit by matches.”) Real noir. The set-up of the concussion allows the director and cinematographer to get in some wonderfully surreal scenes. Very efficient directing by John Farrow, who was, evidently, a sick tyrant on the set – Mitchum’s agent “ran screaming at his throat” at one point, because he kept making Bob fall down a dangerous set of stairs instead of using a stunt man, and after several of these takes, Mitchum finally told Farrow to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words. The screenplay, piling up one outlandishly extreme scenario after another, is actually by Charles Bennett, Hitchcock’s old screenwriter, who did The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Foreign Correspondent, etc. The only real drawback to the film is Faith Domergue, who plays the femme fatale. She does pretty well as a crazy woman, but I would like to have seen another actress in the role. Jane Greer, perhaps, who worked with Mitch on Out of the Past and The Big Steal. Or Gloria Grahame – that would’ve been interesting. All in all, it’s a classic noir, not one of the greatest but interesting and worth watching, with Robert Mitchum out of his head. Relentless is a good word. It gets on a roll, heading downhill fast to “the border” – the mystical line between love and hate, sanity and madness, and darkness and its even darker shadow.

Macao (1952)

8/10 - More Robert Mitchum noir. Mitch teams up again with Jane Russell in this 1952 film about American ex-pats who get entangled in a web of crime in Macao. Josef von Sternberg is credited as director, and it certainly bears some of his hallmark mysterious Asian exotica. I kept waiting (hoping) for Marlene Dietrich to show up, but no such luck. We do get Gloria Grahame, however, so at least there’s that. But Sternberg was fired by producer Howard Hughes during production and Nicholas Ray (Grahame’s husband at the time) finished directing the film, with Mitchum actually writing sections of the movie in an effort to string everything together. Despite some unevenness here and there, it’s a solid noir, with excellent camera work again by Harry J. Wild (who was also shot the previous Mitchum-Russell movie His Kind of Woman.) There’s a gorgeous chase scene at night through sampans docked in the harbor, so you have Mitchum and others maneuvering through lots of fishing nets while precariously balanced on dark water. Mitchum, Russell and the always reliable William Bendix disembark in Macao and immediately become involved with another American who runs the biggest casino on the island. As it turns out, someone’s a cop working undercover, and the plot twists around as different characters try to figure out who is who and who’s helping who and who’s going to wind up with who. (Okay, that last one is never really a mystery.) Mitchum and Russell once again have great chemistry – I wish they had done more films together. Macao was Sternberg’s first film since 1941’s interesting The Shanghai Gesture, and it would be his last Hollywood project. No one will mistake it for his early masterpieces with Marlene, nor will Macao ever be ranked among the greatest noirs, but it has a lot going for it.

His Kind of Woman (1951)

8.5/10 - Currently enjoying a streak of great Robert Mitchum noirs from the late 40s / early 50s, and it started with this one. His Kind of a Woman somehow manages to combine classic film noir elements, action, psychotic violence, and a healthy dose of comedy (though not of the Monty Python variety, as the back of the DVD weirdly claimed). Mitchum plays Dan Milner, a down-on-his-luck gambler who’s set up by high-level mobsters who then “offer” him a large sum of money to go down to an isolated resort in Mexico and wait for instructions on the job they want done. On the flight down, he encounters Jane Russell, the girlfriend of a famous actor – played deliriously by Vincent Price – who’s on a hunting trip at the lodge. The first half of the film has a languid, mysterious atmosphere as Mitchum waits around at the lodge, encountering a strange array of characters, including a sexually predatory Jim Backus (!), and trying to figure out what’s going on. What he doesn’t know is that he’s become involved in a scheme to get a major gangster (Raymond Burr) that’s been deported to Italy back into the United States. Mitchum and Russell sizzle together (they would be re-matched a year later in another great noir, Macao, and, according to the bonus feature, became lifelong friends), but Vincent Price almost steals the show as a hammy, fed-up actor who finally finds himself when he’s actually shooting at bad guys, quoting bits of Shakespeare along the way. The story’s a little convoluted, the product of Howard Hughes re-doing much of the film after the initial version by John Farrow (Mia’s father). The last section alone includes a particularly brutal beating scene (for 1951), a terrifying Nazi serum(!), shootouts, and a swashbuckling fight aboard a yacht, but it’s ultimately quite entertaining. The cinematographer, Harry J. Wild, was a noir veteran (Murder My Sweet, Cornered, The Big Steal) and does a great job with the shadows and angles, making the most of the elaborate Mexican resort set. The casting is terrific. Russell is stunning looking (that according to Alexandra, and I would not disagree) and a lot of fun on screen. Robert Mitchum is, well, just his bad-ass self. His Kind of Woman is a bit of an odd duck as a film noir, with the comic elements and over-elaborate plot twists, but it conjures up just enough of the existential angst before turning into something of a romp. I saw it alone the first time and enjoyed it so much I made Alexandra watch it, and it only got better the second time. Very entertaining.

100 Favorite Films

Every so often, I sit down and make a list of my favorite films. Here's the most recent edition - 100 Films in alphabetical order.

À bout de souffle [Breathless] (1960)
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre, The Wrath of God] (1972)
El ángel exterminador [Exterminating Angel] (1962)
Animal Crackers (1930) ***
Ansiktet [The Magician] (1958) ***
Apocalypse Now (1979) ***
L'armée des ombres [Army of Shadows] (1969)
L'atalante (1934)
The Awful Truth (1937)
Ball of Fire (1941)
The Band Wagon (1953)
Bande à part (1964)
La belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast] (1946)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
La bête humaine [The Human Beast] (1938)
The Bishop's Wife (1947)
Bob le flambeur (1956)
Born Yesterday (1950)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Bringing Up Baby (1938) ***
Capitaine Conan (1996)
Casablanca (1942)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Crna macka, beli macor [Black Cat, White Cat] (1998)
"Dekalog" (1989)
Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967)
Desire (1936)
La dolce vita (1960)
Double Indemnity (1944) ***
La double vie de Véronique [The Double Life of Veronique] (1991) ***
Down by Law (1986) ***
Du rififi chez les hommes [Rififi] (1955)
8½ (1963) ***
Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise] (1945)
El espíritu de la colmena [Spirit of the Beehive] (1973)
Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain [Amélie] (2001)
French Kiss (1995)
Galaxy Quest (1999)
The Gay Divorcee (1934)
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
The Godfather (1972)
La grande illusion (1937)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Help! (1965)
Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] (1987) ***
His Girl Friday (1940)
Holiday (1938)
Intervista (1987)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Jean de Florette (1986) ***
Kagemusha (1980) ***
Key Largo (1948)
The Lady Eve (1941)
The Lady from Shanghai (1947) ***
Life of Brian (1979)
The Maltese Falcon (1941) ***
Manhattan (1979) ***
The Matrix (1999)
Le mépris [Contempt] (1963)
Midnight (1939)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail [Mønti Pythøn ik den Høli Gräilen] (1975) ***
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
My Man Godfrey (1936)
North by Northwest (1959) ***
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) ***
Orphée (1950) ***
Out of the Past (1947) ***
Pépé le Moko (1937)
Paris, Texas (1984) ***
The Philadelphia Story (1940) ***
Pierrot le fou (1965)
Le quai des brumes [Port of Shadows] (1938)
Quai des Orfèvres (1947)
Quick Change (1990)
Ran (1985) ***
The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) ***
Roman Holiday (1953) ***
Sabrina (1954)
Le salaire de la peur [Wages of Fear] (1953)
Le samouraï (1967)
Shichinin no samurai [The Seven Samurai] (1954)
Silk Stockings (1957)
Simple Men (1992) ***
Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Det sjunde inseglet [The Seventh Seal] (1957) ***
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Swing Time (1936)
Tengoku to jigoku [High and Low] (1963)
The Thin Man (1934) ***
Three Days of the Condor (1975) ***
Tierra (1996)
To Have and Have Not (1944) ***
Top Hat (1935) ***
Touchez pas au grisbi [Grisbi] (1954)
Trois couleurs: Rouge (1994)
The Unbelievable Truth (1989)
Vincent, François, Paul... et les autres (1974)
White Christmas (1954) ***
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Yojimbo (1961)

***Films that also appeared on my list of Favorite 50 Films done in 1995 and Favorite 100 Films done in 2004 (1-50 and 51-100).

By Director

Akira Kurosawa (5) - Kagemusha (1980) ***, Ran (1985) ***, Shichinin no samurai [The Seven Samurai] (1954), Tengoku to jigoku [High and Low] (1963) , Yojimbo (1961)

Jean-Luc Godard (4) - À bout de souffle [Breathless] (1960), Bande à part (1964), Le mépris [Contempt] (1963), Pierrot le fou (1965)

Howard Hawks (4) - Ball of Fire (1941), Bringing Up Baby (1938) ***, His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944) ***

George Cuckor (3) - Born Yesterday (1950), Holiday (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940) ***

Federico Fellini (3) - La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963) ***, Intervista (1987)

Krzysztof Kieslowski (3) - "Dekalog" (1989), La double vie de Véronique [The Double Life of Veronique] (1991) ***, Trois couleurs: Rouge (1994)

Jean-Pierre Melville (3) - L'armée des ombres [Army of Shadows] (1969), Bob le flambeur (1956), Le samouraï (1967)

Billy Wilder (3)- Double Indemnity (1944) ***, Sabrina (1954), Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Two Films: Bergman, Carné, Clouzot, Cocteau, Coppola, Curtiz, Hartley, Houston, Jarmusch, Terry Jones, Renoir, Mark Sandrich, Welles, Wyler

By Actors

Cary Grant (7) - The Awful Truth (1937), The Bishop's Wife (1947), Bringing Up Baby (1938) ***, His Girl Friday (1940), Holiday (1938), North by Northwest (1959) ***, The Philadelphia Story (1940) ***

Fred Astaire (5) - The Band Wagon (1953), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Silk Stockings (1957), Swing Time (1936), Top Hat (1935) ***

Humphrey Bogart (5) - Casablanca (1942) Key Largo (1948), The Maltese Falcon (1941) ***, Sabrina (1954), To Have and Have Not (1944) ***

Jean Gabin (5) - La bête humaine [The Human Beast] (1938), La grande illusion (1937), Pépé le Moko (1937), Le quai des brumes [Port of Shadows] (1938), Touchez pas au grisbi [Grisbi] (1954)

William Holden (5) - Born Yesterday (1950), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Sabrina (1954), Sunset Blvd. (1950), The Wild Bunch (1969)

Three Films: Cyd Charise, Kathrine Hepburn, Marcello Mastroianni, Toshiro Mifune, Yves Montand, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck

By Language

Fifty-seven films were in English. Of the 43 films in other languages, 26 were in French.

By Date
1930s: 17
1940s: 17
1950s: 18
1960s: 14
1970s: 11
1980s: 9
1990s: 13
2000s: 2

Fifty-five films were from before I was born.

Other Films

It's interesting for me to see how my lists have changed over the years. I've discovered or explored more fully different directors (Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Becker), actors (Gabin, Holden, Stanwyck) and genres (musicals, French film noir and film gris). Films that meant a lot to me at one time just don't resonate as much now. Or, maybe I just haven't seen them in a long time. Here are some films that appeared on my two previous lists.

1995 & 2004
Alice in den Städten [Alice in the Cities] (1974)
Beat the Devil (1953)
The Big Steal (1949)
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. [The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly] (1966)
Dom za vesanje [Time of the Gypsies] (1988)
Manon des sources (1986)
Raising Arizona (1987)
'Round Midnight (1986)
Vertigo (1958)
You Can't Take It with You (1938)

1995
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Delicatessen (1991)
Un dimanche à la campagne [A Sunday in the Country] (1984)
Duck Soup (1933)
Europa (1991)
The Fisher King (1991)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Jules et Jim (1962)
The Grifters (1990)
Truly Madly Deeply (1990)

2004
Adam's Rib (1949)
After the Thin Man (1936)
The Big Sleep (1946)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Fanny och Alexander (1982)
Fargo (1996)
A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Un flic (1972)
Gilda (1946)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
Lone Star (1996)
Nikita (1990)
No Such Thing (2001)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Sting (1973)
The Third Man (1949)
Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993)
The Usual Suspects (1994)

You can also check out the series of posts I did on The Greatest Films of All Time. Twenty-one of my 100 Favorite Films were in the Top 100.

Recent Screenings

Transsiberian (2008) - Roy and Jessie (Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer) are Americans who've gone to China with Roy's church to work with underprivileged children. A train buff, Roy books them passage on the Transsiberian Express from Beijing to Moscow, before flying back to the States. On the journey, they meet Carlos (Eduardo Noriega), a sexy, well-travelled Spaniard who seems to knows a lot about Customs, and Abby (Kate Mara), a young woman who has run away from Seattle.

Meanwhile, Grinko, a Russian narcotics detective (Ben Kinglsey) is tracking down whoever killed a drug dealer in Vladivostok and vanished with both the drugs and the money.

Jessie, who had a fairly wild past before marrying Roy and trying to settle down, feels sympathetic towards the seemingly lost Abby. And she feels something more unsettling for Carlos, who gives off an aura of raw sexuality and physical danger. When the train stops at a snowy village somewhere in Siberia, Roy goes looking at old coal locomotives with Carlos. When the train starts up again, Roy is no longer aboard.

Hoping that Roy has simply missed the train, Jessie gets off at the next village to make inquiries. Carlos and Abby decide they will stay with her until she finds her husband. They're concerned about her safety. In this isolated, wintry and foreign environment, the sexual tension between Carlos and Jessie begins to heat up, culminating in an abandoned Orthodox church off in the woods near the village.

The pacing of Transsiberian reflects that of the train itself. It starts off slowly -- introducing these people, telling their back stories and actually developing characters and relationships -- and then picks up more and more speed as the film chugs along. The subtle tension in one scene links to another, which links to another, until the total becomes almost unbearable. It's Hitchcock, not Quantum Solace or other contemporary "thrillers" that substitute action and quick edits for genuine suspense.

Director and co-writer Brad Anderson (The Machinist) offers some good twists and turns on the trip, which keeps the film moving along in surprising ways. The story of Jessie and Carlos doesn't end in the Orthodox church in Siberia, it only marks the beginning of a new stage in the journey.

Despite excellent acting all around, the film really belongs to Emily Mortimer. Transsiberian is Jessie's story in the end, and Mortimer does a great job of portraying the internal struggle between her restless nature, with its wild past, and her desire to live a positive life and love Roy, who saved her both physically and emotionally after she slammed head-on into his car while she was drunk. Jessie makes some really poor decisions on this journey. But Mortimer gives her the dignity of a human being really wrestling with good and bad aspects of herself, and the fact that they may be more intertwined than we normally care to admit. As she says to her husband at one point, quoting Tennessee Williams, "Kill off all my demons, Roy, and my angels might die, too."(So that's where Tom Waits got the line.)

But this isn't just a metaphorical journey. It is a physical one as well, through contemporary Russia, and Anderson does a great job capturing the ambience of traveling through a strange land, both in the small details and in the starkly beautiful shots of the train passing through the Siberian wilderness. While the landscape and people can seem exotic to the Americans, there's also a sense of the chaos, hardship and danger in the post-Soviet Union era. This becomes more evident as the film progresses. As one character says, "In Russia, we have expression. 'With lies, you may go ahead in the world, but you may never go back.' Do you understand this, Jessie?"

Where is that line? At what point can you no longer turn back? Brad Anderson has fashioned a fine suspense film that touches on these darker questions as it speeds on its way to a dramatic climax, with action sequences that seem to organically rise out of the need of the moment rather than being a constructed set-piece to show off CGI. The writing and directing are excellent. The acting is consistently great, with special kudos to Woody Harrelson, who has the thankless task of playing a fairly simple guy who's positive by nature, but who imbues Roy with real humanity. The cinematography by Xavi Giménez is top notch. There's a lot going on in this film. It lingers well and leaves you slightly unsettled. And it's easily the best movie that takes place on a train in a long, long time.

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED, unless you must have hyper-kinetic action with lots of explosions.


Duplicity (2009) - Clive Owen and Julia Roberts in a corporate espionage screwball comedy. Tony Gilroy, who did such a great job with Michael Clayton, offers up a much lighter take on capitalist morality this time. Owen is ex-MI6, Roberts ex-CIA, and now they both work in corporate espionage, for competing cosmetic companies. They love each other and are scheming together to make their big pay day and get away from it all.

Or are they? She may be playing him. He may be trying to get revenge for the first time they met, when she seduced him, knocked him out and stole Egyptian military secrets from him. That never set well. They're at competing companies, but she's a mole for the company he works for, and now he's her handler. Or is she a mole for the other company, using him to get information?

Gilroy piles on the layers of doubt, especially in the relationship between Owen and Roberts, which is both passionate and wary. They know they're both liars and schemers. Will they stay together, because they understand each other so well? Or will they be unable to resist the temptation of getting the best of the other? It's classic screwball comedy material taken to another level. Despite a deep vein of cynicism, it wouldn't be hard to imagine Cary Grant and Claudette Colbert in the same roles.

The best part: The film feels like it was written for adults. There may not be a lot here, but at least it's smart and savvy and knowing. If you like Clive and Julia, they have some good chemistry and the film is a lot of fun. And we finally know now: Clive Owen can do comedy. He actually has the funniest scenes in the film, getting excited over developments in the secret battles between two frozen pizza giants. This from a man who once stole Egyptian military secrets. (And that is the sly, darker underside to the film. Gilroy, who explored corporate espionage in Michael Clayton, doesn't go in depth much on the subject, but you realize afterwards how weird this whole new era is in some ways.)

The best sequence in the movie, however, may the opening credits, as Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson - heads of the competing cosmetic corporations who hate each other - get into a delicious slow-motion fistfight on the tarmac between their two executive jets.

RECOMMENDED, especially if you're in the mood for some smart fluff. Not recommended for Julia-haters.


Quantum of Solace (2008) - Casino Royale was such a pleasant surprise in the Bond franchise: Action, class and a dash of tough humanity, thanks to Daniel Craig, the best 007 since Sean Connery. Unfortunately, Q of S exchanges any of the human touches in Casino Royale for even bigger and sillier action sequences. The plot of the film is so unimportant that you don't even know what's going on at times. It's like watching a scene unfold as you pass by in a fast-moving car: "What was that? Who was that?"

On the positive side, we get more Judi Dench. M stands for Mother now, with 007 as her favorite son who gets into trouble all the time. (He's gonna break her heart.) How she keeps winding up in obscure international settings so quickly was weird though.

Strangely, I've never seen a Bond film so intricately tied to the previous one. Someone should've warned me that I had to re-watch Casino Royale immediately before starting this one. I'm supposed to remember all of these people and story lines from the last movie? The director and screenwriters obviously don't care about their characters or plot, though, so why should I?

Too bad. There are some interesting elements at play here, but everything get lost in the blur.

OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS:

Anatomy of a Murder (1959) - I should write extensively about this one, because it's truly a classic, and a landmark in trial films. If it seems unusually dark and cynical for late 1950s Hollywood, that's because it's directed by Otto Preminger. Jimmy Stewart is great, and well chosen for the role of a small-town lawyer who gets involved in a rape and murder case. Lee Remick was way sexy in 1959 - and later, too. The score is famous in and of itself, coming from Duke Ellington, who has a small role in the film. Highly recommended.

Burn After Reading (2008) - No, it's not up to the level of No Country for Old Men, but it's much better than some reviewers said when it first came out. Funny, dark, weird. It's classic Coen Brothers. Brad Pitt excels. And the scenes between two confused CIA superiors are worth everything. "Report back to me . . uh . . . when it makes sense."

2 Days in Paris (2007) - Julie Delphy wrote, directed, starred in, and even did the music for this film about a New York couple - Jack and Marion - who stop at Marion's parents' house in Paris for two days before returning to the States after a long trip. Things haven't gone well between the couple, with tensions brewing, restlessness showing its head, and possible incompatibility issues. While showing indebtedness to both Annie Hall and Richard Linklater's pair of Sunrise/Sunset films that starred Delphy, 2 Days in Paris creates its own personal identity, thanks mostly to Delphy's intelligent script. Some very funny scenes, a lot of excellent dialog, and delightful performances by the director's real-life parents. Delphy, who recently completed a film-making degree at NYU, has made an impressive directorial debut.

The Greatest Films of All Time: 51-100

You can argue forever about the content of a film, its aesthetic, its style, even its moral posture; but the crucial imperative is to avoid boredom at all costs.

Luis Buñuel

Another installment in my exploration of the world's Greatest Films of All Time. The initial post included an Introduction and Films 1-20. [The other posts in this series include Films 21-50, Films 101-200, and The Directors.]

You can skip the following brief intro if you've already read the other posts.

Briefly, I researched and compiled 30 lists of Greatest Films from various sources around the globe, including critics such as Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum; popular magazines like Time and Time Out (UK); films journals such as Sight & Sound, Cahiers du cinema, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski (Russia); and a range of Film Archives from countries like China, India, Ecuador, Israel, Greece, and Finland.

The 30 polls produced a total of 580 films. When films weren't ranked in the polls, I assigned a numeric value depending on the total number of films included (eg. 100 films = 20 points). So, the list I'm presenting is not a ranking of films I personally think are the greatest of all time. It's simply a reflection of results from across 30 polls voted on by hundreds of other people.

My quest was twofold: To see which works were considered the masterpieces of cinema from a variety of international sources, and to see if and how the perception of great films and great directors varied from one region of the world to another.

Films 51-100

51. The Third Man (1949) Carol Reed 396.5 points - 7 mentions
52. Sunset Blvd. (1950) Billy Wilder 379 - 7
53. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) Robert Bresson 373.5 - 7
54. Apocalypse Now (1979) Francis Ford Coppola 371 - 7
55. Ivan Groznyy I and/or II [Ivan the Terrible] (1944) Sergei M. Eisenstein 370 - 7
56. Raging Bull (1980) Martin Scorsese 367.5 - 7
57. Fanny och Alexander (1982) Ingmar Bergman 359.5 - 6
58. North by Northwest (1959) Alfred Hitchcock 357 - 6
59. Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin 355 - 7
60. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) Orson Welles 350.5 - 6
61. Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (1963) Luchino Visconti 347.5 - 7
62. Rio Bravo (1959) Howard Hawks 340.5 - 6
63. L'Age d'or (1930) Luis Buñuel 340 - 7
64. The Birth of a Nation (1915) D.W. Griffith 329 - 7
65. Barry Lyndon (1975) Stanley Kubrick 317.5 - 8
66. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Stanley Kubrick 317 - 6
67. Persona (1966) Ingmar Bergman 316 - 8
68. Pierrot le fou (1965) Jean Luc Godard 315.5 - 7
69. Viridiana (1961) Luis Buñuel 309.5 - 6
70. Pickpocket (1959) Robert Bresson 303.5 - 7
71. The Wizard of Oz (1939) Victor Fleming 292 - 7
72. Il Conformista (1970) Bernardo Bertolucci 288.5 - 5
73. Jules et Jim (1962) François Truffaut 279 - 6
74. All About Eve (1950) Joseph Mankiewicz 275 - 6
75. Rear Window (1954) Alfred Hitchcock 272.5 - 4
76. Sanshô dayû [Sansho the Bailiff] (1954) Kenji Mizoguchi 267 - 6
77. La Strada (1954) Federico Fellini 264.5 - 4
78. Notorious (1946) Alfred Hitchcock 263.5 - 7
79. The Apartment (1960) Billy Wilder 248.5 - 5
80. Amarcord (1973) Federico Fellini 247.5 - 6
81. L'Année dernière à Marienbad [Last Year at Marienbad] (1961) Alain Resnais 243.5 - 7
82. Gertrud (1964) Carl Dreyer 243 - 6
83. The Wild Bunch (1969) Sam Peckinpah 241 - 5
84. Roma, città aperta [Rome, Open City] (1945) Roberto Rossellini 236 - 6
85. Hiroshima mon amour (1959) Alain Resnais 234 - 4
86. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) Max Ophüls 233.5 - 6
87. (tie) Nosferatu (1922) F.W. Murnau 232 - 7
87. (tie) Madame de… (1953) Max Ophüls 232 - 4
89. (tie) Double Indemnity (1944) Billy Wilder 231 - 6
89. (tie) Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre: The Wrath of God] (1972) Werner Herzog 231 - 5
91. To Be or Not to Be (1942) Ernst Lubitsch 227.5 - 4
92. Ikiru (1952) Akira Kurosawa 227 - 6
93. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) Sergio Leone 225.5 - 5
94. Broken Blossoms (1919) D.W. Griffith 219.5 - 6
95. Napoleon (1927) Abel Gance 210 - 5
96. Dekalog (1989) Krzysztof Kieslowski 209 - 6
97. (tie) Blade Runner (1982) Ridley Scott 197 - 5
97. (tie) Un chien andalou (1929) Luis Buñuel 197 - 5
99. Schindler's List (1993) Steven Spielberg 195.5 - 5
100. (tie) Freaks (1932) Tod Browning 195 - 4
100. (tie) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) John Ford 195 - 4

Dekalog: Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1989 Polish mini-series on the Ten Commandments

Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder seem to have done particularly well in this section of the list, with three films each. In the end, Hitchcock wound up with the most films in the Top 100, a total of five. Wilder, along with Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, had four films in the Top 100. Directors with three films included: Buñuel, Chaplin, Coppola, Dreyer, Godard, Griffith, Kubrick, Kurosawa and Welles.
Whereas the most recent work in Films 1-50 was from 1976 (Taxi Driver) and the average year of production was 1949, Films 51-100 tended to be a little newer. The most recent work was from 1993 (Schindler's List) and there were four films from the 1980s: Raging Bull, Fanny and Alexander, Dekalog and Blade Runner. The average year of production was 1956.

Technically, Kieslowski's Dekalog is not a motion picture but a series of ten one-hour programs shown on Polish television. But it often gets included in polls of great "films." And, according to IMDB, Stanley Kubrick said Dekalog was the only masterpiece he could name in his lifetime. So, there. Whatever it is, it's one of the most powerful works I've ever seen.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was Kubrick's 1975 period piece, Barry Lyndon, ranked #65, just ahead of the more well-known Dr. Strangelove. Again, these two Kubrick's films didn't do well outside of the US/UK polls, though Cahiers du cinema did include Barry Lyndon. I've never seen this one by Kubrick and would be curious to hear from others who have.

Another surprise was Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West cracking the Top 100 at #93, even ahead of his own Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo [The Good, the Bad and the Ugly] (1966), which I always thought was more popular - it's currently ranked #5 at IMDB. Three other westerns showed up in Films 51-100: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, ranked #62, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, at #83, and John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, tied at #100. (Ford's The Searchers was the top western at #16.) Of the five westerns in the Top 100, I prefer The Wild Bunch.Peckinpah's western also made it two films for William Holden in the Top 100, along with Sunset Blvd. (#52)

Other actors who showed up in multiple films: John Wayne (The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) Jimmy Stewart (Vertigo, Rear Window and It's a Wonderful Life), Cary Grant (North by Northwest, Notorious), Ingrid Bergman (Casablanca, Notorious), Robert De Niro (Godfather II, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull), Marcello Mastroianni (La Dolce Vita, 8½) , Jean-Paul Belmondo (À bout de souffle, Pierrot le fou), Jack Lemmon (The Aprtment, Some Like it Hot), and, of course, Peter Lorre (M, Casablanca). Charlie Chaplin also starred in all 3 of his films: The Gold Rush, City Lights and Modern Times.

The actor who showed up the most in the Top 100: Orson Welles. He starred in all three of his own productions (Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil and The Magnificent Ambersons), and also gave an unforgettable performance as Harry Lime in Carol Reed's The Third Man (#51). And, of course, there's his little-known but amazing tour de force as Munchkin #27 in The Wizard of Oz.I didn't officially track actors in the list; I'm just eye-balling the film titles - so there may be others who appeared in multiple films. (Ah!, Claude Rains, for example: Notorious, Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia. And Anthony Quinn: Lawrence of Arabia and La Strada.)

Freaks, directed by Tod Browning (Dracula 1931), was an interesting case. It didn't show up on any US/UK lists, and I always considered it a minor cult film, but it was very highly regarded in other areas. The Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique chose it as one of the 20 Greatest Films of All Time, the Fundación Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela as one of the 24 Greatest of All Time, and the Cinémathèque Française as one of the 33 Greatest. It also ranked highly in the other French poll - #21 (tied) - the Cahiers du cinema Top 100.

It's interesting to note how much of a drop off there is in votes received between the #1 film, Citizen Kane, and #100, Freaks and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Kane showed up in all 30 polls and had a total of 1,735 points. The films at #100 each only appeared in four polls and had a total of 195 points. Only 16 films showed up in at least half of the 30 polls. After that, the number of movies considered "greatest" begins to grow exponentially. From that information, I would say that any kind of film canon must exist in a fluid state. Maybe that's why the IMDB Classic Film Board Top 200, which changes every two months, strikes me as a useful poll.

In the end, there were 46 English-language films from the US/UK in the Top 100. Non-English European films accounted for 47 titles (if you include Russia). Among individual European countries, France accounted for the most productions, with 19. Asia only had 7 titles in the Top 100, six of them from Japan.

Films ranked 51-100 that show up in my own list of Favorite 100 Films: Sunset Blvd., Apocalypse Now, North by Northwest, Pierrot le fou, The Wild Bunch, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre: The Wrath of God], Double Indemnity, and Dekalog.

I would like to hear about your own experiences with the films listed 51-100. Faves, ones you can't stand, etc.

Until the next reel. . . .

Films 101-200

The Greatest Films of All Time: 21-50

Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (ranked #45) features the director of Metropolis (ranked #26), Fritz Lang, in the role of a famous film director named . . . Fritz Lang. And, yes, it also stars Brigitte Bardot.

"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."

Alfred Hitchcock

This is the second in a series of posts on my exploration of the world's Greatest Films of All Time. The initial post included an Introduction and Films 1-20. [The other posts in this series include Films 51-100, Films 101-200, and The Directors.]

Briefly, I researched and compiled 30 lists of Greatest Films from various sources around the globe, including critics such as Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum; popular magazines like Time and Time Out (UK); films journals such as Sight & Sound, Cahiers du cinema, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski (Russia); and a range of Film Archives from countries like China, India, Ecuador, Israel, Greece, and Finland.

The 30 polls produced a total of 580 films. When films weren't ranked in the polls, I assigned a numeric value depending on the total number of films included (eg. 100 films = 20 points). What follows are the movies that ranked 21-50 after all of the points from the 30 polls were tabulated. So, this list is not a ranking of films I personally think are the greatest of all time. It's simply a reflection of results from across 30 polls voted on by hundreds of other people.

My quest was twofold: To see which works were considered the masterpieces of cinema from a variety of international sources, and to see if and how the perception of great films and great directors varied from one region of the world to another.

Films 21-50

Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise] - It ranked #21 overall. Bob Dylan once called it his favorite film.

To be honest, I don't place much importance on the exact ranking of the films on this list. If I adjusted the numeric value I assigned to unranked polls, for example, the specific rankings might change quite a bit. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (#26) and Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (#27) were only separated by 1.5 points after 30 polls (606.5 and 605 points respectively.) The former was mentioned 13 times, the latter, 11 times. So it would be ridiculous to suggest that Lang's masterpiece is better than Bergman's.

On the other hand, I think the difference between these two films and, say, Renoir's Rules of the Game, which wound up with 1,350 points and was mentioned in 24 polls, is significant enough to be of interest. Or between these two films and the 200-plus titles that scored few points and were only mentioned once.

Also notable is that while Metropolis and Wild Strawberries fell around the same place in the pack, their support came from different regions of the world. Lang's futuristic silent film from 1927 showed up on four out of six US/UK lists, while Bergman's movie didn't show up at all. Instead, it was Bergman's The Seventh Seal which showed up in four out of six US/UK polls. Meanwhile, Wild Strawberries did better than Metropolis in Europe, a surprising fact to me, as the European polls included a number of film archives, which I thought would naturally favor Lang's film. And, of course, Lang, was from Vienna and both started and ended his career making films in Germany.

My surprise also originates in my American cinematic education. A discussion in the U.S of the masterpieces of cinema, in my experience, would certainly include Metropolis and Bergman's The Seventh Seal. I assumed, then, that the two films were regarded more or less the same way throughout the world, especially since they're both what we usually call "foreign" films. If they're "foreign," wouldn't "foreigners" regard them as highly as we do?

But Metropolis only showed up in one European poll - a film archive in Belgium - and The Seventh Seal didn't show up in any. It seems, then, that a European discussion of the film canon would be more likely to include Wild Strawberries than the other two films.

And Ingmar Bergman, who has been one of the cinematic titans in my film education, barely registers at all in the Asian films lists. Only one of his films showed up in their polls. (I'll discuss Directors more in a future post.) Metropolis, on the other hand, was ranked #13 overall in the Asian polls.

So, take the exact numbers with a big grain of salt. Think in broader terms. Which films get mentioned five times and which ones get mentioned 20? Which ones are mentioned more in the U.S. or Asia?

Here's the list, followed by some of my discoveries.

21. Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise] (1945) - Marcel Carné - 661.5 points - 11 mentions

22. Greed (1924) - Erich von Stroheim - 649.5 - 14

23. M (1931) - Fritz Lang - 646.5 - 12

24. L'avventura (1960) - Michelangelo Antonioni - 645 - 13

25. Les quatre cents coups [The 400 Blows] (1959) - François Truffaut - 617.5 - 13

26. Metropolis (1927) - Fritz Lang - 606.5 - 13

27. Smultronstället [Wild Strawberries] (1957) - Ingmar Bergman - 605 - 11

28. The Gold Rush (1925) Charlie Chaplin - 591 - 13

29. La dolce vita (1960) - Federico Fellini - 588.5 - 11

30. City Lights (1931) - Charlie Chaplin - 584 - 12

31. Casablanca (1942) Michael Curtiz - 582 - 13

32. The General (1927) - Buster Keaton - 548 - 9

33. La grande illusion (1937) - Jean Renoir - 531 - 10

34. The Godfather Part II (1974) - Francis Ford Coppola - 520 - 9

35. Psycho (1960) - Alfred Hitchcock - 515 - 10

36. Touch of Evil (1958) - Orson Welles - 495 - 8

37. Kabinett des Doktor Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] (1920) - Robert Wiene - 487 - 10

38. Gone with the Wind (1939) Victor Fleming - 480.5 - 11

39. Andrei Roublev (1969) Andrei Tarkovsky - 472.5 - 8

40. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) David Lean - 466.5 - 8

41. Night of the Hunter (1955) Charles Laughton - 447 - 7

42. Zerkalo [The Mirror] (1975) - Andrei Tarkovsky - 440.5 - 8

43. Some Like It Hot (1959) Billy Wilder - 437 - 9

44. Chelovek s kino-apparatom [Man with a Movie Camera] (1929) - Dziga Vertov - 433 - 7

45. Le Mépris [Contempt] (1963) Jean-Luc Godard - 426 - 8

46. Chinatown (1974) Roman Polanski - 425.5 - 8

47. Ordet [The Word] (1955) Carl Theodor Dreyer - 418.5 - 9

48. It's a Wonderful Life (1946) Frank Capra - 418 - 8

49. Taxi Driver (1976) Martin Scorsese - 416 - 9

50. Det sjunde inseglet [The Seventh Seal] (1957) Ingmar Bergman - 415.5 - 9

One of the issues I wanted to explore in my quixotic quest was the influence of language in determining our concepts of Greatest Films. As an American, my relationship with cinema developed in an English-language environment, watching English-language films. I wouldn't encounter a film in another language until I was 16 years-old, when, out of boredom and curiosity, I slipped into the University of Texas Student Union Cinema to watch the last hour of one of the films in Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy. (One of the most transformative experiences of my life.) I took film classes in English and was surrounded by a English-language film culture, discussing mostly English-language films in English. It wasn't until I moved to Spain in 1995 that my English-language film life would really undergo a change.

So, when I started on this exploration, I was curious to see how some of the classics of English-language cinema, the movies we love and hold dear in the U.S., would do in other parts of the world. Do people outside of our country revere Casablanca, Gone with the Wind and It's a Wonderful Life? They seem like such quintessentially American films.

Well, as it turned out, all three showed up in polls from other parts of the world. This may be due in part to the vast power and reach of Hollywood, especially in the 1940s, when American global cultural dominance established itself in the ashes of World War II. Take the case of France, for example. The birthplace of cinema, which once had a film industry rivaling that of Hollywood, had to turn to the United States for economic assistance in the aftermath of the war. According to Richard Brody, in his excellent new biography of Jean-Luc Godard, one of the stipulations of the Blum-Byrnes Accords, the debt relief package from the U.S., was that "for nine out of every thirteen weeks, each screen would show American movies." The directors of what we now call the French New Wave - Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette - grew up in this environment and were so closely identified with Hollywood and its cinema when they first gained attention as young film critics, that the French originally deemed them the Hitchcocko-Hawksians, after Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.

The silent films from early American cinema in the list - Greed, Gold Rush, City Lights, and The General - also did well across all regions. Charlie Chaplin has accurately been called the first Hollywood "star" to achieve worldwide fame. But, then, silent films obviously don't have to deal with the language barrier. Also, as I mentioned in the previous post, it seems that comedies often have difficulty moving from one culture to another, so it's interesting to see how well silent comedians Chaplin and Keaton did internationally.

As it turns out, though, there were several English-language films that ranked highly in the Anglo-American lists but didn't even show up in the rest of the world. Three such films in the 21-50 rankings were: Chinatown, which actually ranked #7 overall in US/UK polls; David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. (All three did show up on the "international" lists, which are five polls impossible to classify as being from a specific region.)

Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, a French favorite.

Charles Laughton's disturbing Night of the Hunter, which wound up #13 overall in the US/UK polls, was ranked an astonishing #2 by the French journal Cahiers du cinema - but it wasn't mentioned in any other poll in the rest of the world. Almost the same thing occurred with Orson Welles' film noir Touch of Evil, which wound up #22 overall in the US/UK polls. It was also selected by Cahiers du cinema but didn't show up anywhere else.

All four French films in the 21-50 list - Les enfants du paradis (#21), Les quatre cents coups (#25), La grande illusion (#33), and Le Mépris (#45) - showed up in the French Cahiers du cinema poll, but they only appeared in one other European poll each. All four also showed up in at least one US/UK poll, with Truffaut's film (#25) appearing in five out of six. And, with the exception of La grande illusion, they all showed up in at least one Asian poll.

Both Russian polls chose Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 masterpiece, Andrei Rublev, despite the fact that the film was withheld from release by the Soviet Union for a number of years. The Moscow Film Archive, however, did not list Tarkovsky's later film, Zerkalo [The Mirror]. Time Out (UK) did choose Zerkalo, but that was the only mention in US/UK polls for either of these Tarkvosky films, which, quite frankly, surprised me. Andrei Rublev did appear on all five international lists, including the IMDB Classic Film Board Top 200, where Tarkvosky is worshiped with great devotion. Meanwhile, Zerkalo was the only film by Tarkovsky to appear in any of the four Asian polls.

The other Russian film, Dziga Vertov's influential Man with a Movie Camera, showed up in the Kinovedcheskie Zapiski poll but not in the list from the Moscow Film Archive. It wasn't selected by any of the European or Asian polls, but it did do well in the US/UK and international polls and was included in the list from Venezuela.

Curiously, there were no Asian films ranked 21-50, after an impressive five titles in the 1-20 list.

Films ranked 21-50 that show up in my own list of Favorite 100 Films: Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise], La dolce vita, Casablanca, La grande illusion, The Godfather Part II, Le mépris and The Seventh Seal.

I'd love to hear about some of your own experiences with the films ranked 21-50. Any favorites make the list? Ones you absolutely hate? Are you surprised by any of the cultural differences?

Until the next reel. . . .

Films 51-100

The Greatest Films of All Time: Intro and 1-20

Magic Lantern show from the 19th century

"Cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians."

Francis Ford Coppola

Welcome to the first in a series of posts about one man's quest to figure out the greatest films of all time. In this initial installment, I offer a general introduction to my improbable journey. Then, after various mystical, intellectual and emotional adventures in the realm of cinema - or, more accurately, the gut-wrenching, heart-breaking and mind-numbing struggle with lists, lists, lists! from around the world - I will reveal the amazing and (mon Dieu!) sometimes shocking tableau of what might be the 20 Greatest Films of All Time!

[UPDATE: The other posts in this series include Films 21-50, Films 51-100, Films 101-200, and The Directors.]

Reel One

A few months ago, I decided to start watching masterpieces of cinema that I had never seen before. Being the geek that I am, I wanted a neat, orderly list, so I could cross off titles as I saw each film. But where would I find such a creature? Who among the myriad critics, directors, academics, movie fans, and purveyors of popular magazines had ever compiled the one, true, absolutely indispensable list?

It seemed like a simple question: What are the greatest films of all time?

But it depends, of course, on who's making the list. In the internet age, there seem to be new ones every month, but too often they're skewed towards a specific audience/genre, or pander to commercial tastes, or only include films from one country, mostly the United States. (Recently, the American Film Institute managed all three tendencies at once in "America's 10 Greatest Films in 10 Classic Genres.")

I wanted something more: A genuine attempt at a film canon.

(If you want to argue about the very concept of "canons," take it up with Paul Schrader. "Canon Fodder." Film Comment 42.5 (2006) 33-49.)

Buster Keaton contemplates the Greatest Films of All Time

Obviously, a canonical list had to include cinema from all over the world. But I realized that my very conception of the world's greatest cinema came from reading American critics, taking classes in American universities, watching films distributed in the U.S., and talking with other American film fans. Sure, Roger Ebert may think Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is one of the greatest films of all time, and they may show it in classes at NYU or on Turner Classic Movies, but do people in Asia regard it as highly as we do in the United States? (Not really, as it turns out.)

Hollywood has been such a force in the movie industry for so long, we can forget sometimes about the equally longstanding cinematic traditions and thriving industries in other countries. Film history begins in France, with the Lumière brothers and George Méliès, and until the advent of World War II, the French gave Hollywood a run for its money. Later, via the Nouvelle Vague, they played a profound role in the transformation of cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s. India also has a rich cinematic history and produces more films than Hollywood. So what do the French think is the greatest film of all time? What about the Indians? I was no longer content with a list that simply included international films but was still developed by Americans. I wanted to know what movies the rest of the world loves and considers important.

Do the Portugese think a Hollywood musical like Singin' in the Rain belongs on a list of the best films ever made? (Yes, they do.) What about The Godfather? It's the #1 film on IMDB. Is it the #1 film all over the world? (Not necessarily. Americans and Asians had it ranked #3 overall; Europeans, on the other hand, ranked it #20.)

As it turns out, it wasn't easy finding lists of The Greatest Films of All Time as chosen by people outside of the U.S. and the U.K. (The very idea of listing great works of art may be an Anglo-American trait.) I searched high and low on the internet and found a few efforts from other countries, but not many. I even contacted the film divisions of the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, seeking guidance from my professional brothers, but neither proved helpful. Finally, I tracked down a book published in 1995 by the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film/International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), the most important association of film archives in the world. The book, which was located in only three libraries in the U.S., was called Le jeu des catégories [The Categories Game: a game for the cinema's centenary], and it included lists of great and important works of cinema chosen by film archives and institutes from various places around the globe. It proved very useful for my purposes.

Yeah . . . but will it play in Osaka?

In the end, I compiled 30 lists from eighteen different countries. Two lists came from individual critics: Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Many were done by groups of critics/judges in formats like the British magazine Time Out or the Russian film journal Kinovedcheskie Zapiski. From the FIAF book, I wound up with lists from 17 archives and institutes from around the world, including ones in China, India (maybe the most fascinating list), Ecuador, Finland and Israel. In another post, I'll give all of the sources and talk about some of the problems (and treasures) encountered in using them.

One important note now, however: When I say something like, "the Asians don't seem as enthralled by Stanley Kubrick," (which they don't), I'm obviously talking about a small number of Asians connected to cinema: maybe two dozen directors, critics and archivists in this case. The sample sizes from each of the regions is ultimately too small to formulate any serious conclusions. This isn't an academic paper - it's simply a personal quest. And the results served my purpose: To develop a list of great films from a more international perspective, and to see how many and what kind of cultural variations might show up when discussing cinema in different parts of the world. While my findings from these 30 lists obviously can't be conclusive, I do think they're interesting and worthy of discussion.

Alas, I couldn't find any lists from Africa or the Middle East. That's interesting in and of itself.

In choosing my sources, I had three main criteria: 1) that the lists had to be made by people or groups consciously trying to rank the Greatest Films of All Time, 2) that the lists had to include films from everywhere, and 3) that the lists had to be from 1995 or sooner.

I didn't use IMDB's TOP 250, for example, because I don't think the results are determined by people who necessarily know world cinema and have been mulling over 113 years of film history. As much as I loved WALL-E, I'm simply not ready to say it's the 19th greatest film ever made. Maybe it will be in the future, but I think wrestling with a canon requires a certain amount of distance from an initial release. At least more than 17 days. I did, however, include the Top 200 list from the IMDB Classic Film Board, as that list did fit my criteria.

The website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They compiles lists from over 2,000 sources to make their own grand list of the 1,000 Greatest Films. It's like the mega-version of what I put together. So why didn't I just use the TSPDT list? Well, it's an excellent and fun website, and I included their Top 200 in my own analysis, but I wasn't satified with their rankings because I had problems with their criteria - or lack thereof. They seem to include whatever list they could get their hands on: Sight & Sound's 10 Greatest Films from 1950 (i.e., nothing from the last 58 years of cinema), Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 "Best French Films Since the Liberation," or "The Top 10 Greatest Animated Lesbian Action Films of the 1990s," chosen by Ned, a first-year film student at North-Central State University in the Middle of Nowhere. There are some fascinating lists available on their website, but many of them didn't fit my criteria.

With all due respect for people in the rest of the world . . . What the hell's wrong with you?!?! What's so hard to understand about The Lady Eve? (It showed up on 4 out of 6 Anglo-American lists, and none anywhere else. Is comedy the hardest genre to transfer from one culture to another?)

One of the best sources, I thought, was the British Film Institute's journal Sight & Sound. Each decade, they produce highly regarded Top Ten Lists, one chosen by Critics and one by Directors. They do an excellent job of including judges from around the world, both men and women. If you love film and love lists, I recommend spending some time on their website. You can see individual choices from all the judges in the 2002 edition. Which film, for example, did Jim Jarmusch choose as the greatest of all time? (Jean Vigo's L'Atalante). Or compare #1 picks by Richard Linklater (Minnelli's Some Came Running), Roger Ebert (Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God) and Thai critic Anchalee Chaiworaporn (À bout de souffle [Breathless] by Godard). You can also track the perception of cinematic greatness over time. Citizen Kane didn't even make the first Top Ten in 1952, when De Sica's Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] was considerewd the Greatest Film of All Time, even though it had only been released four years earlier. After that, however, Citizen Kane has been ranked #1 on every Sight & Sound list from the last five decades. Bicylce Thieves didn't make the Critics Top Ten in 2002.

So, let's get it on with it. What are the greatest films of all time? Is it even possible to decide?

Out of 30 lists, ranging from 10 to 200 films each, I wound up with a staggering total of 580 films that someone somewhere considered to be the greatest of all time. Many films were only chosen once. But some films definitely began to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.

One, and only one, film wound up on ALL 30 LISTS. An amazing feat, it seems to me. (The #2 film, for example, only showed up on 24 lists.)

Not only that, it was also NUMBER ONE on every single list that ranked its films.

There was, then, surprisingly (and disappointingly) little debate about the Greatest Film of All Time. After all these years, it's still Citizen Kane (1941).

Orson Welles may have been shunned by Hollywood and had terrible luck raising money to make movies at all, but his rookie effort is still considered to be the greatest work in the history of cinema. Though I suppose it shouldn't have, the outcome surprised me. I thought by now that Kane's reputation might have subsided somewhat. It's obviously an incredibly important film, but was it, aesthetically speaking, the Greatest Film of All Time? Or, maybe it wasn't so highly regarded in other parts of the world. Maybe the Russians wouldn't think it was that great. But no, the 28 critics at the Russian film journal Kinovedcheskie Zapiski chose Citizen Kane as #1 overall. It was on a Time magazine list that included popular fare like Finding Nemo, and lists by film archives from Venezuela to Slovenia. It was even among the Vatican's list of Top Ten Greatest Films.

Yeah, whatever. Orson Welles and Citizen Kane. Yawn. His wife, however, definitely ranks #1 in the eyes of many serious and intellectual people who appreciate the finer aspects of cinema.

The #2 and #3 films also showed up on a lot of lists (24 and 23 respectively), often battling for second place. In the final analysis, Jean Renoir's La Régle du jeu [Rules of the Game] (1939) nudged out Sergei Eisenstein's silent classic Bronenosets Potyomkin [The Battleship Potemkin] (1925).

And, almost immediately, cultural differences started showing up. Potemkin was actually #2 in the rest of the world outside of the U.S. and U.K. Where did it rank in the Anglo-American universe? Down at #42! Do Americans think it's too old? Too communist? Why such a big discrepancy?

I developed a point system, awarding 100 points to the #1 film in a ranked Top 100, for example, and giving X number of points to films on unranked lists. If a film showed up in an unranked Top 10, for instance, I gave it 50 points, because it seems significant to be one of only ten works chosen. On an unranked list of 100 films, I gave each one 20 points. I tried to be fair in my calculations, but I'm certainly not claiming the system to be perfect. I also tracked the number of times a film was mentioned (Only the Top 100 titles.)

Citizen Kane wound up with 1,735 points in my system and was mentioned 30 times. Rules of the Game had 1,390 points (24 mentions) and Battleship Potemkin scored 1,253 points (23 mentions).

Only three other films scored over a thousand points:

4. Otto e Mezzo [8½] (1963) - Federico Fellini - 1137 (19 mentions)

5. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) - Carl Dreyer - 1061 (20 mentions)

6. Vertigo (1958) - Alfred Hitchcock - 1042 (16 mentions)

Hitchcock's classic also showed a bit of cultural variation, ranking #2 overall in the U.S./U.K. lists and only #18 in the Asian lists.

Jean-Luc Godard tries to determine the masterpieces of world cinema

Rounding out the Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time:

7. À bout de souffle [Breathless] (1960) – Jean-Luc Godard - 898.5 (17 mentions)

8. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – Stanley Kubrick - 880.5 (15 mentions)

9. The Godfather (1972) – Francis Ford Coppola - 872 (14 mentions)

10. Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) (1953) – Yasujiro Ozu - 844.5 (14 mentions)

Godard's first work may have transformed cinema more than any other movie since Citizen Kane, but don't tell the folks in the U.S. and U.K. Despite a high finish in the rest of the world, it came in at #63 in the Anglo-American lists. Do we hate him because he's French? Because he was a political radical? Because he won't tell us a nice, simple story?

Conversely, Kubrick's science fiction classic didn't impress the Asians as much as everyone else, only reaching #33 on their lists. It's such a visual and musical work, almost non-verbal at times - it seems like it would translate more easily into other cultures. Could images or concepts be more culturally specific than we think? Even more interesting, they don't seem to like Stanley Kubrick in general. Though he had 8 films on the full list, 2001 was the only one they mentioned. What is it about his work that doesn't connect with an Asian audience?

And here's the rest of the Top 20:

11. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) – F.W. Murnau - 833.5 (16)

12. L’Atalante (1934) – Jean Vigo - 829 (14)

13. Intolerance (1916) – D.W. Griffith - 828 (16)

14. Shichinin no samurai [The Seven Samurai] (1954) – Akira Kurosawa - 792.5 (12)

15. Rashômon (1950) – Akira Kurosawa - 775.5 (14)

16. The Searchers (1956) – John Ford - 749 (13)

17. Singin' in the Rain (1952) – Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen - 740 (14)

18. Pather Panchali (1955) – Satyajit Ray - 722.5 (15)

19. Ladri di biciclette [The Bicycle Thieves] (1948) – Vittori De Sica - 716.5 (13)

20. Ugetsu monogatari [Ugetsu] (1953) – Kenji Mizoguchi - 710.5 (14)

Though he didn't make it into the Top Ten, Kurosawa was the only director to have more than one film in the Top Twenty. As I mentioned before, Seven Samurai is actually regarded more highly in the U.S./U.K. - where it came in fifth - than it is in Asia, where it was only #19. Asians preferred Rashomon more, ranking it #13. Europeans, on the other hand, were the opposite. They had Seven Samurai at #13, but Rashomon doesn't show up until #95.

Another Japanese film that showed wide variations between Asia and Europe was Kenji Mizoguchi's 1953 classic, Ugetsu, which the Europeans ranked #9 and the Asians #96. But that's nothing compared to the variation shown with Mikio Naruse's 1955 film, Ukigumo [Floating Clouds], which ranked #9 overall on Asian lists and wasn't mentioned at all in the rest of the world. This Japanese film didn't even get released in the U.S. until 1980. I had never heard of it before. Could this be a case of poor distribution that has kept us from seeing and appreciating a great piece of art from another part of the world? How did Kurosawa do so well in the U.S. during the same time period?

What about Singin' in the Rain, perhaps the quintessential American musical? How did it do? Well, the Europeans think it's grand (The French critics at Cahiers du cinema ranked it #7 all time), but the Anglo-Americans only had it at #28 and the Asians at #48.

The Asians also didn't care as much for Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, ranking it #50, whereas it wound up #9 overall in the U.S./U.K.

Films ranked 1-20 that show up in my own list of Favorite 100 Films: Citizen Kane, Otto e Mezzo [8½], À bout de souffle [Breathless] The Godfather L’Atalante, The Seven Samurai, Rashômon, and Singin' in the Rain.

I'll discuss other regional differences in future posts and reveal more of the Top 200 as I go.

Which directors had the most films mentioned? (Cash prize for naming the top three.) Which decade produced the highest number of masterpieces? What was the worst year for great cinema? What do Asians have against Chinatown? And why do Americans hate Luchino Visconti? (Because he was in the Italian Communist Party?) So stay tuned (oops, that's a television metaphor) for future installments.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear what you think about some of these "greatest" films that have been listed. And which movies do you think are the best of all time?

Next up: Films 21-50