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

Recent Screenings

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does,

straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.
Ingmar Bergman

I've fallen behind on my Recent Screenings. Seems like I've been too busy lately to do much more on the blog than toss out a YouTube video or an obituary notice. In case you missed it, though, I did add a rotating list of the last 10 films I've seen, under the heading Recent Screenings in the right-hand column. There have been a couple of great films in the last month, several good ones, and a few I could've skipped. I was going to offer a brief rundown of some of the more interesting ones, but I made the mistake of starting with Sunset Blvd. I enjoyed the film so much upon re-watching it, and had so much fun trying to write about it, that I never managed to get to the others. I'll try again when I have more time and I'm not unpacking.

Sunset Blvd. (1950) - Directed by Billy Wilder, written by Wilder and Charles Brackett. Starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson.

One could write an entire book about Sunset Blvd., and, in fact, someone has: Close-up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream (St. Martin's 2003), by Sam Staggs. I feel like I can't even came close to doing it justice. There are so many elements about the film and the filmmaking that one could discuss.

The plot of Sunset Blvd. is fairly straightforward. Joe Gillis is a struggling screenwriter who had one early hit but now can't sell anything. Circumstances haven't gotten so bad that his car is about to repossessed, which would effectively finish him off in Hollywood. By accident, or fate, his car has a blowout in the driveway of an abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard. Except the mansion isn't abandoned after all, but inhabited by a former silent movie star named Norma Desmond and her devoted and somewhat mysterious butler. Desmond, planning a supposed comeback, has written a long screenplay based on Salome, and she offers Gillis the job of refining it. Thinking he can make some quick money, he accepts the task and winds up staying in the eerie mansion, where he gets sucked deeper and deeper into the dusty, psychotic but alluring world of Desmond, her wealth, and her increasingly unhinged mind. When Gillis begins sneaking out at night to work on a screenplay with a young woman from Paramount, Desmond's jealousy erupts and the whirlpool turns faster and faster until it pulls everyone towards the bottom.

The famous opening sequence features William Holden, as Joe Gillis, delivering a voice-over narration while floating dead in a swimming pool. Right away, you know this isn't going to be your typical film. Ironically, this wasn't the original beginning of the movie. The first version, which featured several corpses conversing in a morgue, provoked unintentional laughter from the audience at a sneak preview in Evanston, Illinois. Director Billy Wilder was stunned. Years later, he admitted that it had been one of the worst moments of his life. The release of the film had to be delayed for six months while he worked on a new beginning. It was worth it, though, as the swimming pool sequence became one of the most iconic in the history of cinema. Interestingly, Franz Waxman, who composed the excellent score for the film, didn't change his music at all for Wilder's new opening. The power, I suppose, of creative serendipity.

One of the greatest achievements of Sunset Blvd. is the seemingly impossible balance it strikes between film noir, drama, mystery, love story and some of the most exquisite black humor ever produced. Oh, and it's also the best film ever made about Hollywood. But the slightest wrong turn here or there and one feels like the entire work could unravel. I think some of the appeal of Sunset Blvd. comes from the tension that builds up as we wait for Wilder to slip and fall from his cinematic highwire. But he never does. It's one of the most spectacular daredevil acts by a director in film history.

Billy Wilder

This daredevil aspect is also exemplified in Wilder's choice of subject matter and in his casting decisions. An Austrian-born Jew, Wilder came to Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1933. His career immediately took off and by the time he began Sunset Blvd., he had notched six Oscar nominations for writing and two for directing, winning one each for Lost Weekend in 1946. But he was still something of an outsider, and to make a film about Hollywood's dark side after so much success there might have seemed like he was biting the hand that fed him extremely well. In fact, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, was so incensed by Sunset Blvd. that he screamed at Wilder after the premiere that he should be tarred and feathered for showing Hollywood in such a bad light. [The highly cultured and intelligent Wilder could only manage a two-word reply involving sexual intercourse.] If the film had turned out badly, or if the tone had been any sharper, or the writing had been the least bit self-serving, Wilder's career could've been seriously damaged, Hollywood not being the most forgiving place on earth. But it's a testament to the brilliance of Sunset Blvd. that it remains the film about Hollywood against which all other attempts are judged.

Wilder also took a tremendous gamble with his casting decisions. By 1950, the silent movie star Gloria Swanson had virtually disappeared from Hollywood, moving to the stage not long after the advent of talking pictures. Erich von Stroheim, one of the great directors of the silent period, had been reduced to acting in mostly bit roles after the colossal failure of his 1929 film, Queen Kelly. One of the great stories within the story of Sunset Blvd. is that Gloria Swanson was the main actress and co-producer of Queen Kelly. She and von Stroheim fought bitterly over the film until she eventually fired him and brought in someone to else to finish the production. He, in turn, owned rights to parts of the film, which he wouldn't allow to be released in the United States. The two had not spoken for 21 years before filming Sunset Blvd. When Norma Desmond (Swanson) watches herself on screen in one of her famous silent movies, with her butler (von Stroheim) running the projector, it is, in fact, a scene from Queen Kelly that we are shown. And though it's hard to imagine anyone else playing Norma Desmond, Swanson was actually Wilder's fourth choice after being turned down by Mae West, Mary Pickford and Pola Negri.

William Holden & Gloria Swanson

Finally, there is the case of William Holden. Though he made something of a splash in his 1939 debut, Golden Boy, Holden's career in the 1940s had basically gone nowhere as he got stuck in one mediocre film after another. He wasn't exactly a hot property when production began on Sunset Blvd. In retrospect, it seems like the role of Joe Gillis, a one-hit wonder whose career fizzles out, was written especially for William Holden at that point in his life. But Holden, like Swanson, wasn't Wilder's first choice either. Montgomery Clift was originally signed to play Gillis, but he backed out of the contract two weeks before filming began. Wilder then offered the role to Fred MacMurray, who turned it down. Marlon Brando was briefly considered, and the producers approached MGM about using Gene Kelly, but the studio refused to loan him out to Paramount. Someone mentioned the idea of Holden, but Wilder had seen some of his films and wasn't impressed. He agreed, though, to have lunch with the actor. As it turned out, Wilder realized that Holden was much more intelligent, sensitive, and charismatic than he had seemed in his movies up until then, and that he had never really been given a chance to shine. In the end, the two became lifelong friends and wound up making three other films together, including Stalag 17 (1953), for which Holden won Best Actor; Sabrina (1954); and Fedora (1978), a disappointing quasi-sequel to Sunset Blvd. So, Wilder not only took a chance on the controversial subject matter of his film, but he did so with a group of actors who in Hollywood terms in 1950 were pretty much has-beens, disappointments, and unknowns (Nancy Olson). And his two main stars, who had to carry the movie, were his fourth and fifth choices. His gamble on the cast paid off in spades, however, as the four principal actors in Sunset Blvd. were all nominated for Academy Awards: Holden for Best Actor, Swanson for Best Actress, von Stroheim for Best Supporting Actor, and Nancy Olson for Best Supporting Actress.

One more aspect of the film that seems risky now is Wilder's extensive use of voice-over. Seeing this classic for the second time, I was struck by how much of the story is told to us by Joe Gillis. It's a happy accident for Wilder that he wound up with William Holden in the role. Roger Ebert once said that Holden had one of the best screen voices of all time, and I concur. It's one of his underrated qualities as an actor. If you think the voice-over in Sunset Blvd. wasn't risky, imagine, if you can do so without cringing or laughing, Marlon Brando going on and on about Norma Desmond in that nasal accent of his. Or consider the different feel the film would've had if Gene Kelly had done the narration. Could he have maintained that incredibly fine balance between drama, noir and black comedy? Fred MacMurray does an excellent job with his voice-over in Wilder's Double Indemnity, but that film had a much different tone than Sunset Blvd. I think his higher-pitched, quasi-tough guy voice would've become grating after a while. And finally, though I like Montgomery Clift as an actor, I'm not sure he had the necessary weight or gravitas for Joe Gillis' extensive narration, or for the role in general for that matter. Holden, who always had a hint of sadness in his eyes and in his voice, no matter how cheerful or funny he was in his films, talks to us for almost two hours, and yet we never grow tired of listening to him tell us this strange, sad and darkly humorous tale.

Wilder was riding high when he made Sunset Blvd, and it's to his great credit that he was willing to take so many chances on his next film. A lesser director might have easily gone for the safe project. But you can't make great art without taking great risks. And in the end, Sunset Blvd. will probably go down Wilder's legacy film.

So what holds the movie together so well? I think Wilder's intelligence and great skill as a director are crucial. To weave together disparate genres so well, to have seen something in Holden, to have chosen Swanson and von Stroheim, despite their bitter past, all testify to his greatness as an artist and filmmaker. But the writing may be the key. Billy Wilder is rightly remembered as one of our greatest directors, but he was also one of the finest screenwriters to ever work in Hollywood. He received a total of eight Academy Award nominations for Best Director, winning twice. But he received an astounding 11 nominations for Best Screenplay, and he took an Oscar home for his work on Sunset Blvd. and two other films.

Billy Wilder's grave at Pierce Brothers Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles

If you read through some of the movie's Memorable Quotes on IMDB, you'll see how many are famous and, more importantly, how many are so damn good. It's one of those rare films that feels like it must have come from a great novel, even though it was written for the screen. When Gillis first spies Norma Desmond in the window of her sprawling, seemingly deserted mansion, he says it reminds him of Mrs. Haversham in Dickens' Great Expectations. And the movie itself has a bit of Dickensian feel in a modernized form. The kind of details that Gillis notices when he enters the house - the monkey's paw slipping out from under the cover, the wind blowing through the old pipe organ, the pictures everywhere of the young Norma Desmond - are the details one normally encounters in a book. Using such extensive voice-over allows Wilder and his co-writer, Charles Brackett, to give the film a more literary feel, a story-telling quality. It only works, however, because of the great cinematography and editing, the set design, and the wonderful pace that Wilder sets. Few films could feature so much narration and get away with it.

If you've never seen Sunset Blvd., I highly, highly recommend it. If you've already seen it, watch it again! It's so good, it gets better with each viewing. It's truly one of the greatest works of cinema ever produced in this country.