AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE'S TOP 1001 Citizen Kane (1941) 2 Casablanca (1942) 3 The Godfather (1972) 4 Gone With the Wind (1939) 5 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 6 The Wizard of Oz (1939) 7 The Graduate (1967) 8 On the Waterfront (1954) 9 Schindler's List (1993) 10 Singin' in the Rain (1952) 11 It's a Wonderful Life (1946) 12 Sunset Boulevard (1950) 13 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) 14 Some Like It Hot (1959) 15 Star Wars (1977) 16 All About Eve (1950) 17 The African Queen (1951) 18 Psycho (1960) 19 Chinatown (1974) 20 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) 21 The Grapes of Wrath (1940) 22 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 23 The Maltese Falcon (1941) 24 Raging Bull (1980) 25 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 26 Dr. Strangelove (1964) 27 Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 28 Apocalypse Now (1979) 29 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) 30 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) 31 Annie Hall (1977) 32 The Godfather, Part II (1974) 33 High Noon (1952) 34 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) 35 It Happened One Night (1934) 36 Midnight Cowboy (1969) 37 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 38 Double Indemnity (1944) 39 Doctor Zhivago (1965) 40 North by Northwest (1959) 41 West Side Story (1961) 42 Rear Window (1954) 43 King Kong (1933) 44 The Birth of a Nation (1915) 45 A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) 46 A Clockwork Orange (1971) 47 Taxi Driver (1976) 48 Jaws (1975) 49 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) 50 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) 51 The Philadelphia Story (1940) 52 From Here to Eternity (1953) 53 Amadeus (1984) 54 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 55 The Sound of Music (1965) 56 M*A*S*H (1970) 57 The Third Man (1949) 58 Fantasia (1940) 59 Rebel Without a Cause (1955) 60 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 61 Vertigo (1958) 62 Tootsie (1982) 63 Stagecoach (1939) 64 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) 65 The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 66 Network (1976) 67 The Manchurian Candidate (1962) 68 An American in Paris (1951) 69 Shane (1953) 70 The French Connection (1971) 71 Forrest Gump (1994) 72 Ben-Hur (1959) 73 Wuthering Heights (1939) 74 The Gold Rush (1925) 75 Dances With Wolves (1990) 76 City Lights (1931) 77 American Graffiti (1973) 78 Rocky (1976) 79 The Deer Hunter (1978) 80 The Wild Bunch (1969) 81 Modern Times (1936) 82 Giant (1956) 83 Platoon (1986) 84 Fargo (1996) 85 Duck Soup (1933) 86 Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) 87 Frankenstein (1931) 88 Easy Rider (1969) 89 Patton (1970) 90 The Jazz Singer (1927) 91 My Fair Lady (1964) 92 A Place in the Sun (1951) 93 The Apartment (1960) 94 GoodFellas (1990) 95 Pulp Fiction (1994) 96 The Searchers (1956) 97 Bringing Up Baby (1938) 98 Unforgiven (1992) 99 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) 100 Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) |
 ust about everyone I've spoken to about the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American movies, presented on a stultifyingly vacuous three-hour CBS special last week, has been depressed about it--partly because the list was so lackluster and partly because the show failed to offer an interesting justification for any of the titles. Yet it's not as if the people I talked to had outsize hopes that were dashed. Rather they grimly acknowledged that the list was just business as usual, symptomatic of an increasingly dumbed-down film culture that continues to outflank our shrinking expectations.
Is the list simply a commercial ploy dreamed up by a consortium of marketers to repackage familiar goods, or is it a legitimate cultural contribution that's somehow supposed to improve the quality of our lives? (Are we still capable of distinguishing between the two?) If it's the former, then surely it qualifies as front-page news only if we're living in the equivalent of Stalinist Russia. If it's the latter, then why does the list contain so many movies that lie--about Vietnam (The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now), about racism (The Birth of a Nation, Taxi Driver, Pulp Fiction), about countless other matters? And why are so many of the entries aesthetically bland or worse while recapitulating all the worst habits of Hollywood self-infatuation, liberal (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) as well as conservative (Forrest Gump)? Shane is bad enough, but why did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid make the cut, along with (choke) Dances With Wolves? I yield to no one in my love for James Cagney, but did he ever make a less bearable picture than Yankee Doodle Dandy, the only Cagney vehicle on the list? But let's stop and consider what we're working with. Unlike every other comparable national film institution, the American Film Institute restricts its focus to films of its own nationality. (The organization was launched during the Johnson administration, at a time when patriots must have been concerned about Americans seeing too many foreign pictures.) This means that a survey of the best 100 movies period is a lot more than the AFI can handle, so it's merely recycling a lot of already overtouted product, as if to prove what fine citizens we all are. To make matters worse, as Michael Wilmington recently pointed out in the Tribune, "The battle-weary NEA, which used to supply The AFI with several million dollars in annual grants now gives about $100,000. By contrast, Britain supports its own Film Institute to the tune of over $60 million a year." Yet I'm not sure the AFI can justify getting even two cents for its present agenda. I'm told that when it recently shut down its art theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the AFI's director, Jean Firstenberg, told the press that video made repertory programming unnecessary. If that's what she said and that's what she meant, I'd rather see any NEA funds for the AFI used to reduce it to rubble. And given its egregious industry ass kissing throughout its existence, I'm tempted to conclude that its only substantial contribution to film culture--American or global--was producing David Lynch's Eraserhead at its film school. But the malaise provoked by the list of 100 movies isn't just a response to the uselessness of the AFI; it's also a response to an increasing lack of distinction between corporate greed and what used to be called public works. Whether the list grew out of a holy or unholy alliance of the AFI, Blockbuster Video, CBS, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, and the home-video divisions of 13 film studios--all of which have planned a summer full of hoopla promoting this list--doesn't really matter. What does matter is the rise of corporate cultural initiatives bent on selling and reselling what we already have (including, for instance, the worst possible video version of The Birth of a Nation), making every alternative appear more scarce and esoteric, without even attempting to illuminate the choices. (A friend points out that it's almost as if most of the masterpieces in the Louvre were being cleared out to make room for the work of Sunday painters.) Let me hasten to add that if I were drawing up my own list of the 100 greatest American movies, roughly a quarter of the AFI's list would be on it. But it seems more useful to offer an alternative list of 100 features rather than an unwieldy composite of the 25 or so AFI titles I can live with and 75 others. I've also decided to list my choices alphabetically rather than impose an order based on merit, since that would be tantamount to ranking oranges over apples or declaring cherries superior to grapes. For if lists serve any purpose (besides the interests of the merchandisers), it's surely to rouse us from our boredom and stupor. Above all, my impulse is to defend the breadth, richness, and intelligence of the American cinema against its self-appointed custodians, who seem to want to lock us into an eternity of Oscar nights. And the most salient fact about my list is that it's far from exhaustive; I didn't even have room for such miracles as Adam's Rib, Angel Face, The Band Wagon, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Blonde Crazy, John Ford's cavalry trilogy, Crumb, Dog Day Afternoon, Duel in the Sun, Family Plot, Gun Crazy, Ice, Lives of Performers, Me and My Gal, The Old Dark House, Paths of Glory, Pickup on South Street, Point of Order, Rope, Ruggles of Red Gap, Safe, Salt of the Earth, Two-Lane Blacktop, and God knows what else. For all the ranting I do about the absence of foreign movies from American screens--the only American cable channel to show many, Bravo, systematically recuts them--I have to admit that of all the national cinemas I know, the American cinema is the richest. That's what makes the historical and aesthetic paltriness of the AFI list so stupefying; it appears to display the taste of viewers who almost always see movies on TV or video and who can't remember what they saw more than a few years back. So it's poignant--especially given the stringent limitations on what kind of American movies can be financed, made, exhibited, and marketed today--that a brilliant industry aberration like Citizen Kane should head the AFI list, just as it's headed every comparable list over the past 30-odd years. It's a movie that clearly couldn't get bankrolled today (it's in black and white), much less survive test-marketing previews; it failed to turn a profit when it came out. The persistence of Kane as a favorite is ample proof that viewers--even "film professionals"--are smarter than they're usually cracked up to be. (Kane was the first of Orson Welles's Hollywood films, and one reason I've refrained from including his last, Touch of Evil, on my list is that I was a consultant on a version that's been reedited according to Welles's instructions and is scheduled to open in the fall.) Viewers are perhaps less smart about rooting out American masterpieces that don't have mainstream visibility; they need to be alert to what's playing fleetingly at alternative venues and then make an effort to get to them. The attitude that anything can eventually be caught up with on video is an illusion--not only because not everything makes it to video, but because none of these masterpieces was designed to be seen that way, any more than any great novel was written to be skimmed or read with pages torn out. If you want to test my list, you have a perfect opportunity this week, because two of the AFI's favorites (From Here to Eternity and Forrest Gump) and two of mine (Rio Bravo and Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son) are playing at alternative venues in Chicago. But if you decide instead to catch Tom, Tom on video you'll be out of luck; that pungent silent experimental film (see Fred Camper's Critic's Choice in Section Two) would lose most of its meaning and impact on video even if its maker, Ken Jacobs, were foolish enough to authorize a transfer. Admittedly, Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son is one of the most difficult films on my list, so it's not for everyone. (For that matter, neither is Citizen Kane, a movie disliked by some of my women friends.) It's one of three selections that incorporate and critically analyze other films, along with Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (a superb hour-long essay film by Thom Andersen, made in 1974 and narrated by Dean Stockwell) and That's Entertainment! III (a work of critical historiography as well as an excellent compilation that was rudely dumped by its distributor in 1994). The vicissitudes of availability always play a major role in developing film tastes and canons, and if the AFI and its business cronies had wanted to do something genuinely useful, they might have polled their group of voters about the 100 most neglected American movies and then made an effort to make them available, on film and on video. I can't say I'd agree with all the choices, and anyway some of the most neglected films don't work on video. But it's emblematic of how far we are from having a decent film culture that even if the AFI and company elected to make just the first 10 or 25 films on their list available in new 35-millimeter prints for screenings in theaters across the country, a veritable revolution would have to occur in the studios. * * * Our isolationism is a major part of the problem. I participated in a similar "reevaluation" of American cinema 21 years ago, when the Royal Film Archive of Belgium polled 116 Americans and 87 non-Americans from two dozen countries. The results, contained in a fascinating volume called The Most Important and Misappreciated American Films Since the Beginning of Cinema, were substantial and lively, and not only because the 1926 Ben-Hur garnered more votes than the 1959 version. (Truthfully, I haven't seen either, but at least the silent version piques my curiosity.) The RFA's top 100 included 36 of the movies on the AFI list, and Citizen Kane topped both lists. But even after taking into account the 15 titles on the AFI list made since 1977, the year of the RFA survey, the differences are telling. The films on the RFA list that came in second, third, and fourth--Sunrise, Greed, and Intolerance--don't figure at all in the AFI pantheon, and not far below those essential works were movies by such key figures as Robert Flaherty, Buster Keaton, King Vidor, Ernst Lubitsch, Victor Sjostrom, Preston Sturges, and Josef von Sternberg, none of whom was represented in the AFI's hit parade. Should one snobbishly conclude from this that non-Americans are more intelligent and discerning when it comes to American movies? I wouldn't. It's important to bear in mind that the RFA polled 203 film professionals--historians, critics, archivists, directors, teachers, and even a few students--whereas the AFI polled more than 1,500 Americans of every conceivable stripe in terms of knowledge about film. (If memory serves, I was one of them.) I should add that the RFA's and the AFI's notions of what a "film professional" is couldn't be more disparate; in this country, where familiarity with film history rarely plays any role in the hiring of reviewers, "film professionals" tend to get defined in tautological terms as people who write about films. (This process, along with institutional validation, can produce all sorts of strange anomalies, allowing, say, Pauline Kael and Daphne Merkin to be regarded as sisters under the skin.) I believe the difference between Americans and non-Americans in judging American movies is basically a matter of access and cultural conditioning, the consequences of which can be staggering. Let me cite a couple of examples of what I mean. Two nights before I tried to watch the AFI's three-hour special, I was in a hotel room in Helsinki, having just returned from the four-day Midnight Sun international film festival in Lapland. I did some channel surfing and found two films playing on local TV in pristine prints--Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Robert Bresson's Lancelot du lac. When I mentioned this the next morning to Peter von Bagh, director of the festival, he was miffed that the local TV programmers had been so thoughtless as to screen the two films at once, since that meant local film buffs couldn't tape both of them. Four days earlier I'd arrived at Sodankyla, the remote arctic circle village where the Midnight Sun festival has been held since its inception 13 years ago, and the first thing I saw on the main street was a couple of new street signs that said "Samuel Fuller's Street." An hour later von Bagh--a professional film historian who was one of the 87 non-Americans polled by the RFA in 1977--officially renamed the street at an impromptu ceremony. A major Hollywood filmmaker who died last November, Fuller isn't represented on the AFI's top 100 or on its top 400 list (he gets two slots on mine, for Park Row and The Steel Helmet); he attended the Midnight Sun festival its first year and subsequently starred in Tigrero, a film made by one of the festival's cofounders, Mika Kaurismaki. This year the festival showed Tigrero as well as a feature-length documentary about Fuller and Fuller's Underworld, U.S.A. Given the force and complexity of what Fuller's films say about American racism from the early 50s onward, it was more than a little disconcerting to fly back to Chicago, turn on the TV, and hear Jack Valenti praise the mediocre and relatively gutless To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)--number 34 on the AFI list--as the first Hollywood film to deal honestly with racial issues. It made me wonder if Valenti had been living on the moon; if so, he might have rocketed to the arctic circle for enlightenment. Robert Mulligan, who directed To Kill a Mockingbird, is a talented filmmaker, but better pictures by him would have found their way onto the AFI list if his mise en scene were the issue. One can safely bet that the inclusion of To Kill a Mockingbird--like the choice of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? over the infinitely superior Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Adam's Rib--is merely a function of the kind of liberal self-congratulation that brings standing ovations on Oscar nights and tears to Valenti's eyes. It has nothing to do with either the art of cinema or the reality of America--check out The Phenix City Story if you want to learn something about Alabama instead of Gregory Peck's virtue--but a great deal to do with the industry's guilty conscience. Indeed, what the AFI in one of its press releases has called a "celebration of the 100th anniversary of American movies" reminds me of Haven Hamilton's glib country-western national anthem at the beginning of Robert Altman's Nashville: "We must be doing something right to last 200 years." I would submit that if this piss-poor representation of American cinema is all we have to celebrate, we must be doing something wrong. * * * One proof of how isolationist we are is our perverse compulsion to remake others in our own image. This accounts for the inclusion on the AFI list of British films such as Lawrence of Arabia (number 5), The Bridge on the River Kwai (13), Doctor Zhivago (39), The Third Man (57), and A Clockwork Orange (46)--a gesture no doubt of unconscious imperialism on the part of those polled, justified by the American money that financed these films or by the few Hollywood actors in them. (Given these rules, why The Third Man turns up but not The Thief of Bagdad is anyone's guess.) In part as a riposte to the inclusion of A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's most dubious feature, I've included Vinyl, Andy Warhol's remarkable adaptation of the same English novel, on my list. Last summer at the Locarno film festival American directors made selections for a retrospective of "neglected" American movies, and Steven Spielberg had the cheek--or the innocence--to select Lawrence of Arabia. But back in 1977 only four participants in the RFA survey thought to include any of the David Lean films cited above, and three of them were Americans (one of them was a member of the AFI's board of trustees); no one had the nerve to select The Third Man. So maybe a gradual slippage in our understanding of what is and isn't American is part of the trouble. Making up my list, I grappled long and hard with the existential issue of national identity posed by such ambiguous masterpieces as F.W. Murnau's Tabu, Luis Buñuel's The Young One, Albert Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Josef von Sternberg's Anatahan, Michael Snow's Wavelength and Back and Forth, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, and David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. I finally wound up excluding all of them. Rightly or wrongly, I also refrained from including some of my favorite films by high-profile directors who are well represented on the AFI list, even if their best films aren't. For the record, I prefer The King of Comedy and Kundun to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas; The Conversation to either of the Godfathers; and Dumbo to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia. But even though I had some regrets about excluding these favorites, I have no doubt that readers can find them without my prodding. (One might quarrel with my excluding animation features entirely--just as I would quarrel with the exclusion of independents like Cassavetes and experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage from the AFI's list--but I would argue that the most remarkable animation in American cinema, from Tex Avery to Robert Breer, is generally found in short films. For that matter, the absence of shorts as an arbitrary ground rule is what explains my exclusion of Maya Deren.) I've deliberately sought to make my list conservative rather than provocative and grounded in pleasure rather than in any dutiful sense of historical importance. But since I've already stressed the significance of access and cultural conditioning in forming tastes, I should clarify the nature of my own background, which indisputably slants my list. Twenty-five of my selections were released in the 50s, when I was growing up, and my acquaintance with American cinema was based on two atypical forms of access to it. The first came from being the grandson of a man who ran a chain of movie theaters in Alabama and the son of a man who worked for the chain, which meant that I had virtually unlimited access to Hollywood movies throughout most of the 50s, seeing practically everything that came out without having to pay admission. The second came from living in Paris and London between 1969 and 1977, when the American movies I saw in both places--particularly at the Cinematheque and numerous revival houses in Paris, and at London's British Film Institute, where I was an employee--weren't always the ones shown in New York and Chicago. Moreover, the criticism I read in both cities reeducated me on the subject of American movies, because French and English critics were discovering important things about these movies that my cultural conditioning in Alabama hadn't revealed. Discoveries of this kind are still going on across the world, illuminating aspects of American film history that we haven't noticed--though we may never benefit from these insights if we listen only to the American film industry and its deputies. Am I saying that the 50s were the most bountiful decade in American movies? That's what my own access and cultural conditioning tells me, because what I find there, in spite of all that period's repression--and maybe in part because of it--is a grappling with this country's social reality that's unparalled in other decades, including the present one. Yet I can easily imagine a critic like Manny Farber, who grew up during the 30s, making an equally strong case for that decade, and critics who grew up during the 70s--including Kent Jones in the U.S., Nicole Brenez in France, Alexander Horwath in Austria, and Adrian Martin in Australia--have recently been offering some powerful arguments on behalf of American movies from that era. (For the record, I wound up including 16 films from the 70s, 15 from the 40s, 14 from the 30s, 11 from the 20s, 10 from the 60s, and only a token few from the teens, 80s, and 90s.) In the final analysis, selecting America's 100 greatest movies has to be an ongoing effort of exploration and discovery--something that can happen only if we stop to consider what we still don't know about and try to set up some mechanisms for educating ourselves. The saddest thing about the AFI's list is that it proposes that we stop looking, go home, and proceed to pick more lint out of our navels for the remainder of the millennium. |
ROSENBAUM'S ALTERNATE 100Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival (1951) An Affair to Remember (1957) Anatomy of a Murder (1959) Avanti! (1972) The Barefoot Contessa (1954) The Big Sky (1952) Bigger Than Life (1956) The Black Cat (1934) Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Broken Blossoms (1919) Cat People (1942) Christmas in July (1940) Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) The Crowd (1928) Dead Man (1995) Do the Right Thing (1989) The Docks of New York (1928) Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974) 11 x 14 (1976) Eraserhead (1978) Foolish Wives (1922) Force of Evil (1948) Freaks (1932) The General (1927) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) Gilda (1946) The Great Garrick (1937) Greed (1925) Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933) The Heartbreak Kid (1972) Housekeeping (1987) The Hustler (1961) Intolerance (1916) Johnny Guitar (1954) Judge Priest (1934) Killer of Sheep (1978) The Killing (1956) The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) Kiss Me Deadly (1955) The Ladies' Man (1961) The Lady From Shanghai (1948) Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977) Laughter (1930) Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) Lonesome (1929) Love Me Tonight (1932) Love Streams (1984) The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Man's Castle (1933) McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) Mikey and Nicky (1976) Monsieur Verdoux (1947) My Son John (1952) The Naked Spur (1953) Nanook of the North (1922) The Night of the Hunter (1955) The Nutty Professor (1963) The Palm Beach Story (1942) Panic in the Streets (1950) Park Row (1952) The Phenix City Story (1955) Point Blank (1967) Real Life (1979) Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) Rio Bravo (1959) Scarface (1932) The Scarlet Empress (1934) Scarlet Street (1945) Scenes From Under Childhood (1970) The Scenic Route (1978) The Seventh Victim (1943) Shadows (1960) Sherlock Jr. (1924) The Shooting (1967) The Shop Around the Corner (1940) The Sound of Fury/Try and Get Me! (1950) Stars in My Crown (1950) The Steel Helmet (1951) Stranger Than Paradise (1984) The Strawberry Blonde (1941) Sunrise (1927) Sylvia Scarlett (1935) The Tarnished Angels (1958) That's Entertainment! III (1994) This Land Is Mine (1943) Thunderbolt (1929) To Sleep With Anger (1990) Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969) Track of the Cat (1954) Trouble in Paradise (1932) Vinyl (1965) Wanda (1971) While the City Sleeps (1956) Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) Woodstock (1970) The Wrong Man (1957) Zabriskie Point (1970) |
 |
Subscription and general information about the Reader. Questions? Comments? Send us a message. Copyright © 1998 Chicago Reader Inc.
|