Even More of The Greatest part 1

As before they're not in any particular order.











60. Ride in the Whirlwind (1965)

Some time during the mid sixties Roger Corman gave director Monte Hellman the money to make two western b-movies, to be shot more or less at the same time. The first was The Shooting, a kind of existential take on the traditional western stereotypes whith Jack Nicholson as a black clad, sociopathic gunfighter and Warren Oates as kind of architypal western hero in the style of Ethan Edwards. Infact, Oates characters paternal relationship with a younger protagonist is like a straight up homage to John Wayne in The Searchers. The Shooting has much of the best things of the traditional hollywood western, while at the same time waving farewell to it. The second film to be made was Ride in the Whirlwind. Made with much of the same cast as The Shooting (minus Oates) and from a script knocked together by Jack Nicholson, it nevertheless marks a drastic departure from its predecessor.
The architypes are replaced with beleivable characters. The incredible dialogue which carries most of the film is a sometimes bareley comprehensible stream of authentic 1870s north american slang and inflections. Watching this film you feel as if you're listening in on the old west, perhaps from an early record. Harry Dean Stanton plays a one eyed bandit called Blind Dick, who's gang robs a stagecoach in the opening scene of the film. They are tracked down and killed by a vigillante mob, who then mistake some nearby cowboys, Wes (Jack Nicholson) and Vern (Cameron Mitchell), for outlaws. Wes and Vern are forced to go on the run and even take a family hostage in order to escape their pursuers, essentially becoming what they where accused of being in the first place. Seemingly then, the film is a comment on subjective justice as a kind of physical embodiment of the 'lawlessenes' of the old west. Jack Nicholson, already one of the great actors, can apparently write too. Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting could also be seen as direct predecessors to a later more famous western, The Missouri Breaks, which also stared Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton (alongside Marlon Brando) and had a similar sense of authenticity and approach to dialogue.














































59. The Name of the Rose (1986)

Jean-Jacques Annaud adapted this from a book by Umberto Eco, it's basically a murder mystery set in a remote abbey in northern Italy during the middle ages. It's thickly atmospheric, feeling for the most part like a horror film, Annaud seems to have deliberately chosen the ugliest actors to play the various characters, who in turn have been exagerated to the level of gargoyles. Sean Connery and Christian Slater play franciscan monks who have been sent to the abbey as representatives during a theological conference. As certain monks start turning up dead they soon uncover a conspiracy that reveals corruption in the catholic church itself, represented by an inquisitor played by a demonic looking F. Murray Abraham. It's good, late night fun.















































58. The Double Life of Veronique (1991)













































57. Satyricon (1969)

Federico Fellini's adaptation of the Roman text by Petronius, the story of Satyricon basically follows the exploits of two Roman men who start out as rivals in a love triangle with a young boy and then end up in a series of misadventures that take them on a kind of tour through Roman society. The original text is basically an attempt by a Roman writer to update, or satirise, the kind of Greek heroic myths in which young men are sent on these long journeys of discovery. In Satyricon however the two protagonists are distinctly un-heroic, and their journey is a chaotic series of mishaps brought about by their initial capture into slavery. In alot of ways this is a typical Fellini movie, lots of scary women with painted faces and the narrative progresses in this kind of dreamlike way, but it seems to take his cartoonish stylisation to a new level. It's a beautiful dream.
I think it's also notable among his films as being an adaptation of a well known work of literature rather than his own story. Usually I think of Fellini as a very autobiographical director who wrote most of his more well known films with a kind of confesional quality. This is apparent in what are arguably his three most famous films: 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita and Amacord (which translates as I Remember). The only other story that I'm aware of him adapting would be his 1976 film of Casanova's memoirs. Satyricon has something of the same atmosphere as Casanova, as I've said before it's very visually exagerrated, as if the further back he goes historically, the less 'realistic' he's prepared to be. Perversely, this can also add to the veiwers historical curiosity, a curiosity Fellini reveals himself in a film he made not long after Satyricon, Fellini's Roma.















































56. Tokyo Story (1953)

Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story is perhaps one of the greatest human dramas ever made. It's about the generational divide and the certainty of change and eventually death, set against the backdrop of what was apparently a transitional period for Japan in the early fifties. Ozu is well known for his family drama's and his distinctive visual style, the kind of odd low camera angles and tendency for filming actors straight on so that they are almost talking into the camera. The audience experiences the story as if a participant, first hand. Ozu himself is a slightly mysterious character. He seems to have rareley, if ever, given interviews. Ozu comes from the generation of directors who basically taught themselves how to make films from just watching movies, and apparently he spent much of his formative education in the cinema instead of the classroom. He was eventually expelled from the boys school he attended for sending love letters to a fellow student, so its possible he was a homosexual, a huge taboo in the Japan of the twenties. In Early Summer, a film he made a few years before Tokyo Story, the subject of arranged marriages is dealt with with vaguely homoerotic undertones. Like Tokyo Story and another film called Late Spring, Early Summer follows the character of Noriko (played as always by Ozu's muse, Setsuko Hara), a twenty something who is presurised to marry by her family. During the course of the story she is forced to decide whether she even wants to marry anyone. She remains reluctant untill almost the end of the film, and when she does finally choose a man it seems to be mostly because of his friendship and apparent loyalty to her dead brother (the war is never far away). No romantic melodrama here. The scene in which she asks his mother for her consent seems bizarre, as if she's asking his mother to marry her instead of him. The theme of repressed homosexuality is subtle but it's there. Tokyo Story was the last in this 'Noriko Trilogy', and I think the most succesful in achieving a sense of genuine pathos with the character's. In this film Noriko is a war widow who's relationship with her dead husbands parents is much deeper than that of their real children. The drama is understated as ever, but seemingly all the more poignant. The plot of Tokyo Story is episodic, like real life. One of the most distinctive things about Ozu's films is his sense of this kind of simple beauty in the cinematography, particularly in his famous establishing shots, and also his sense of rythm in the editing, it's just really well made, pure filmaking.



























































55. Hardware (1990)

Richard Stanley's horror sci-fi debut, Hardware is a cult oddity, crafted from elements of eighties's classics like The Terminator, Alien, Blade Runner and Mad Max. As an amalgamation of these films, it seems to represent a kind of quintessential eighties sci-fi action movie, with an added influence of the european horror films of Bava and Argento. In the comentary of the Optimum dvd release Stanley even admits to the film being "..a rip off of Terminator and Alien", it seems as if this was Richard Stanley trying to appease movie producers as much as the immagined audience. It was never more than a cult hit, this may be dew to the emphasis on dialogue and character development and lack of action in the first half. Hardware has some of the slow burning elements of a John Carpenter movie like The Thing or Assault on Precinct 13. Like Rio Bravo for the MTV generation. When it reaches its climactic second half the violence is concentrated and brutal, the film kind of explodes. Some of the eye gouging and various other things were cut out on it's initial release, and there are some other sequences that have stayed with me since I saw it when I was 11. The plot is looseley adapted from a story in the comic weekly 2000 A.D., about a homicidal skull faced robot called The Mark 13 that goes on the rampage through a post apocalyptic urban slum of the future. The use of eighties rock songs like P.I.L.'s The Order of Death and Iggy Pop's Cold Metal seem fitting and are well placed. More music by bands like Gwar and Ministry add to the film's gothic industrial aesthetic. Also of interest are the cameos: Fields of the Nephilim singer Carl McCoy plays an enigmatic "zone tripper", Lemmy from Motorhead appears as a taxi driver and Iggy Pop's voice is heard as a radio personality called Angry Bob. Bob's rants at the beginning and end of the film serve a narrative purpose, establishing first of all the context of the story, and finally the outcome in a kind of verbal epilogue, giving the feeling of a medieval play. It's certainly as violent and existential as any work of Shakespeare.










































54. Immoral Tales (1974)

Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales is one of the most famous erotic films of the seventies, but it has a dreamy quality and sense of the surreal that sets it apart from films like The Story of O and Emmanuelle. Immoral Tales is made of four segments, which regress cronologically, starting on a French beach in the present day and ending in fifteenth century Rome. The film is obviously about sex as sin. All the characters missbehave by the standards of their time, and seem to get worse as we go on, as if we are regressing also in a moral sense. Borowczyk's film seems to imply that morality itself is relative. The earlier scenes are atmospheric, closer to todays reality and more subdued. The later stories are presented rather more dramatically. The Countess Bathory segment is perhaps the most interesting and memorable, filled with surreal images. Paloma Picasso's performance as Elizabeth Bathory is detached and somewhat menacing. The Borgia family in the final segment are presented as the ultimate symbol of corruption, their incestuous relationships are a subversion of the family, in the Catholic Church in which the family is an important symbol of the relationship between man and God. It seems as if the more repressed the time and place the characters are from, the more corrupt they infact become, and sex and sensuality are represented as all the more enjoyable for being 'wrong'. The characters are not judged or punished by Borowczyk, they are shown objectively, as if specimens in a zoo.














































53. Death in Venice (1971)

Luchino Visconti's masterpiece is an adaptation of the famous novel by Thomas Mann. The story concerns a 19th century Viennese composer Gustave Aschenbach, apparently based on Gustav Mahler, who travels to Venice after suffering from health problems brought about by a series of personal and artistic failures. Upon arrival he becomes secretly obssessed with a young Polish tourist called Tadzio. Eventually he tries to leave Venice, which appears to be in the grip of a cholera epidemic, only to return straight away after a minor problem concerning his luggage. It seems as if he is glad to return. He begins to openly follow the boy, to the extent that Tadzio's family notice him. Tadzio reminds him of his own past, seeming to embody everyone he has ever loved, including his dead daughter. It's incredibly poignant and sad. Visconti creates a sense of profound isolation around his central character, a solitary figure who hardly speaks to anyone. Aschenbach is a man at the end of his life, alone in a foreign country and trapped by his past. The dialogue is minimal, much of the film is carried by Dirk Bogarde's incredible performance as Aschenbach, and the music of Mahler resounds through the opening and closing scenes of the film, it seems like a wordless opera.

















































52. Tenebrae (1982)

Tenebrae is Dario Argento's last great giallo, it's also probably my favourite film of this much underrated genre. It's an incredibly violent film, almost all the characters are eventually killed, but as always the deaths are beautifully elaborate, his style is indesputable and very Italian. I particularly love the fact that in one scene a young girl is chased into the path of her killer by an over enthusiastic doberman, a cruel twist of fate typical of Argento's films. His characters often die in the most unlucky ways. Daria Nicolodi, the mother of Argento's daughter Asia, was often the brunt of these sadistic ironies: in Terror at the Opera she's not only shot in the head but through the eye. In Phenomena she's mauled by a razor weilding chimpanzee. In the climax of his early giallo, Cat o' Nine Tails, the murderer receives their comupence by falling down a lift shaft (after being shot) and on the way down burns their hands trying to hold on to the lift cable. He seems to like making his characters suffer, beyond what is required. Argento's violence is literally excessive.














































51. 3 Women (1977)
By far Robert Altman's most disturbing and strangest film, 3 Women is a schizophrenic nightmare. Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) share an appartment and work together at a health spa. They are both archetypes. Modern girl Millie is outgoing, sexually confident and shallow. Pinky is a country girl, shy and childlike. The appartment complex they live in is owned by an older woman, Willie (Janice Rule) a pregnant artist who paints horrific murals, depicting ferral, ape like creatures. The two younger women are also sporadically bothered by Willie's over sexed husband, Edgar. The three central characters are so exagerrated, Duvall and Spacek are clownlike.
Millie, Pinky and Willie all seem to exist apart from their surroundings and are treated with indifference and sometimes hostility. By the end of the film the three women have swapped roles to the extent that it suggests that they are merely facets of the same woman. In this sense it's similar to Bergman's Persona. This idea is more blatantly suggested in the ending which is horrific and mysterious.

Definitive Rundown

My top 10, in descending order.




















10. Peeping Tom (1960)
This is probably one of the greatest horror-thrillers ever made, although it was banned and ruined director Michael Powell's career. Powell had been previously known as one half of the Powell and Pressburger partnership that in the 40's made classic films like Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Although these are some of the greatest and most beautifully photographed (by Jack Cardiff) films to come out of Britain ever, they are basically melodramas. Peeping Tom was a huge departure of subject matter. The film is about a young man, Mark Lewis, who kills women with his camera tripod and films them dying. He suffers from a disorder that means he is compelled to stare at people through windows and whenever he generally feels they can't see him. I think it's one of the cleverest scripts Michael Powell ever worked with, and the film is also visually groundbreaking. It's influence on latter giallo films by Bava and Argento is quite apparent. Carl Boehm's performance as Mark is also incredible.


































9. 8 1/2 (1963)
Federico Fellini's iconic, self referencing masterpiece (including his segment of Boccaccio 70, this was Fellini's 8th and a half film), 8 1/2  is a portrait of a disenchanted film director (played by Marcello Mastroianni) and the characters who fill his life and imagination: his girlfriend, wife, writers, producers, their girlfriends, some other people who he meets and the various characters remembered from his childhood. The film's reality is constantly undermined by his fantasies, dreams and embellished memories, without you ever knowing where you are exactly. A beautiful mess. 8 1/2 is a shamelessly indulgent depiction of the Italian male psyche.


































8. The Producers (1968)

With films like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, writer director Mel Brooks has been responsible for some of the most groundbreaking comedy films of the 60s and 70s. His original 1968 version of The Producers is arguably one of the greatest of these. A has-been theatre producer, Max Bialistock (played by Zero Mostel), and his accountant Leo Bloom (played by Gene Wilder) decide to produce 'the worst play ever', a light musical comedy called Springtime For Hitler. They hope that it will close after one night and thereby leave them with most of the funding, which would greatly exceed the actual budget of the play. The fact they are both Jewish offcourse lends an extra depth to what is probably the definitive comedy of the 20th century.  Gene Wilder is great in his starring debut and Zero Mostel is absolutely astounding.









































7. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

This was adapted from a book by Erich Maria Remarque about his experiences as a German soldier in the First World War. The film, directed by Lewis Milestone, is probably one of the most groundbreaking for its time. It won Best Picture at the third ever Academy Awards, and its not hard to see why. The camera work is more dynamic than most films made now, and it features some of the greatest battle sequences ever, along side intimate, naturalistic dialogue scenes. A recurring visual motif seems to be of the characters sitting in the foreground with a large window or doorway in the background showing the different environments and stages of the war. It's a film that perfectly expresses its message, verbally and visually.













































6. The Silence (1963)

The story of Ingmar Bergman's The Silence concerns three relatives who are travelling through Europe: Ester, who is busy translating a book into Swedish, her younger sister Anna and Anna's son Johan, who are accompanying Ester on what seems to be a work related trip. The three arrive in an unspecified European country that appears to be at war and who's language they don't understand, staying in a hotel sweet of two adjoining rooms. Johan is inquisitive and explores much of the hotel in the earlier part of the film. These early scenes rely on visual narratives and are short, seemingly unrelated and almost completely without dialogue. This is the most cinematic Bergman gets (until 1966's Persona), the result is beautiful and hypnotic. It is only towards the middle and end of the film that the dialogue starts to take hold and the film returns to more familiar Bergman territory. The sisters are portrayed in more depth and their strange relationship is exposed. Anna is often rather suggestively shown with wet or moist skin, denoting her apparent health and vitality. She is voracious and sensual. Ester, by contrast, is the intellectual, seeming to live solely on alcohol and cigarette's. At the end of the film Ester appears to be terminally ill. The films three main characters can be seen to be based on the stages of man (youth, adulthood and old age), and the hotel and foreign country they find themselves in an allegory for humanity's unexplained and seemingly pointless existence in the universe. However, as with other Bergman classic's like Through a Glass Darkly, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, The Silence also works excellently as a simple, play-like narrative.












































5. Hard Boiled (1992)

John Woo is the greatest action director of all time and Hard Boiled is the ultimate John Woo movie. All his early Hong Kong films: Bullet in the Head, The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, etc. feature these incredible set piece action sequences along side emotionally involving characters and fairly complexed sub-plots. A bit like Die Hard meets The Godfather. I think Hard Boiled is the best example of this. The story is basically a cop drama about a stereotypically hot-headed yet sensitive jazz loving detective, played by Chow Yun Fat, and his relationship to a slick mafia hit man who is actually an undercover cop, played by Tony Lueng Chui-Wai. It features a frankly excessive amount of action scenes and gobsmacking set-pieces, which along with what infact ends up being a rather moving story of friendship, elevates the film above anything done before or since. Hard Boiled is quite simply the zenith of action cinema, it has never been surpassed.












































4. Night of the Living Dead (1968)/ Dawn of the Dead (1978)/ Day of the Dead (1985)
I tend to think of George Romero's iconic zombie trilogy as a single work. Although all three films have a different setting and characters, they seem to exist in context to each other, all being a continuation of the same story: that of the end of human civilisation after the dead start to apparently rise from the grave and eat the living. Romero re-invented the zombie film in 1968 with his original take on the sub-genre: Night of the Living Dead. It's a perfect horror b-movie, with 50's stock music and atmospheric black and white photography. Romero's trademark sense of editing and pace are already apparent here. As with it's two follow ups, the dialogue is gritty and real. In Dawn of the Dead the violence is in Technicolor. People with grey/green faces bite into fleshy make up sacks filled with bright red paint. The film is garish and entertaining, like a comic book. The final act, Day of the Dead, is simultaneously the goriest and most cerebral of the three, with even more dialogue, and Tom Savini's groundbreaking special effects. These three films are undoubtedly Romero's best, and perhaps the greatest concept movies ever made.

















































3. Persona (1966)

Ingmar Bergman's Persona is probably the most beautiful film I've ever seen. It's also in some way about film itself. The abstract opening sequence is unsettling, it reminds you of the fact that you are watching a film, it reminds you of death, you are placed in a defensive state of mind. The films reality can no longer be taken for granted. From the outset of the story then, the characters seem to be like apparitions. Symbolic. The narrative seems fragile and dreamlike. Nurse Alma (excellently played by Bibi Anderson), is charged with the care of a mental patient, an actress called Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), who has inexplicably stopped talking. Alma's boss, a female Doctor, send's them to stay at her holiday home by the sea. Here, Alma engages in long monologues while Elisabet listens. The patient has a sinister, haunting presence and the nurse's honesty makes her seem vulnerable. The two characters are like hot and cold. One of the most telling moments of the film is when Elisabet apparently speaks. She tells Alma to go to bed after the nurse nearly falls asleep at a table. Infact, Elisabet is never shown to visibly speak, but her voice is heard as a whisper, as if possibly imagined by Alma. Looking at the characters of Persona allegorically, as with The Silence, this time they seem to represent facets of the same mind. Elisabet, the actress, seeming to represent a kind of creative sub-conscious, and Alma (who's name is the Spanish word for soul) representing the heavily constructed conscious mind, full of what are apparently frivolous concerns and observations. As a simple narrative its filled with beautiful images, and Bergman himself regarded it as one of his most cinematic and important films.

















































2. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

This film is just stunning. Masterfully directed by David Lean, it seems to have an entirely different feel to his previous films, classics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Brief Encounter, and was never surpassed by his later, slightly less enthralling epic Doctor Zhivago. The new wave inspired editing of Lawrence of Arabia are one of the more obvious influences on directors like Steven Spielberg, the scene transitions seem to relate to each other. The dialogue is simply astonishing, from a screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson that is probably one of the greatest ever written, and based on the real T. E Lawrence's own written accounts. Peter O' Toole's performance in the role of Colonel Lawrence is also wonderful, and probably a landmark in his career. The desert is used to great effect in the cinematography by Freddie Young, along side one of the most iconic cinematic scores ever by Maurice Jarre. Lawrence of Arabia is simply so watchable, it doesnt feel as long as it is (which is about three and a half hours), something of a rarity in epic cinema. Undoubtedly, it is the greatest of the Hollywood epics of the 50's and 60s.

















































1. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966)

Sergio Leone's masterful example of film-making in its purest form, The Good The Bad and The Ugly is arguably the greatest film of all time. There is something mystical, un-explainable about why this is, but nevertheless I will try to convey some sort of rationality as to why this is my favourite film. The first ten minutes or so are completely whithout dialogue. The characters move through entire scenes silently, to the point where their actions are almost abstracted. When they do finally speak we learn of a plot involving some stolen confederate gold (the story takes place during the American Civil War), apparently buried in the grave of a soldier. A mysterious oportunist known as "Blondie" (played by Clint Eastwood) knows the name on the grave, and a greedy and generally base outlaw, Tuco (Eli Wallach) knows which graveyard. As old acquaintances, they must temporarily bury the hatchet and work together to uncover the lost loot. On their trail is a man Tuco calls "Angel Eyes" (Lee Van Cleef), a sadistic and self serving bounty hunter and army captain. Although the film is offcourse a spaghetti western, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly's sprawling scale and American Civil War context give it the feeling of a true epic.
Throughout the film, Tuco is confronted with ethical decisions. His choices seem to guide the story along. Tuco can be seen allegorically as an everyman, with Blondie and Angel Eyes as incarnations of his own good and bad instincts. In this context, the story is seemingly elevated to a timeless parable. It is almost Biblical. Leone's 'Dollars Trilogy', the trio of iconic westerns starring Clint Eastwood of which The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is the final part, brought the Italian style western into the mainstream and inspired a surge of similar movies, all shot in southern Spain, and usually with funding from Italian or German production companies. These would become known in America as "spaghetti westerns". Spaghetti westerns, as apposed to the traditional kind, featured the violence and high drama of Italian opera, along with a knowing modernity, often influenced by the social and cultural climate of the 60's. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is no exception to this rule, having a distinctly anti-war message at around the time America was gearing up to invade Vietnam. A movie that has yet to be surpassed in terms of visual and sonic aesthetics, and perhaps one of the greatest artefacts of the 20th century.