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.
