MC Decade Consensus - 1940s

[Spinal]

Submit your ten favorite eligible films from this decade and in a week I will give you a top twenty.

The point system is as follows

1st Place-10 points
2nd Place- 8 points
3rd Place- 7 points
4th Place- 6 points
5th Place- 5 points
6th Place - 4 points
7th Place - 3.5 points
8th Place - 3 points
9th Place - 2.5 points
10th Place - 2 points

As you can see, the scale is weighted to give your top film a little bonus and to make sure that the difference between a 6th place and a 10th place is not too drastic.

Ten eligible films must be listed. Please make any edits by making a new post and telling me what changes have been made.

PLEASE READ:
In order to be eligible for this vote, a film must have placed in the top 10 for the Yearly Consensus Poll for the year it was released. Honorable mention films are not eligible. Since you only have ten slots to fill, I want you to focus on films that have a realistic chance of making the final list, so that we may achieve the most accurate results possible. My goal is to increase the influence of your vote. Please feel free to post an additional list that reflects your "true" top films of the decade. However, only lists with ten eligible films will be counted towards the final poll.

In order to add some suspense to the final results, you may (if you choose) PM your ballot to me instead of posting it in the thread below. Either method of voting will be acceptable. (But please do not do both.) "Secret" ballots will be revealed after the final poll is posted.

You may begin now.

Eligible films
A Canterbury Tale (Powell/Pressburger)
A Matter of Life and Death (Powell/Pressburger)
And Then There Were None (Clair)
Arsenic and Old Lace (Capra)
At Land (Deren)
Ball of Fire (Hawks)
Bambi (Hand)
Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau)
Black Narcissus (Powell/Pressburger)
Blood of the Beasts (Franju)
Brief Encounter (Lean)
Brute Force (Dassin)
Casablanca (Curtiz)
Cat People (Tourneur)
Children of Paradise (Carné)
Christmas in July (Sturges)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
Daisy Kenyon (Preminger)
Day of Wrath (Dreyer)
Detour (Ulmer)
Double Indemnity (Wilder)
Dumbo (Sharpsteen)
Fantasia (various)
Fireworks (Anger)
Force of Evil (Polonsky)
Foreign Correspondent (Hitchcock)
Germany Year Zero (Rossellini)
Great Expectations (Lean)
Hangmen Also Die! (Lang)
His Girl Friday (Hawks)
I Know Where I’m Going! (Powell/Pressburger)
I Shot Jesse James (Fuller)
I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur)
It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
Ivan the Terrible, Part One (Eisenstein)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer)
Late Spring (Ozu)
Laura (Preminger)
Le Corbeau (Clouzot)
Lifeboat (Hitchcock)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren/Hammid)
Mildred Pierce (Curtiz)
Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin)
My Darling Clementine (Ford)
Notorious (Hitchcock)
Odd Man Out (Reed)
Out of the Past (Tourneur)
Pinnochio (Luske/Sharpsteen)
Portrait of Jennie (Dieterle)
Quai des Orfevres (Clouzot)
Rebecca (Hitchcock)
Red Hot Riding Hood (Avery)
Red River (Hawks/Rosson)
Ride the Pink Horse (Montgomery)
Rome, Open City (Rossellini)
Rope (Hitchcock)
Scarlet Street (Lang)
Sergeant York (Hawks)
Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock)
Shoeshine (De Sica)
Spellbound (Hitchcock)
Stray Dog (Kurosawa)
Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges)
Suspicion (Hitchcock)
The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler)
The Bicycle Thief (De Sica)
The Big Sleep (Hawks)
The Children are Watching Us (De Sica)
The Devil and Daniel Webster (Dieterle)
The Grapes of Wrath (Ford)
The Great Dictator (Chaplin)
The Heiress (Wyler)
The Killers (Siodmak)
The Lady Eve (Sturges)
The Lady from Shanghai (Welles)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell/Pressburger)
The Lost Weekend (Wilder)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
The Maltese Falcon (Huston)
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Sturges)
The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman)
The Palm Beach Story (Sturges)
The Philadelphia Story (Cukor)
The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger)
The Set-Up (Wise)
The Seventh Victim (Robson)
The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch)
The Talk of the Town (Stevens)
The Third Man (Reed)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston)
They Live By Night (N. Ray)
Thieves' Highway (Dassin)
This Gun for Hire (Tuttle)
To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch)
To Have and Have Not (Hawks)
Unfaithfully Yours (Sturges)
White Heat (Walsh)

[Ivan Drago]

1. The Heiress
2. The Third Man
3. Citizen Kane
4. Sullivan's Travels
5. Double Indemnity
6. The Lady From Shanghai
7. The Bicycle Thief
8. It's A Wonderful Life
9. Casablanca
10. His Girl Friday

[Spinal]

1. The Bicycle Thief
2. Hangmen Also Die
3. The Lady Eve
4. Notorious
5. Meshes of the Afternoon
6. Stray Dog
7. Children of Paradise
8. Day of Wrath
9. Casablanca
10. His Girl Friday

Only the first 3 are in my top 100.

[Melville]

1. It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
2. Blood of the Beasts (Franju)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles)
4. The Third Man (Reed)
5. The Big Sleep (Hawks)
6. His Girl Friday (Hawks)
7. Children of Paradise (Carné)
8. Portrait of Jennie (Dieterle)
9. Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin)
10. The Devil and Daniel Webster (Dieterle)

[DavidSeven]

01. Black Narcissus (Powell/Pressburger)
02. Citizen Kane (Welles)
03. Red River (Hawks/Rosson)
04. The Third Man (Reed)
05. His Girl Friday (Hawks)
06. The Bicycle Thief (De Sica)
07. The Big Sleep (Hawks)
08. Double Indemnity (Wilder)
09. Out of the Past (Tourneur)
10. Sullivan's Travels (Sturges)

Don't feel too strongly about this one.

[jamaul]

1. Citizen Kane (Welles)
2. The Third Man (Reed)
3. Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin)
4. The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger)
5. The Treasure of Sierra Madre (Huston)
6. Notorious (Hitchcock)
7. Casablanca (Curtiz)
8. Children of Paradise (Carné)
9. To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch)
10. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)

[Raiders]

1. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
2. Portrait of Jennie (1948)
3. Citizen Kane (1941)
4. Brief Encounter (1945)
5. Late Spring (1949)
6. Daisy Kenyon (1947)
7. The Big Sleep (1946)
8. Black Narcissus (1947)
9. The Seventh Victim (1943)
10. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

HMs: At Land, Notorious, I Shot Jesse James, Red Hot Riding Hood, His Girl Friday, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, The Red Shoes, Lifeboat

[Derek]

01. Black Narcissus (Powell/Pressburger)
03. Red River (Hawks/Rosson)

Awesome picks.

[Derek]

1. Notorious (Hitchcock)
2. It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
3. Double Indemnity (Wilder)
4. The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
5. Ivan the Terrible, Part One (Eisenstein)
6. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston)
7. The Big Sleep (Hawks)
8. Casablanca (Curtiz)
9. Shoeshine (De Sica)
10. Quai des Orfevres (Clouzot)

[Lazlo]

1. Casablanca
2. The Philadelphia Story
3. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
4. Citizen Kane
5. The Third Man
6. The Maltese Falcon
7. Red River
8. Double Indemnity
9. It's a Wonderful Life
10. Rebecca

[Ezee E]

1. Citizen Kane
2. The Bicycle Thief
3. It’s A Wonderful Life
4. Casablanca
5. Pinnochio
6. Notorious
7. Double Indemnity
8. The Set-Up
9. Rope
10. Laura

Been meaning to see Black Narcissus....

[Mysterious Dude]

1. Germany Year Zero
2. The Bicycle Thief
3. Shoeshine
4. Double Indemnity
5. Ride the Pink Horse
6. Notorious
7. Meshes of the Afternoon
8. Laura
9. Citizen Kane
10. White Heat

Match-Cut hates/has never heard of:

Ossessione (1943)
Gaslight (1944)
The House on 92nd Street (1945)
T-Men (1947)
The Spring River Flows East (1947)
The Naked City (1948)
The Quiet One (1948)
The Search (1948)
Border Street (1948)
Stray Dog (1949)

[Spinal]

Match-Cut hates/has never heard of:
Stray Dog (1949)

Eligible.

[Mysterious Dude]

Dammit! My humiliation is never ending!

[Irish]

The lack of votes so far for The Best Years of Our Lives and The Red Shoes is worrisome.


3. The Lady Eve

Oh Jesus.

[Derek]

Oh Jesus.

Got something against Preston Sturges?

[Spinal]

Oh Jesus.

One of the funniest movies of all-time. Of all-time.

[Raiders]

The Best Years of Our Lives

Oof.

See? We can do it too.

[DavidSeven]

If there's one thing that the 40s dominate every other decade in it's wit, banter, and sarcastic retorts. Hawks, Sturges, heck, even Welles. Economic depressions sure lead to some funny movies.

[Grouchy]

1. Beauty and the Beast
2. Citizen Kane
3. Shadow of a Doubt
4. The Third Man
5. Casablanca
6. Notorious
7. My Darling Clementine
8. The Philadelphia Story
9. The Treasure of Sierra Madre
10. Mildred Pierce

[DavidSeven]

The lack of votes so far for ... The Red Shoes is worrisome.


Beautiful movie. Black Narcissus is beatiful-er.

[Russ]

1. Rope (Hitchcock)
2. The Third Man (Reed)
3. Double Indemnity (Wilder)
4. Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren/Hammid)
5. Casablanca (Curtiz)
6. Fantasia (various)
7. Out of the Past (Tourneur)
8. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston)
9. The Palm Beach Story (Sturges)
10. Ride the Pink Horse (Montgomery)

Ineligible, but would have made my top ten:

Hellzapoppin
Spring Awakens

[Irish]

Got something against Preston Sturges?

Nope. I'm a fan. There are times when I think he tries too hard, and Lady Eve is one of those times.


One of the funniest movies of all-time. Of all-time.

If you say it, then I'll give it a second look and reconsider.


Oof. See? We can do it too.

Yes, but in your case you're almost always wrong. Or at least, terribly misguided. ;)

Also, interesting use of the first person plural.


Economic depressions sure lead to some funny movies.

But then you'd think Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Grown Ups would have been a helluva lot funnier.

[Weeping_Guitar]

01. Casablanca (Curtiz)
02. His Girl Friday (Hawks)
03. The Big Sleep (Hawks)
04. Late Spring (Ozu)
05. Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges)
06. The Third Man (Reed)
07. Notorious (Hitchcock)
08. Citizen Kane (Welles)
09. Double Indemnity (Wilder)
10. The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch)

[Watashi]

1. Citizen Kane
2. Double Indemnity
3. Casablanca
4. His Girl Friday
5. Black Narcissus
6. The Red Shoes
7. Out of the Past
8. Kind Hearts and Coronets
9. Lifeboat
10. Shadow of a Doubt

[Boner M]

1. It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
2. The Lady Eve (Sturges)
3. The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger)
4. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler)
5. Children of Paradise (Carné)
6. They Live By Night (N. Ray)
7. At Land (Deren)
8. Blood of the Beasts (Franju)
9. Daisy Kenyon (Preminger)
10. Late Spring (Ozu)

[baby doll]

Eligible:

The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
Ivan the Terrible, Part One (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944)
Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
La Belle et le Bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Ineligible:

Begone Dull Care (Evelyn Lambart / Norman McLaren, 1949)
Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)
Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1948)
The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948)
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1948)
Whirlpool (Otto Preminger, 1949)

The apparent consensus that Black Narcissus is a flawless masterpiece and not downright silly (clean air leads to horniness, which inevitably leads to madness) is rather troubling.

By the way, and maybe it's a bit late to bring this up, but if we're aiming for a representative sample, wouldn't it make more sense to let us vote for twenty films instead of ten? Choosing just ten leads to painful cuts, which could skew the results (i.e., not many people voting for The Red Shoes, because they evidently prefer a colonialist fantasy about India).

[dmk]

Detour (Ulmer)
Force of Evil (Polonsky)
The Bicycle Thief (De Sica)
The Seventh Victim (Robson)
The Great Dictator (Chaplin)
The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch)
Cat People (Tourneur)
Day of Wrath (Dreyer)
Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin)
Pinnochio (Luske/Sharpsteen)

Ineligible:
How Green Was My Valley (Ford)
The Leopard Man (Tourneur)
The Thief of Bagdad (Powell/Berger et al)
Tobacco Road (Ford)

[baby doll]

The Great Dictator (Chaplin)
Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin)Awesome. I wanted to vote for the former as well, but just didn't have room for it.

[Boner M]

Oof.

See? We can do it too.
Wait... what do you have against Best Years? Doesn't strike me as being much different to Ozu of Naruse in tone or emotional truth.

[Spinal]

clean air leads to horniness

Maybe I just want it to be true.



By the way, and maybe it's a bit late to bring this up, but if we're aiming for a representative sample, wouldn't it make more sense to let us vote for twenty films instead of ten? Choosing just ten leads to painful cuts, which could skew the results (i.e., not many people voting for The Red Shoes, because they evidently prefer a colonialist fantasy about India).

1. The idea is that we are limiting people to only films that they feel really strongly about. If the cuts are hard, then that's a good thing.
2. It reduces the amount of time spent tallying the results.

[Raiders]

Wait... what do you have against Best Years? Doesn't strike me as being much different to Ozu of Naruse in tone or emotional truth.

Doth sayeth Manny Farber, "a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz."

[dmk]

Manny Farber is so passé. Fun to read though. (Note: I haven't seen Best Years...)

I'm surprised I'm the only one who voted for The Great Dictator. I thought it was generally considered one of the greatest and popular of Chaplin's films.

[B-side]

1. Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren/Hammid)
2. At Land (Deren)
3. Ivan the Terrible, Part One (Eisenstein)
4. Citizen Kane (Welles)
5. Children of Paradise (Carné)
6. The Big Sleep (Hawks)
7. Rope (Hitchcock)
8. The Great Dictator (Chaplin)
9. The Third Man (Reed)
10. Red River (Hawks/Rosson)

[soitgoes...]

Notorious (Hitchcock)
Late Spring (Ozu)
The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman)
Casablanca (Curtiz)
To Have and Have Not (Hawks)
Shoeshine (De Sica)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
The Philadelphia Story (Cukor)
Double Indemnity (Wilder)
I Know Where I’m Going! (Powell/Pressburger)


Best thing from the 40's is probably Begone Dull Care.

[B-side]

Best thing from the 40's is probably Begone Dull Care.

It's pretty swell.

[soitgoes...]

The Lady Eve is the worst thing Sturges did that I've seen. I can't get past the fact that Fonda is so dense as not to be able to recognize Stanwyck. Twice? WTF?

[Irish]

Doth sayeth Manny Farber, "a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz."

+1 for referencing Farber, but do you really believe that? Or are you just being a smart-aleck?


The Lady Eve is the worst thing Sturges did that I've seen. I can't get past the fact that Fonda is so dense as not to be able to recognize Stanwyck. Twice? WTF?

I had the same reaction, but I went into this thinking it was a different kind of movie, and admittedly the premise flew right over my head.

It helps if you look at Stanwyck as the male lead and Fonda as the female lead. The way the movie reverses traditional gender roles is really clever.

But if you're coming into it cold, and don't pick up on that (I sure as hell didn't), then you'll probably find the film mystifying.

[Irish]

1. The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles)
3. Casablanca (Curtiz)
4. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler)
5. My Darling Clementine (Ford)
6. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston)
7. Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges)
8. The Third Man (Reed)
9. His Girl Friday (Hawks)
10. Laura (Preminger)

Honorables:

Detour (Ulmer)
The Set-Up (Wise)
The Naked City (Dassin)
Christmas in July (Sturges)
The Devil and Daniel Webster (Dieterle)

Edit: Holy-what-the-frack. Gilda isn't on the eligible list? What the .. ?! I can't conceive ... who did .. why?! What kind of person would ...?

Unbelievable!

[B-side]

I felt bad leaving Detour off, but it definitely would've made my top 15.

[Irish]

I felt bad leaving Detour off, but it definitely would've made my top 15.

Likewise. It's such a fun movie. There's so much good noir in this decade, I think I could make up a list of just 10 noir films and make a case for each of them as "best of."

[B-side]

Likewise. It's such a fun movie. There's so much good noir in this decade, I think I could make up a list of just 10 noir films and make a case for each of them as "best of."

I'd like to see that list. I'm woefully uneducated on noir, and classic Hollywood cinema in general.

[Irish]

I'd like to see that list. I'm woefully uneducated on noir, and classic Hollywood cinema in general.

There's a great, slim volume of essays by Barry Gifford (the novelist who wrote the book David Lynch's Wild at Heart was based on) called Out of the Past. (An earlier edition was titled The Devil Thumbs a Ride).

It contains write ups on the major stuff you've heard of, but also obscure movies that aren't on DVD and never seem to play anywhere. Each essay is a treat, best enjoyed after viewing the movie (some of them do contain major spoilers).

If nothing else, it's a great list of titles. If you really get into this subgenre, it's invaluable and tons of fun.

http://books.google.com/books?id=YTpaSviWrzIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Barry+Gifford+out+of+the+pa st&source=bl&ots=B1EOwO163Q&sig=u7Vzs3uidBXDflQ3nIrAfiv0nk I&hl=en&ei=BpYETdC8NIPksQO2hoyVDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.barrygifford.com/books_out_of_past.html

Edit: You can read the introduction to the book on Google books (link above). Detour is mentioned. It's a decent representation of the tone one finds in the essays.

[B-side]

There's a great, slim volume of essays by Barry Gifford (the novelist who wrote the book David Lynch's Wild at Heart was based on) called Out of the Past. (An earlier edition was titled The Devil Thumbs a Ride).

It contains write ups on the major stuff you've heard of, but also obscure movies that aren't on DVD and never seem to play anywhere. Each essay is a treat, best enjoyed after viewing the movie (some of them do contain major spoilers).

If nothing else, it's a great list of titles. If you really get into this subgenre, it's invaluable and tons of fun.

http://books.google.com/books?id=YTpaSviWrzIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Barry+Gifford+out+of+the+pa st&source=bl&ots=B1EOwO163Q&sig=u7Vzs3uidBXDflQ3nIrAfiv0nk I&hl=en&ei=BpYETdC8NIPksQO2hoyVDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.barrygifford.com/books_out_of_past.html

Edit: You can read the introduction to the book on Google books (link above). Detour is mentioned. It's a decent representation of the tone one finds in the essays.

I'm far too impatient and/or stupid to read a whole book, so could you be a doll and list them all for me? I'd really appreciate it.:D

[Irish]

I'm far too impatient and/or stupid to read a whole book, so could you be a doll and list them all for me? I'd really appreciate it.:D

:lol: Fair enough. But are you sure you want advice from me? Look to the avatar to your left and consider who you're talking to. ;-)

Edit: I get the feeling there's about 6 posters out there who are going to leap at their keyboards as soon as they read this. Two of them might be mods.

[B-side]

:lol: Fair enough. But are you sure you want advice from me? Look to the avatar to your left and consider who you're talking to. ;-)

Edit: I get the feeling there's about 6 posters out there who are going to leap at their keyboards as soon as they read this. Two of them might be mods.

I'm always interested in an unpopular opinion and the taste of the one expressing it, regardless of how much sense it makes to me.

[Pop Trash]

1. Citizen Kane
2. Meshes of the Afternoon
3. The Bicycle Thief
4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
5. Fantasia
6. Shadow of a Doubt
7. Fireworks
8. Sullivan's Travels
9. The Third Man
10. At Land

Great list that.

[Pop Trash]

Manny Farber is so passé.

Quite literally, since he just died recently.

[Irish]

I'm always interested in an unpopular opinion and the taste of the one expressing it, regardless of how much sense it makes to me.

In that case, from this decade & in order of preference (spoiler'd so the person tabulating doesn't get confused):

Gilda
Laura
The Killers
The Big Sleep
Treasure of the Sierra Madres
Out of the Past
Mildred Pierce
The Maltese Falcon
High Sierra
Detour

Honorables:
The Set-up
Gun Crazy

Where my list differs, I think, is that I deliberately left off Double Indemnity. I love James M Cain, but I think that one is his weakest novel and the movie bends over backwards to get around some of its issues. If you've never seen it, it's worth viewing for completeness sake, and because Edward G Robinson's performance in it is nothing short of outstanding.

Edit: Working in stuff I forgot!

[B-side]

I'll have to check out Gilda, Out of the Past, Mildred Pierce, Gun Crazy and High Sierra. Seen and enjoyed the rest to varying extents.

[soitgoes...]

In that case, from this decade & in order of preference (spoiler'd so the person tabulating doesn't get confused):


Laura
The Big Sleep
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Out of the Past
Mildred Pierce
The Maltese Falcon
Gun Crazy
A big fan of these, especially the last one. Interesting to see Treasure of the Sierra Madre labeled as a film noir.

[DavidSeven]

Gun Crazy

One of my favorite MC quirks is the love this one gets. Woefully under-appreciated in other circles. Definitely check it out.

[B-side]

One of my favorite MC quirks is the love this one gets. Woefully under-appreciated in other circles. Definitely check it out.

Will do.

[Irish]

A big fan of these, especially the last one. Interesting to see Treasure of the Sierra Madre labeled as a film noir.

It's a borderline case, I think. It's not so much noir in style (it plays, much of the time, more like a western) but it's definitely noir in tone.

I think you could make a case that stuff like Vera Cruz and The Man from Laramie are noir too, even though their obvious trappings are western.

[soitgoes...]

It's a borderline case, I think. It's not so much noir in style (it plays, much of the time, more like a western) but it's definitely noir in tone.

I think you could make a case that stuff like Vera Cruz and The Man from Laramie are noir too, even though their obvious trappings are western.Hmm. It's been too long for me to be able to conjure up any agreement or disagreement to this. There is the moral ambiguity I suppose. Interesting.

[Yxklyx]

1. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau)
2. The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)
3. Odd Man Out (Carol Reed)
4. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid)
5. The Third Man (Carol Reed)
6. The Set-Up (Robert Wise)
7. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)
8. A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
9. Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot)
10. Quai des Orfèvres (Henri-Georges Clouzot)

[Eleven]

1. Citizen Kane
2. Children of Paradise
3. Late Spring
4. Force of Evil
5. His Girl Friday
6. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
7. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
8. Monsieur Verdoux
9. Ivan the Terrible, Part One
10. The Red Shoes

Almost There: The Best Years of Our Lives, Black Narcissus, Cat People, Christmas in July, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Maltese Falcon, The Philadelphia Story, Scarlet Street, Shadow of a Doubt, The Shop Around the Corner, Sullivan’s Travels, To Be or Not to Be.

Not Eligible: Born to Kill, The Great Madcap, Heaven Can Wait, Jour de Fete, Leave Her to Heaven, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Mortal Storm, Pursued, Raw Deal, Spring in a Small Town.


So much Lubitsch, Sturges, Hawks, Powell and Pressburger, so few spaces.

[Bosco B Thug]

Shameful blind spots.

1. Notorious
2. Citizen Kane
3. The Third Man
4. I Walked With a Zombie
5. The Bicycle Thief
6. Casablanca
7. Shadow of a Doubt
8. The Red Shoes
9. The Seventh Victim
10. They Live By Night

[dreamdead]

1. The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger)
2. Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren/Hammid)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles)
4. The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch)
5. Children of Paradise (Carné)
6. The Third Man (Reed)
7. I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur)
8. Late Spring (Ozu)
9. It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
10. Black Narcissus (Powell/Pressburger)

[Qrazy]

In that case, from this decade & in order of preference (spoiler'd so the person tabulating doesn't get confused):

[spoiler]Gilda
Laura
The Killers
The Big Sleep
Treasure of the Sierra Madres
Out of the Past
Mildred Pierce
The Maltese Falcon
High Sierra
Detour

Honorables:
The Set-up
Gun Crazy



re list: Gilda, Laura, Gun Crazy and High Sierra do little for me. The rest are good to great.

Brightside (other recs):

The Postman Always Rings Twice (for my money the best of the Postman adaptations, even slightly prefer it to Visconti's)
Boomerang (because Kazan brings the dramatic urgency but Panic in the Streets is better)
Brute Force (even minor Dassin is quality)
Force of Evil
The Reckless Moment
Thieves Highway (if you're only going to watch one Dassin make it Night and the City or Rififi)
The Lost Weekend
Murder, My Sweet (Probably also worth a viewing)
The Seventh Victim could probably be labeled as a noir as well.

Also these are British noirs but give Brighton Rock, Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol a look. These three were released in 1950 but they're all quality Curtiz's The Breaking Point, Kazan's Panic in the Streets and Dassin's Night and the City.

Bolded those which I like most of the above but they're all quality.

There are a few Curtiz scholars who actually consider The Breaking Point his best film. I don't agree but it is tops. It's available on KG.

[Yxklyx]

Thieves Highway (if you're only going to watch one Dassin make it Night and the City or Rififi)

I loved Thieves' Highway more than the other two - by quite a bit. It just missed my top 10 here.

[Qrazy]

I loved Thieves' Highway more than the other two - by quite a bit. It just missed my top 10 here.

Reposted:

"Well I quite liked it, I just graded it hard. I don't think it's as formally excellent or compelling as his best work (Night and the City and Rififi). A lot of that I think had to do with the editing and the general storyboard of the film. It was functional but it didn't grab me the way those other two films were able to. For example the cut aways to his partner seemed somewhat haphazard. There were a couple stand out scenes such as jacking up the truck by the side of the road or learning about the death of his partner. Also his back and forths with the girl were great. However the dramatic pacing of certain plot resolutions felt a little off to me as well. For instance the truck going off the road or the very end of the film with the cards... both moments seemed to be echoing other better films to me and the film's fatalism seemed rote at times rather than an unavoidable tragedy (Night and the City, Rififi, Le Trou, Army of Shadows, etc). Well I mean in Thieves Highway the tragedy was clearly unavoidable but in an overly predictable way.

Brute Force is probably my third favorite then Thieves Highway then The Naked City. I recently downloaded Never on Sunday so that will be my next Dassin outing."

[balmakboor]

1. It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)
2. Notorious (Hitchcock)
3. A Canterbury Tale (Powell/Pressburger)
4. Citizen Kane (Welles)
5. The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger)
6. Late Spring (Ozu)
7. The Bicycle Thief (De Sica)
8. Pinnochio (Luske/Sharpsteen)
9. Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock)
10. The Grapes of Wrath (Ford)

[baby doll]

Eligible:

The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
Ivan the Terrible, Part One (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944)
Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
La Belle et le Bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)Okay, it looks like there are enough people voting for The Red Shoes to convince me to switch my vote, even though The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is obviously more ambitious and masterful as storytelling.

[Dead & Messed Up]

01. Fantasia (various)
02. Casablanca (Curtiz)
03. The Bicycle Thief (De Sica)
04. Notorious (Hitchcock)
05. Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau)
06. Cat People (Tourneur)
07. Citizen Kane (Welles)
08. Le Corbeau (Clouzot)
09. Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock)
10. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston)

[Qrazy]

Okay, it looks like there are enough people voting for The Red Shoes to convince me to switch my vote, even though The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is obviously more ambitious and masterful as storytelling.

I don't find that obvious.

[baby doll]

I don't find that obvious.The ambitious part should be, since the story covers a span of forty years and three wars. And the masterful thing part is that, despite this, how quickly it moves as storytelling, and how funny and touching and light on its feet it is.

[soitgoes...]

I had the same reaction, but I went into this thinking it was a different kind of movie, and admittedly the premise flew right over my head.

It helps if you look at Stanwyck as the male lead and Fonda as the female lead. The way the movie reverses traditional gender roles is really clever.

But if you're coming into it cold, and don't pick up on that (I sure as hell didn't), then you'll probably find the film mystifying.That doesn't really change that Fonda is an idiot for not being able to recognize Stanwyck a couple years later, especially when she makes no attempt to disguise herself. Yeah, I know it's a screwball comedy, and crazy shit like this happens in them, but it just rubbed me the wrong way in this film.

[Irish]

Thieves Highway (if you're only going to watch one Dassin make it Night and the City or Rififi)

Agreed, especially this, especially Rififi.

[Irish]

That doesn't really change that Fonda is an idiot for not being able to recognize Stanwyck a couple years later, especially when she makes no attempt to disguise herself. Yeah, I know it's a screwball comedy, and crazy shit like this happens in them, but it just rubbed me the wrong way in this film.

I haven't seen it in awhile, so the details are fuzzy, but I could have sworn there was some kind of minor variation in her appearance. Not enough to dismiss your incredulity, but enough to pass muster in a movie world -- sorta the same way Clark Kent's glasses make him unrecognizable as Superman to Lois Lane.

[baby doll]

I haven't seen it in awhile, so the details are fuzzy, but I could have sworn there was some kind of minor variation in her appearance. Not enough to dismiss your incredulity, but enough to pass muster in a movie world -- sorta the same way Clark Kent's glasses make him unrecognizable as Superman to Lois Lane.The joke is that not wearing a disguise is so brazen that nobody would believe she'd even attempt it.

[balmakboor]

I don't find that obvious.

I don't either, even after baby doll's explanation. I think The Red Shoes is both marvelous storytelling and extremely ambitious. I think it's ridiculous to equate greater time span with greater ambition.

I did have to restrain myself though or almost half my list would've been P&P films.

[Qrazy]

I don't either, even after baby doll's explanation. I think The Red Shoes is both marvelous storytelling and extremely ambitious. I think it's ridiculous to equate greater time span with greater ambition.

I did have to restrain myself though or almost half my list would've been P&P films.

Yeah, same here... Red Shoes was my first P and P, saw it in a theater for the first time and it's still far and away my favorite.

[B-side]

re list: Gilda, Laura, Gun Crazy and High Sierra do little for me. The rest are good to great.

Brightside (other recs):

The Postman Always Rings Twice (for my money the best of the Postman adaptations, even slightly prefer it to Visconti's)
Boomerang (because Kazan brings the dramatic urgency but Panic in the Streets is better)
Brute Force (even minor Dassin is quality)
Force of Evil
The Reckless Moment
Thieves Highway (if you're only going to watch one Dassin make it Night and the City or Rififi)
The Lost Weekend
Murder, My Sweet (Probably also worth a viewing)
The Seventh Victim could probably be labeled as a noir as well.

Also these are British noirs but give Brighton Rock, Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol a look. These three were released in 1950 but they're all quality Curtiz's The Breaking Point, Kazan's Panic in the Streets and Dassin's Night and the City.

Bolded those which I like most of the above but they're all quality.

There are a few Curtiz scholars who actually consider The Breaking Point his best film. I don't agree but it is tops. It's available on KG.

I've seen and enjoyed The Reckless Moment and Brute Force. I prefer Caught of Ophuls noirs.

[StanleyK]

As I imagined, I haven't seen enough of these movies recently enough to rate; I only got 7:

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren)
Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen)
The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica)
The Third Man (Carol Reed)

With the last one being my favorite.

[balmakboor]

I've seen and enjoyed The Reckless Moment and Brute Force. I prefer Caught of Ophuls noirs.

I've been meaning to catch up with The Reckless Moment, if only because it is in Robin Wood's top 10. I have seen the remake though -- The Deep End.

[MadMan]

I'd really like to call this the Top 10 of the 40s: Bogart Edition/Film Noir, because there are way too many of his movies on here plus a lot of film noir, but then the decade was the golden age for the genre. I also had to resist putting a ton of Hitchcock on there, also, considering I've viewed a decent amount of his 40s work, too. Unfortunately Cat People and Out of the Past didn't crack it, either, among others.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)
2. The Third Man (1949)
3. Casablanca (1942)
4. Double Indemnity (1944)
5. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
6. Fantasia (1940)
7. Its a Wonderful Life (1946)
8. Shadow of a Doubt (1946)
9. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)
10. The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1946)

[soitgoes...]

An alternate 40's Top 10:


Begone Dull Care (McLaren, Lambart)
The Westerner (Wyler)
The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Ozu)
Green for Danger (Gilliat)
MarÃ*a Candelaria (Fernández)
The Fugitive (Ford)
In Which We Serve (Coward, Lean)
The Devil and Miss Jones (Wood)
The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Ozu)
The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (Clouzot)

[Raiders]

Alternate:

1. None Shall Escape (1944)
2. The Mortal Storm (1940)
3. Border Incident (1949)
4. Puss N' Booty (1943)
5. This Land is Mine (1943)
6. The Leopard Man (1943)
7. The House of Tomorrow (1949)
8. Raw Deal (1948)
9. The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
10. The Fallen Idol (1948)

[Eleven]

Alternate:

2. The Mortal Storm (1940)
8. Raw Deal (1948)


High five! I think I saw somewhere that you were a fan of Pursued as well.

[Raiders]

High five! I think I saw somewhere that you were a fan of Pursued as well.

Yeah, I am... would have been another worth mentioning on that alt. list.

[Derek]

1. None Shall Escape (1944)
5. This Land is Mine (1943)
9. The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Eleven high fived you for the wrong films, so *high five*!

Hopefully None Shall Escape gets a DVD release, so it won't have to be on anyone's alternate list.

[Russ]

An alternate 40's Top 10:


Begone Dull Care (McLaren, Lambart)
Fuck yeah! Absolutely amazing syncopation of Peterson's music with McLaren's images. I had never seen this before.

Thank you!!

[soitgoes...]

Fuck yeah! Absolutely amazing syncopation of Peterson's music with McLaren's images. I had never seen this before.

Thank you!!
You're welcome. The best thing McLaren ever did, which is saying a lot.

[MacGuffin]

I'm going to try to see De Toth's None Shall Escape plus a few more before this thing ends.

[Raiders]

I'm going to try to see De Toth's None Shall Escape plus a few more before this thing ends.

Won't help with this but the more to love it the merrier!

[Mr. Pink]

1) Treasure of the Sierra Madre
2) It's A Wonderful Life
3) Sullivan's Travels
4) The Lost Weekend
5) His Girl Friday
6) Double Indemnity
7) Citizen Kane
8) Lifeboat
9) Laura
10) Casablanca

[Spinal]

Anyone interested in tallying this?

[Raiders]

Anyone interested in tallying this?

I can work my magic again. I don't have much to do since I took off this week, so I'll start tonight.

[Dillard]

Sorry, late to the party. Ignore if I'm too late.

1. Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock)
2. Casablanca (Curtiz)
3. At Land (Deren)
4. My Darling Clementine (Ford)
5. I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur)
6. Double Indemnity (Wilder)
7. The Maltese Falcon (Huston)
8. The Bicycle Thief (De Sica)
9. It's a Wonderful Life (Capra)
10. Sullivan's Travels (Sturges)

[Spinal]

Many apologies for the delays. Things continue to be super busy in my real world and I haven't enough time to spend with this.

[Raiders]

You never confirmed that I would do it as I offered. If you want, I'll start tonight. I did some tabulations already in case.

[Spinal]

You never confirmed that I would do it as I offered. If you want, I'll start tonight. I did some tabulations already in case.

Oh, sorry, yes, go ahead if you like.

[Raiders]

http://i54.tinypic.com/w9ejo4.jpg

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
1944

Wikipedia says: Colors are used with precision to add to the overall atmosphere. Almost all the film is in black and white, but at the very end of Part II, just for 10 minutes color film is used to emphasize the transition from good to bad as well as its general importance. At the end of color part Ivan decides to put his cousin under assassin's knife by robing him in tsar's dress. The use of black and white also is a visual cue to aid in the dualistic breakdown of characters and their personalities. Certain characters wear colors to refer to their personalities, such Efrosinia wearing black to visually allude to her evil nature. Beyond that, swans are served at two feasts within the film, the first are white representing innocence and goodness, the second are black representing the wickedness that has come to pass.

Match-Cut says:
I was lukewarm on Ivan the Terrible Pt. I the first time around a few years back. I'm guessing this was due to the excessive theatricality of the picture, which was probably jarring enough to put me at too much of a distance, thus not allowing me to get fully engaged with the material and swept up in the madness. Thankfully, this time around, while I can't say it's perfect, I'm definitely boarding the train that declares it to be an excellent, likely brilliant, film. One right after another, the compositions are fantastic. From the intricately detailed ones, to the wonderfully lit Eisenstein close-ups, nearly every shot deserves framing. The best black and white photography I've seen in a film, bar none. Leering eyes inducing a permanent state of paranoia, escalating tension and an excellently realized battle scene. It's melodramatic as all hell, but it works so well it's hard to find fault. I'll be posting an obscene amount of caps in the Random Screenshot Thread, if anyone's interested.
-Brightside

[Raiders]

http://i52.tinypic.com/e1bwk1.jpg

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
1940

Wikipedia says: In an odd Hollywood turn, Rudy, the last major speaking part of the film (the newest delivery boy, offered a huge Christmas meal by Mr. Matuschek), is played by Charles Smith. In the remake, In the Good Old Summertime with Van Johnson and Judy Garland, an uncredited Charles Smith is one of the quartet singing with Judy at the engagement party.

Match-Cut says:
For the first hour The Shop Around the Corner was the most fun I could have had without laughing. By that, I mean to suggest that the script is subtly humorous, yet the dramatic elements prevent any real laughter. Yet that first hour is so fundamental to the power of the film, and theThe last half hour, though, is wondrous comedy, full of many moments of joy, and it's here that Lubitsch orchestrates a subtle transformation across genres. Stewart's great here, as always, and the whole film's an awesome affair. Very fun. performances lend it a certain gravity, such as when Klara's face collapses when there's no new mail from James Stewart's Klarik.
-dreamdead

[Raiders]

http://i52.tinypic.com/k20dv5.jpg

Directed by a bunch of people
1940

Wikipedia says:
By the late 1930s, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse was losing his popularity with movie audiences. The Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts series had spawned the spin-off Donal Duck series, which was proving to be more popular and profitable than the former, but Walt Disney wasn't ready to give up on his favorite character and devised a special short that would be produced as a "comeback" film for Mickey Mouse. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, based on Goethe's balladic poem Der Zauberlehrling (1797), was planned as a special Mickey Mouse short and would be completely silent save for the program music by Paul Dukas, L'apprenti sorcier (1897). The story artists who developed The Sorcerer's Apprentice originally suggested Dopey from Snow White for the title role, but Disney insisted upon using Mickey.

As work began on The Sorcerer's Apprentice in 1938, Disney happened to meet famed conductor Leopold Stokowski at Chasen's, a noted Hollywood restaurant. Stokowski offered to serve as conductor for The Sorcerer's Apprentice at no charge, and assembled over one-hundred professional musicians in Los Angeles to record the score for the nine-minute cartoon.

At nine minutes, The Sorcerer's Apprentice ran two minutes longer than the average cartoon short of that time, whose length was rarely any more than seven minutes.


Match-Cut says:
Whenever I watch Fantasia I am reminded at just how far theatrical animation in the west has fallen, or has failed to progress since. The artistry of this film is unmatched in the west.
-D Davis

[Raiders]

http://i55.tinypic.com/256cpzr.jpg

Directed by Preston Sturges
1941

Wikipedia says: Veronica Lake was six months pregnant at the beginning of production, a fact she didn't tell Sturges until filming began. Sturges was so furious when he learned that, according to Lake, he had to be physically restrained. Sturges consulted with Lake's doctor to see if she could perform the part, and hired former Tournament of Roses queen Cheryl Walker as Lake's double. Edith Head, Hollywood's most renowned costume designer, was tasked to find ways of concealing Lake's condition. Reportedly, Lake was disliked by some of her co-stars; McCrea refused to work with her again, turning down a lead role in I Married a Witch, and Frederic March, who got the part, didn't get along with her as well.

Match-Cut says:
Sullivan's Travels still takes the cake for me, I think it's Veronica Lake...mmm..
-Philosophe_rouge

[Raiders]

http://i53.tinypic.com/5z3yb8.jpg

Directed by Jean Cocteau
1946

Wikipedia says: Jean Marais originally suggested to Cocteau for the beast to have a stag's head, obviously remembering a detail in the fairy tale (French: La Chatte blanche): The knocker at the gate to the castle of the princess/The White Cat has the form of a roe's foot. While this suggestion followed the narrative lines of its fairy tale origin and would have evoked the mythical echo of Cernunnos, the celtic stag-headed god of the woods, Marais' idea was nonetheless refused by Cocteau who feared that in the eyes of modern cinema audiences a stag's head would turn the beast into a laughing-stock.

Match-Cut says:
Slim pickins...

I found Cocteau's film to be too weird for me, but I think my tolerance for weirdness has grown.
-Isaac

Re-watched Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast last night. Amazing film, but something puzzled me a bit - I clearly remember the opening titles being hand-written on a chalkboard by Cocteau's hand, yet the DVD copy I rented had very traditional credits instead. IMDb doesn't mention anything on it.
-Grouchy

[Raiders]

http://i53.tinypic.com/2n8nbxh.jpg

Directed by Marcel Carne
1945

Wikipedia says: The set builders were short of supplies and the camera crew's film stock was rationed. The financing, originally a French-Italian production, collapsed a few weeks after production began in Nice, due to the Allied conquest of Sicily in August 1943. Around this time, the Nazis forbade the producer, Andre Paulve, from working on the film because of his remote Jewish ancestry, and the production had to be suspended for three months. Pathé Cinéma took over production, whose cost was escalating wildly. The quarter-mile long main set, the "Boulevard Du Temple", was severely damaged by a storm and had to be rebuilt. By the time shooting resumed in Paris in early spring of 1944, the Director of Photography, Roger Hubert, had been assigned to another production and Philippe Agostini, who replaced him, had to analyze all the reels in order to match the lighting of the non-sequential shot list; all the while, electricity in the Paris Studios was intermittent.

After the film was made, accusations of collaboration made against Arletty were met with her classic response: "My heart is French but my ass is international."

Match-Cut says:
For all its similarities to other period films Children of Paradise tells a rather post modern story. It's not a Dickens like tale of social injustice or even a film about crossing boundaries. It is a film about how sometimes things just don't work out. It's about our conceptions our expectations and the effect of time on these. It's about how all the things in our hearts, that we just know are meant to be, can fail to happen. It's about all the small things that build up and ruin the future. The film's studio epic style is a veneer of period chic thinly coats a rougher underlying reality.
-SirNewt

[Mysterious Dude]

I found Cocteau's film to be too weird for me, but I think my tolerance for weirdness has grown.
-Isaac
I'm not proud of this quote.

Edit: I found the context (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?t=1999), and now I'm less ashamed.

[Raiders]

http://i52.tinypic.com/ip8cvd.jpg

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1943

Wikipedia says: The Newton family home is located at 904 McDonald Avenue in Santa Rosa, California. McDonald Avenue is named for the McDonald Mansion, built by Mark L. McDonald in 1879, and situated on several acres on the street. The McDonald Mansion was later used by Walt Disney for the movie Pollyanna. The stone train station in the film was built in 1904 for the Northwestern Pacific Railroad and is one of the few commercial buildings in downtown Santa Rosa to survive the earthquake of April 18, 1906. It is currently a visitor center. Some of the buildings in downtown Santa Rosa that are seen in the film were damaged or destroyed by earthquakes in 1969; much of the area was cleared of debris and largely rebuilt. The library was a Carnegie Library which was demolished in the mid-1960s due to seismic concerns.

Match-Cut says:
Shadow of a Doubt may me middle of the line Hitchcock, but it still shows how good of a director he can be with the material he's given. Imagine what he could've done with CGI if it was around.
-Ezee E

[Raiders]

http://i52.tinypic.com/23wo3u1.jpg

Directed by Howard Hawks
1946

Wikipedia says: The Big Sleep is known for its convoluted plot. During filming, allegedly neither the director nor the screenwriters knew whether chauffeur Owen Taylor was murdered or had killed himself. They sent a cable to Chandler, who told a friend in a later letter: "They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either".

The cinematic release of The Big Sleep is regarded as more successful than the pre-release version, although some complain it is confusing and difficult to follow. This may be due in part to the omission of a long conversation between Marlowe and the Los Angeles District Attorney where facts of the case, thus far, are laid out. Yet movie-star aficionados prefer it to the film noir version because they consider the Bogart-Bacall appearances more important than a well-told story.

Match-Cut says:
Oh yeah. Watched The Big Sleep last night. It was pretty much incredible.
-Sycophant

I do not like The Big Sleep. It makes no sense.
-Spinal

[soitgoes...]

The 40's has to be the worst decade since the 1920's for film. Discuss.

[Raiders]

http://i51.tinypic.com/2e2e1bl.jpg

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
1949

Wikipedia says:
Nothing.

Reboots:
Ozu himself revisited this film in 1960 with Late Autumn and Claire Denis recently was inspired by this film and turned that inspiration into 35 rhums.

Match-Cut says:
In terms of Late Spring, I really couldn't stand Noriko. I don't know if it was the actress or the character but her smile seemed so false to me... for a while I gave the film the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the character was meant to seem a bit haughty, condescending, etc... but even when the script called for her to be genuinely happy, I still found that her happiness did not seem genuine... and not on a level that revealed something about the character. The film kind of fell apart for me when I couldn't stand spending any time with the lead... and the falseness I felt in her did not play well off the whimsical tone of the rest of the film. The biking scene was also awful.
-Qrazy

[Raiders]

http://i53.tinypic.com/tjlh.jpg

Directed by Howard Hawks
1940

Wikipedia says: While the choice of Cary Grant was almost instantaneous, the casting of Hildy was a far more extended process. At first, Hawks wanted Carole Lombard, whom he had directed in the screwball comedy Twentieth Century, but the cost of hiring Lombard in her new status as a freelancer proved to be far too expensive, and Columbia could not afford her. Katherine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Margaret Sullavan, Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunne were offered the role, but turned it down, Dunne because she felt the part was too small and needed to be expanded. Jean Arthur was offered the part, and was suspended by the studio when she refused to take it. Joan Crawford was reportedly also considered.

Hawks then turned to Rosalind Russell, who was annoyed that she was not his first choice, even arriving at her audition with wet hair. During filming, Russell noticed that Hawks treated her like an also-ran, so she confronted him: "You don't want me, do you? Well, you're stuck with me, so you might as well make the most of it." In her autobiography, Life is a Banquet, Russell wrote that she thought her role did not have as many good lines as Grant's, so she hired her own writer to "punch up" her dialogue. With Hawks encouraging ad-libbing on the set, Russell was able to slip her writer's work into the movie. Only Grant was wise to this tactic and greeted her each morning saying, "What have you got today?"


Match-Cut says:
It was one of the first films I watched and fell in love with when I first fell for cinema. I haven't seen it since, and while I don't love it nearly as much as I did intially it still makes for a great romp. The performances are brilliant, the lines quick, lively and funny. It drags a little when Grant and Russell aren't onscreen together, but the supporting cast does a tremendou job. I'm a screwball comedy fanatic, and even at their worst I love them. This for me is above average in the genre, but I still can't rank it among the very best. I need to get on watching more Cary Grant films...
-Philosophe_rouge

[MacGuffin]

Match-Cut says:
In terms of Late Spring, I really couldn't stand Noriko. I don't know if it was the actress or the character but her smile seemed so false to me... for a while I gave the film the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the character was meant to seem a bit haughty, condescending, etc... but even when the script called for her to be genuinely happy, I still found that her happiness did not seem genuine... and not on a level that revealed something about the character. The film kind of fell apart for me when I couldn't stand spending any time with the lead... and the falseness I felt in her did not play well off the whimsical tone of the rest of the film. The biking scene was also awful.
-Qrazy

Even though this is a masterpiece, I can completely understand why someone would feel this way. I never really understood why she acts like that either.

[Qrazy]

Even though this is a masterpiece, I can completely understand why someone would feel this way. I never really understood why she acts like that either.

Thank you.

[baby doll]

I do not like The Big Sleep. It makes no sense.
-SpinalThe book does. The problem is that they had to take out a lot of essential information to get around the production code, including the ending.

[Mysterious Dude]

The 40's has to be the worst decade since the 1920's for film. Discuss.
The 20's were much better than the 40's.

[Yxklyx]

Thank you.

Regarding Noriko's smile... I might be mixing the two films (which are very similar) but from what I recall, Early Summer (which I liked more) has Noriko with that smile again but in this case it's a tragic smile because you sense that her actions are contrary to what she really wants. So, she's keeping this outward veneer of happiness that she must show because society demands it but her inner desires are never fulfilled. It's possible that Ozu was going for the same thing in Late Spring but it didn't come out as well?

[Raiders]

http://i55.tinypic.com/29oopao.jpg

Directed by John Huston
1948

Wikipedia says: A few notable uncredited actors appear in the film. In an opening cameo, director John Huston is pestered for money by Bogart's character. Actor Robert Blake also appears as a young boy selling lottery tickets. However, the most controversial cameo is the rumored one by Ann Sheridan. Sheridan allegedly did a cameo as a streetwalker. After Dobbs leaves the barbershop in Tampico (actually a set on a studio soundstage), he spies a passing prostitute who returns his look. Seconds later, the woman is picked up again by the camera, but this time in the distance. Some filmgoers and critics feel the woman looks nothing like Sheridan, but the DVD commentary for the film contains a statement that it is she. A photograph included in the documentary accompanying the DVD release shows Sheridan in streetwalker costume, with Bogart and Huston on the set. However, single frames of the film show a different woman in a different dress and different hairstyle, raising the possibility that Sheridan filmed the sequence but that it was reshot with another woman for indeterminate reasons. Many film-history sources credit Sheridan for the part.

Match-Cut says:
The dehumanization of Fred C. Dobbs remains one of the most frightening turns of fate in cinema and while the narrative catalysts of gold and greed are crucial in this development, at least as much credit must be given to John Huston for his astounding use of close-ups. It’s not in the same league as The Passion of Joan of Arc, however Huston’s camera is nearly as attentive to the ticks and grooves of Bogart’s face as Dreyer to Falconetti’s. And while I can’t deny that Bogart didn’t have the overall range as some of the other greats from the time, the subtlety of the expressions he produces, both vocally and facially, as his character struggles with the increasingly burdenous task of balancing his humanity with a desire to forever escape his poverty shows a remarkable control and efficiency within that range. It was not merely a matter of growing a beard and throwing some grease on his face - Bogey's already odd-looking face is distorted in ways I've never seen before, expressing feelings of anguish, despair and pure rage to a degree he never again matched.
-Derek

[Raiders]

http://i52.tinypic.com/fog8m1.jpg

Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
1948

Wikipedia says:
Pressburger originally wrote the screenplay for Alexander Korda as a vehicle for Korda's future wife Merle Oberon. After some years had passed without the film being made, Powell and Pressburger rewrote the screenplay, including more emphasis on dancing, and produced it themselves.


Powell and Pressburger decided early on that they had to use dancers who could act rather than actors who could dance a bit. To create a realistic feeling of a ballet company at work, and to be able to include a fifteen minute ballet as the high point of the film, they created their own ballet company using many dancers from The Royal Ballet. The principal dancers were Robert Helpmann (who also choreographed the main ballet), Leonide Massine (who also choreographed the role of The Shoemaker), Ludmilla Tcherina and Moira Shearer.


Match-Cut says:
Horror director George Romero (“Dawn of the Dead�) has long admitted Powell and Pressburger among his favorite directors. And watching “The Red Shoes� makes this seem perfectly natural. The movie is dark, obsessive, and tortured. It plays like a horror film. And at the center is Lermontov, a character of brooding intensity. He constantly emerges from and then retreats back into the movie’s many expressionistic shadows. He is a character whose destructive nature borders on bloodlust.

Yes, in its aching heart, “The Red Shoes� is one of the all-time great vampire movies. As you watch, consider this: Lermontov is an elegantly dressed man with a pale complexion who is seen almost exclusively indoors or at night. When we see him outdoors in daylight, the cinematography is pointedly, blindingly bright and he always wears dark glasses as if cringing from the light.

And consider the way he treats Craster and Page as people to be sucked in, bled dry, and then discarded. “The Red Shoes� is like “Nosferatu� with the neck bites tastefully removed.
-balmakboor

[Raiders]

http://i56.tinypic.com/2lktelk.jpg

Directed by Maya Deren
1943

Wikipedia says:
The dreamlike (or nightmarish) atmosphere of Meshes has influenced many subsequent films, notably David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997); Wendy Haslem of the University of Melbourne's Cinema Studies department wrote about the parallels:
Maya Deren was a key figure in the development of the New American Cinema. Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon in his experimentation with narration. Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance. Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters and in the incorporation of the “psychogenic fugue,� the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual. Jim Emerson, the editor of rogerebert.com, has also noted the influence of Meshes within David Lynch's film, INLAND EMPIRE.

Match-Cut says:
Wow. Meshes of the Afternoon is fantastic. I'd seen it before a while back long before I was into experimental film, but seeing it now was like seeing it for the first time.
-Brightside

[B-side]

What a brilliant and thoughtful analysis I provided.

[Raiders]

http://i52.tinypic.com/6h2q21.jpg

Directed by Billy Wilder
1944

Wikipedia says: Wilder would later recall with disappointment his first meeting with (Raymond) Chandler. Envisioning a former private detective who had worked his own experiences into gritty prose, he instead met a man he would later describe as looking like an accountant. Chandler was new to Hollywood, but saw it as a golden opportunity. Not realizing that he would be collaborating with Wilder, he demanded $1000 and said he would need at least a week to complete the screenplay, to which Wilder and Sistrom simply looked at one another in amazement. After the first weekend, Chandler presented eighty pages that Wilder characterized as "useless camera instruction"; Wilder quickly put it aside and informed Chandler that they would be working together, slowly and meticulously. By all accounts, the pair did not get along during their four months together. At one point Chandler even quit, submitting a long list of grievances to Paramount as to why he could no longer work with Wilder. Wilder, however, stuck it out, admiring Chandler's gift with words and knowing that his dialogue would translate very well to the screen.

Match-Cut says:
The characters and their banter-y dialogue are so stylized and lively, and the plot so carefully contrived, that I found the whole thing consistently amusing and frequently quite funny.
-Melville

[Pop Trash]

The book does. The problem is that they had to take out a lot of essential information to get around the production code, including the ending.

I'm also one of those people that finds this movie vastly overrated.

[Raiders]

http://i56.tinypic.com/xl060y.jpg

Directed by Vittorio de Sica
1948

Wikipedia says:
The original Italian title literally translates into English as Bicycle Thieves, ladri being plural in Italian, but the film has usually been released in the United States as The Bicycle Thief. According to critic Philip French of The Observer (UK), this alternative title is misleading, "because the desperate hero eventually becomes himself a bicycle thief". The film is released in the UK as the more accurate Bicycle Thieves, and the recent Criterion Collection release in North America uses Bicycle Thieves.

When the film was re-released in the late 1990s Bob Graham, staff film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, was quoted as saying that he preferred the title The Bicycle Thief, stating, "Purists have criticized the English title of the film as a poor translation of the Italian ladri, which is plural. What blindness! The Bicycle Thief is one of those wonderful titles whose power does not sink in until the film is over".

Match-Cut says:
Not much on the film itself, but the semantics of its title know no bounds. Start here (http://match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=189828) and enjoy.

[Raiders]

http://i52.tinypic.com/2yzd0s8.jpg

Directed by Frank Capra
1946

Wikipedia says: Somewhat more iconoclastic views of the film are occasionally expressed. In 1947, film critic Manny Farber wrote, "To make his points [Capra] always takes an easy, simple-minded path that doesn't give much credit to the intelligence of the audience", and adds that there are only a "few unsentimental moments here and there." Wendell Jamieson, in a 2008 New York Times article which was otherwise positive in its analysis of the film, posited that the film "is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife."

Match-Cut says:
Originally Posted by dreamdead
So after (finally) viewing Capra's classic, I'm largely struck by the success he has in eliciting true empathy in the goodness of man (represented in George Bailey), and by how much than goodness is trodden upon by other machiavellian forces (Mr. Potter, the epitome of rampant capitalism). As others like Melville have noted, the continual beat-down that George's dreams take affirms a darker vision of the world than is typically granted to this film.

However, I must rescind my praise before it becomes euphoric because I'm stuck by a (perceived) glitch in the film's ideology--namely, how are we to ascertain that the community coming together to reward George at film's end will do anything to assuage the (existential) misery that he's otherwise in? Sure, the family company is saved from ruin, but at the end of the day his life is still sacrificed without any real recompense for his essential goodness. He and his wife are still barred from traveling and getting beyond the small town that he's yearned to be freed from for so many years. Or do others here read the ending to suggest some fuller note of transformation beyond George Bailey? That is, is the whole community going to enable George and his family to find financial in addition to their spiritual contentment?

Originally Posted by Raiders
In a word, yes. Didn't Clarence teach you anything? George thinks he needs to escape Bedford Falls, or rather "disappear," but as Clarence shows him, he can accomplish great things and mean a lot to people and change their lives right within the confines of his "crummy ol' town." The money at the end is a signifier that the greed of Potter won't strip him of his dignity and his chance to help out the citizens of this town, but the real joy is in the collection of people at the end there to celebrate his "return." The people in his life are his wealth. He doesn't need a million dollars.

Originally Posted by Melville
I don't think anything in the film implies that the community is going to suddenly make George rich (and he was already financially content). And thank God, since such an implication would ruin the whole impact of the film. The point is that George has learned to love life as it is—in other words, to love his ineluctable entanglements with other people. His dream to go to other places and to build monumental things is an idealized expression of an existential (or Nietzschean, if you prefer) desire to make the world his own, to escape his involvement in a community of Others. Conversely, his perpetual self-sacrifice for others is an admission of the responsibilities inherent in that involvement with Others. The way in which he follows the latter path while desiring the former is the reason why I have always considered him an existential hero: he does not merely do what is expected of him because it is the way things are done (i.e. he is not living in habit according to his sense of how people live, as a Heideggerian "they-Self"); he lives with one foot outside the social norm of "the they", and from that position he commits himself to aiding the individuals who form his community (and not to some normative ideals abstracted from that community).

[soitgoes...]

The 20's were much better than the 40's.That's not what I meant. My wording would have been better if I said since 1920.

[Raiders]

http://i51.tinypic.com/33bh3e0.jpg

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1946

Wikipedia says:
But there were two passionate turmoils going on on-set, and both served to inform the final product: one was Hitchcock's growing infatuation with Bergman, and the other was her torturous affair with celebrity battlefield photographer Robert Capa. As a result of this sympatico, and "to accomplish the deepest logic of Notorious, Hitchcock did something unprecedented in his career: he made Ingrid his closest collaborator on the picture":

"The girl's look is wrong," Ingrid said to Hitchcock when, after several takes of her close-up during the dinner sequence, everyone knew something was awry. "You have her registering [surprise] too soon, Hitch. I think she would do it this way." And with that, Ingrid did the scene her way. There was not a sound on the set, for Hitchcock did not suffer actors' ideas gladly: he knew what he wanted from the start. Well before filming began, every eventuality of every scene had been planned—every camera angle, every set, costume, prop, even the sound cues had been foreseen and were in the shooting script. But in this case, an actress had a good idea, and to everyone's astonishment, he said "I think you're right, Ingrid."

Match-Cut says:
Tough-as-nails but sympathetic-as-heck, restrained but sparkling, dead serious but first-class drama all the same.
-Bosco B Thug

[dreamdead]

I still love balmakboor's reading of The Red Shoes. Really can't wait to revisit it and study it within that reading.

I love the MC quirk of liking Capra's film more than De Sica, though I hope to someday see Shoeshine.

Boo on Deren being comparatively low. 'Tis a masterpiece.

This next year I will watch Huston's film. I've always been afraid it's an old star vehicle that wasn't actually good, so this eases my fears.

[Raiders]

http://i51.tinypic.com/28a3tax.jpg

Directed by Carol Reed
1949

Wikipedia says: The atmospheric use of black-and-white expressionist cinematography by Robert Krasker, with harsh lighting and distorted camera angles, is a key feature of The Third Man. Combined with the unique theme music, seedy locations, and acclaimed performances from the cast, the style evokes the atmosphere of an exhausted, cynical post-war Vienna at the start of the Cold War. The film's unusual camera angles, however, were not appreciated by all critics at the time. C.A. Lejeune in The Observer described Reed's "habit of printing his scenes askew, with floors sloping at a diagonal and close-ups deliriously tilted" as "most distracting". American director William Wyler, a close friend of Reed's, sent him a spirit level, with a note saying, "Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you?"

Match-Cut says:
I love The Third Man on a moment-to-moment basis, for the performances, and the zither score rules, but there's something about its overall narrative shape that doesn't really do it for me.
-Boner M

[Raiders]

http://i53.tinypic.com/oid4c8.jpg

Directed by Michael Curtiz
1942

Wikipedia says: Casablanca received "consistently good reviews". The New York Times wrote, "The Warners... have a picture which makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap." The newspaper applauded the combination of "sentiment, humor and pathos with taut melodrama and bristling intrigue". While the Times noted its "devious convolutions of the plot", the newspaper praised the screenplay quality as "of the best" and the cast's performances as "all of the first order". The trade paper Variety commended the film's "combination of fine performances, engrossing story and neat direction" and the "variety of moods, action, suspense, comedy and drama that makes Casablanca an A-1 entry at the b.o". The paper applauded performances by Bergman and Henreid and analyzed Bogart's own: "Bogart, as might be expected, is more at ease as the bitter and cynical operator of a joint than as a lover, but handles both assignments with superb finesse." Variety wrote of the film's real-world impact, "Film is splendid anti-Axis propaganda, particularly inasmuch as the propaganda is strictly a by-product of the principal action and contributes to it instead of getting in the way." Some other reviews were less enthusiastic: The New Yorker rated it only "pretty tolerable".

Match-Cut says:
Casablanca has an obvious war-time message, but that doesn't account for its enduring popularity sixty-five years later.
-baby doll

[Raiders]

http://i55.tinypic.com/34fy4b6.jpg

Directed by Orson Welles
1941

Wikipedia says: Mankiewicz had already written an unperformed play entitled, The Tree Will Grow about John Dillinger. Welles liked the idea of multiple viewpoints but was not interested in playing Dillinger. Mankiewicz and Welles talked about picking someone else to use a model. They hit on the idea of using Hearst as their central character. Mankiewicz had frequented Hearst's parties until his alcoholism got him barred. The writer resented this and became obsessed with Hearst and Marion Davies. Hearst had great influence and the power to retaliate within Hollywood so Welles had Mankiewicz work on the script outside of the city. Because of the writer's drinking problem, Houseman went along to provide assistance and make sure that he stayed focused. Welles also sought inspiration from Howard Hughes and Samuel Insull (who built an opera house for his girlfriend). Although Mankiewicz and Houseman got on well with Welles, they incorporated some of his traits into Kane, such as his temper.

Match-Cut says:
Above all else, it's the wild ambition and the unhinged genius of Welles that bring me back time and time again to Citizen Kane. There are two basic levels that I enjoy films, the first as a partisan... a fan of art and cinema, the second as an aspiring artist. I don't think any other filmmaker is as personally inspiring as Welles, and it all starts with Kane. The film is an incredible exercise in style, the defied and pushed all limits to create a unified and meaningful film. While not evident the first time around, every supposed visual whim reveals and conceals aspects of Kane's life and demeanor. Watching the film again and again does little to clear up Kane's story, or motive, if anything he becomes more obscured. Kane delves into the spirit of a megalomaniac (if anything, the bombastic style of the film is an outward expression of a man bent on excess and control), who isn't just satisfied with controlling his own life, but everyone and everything around him. Rosebud does not serve as the clean-cut answer to a gap he was trying to fill, but again serves to further obscure an already complicated man. Rosebud is not so much a defining metaphor for childhood and innocence, but rather an unatainable and undefineable "something" that makes every person distant and unconnected. No one is transparent, and while Kane may be more opaque than most of us his journey and his mystery mirror fundamentally human unknowns. Life is as unknown as death, and even when we cease to exist things don't suddenly become clear. What more do we understand about a man who's last words reach out to a relic of childhood? Frankly, not too much... but as individuals, and as a collective we are drawn in by our inclination towards curiosity. There is a shallow sense of satisfaction in the discovery, and this feeling overwhelms the fact that the discovery is just that; shallow. Welles never had the same freedom as he did with this film, for the rest of his career he was burdened if not by studio interference, but by some financial difficulty. While not my favourite of his films, it's quite probably the definete. Is this the greatest film ever made? Perhaps, at the very least it's one of the most interesting.
-Philosophe Rouge (dominating for good pulls for 40s cinema)

[Raiders]

1 Citizen Kane 162
2 Casablanca 96.5
3 The Third Man 85
4 Notorious 74.5
5 It's a Wonderful Life 67
6 Bicycle Thieves 66
7 Double Indemnity 61.5
8 Meshes of the Afternoon 56.5
9 The Red Shoes 50
10 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 45.5
11 His Girl Friday 43
12 Late Spring 37.5
13t The Big Sleep 34.5
13t Shadow of a Doubt 34.5
15 Children of Paradise 33
16 Beauty and the Beast 30
17 Sullivan's Travels 28.5
18 Fantasia 23
19 The Shop Around the Corner 23
20 Ivan the Terrible Part I 21.5

______________________________
21 At Land 20.5
22 Black Narcissus 20
23 Monsieur Verdoux 19.5
24 Rope 16
25 Laura 15.5
26 The Lady Eve 15
27 My Darling Clementine 14.5
28 I Walked With a Zombie 14.5
29 The Philadelphia Story 14
30 Force of Evil 14
31 Shoeshine 13.5
32 Red River 12.5
33 The Maltese Falcon 12.5
34 The Best Years of Our Lives 12
35 Blood of the Beasts 11
36 Portrait of Jennie 11
37 The Seventh Victim 11
38 The Heiress 10
39 Pinocchio 10
40 Germany Year Zero 10
41 Detour 10
42 A Canterbury Tale 10
43 Out of the Past 9.5
44 Hangmen Also Die 8
45 The Great Dictator 8
46 Cat People 8
47 The Set-Up 7
48 Ride the Pink Horse 7
49 The Ox-Bow Incident 7
50 Odd Man Out 7
51 Daisy Kenyon 6.5
52 The Miracle of Morgan's Creek 6.5
53 Day of Wrath 6
54 Brief Encounter 6
55 The Magnificent Ambersons 6
56 They Live by Night 6
57 The Lost Weekend 6
58 Lifeboat 5.5
59 Le Corbeau 5.5
60 To Have and Have Not 5
61 The Lady from Shanghai 4
62 Stray Dog 4
63 The Grapes of Wrath 4
64 Quai des Orfevres 4
65 Fireworks 3.5
66 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 3.5
67 Kind Hearts and Coronets 3
68 To Be or Not to Be 2.5
69 The Palm Beach Story 2.5
70 The Devil & Daniel Webster 2
71 Rebecca 2
72 White Heat 2
73 Mildred Pierce 2
74 I Know Where I'm Going! 2

[soitgoes...]

1 Citizen Kane ****
2 Casablanca ****
3 The Third Man ****
4 Notorious ****
5 It's a Wonderful Life ***½
6 Bicycle Thieves ***½
7 Double Indemnity ****
8 Meshes of the Afternoon ***½
9 The Red Shoes ***½
10 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre **½
11 His Girl Friday ***½
12 Late Spring ****
13t The Big Sleep ***½
13t Shadow of a Doubt ***½
15 Children of Paradise ***½
16 Beauty and the Beast ***½
17 Sullivan's Travels ***½
18 Fantasia ***½
19 The Shop Around the Corner ***½
20 Ivan the Terrible Part I **½

[Mysterious Dude]

So for the longest time, when people talked about the great kiss from Notorious, I thought they were talking about the one where they had just been discovered by Claude Rains and ran outside the door ("Oh Dev..."). Only recently did I learn it was actually that completely lame scene in the apartment before they even found out what their assignment was.

[Ezee E]

So for the longest time, when people talked about the great kiss from Notorious, I thought they were talking about the one where they had just been discovered by Claude Rains and ran outside the door ("Oh Dev..."). Only recently did I learn it was actually that completely lame scene in the apartment before they even found out what their assignment was.
That's lame? It's one of the best kissing scenes that I can think of period.

[Boner M]

Sullivan's Travels is probably my least favorite Sturges. Surprised it cracked the top 20 instead of The Lady Eve.

[Bosco B Thug]

1. Citizen Kane ****
2. Casablanca ****
3. The Third Man ****
4. Notorious ****
5. It's a Wonderful Life ***½
6. Bicycle Thieves ***½
7. Double Indemnity N2R
8. Meshes of the Afternoon ***½
9. The Red Shoes ***½
10. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ***
11. His Girl Friday ***½
12. Late Spring n/a
13t. The Big Sleep n/a
13t. Shadow of a Doubt ***½
15. Children of Paradise N2R
16. Beauty and the Beast ***½
17. Sullivan's Travels n/a
18. Fantasia N2R
19. The Shop Around the Corner ***½
20. Ivan the Terrible Part I n/a

Maybe I'm impressionable, but I just quoted soitgoes and that was pretty much my ratings. Good work soitgoes! I liked Treasure of the Sierra Madre better than **1/2, but I didn't love it. Still was really disappointed with Huston's Wise Blood, so I've kind of knee-jerked to the side of the indifferent. Will give him more tries eventually though.

[soitgoes...]

1. Citizen Kane ****
2. Casablanca ****
3. The Third Man ****
4. Notorious ****
5. It's a Wonderful Life ***½
6. Bicycle Thieves ***½
7. Double Indemnity N2R
8. Meshes of the Afternoon ***½
9. The Red Shoes ***½
10. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ***
11. His Girl Friday ***½
12. Late Spring n/a
13t. The Big Sleep n/a
13t. Shadow of a Doubt ***½
15. Children of Paradise N2R
16. Beauty and the Beast ***½
17. Sullivan's Travels n/a
18. Fantasia N2R
19. The Shop Around the Corner ***½
20. Ivan the Terrible Part I n/a

Maybe I'm impressionable, but I just quoted soitgoes and that was pretty much my ratings. Good work soitgoes! I liked Treasure of the Sierra Madre better than **1/2, but I didn't love it. Still was really disappointed with Huston's Wise Blood, so I've kind of knee-jerked to the side of the indifferent. Will give him more tries eventually though.Yay! Go with The Dead stat!

[Mr. Pink]

Will give him more tries eventually though.


My votes go to Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle and The Man Who Would Be King.

[Boner M]

Key Largo is sooo fucking dull.

[Mr. Pink]

No it's not, but okay. Try something else.

[Mysterious Dude]

That's lame? It's one of the best kissing scenes that I can think of period.
I'm amazed that this is apparently the consensus. They've hardly been through anything together at that point. It's just generic 40's romance with a little more kissing.

Whereas the scene in the wine cellar has genuine tension and the romance is more meaningful because they rarely get to see each other anymore.

[MacGuffin]

I'm amazed that this is apparently the consensus. They've hardly been through anything together at that point. It's just generic 40's romance with a little more kissing.

Whereas the scene in the wine cellar has genuine tension and the romance is more meaningful because they rarely get to see each other anymore.

Why would the kiss in the cellar not be considered as the best kiss in the film? Probably because it's overshadowed by the fact that it's included in one of the best suspense set-pieces of all-time.

[Qrazy]

Notorious is mediocre.

[Spinal]

Sullivan's Travels is probably my least favorite Sturges. Surprised it cracked the top 20 instead of The Lady Eve.

It happens every time we have a similar vote. To me, The Lady Eve is far and away the superior movie.

[Derek]

Notorious is mediocre.

I'll suck you right up my tailpipe, bro.

[Qrazy]

I'll suck you right up my tailpipe, bro.

Snow Angels?

[Spinal]

To me, Notorious is the best combo of Hitchcock's directorial wizardry and a script that is solid throughout.

[Derek]

Snow Angels?

Yup.

Now there's an actual mediocre movie...though Nicky Katt nailed that line. :)

[Qrazy]

Yup.

Now there's an actual mediocre movie...though Nicky Katt nailed that line. :)

Did you give the Zwick film 0 stars or?

[Derek]

Did you give the Zwick film 0 stars or?

I figured leaving it blank rather than writing "No Stars" more acurately represents how monumentally horrible it is.

[balmakboor]

To me, Notorious is the best combo of Hitchcock's directorial wizardry and a script that is solid throughout.

I certainly agree with this (although Rear Window is a close challenger). I also agree with Truffaut's feeling about Notorious as being so perfectly and precisely directed that it could be an animated film.

Being away from my copy of "Hitchcock by Truffaut" at the moment, I tried a little googling to get the quote exactly right and didn't really find what I was looking for, but did find this:

http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Interview:_Alfred_Hitchcock_an d_Francois_Tuffaut_(Aug/1962)

I didn't know these recordings were readily available. Cool.

Btw, the episode "Hollywood through Notorious" contains a funny story about the origin of the word "MacGuffen."

[Qrazy]

I figured leaving it blank rather than writing "No Stars" more acurately represents how monumentally horrible it is.

I hate Zwick so much.

[Derek]

I hate Zwick so much.

This would make you hate Zwick so much more. It makes Last Samurai look like a masterpiece and that film sucked.

[balmakboor]

That's lame? It's one of the best kissing scenes that I can think of period.

This clip opens with Hitchcock's story about how he was inspired to direct the kissing scene.

http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/cgi-bin/mp3b.pl?file=http://hitchcock.dreamhosters.com/hitch/mp3/truffaut1/19.mp3

Good stuff.

[Qrazy]

This would make you hate Zwick so much more. It makes Last Samurai look like a masterpiece and that film sucked.

Yeah I'll definitely never see that. I even dislike Glory quite a lot.

[jamaul]

I figured leaving it blank rather than writing "No Stars" more acurately represents how monumentally horrible it is.

Anne Hathaway boobs? :cry:

[Melville]

It's a Wonderful Life's passionate, intensely emotional kissing scene owns Notorious's kisses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf6e6dY1F0E
Best kissing scene ever.

[Yxklyx]

Notorious is mediocre.

A little bit better than that but yeah I don't understand the great love it gets.

[Qrazy]

A little bit better than that but yeah I don't understand the great love it gets.

Ok yeah true, better than mediocre in the grand scheme of mediocrity. It's a good film but not one of Hitch's best imo, maybe top 10.

[Mysterious Dude]

Are we doing the 1930's, or what?

[Spinal]

Are we doing the 1930's, or what?

Yes. Hold on.

[baby doll]

When we run out of decades, are we going to do one for all time?