The Movie List: 25-21

Where were we?

25. "It defeats its own purpose."

Raging Bull (1980)

Boxing offers archetypal plots that filmmakers can’t resist. The number of movies about boxers are out of proportion to even the sport’s heyday, which was a long, long time ago. Many of the sport’s giants have come from bad backgrounds, achieved great heights, and met ignominious ends. Many of its tomato cans are hard-luck studies in trying to flail your way out of a corner. The stories write themselves — or just about — which has led to the following, to name just a few: Body and Soul, Champion, Cinderella Man, The Champ, the Rocky series, Ali, Million Dollar Baby, The Boxer, The Fighter. Those are off the top of my head.

But Scorsese, being Scorsese, takes it to another level. First, as he always has, he got the best of Robert De Niro, who’s incredible here. And then there’s the composition, starting with the justifiably iconic title sequence, during which De Niro as Jake La Motta warms up in slow motion to a piece of music from Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana. (You can hear cinematographer Michael Chapman discuss the popping light bulbs in that clip if you scroll down a bit here.) Chapman deserves a ton of credit for the film’s stark-but-lovely look.

There was a particular scene available on YouTube when I first started drafting this (in 1984), but it’s gone now. It’s at the public swimming pool, but Scorsese starts with the camera up high, then trails down a brick building, follows the path of a young black boy as he jumps into the pool, and then tracks across to De Niro. It’s a beautifully fluid motion, like reading. Raging Bull is like an unforgiving but lyrical novella; not exactly uplifting, but perfectly made.

24. “I swear, if you existed, I’d divorce you.”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Thinking about getting married? Or even just feeling affection for another human being? You might want to avoid this film adaptation of Edward Albee’s award-winning 1962 play. To understate it: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor play a couple who don’t like each other. To properly state it: Take the angriest you’ve ever been. Take the drunkest you’ve ever been. Combine them. Multiply them by four. Add the most resentful you’ve ever been. Take one more drink. Now light yourself on fire. At that point, you might feel some fraction of what associate professor of history George and his wife Martha are feeling as they verbally assault each other.

Censors faced a string of impossible decisions, leading to outcomes like deleting the word “screw” from the film but leaving in the phrase “hump the hostess.” It’s easy to sympathize with their plight. The script certainly has its profane moments, but it’s more that the sheer intensity of the thing feels filthy. What do you make of a husband flatly saying to his wife, “There isn’t an abomination award going that you haven’t won”?

George Segal and Sandy Dennis are very good as Nick and Honey, the wispy young couple who are witness to the carnage, though the most unrealistic part of the movie might be that they don’t run screaming from the house after five minutes. Or less.

23. “Are you here for an affair, sir?”

The Graduate (1967)

22. “You’re not dying, you just can’t think of anything good to do.”

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Some people grew up with the height of the French New Wave, others during the Golden Era of 1930s Hollywood. I grew up in the 1980s. This position in the time-space continuum was not by choice, of course, but it certainly heightened my enjoyment of John Hughes’ movie about a Chicago teenager playing hooky with his best friend and his girlfriend, which came out in 1986, when I was 12 and orders of magnitude less cool than Ferris. (It’s 2012, and the grayer and pastier Matthew Broderick gets, the more I feel like I’m catching up.)

I can’t imagine there’s much more to say about this movie, so I’ll share a couple of facts learned from my old friend Wikipedia: One is that David Denby, a critic for New York at the time, called Ferris “particularly awful,” and “a nauseating distillation of the slack, greedy side of Reaganism.” The moral of the story? Denby is as dependable a guide as he’s ever been. (Though Wikipedia does say that Hughes was a Republican.) I also learned that “Several notable people have called Ferris Bueller's Day Off their favorite motion picture, including Wolf Blitzer, Dan Quayle, Michael Bublé, Simon Cowell and Justin Timberlake.” I didn’t opt to place the movie at No. 22 on my list instead of No. 1 to avoid being lumped in with that group, but I can’t say I’m upset about the coincidence.

Here’s one of those banal facts that still manages to feel earth-shattering (or at least rapidly age-inducing) to me: It’s been 26 years since Ferris was released, and there were 19 years between it and The Graduate. Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock is vastly different from Ferris (he’s closer to Ferris’ fragile best friend, Cameron, who contemplatively sinks to the bottom of a pool in a scene that echoes The Graduate), but the protagonists do share one thing, which is a sense of coming to the end of something with no idea what comes next. Ferris might play the uncertainty much cooler than Ben, but these are movies about blind transition out of youth. As the years pass, I take points away from The Graduate for all kinds of things — Hoffman’s performance is one-note; I love Simon & Garfunkel, but the songs don’t really fit the movie; Katharine Ross’ character is a weaker element than I think she’s supposed to be (but oh, Katharine Ross). But I still love its look and much of its humor, as in the scene when Ben meets Mrs. Robinson at a hotel. The shot of him holding the door for the parade of elderly people is great.

The Graduate is often talked about as a generational snapshot, but I think it holds up because of its oddball tone and its cinematic qualities. The Time Out film guide says director Mike Nichols “couldn’t decide whether he was making a social satire or a farce.” They mean it as insult, but that might be what makes it work. A pure farce or pure social satire may have misfired in any number of ways. This sometimes uneasy combination gives it a winning personality all its own.

21. "From now on, I would like to be a good guy, and a good gambler."

Guys and Dolls (1955)

There are many people under the age of 50 or so who have never seen this movie, and there are many people of all ages who have seen it and don’t like it very much. Leave aside, for a moment, that the people who don’t like it are implying that Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra could appear in something together in 1955 and that thing could be bad. That’s faulty argument No. 1. It’s true that some of the singing is amateurish, and if you’re not fond of Damon Runyon’s patois, I suppose this variation of it could grate. (I’m a big fan. “The oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.” Come on.) There are some things, though, that are argument-proof, and this clip is one of them:

The Movie List: 30-26

30. “I think we oughta get to the bottom of R. P. McMurphy.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

I haven’t read the Ken Kesey novel on which the movie was based, and I’m sure reading it would affect this ranking one way or another. But as it is, the movie is a classic for a reason (or several), even if it’s not perfect. To this point on my list, it might be the most lauded entry. (Well, no, I guess that would be The Godfather Part II.) Cuckoo’s Nest was the second movie (after It Happened One Night) to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay). The supporting cast around Nicholson and Louise Fletcher (including Danny DeVito in one of his first movies) is very good, and the visual approach is appealingly unscrubbed. A mainstream picture set in a psych ward today would have crippling amounts of Twee Quirk. (See this trailer, for instance, for a bellyful of it.)

29. “You taught me that people will do anything for a potato.”

Empire of the Sun (1987)

Since it’s already taken something like 42 years to get around to this installment of the list, I’ll lean on something I wrote previously about this one: I’ve always thought this was Spielberg’s best work. It’s certainly his most underrated. Just about every scene is flawlessly shot, and while the last 30 minutes come apart a bit as Spielberg breaks out his Book of Morals, that hardly makes it different from any of his other Serious Films. Amazingly, Empire “introduced” Christian Bale, and you could do worse than have your coming-out party directed by Spielberg from a script by Tom Stoppard. Bale is impressive as James Graham, a young Brit in Japan-occupied China during World War II who goes from aristocratic brat to orphaned in an internment camp, where he has to grow up, but quick. Here’s a clip, which is only an average scene for Bale, but the slow-motion shot as he watches his favorite fighter plane glide by is pure genius. There are things to dislike about Spielberg, but when you see a moment like this, it’s hard to deny that the guy is a master of his medium.

28. “It may be wrong of them, but they value their lives.”

The Rules of the Game (1939)

I saw this for the first time not very long ago. Renoir’s mix of farce and tragedy, set on a country estate, ruffled upper-class French feathers when it was first released. Renoir cut it to appease critics, and the film has been slowly restored to its original intentions over the course of many years. Very funny at times, and ultimately heartbreaking, Rules is equally rich for historicist film snobs and audiences just wanting entertainment. It features one of my all-time performances, turned in by Julien Carette, who plays Marceau, a rabbit poacher who is caught and offered a job on the estate. Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, with its similar setting and juxtaposition of aristocrats and servants, is in several ways a direct homage to Rules. I’m not a big Altman fan, but I’m tempted to revisit Gosford Park (which I remember enjoying) after watching Renoir’s masterpiece.

27. “What's a logical explanation for a woman taking a trip with no luggage?”

Rear Window (1954)

I went through a mildly feverish Hitchcock phase when I was younger. Nothing like what a Hitchcock phase could be, but I watched at least half a dozen movies in quick succession and fell for the overall style. I keep threatening (in my mind, which is where I do all of my threatening) to go on a full-blown kick soon. As for this pick: If you need much more than Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, let’s face it, there’s something wrong with you, but there’s also something timelessly fascinating about Rear Window's set of one apartment building looking out onto another. In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock said:

It was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilized man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea. Pudovkin dealt with this, as you know. In one of his books on the art of montage, he describes an experiment by his teacher, Kuleshov. You see a close-up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is immediately followed by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now, when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.

26. “No going to the dark side!”

Sideways (2004)

This is low, believe it or not, a (temporary?) concession to the wisdom of crowds. The backlash against this movie’s success was pretty severe, and people keep telling me that I overrate it (I saw it five times in the theater), and I’m cautious enough about the effects of time that I’m happy to temper my enthusiasm somewhat, pending a few more years of perspective. But when I left the theater after first seeing Sideways, I felt thrilled. I had laughed -- a lot, and not cheaply -- and I felt like Paul Giamatti’s performance as Miles, a schlubby, snobby, struggling writer, was almost perfect. But more than anything else, I thought the movie achieved a combined state that I think is enjoyable and rare -- the feeling of cinematic real life. Real life can be boring, or at least frustratingly un-narrative in two-hour chunks. Cinema can be too glossy and/or too contrived. But here, real life is approximated in several scenes: Miles and Jack (an ingeniously cast Thomas Haden Church) walk from their hotel to a local restaurant along a highway at dusk; the two friends and their girlfriends share an increasingly inebriated dinner, culminating in Miles’ famous drunk-dialing incident; the four of them retire to a hillside home and share moments both intimate and awkward. There’s something about the characters and the California light and the leisurely-but-still-compelling pace. . . . Oh, heck, it should have been higher. That said, it’s hard to say who it would have bumped -- the next 25 are heavyweights.

The Movie List: 35-31

35. “Why does everything take so long?”

Four Friends (1981)

I haven’t seen this one in quite a while, and it’s not available on Netflix, so I’m going by distant memory. I realize this is awfully high for distant memory. But what can I say, I trust myself. Four Friends was directed by Arthur Penn, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, and was written by Steven Tesich, who also wrote the terrific Breaking Away. (Breaking Away is another movie I saw a long time ago, but could have confidently put on this list nevertheless. Why I put this movie on here and not that one is one of those mysteries of which the list is really made.) Four Friends at least begins true to its title, with three young men in love with the same woman, Georgia (Jodi Thelen), but it soon focuses primarily on Danilo (Craig Wasson), who has a contentious relationship with his hard-working immigrant father. I’ll excerpt Vincent Canby’s original review in the New York Times for the rest, because on December 11, 1981, he surely had a fresher view of the movie than I have now:

Four Friends is the best film yet made about the 60's . . . It's a film that embraces the looks, sounds, speech and public events of the 60's, but not in the way of a documentary. It has the quality of legend, a fable remembered. . . . Danilo is the Yugoslavian-born son of immigrant parents, who arrives in this country in 1948 at the age of 12 and spends the next decade and a half sorting out the reality of America from his dream of it . . . Mr. Tesich sometimes lets his prose become more purple than is easily accepted on the screen -- “When stars collide, it's out of loneliness” -- but this is the film's method. Four Friends is about ordinary people, but not ordinary people who speak a predictable, commonplace vernacular. They take leaps into the unknown and occasionally come up spouting what sounds like rubbish, which is part of the film's extraordinary style and what separates it from a kind of fiction that aspires to do nothing more than reproduce actuality.

34. “I got it, I’m gone.”

Do the Right Thing (1989)

This is a movie that is great to look at and great to argue about, and it’s hard to want a lot more than that. The saturated colors, the true capture of a steamy day in Brooklyn, and the sometimes cartoonish characterizations make the movie’s march toward real violence something special. When I was younger, I thought that Mookie’s actions at the end of the movie were shocking and unforgivable. Now that I’m older, I still think it’s shocking, but obviously complicated. Spike Lee has said, more than once: “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the can through the window. Twenty years later, they're still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.” Like other questions of this nature, I think the divide in reaction he describes goes a good way toward defining the problem. The can through the window is the movie’s most blatant provocation, though there are others -- like the scene in which Mookie and Pino talk about bigotry and then a series of actors address the camera spewing their own favored stereotypes. The rest of the movie, always concerned with race, is a joy to watch for the performances, from Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and native Brooklynites Rosie Perez and John Turturro.

33. “You guys gotta look menacing!”

American Movie (1999)

Oh, how I love American Movie, a documentary about 30-year-old Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt, who’s desperately trying to finish a low-low-budget horror flick called Coven (which he insists on pronouncing COE-ven). He’s accompanied on the journey by his musician friend Mike Schank. As I wrote in a previous post: “One of the great things about the movie is that you genuinely like Mark and Mike even when you're laughing at them. And yes, you laugh at them. A lot.” Borchardt’s motor-mouth antics, and his complicated mixture of ambition and self-loathing, made the film an instant hit, and made him a regular guest on Late Show with David Letterman. He’s become something of a cult star since, appearing in several horror movies (Zombie Island and The Hagstone Demon, among others). But it’s likely he’ll always be best known for American Movie, where director Chris Smith lovingly captures his Midwestern personality and his Plutonian, if un-filmable visions.

32. “Anyone can cook . . . but only the fearless can be great.”

Ratatouille (2007)

I think this is Pixar’s crowning achievement so far, for a few reasons. First, they managed to make a rat sympathetic. I see rats in New York all the time, and let me tell you, that’s no mean trick. Second, it’s as clever as their other stories, positing a restaurant's perceived greatest villain as its possible savior. Third, it’s gorgeous, with the studio’s animation put to use on some stunning scenes, including Remy’s journey through underground sewers, ending on a panoramic rooftop view of Paris. But lastly, and most importantly, while all of Pixar’s movies have that often-mentioned mixture of moments for children and adults, the last act of Ratatouille, and what it says about both the urge to create and the urge to critique, is particularly sharp. The critic (brilliantly voiced by Peter O’Toole) is reminded of his childhood in a way that it would be impossible for a child to appreciate. (My friend Sarah extrapolated on this thought here.)

31. “I’m glad what I done!”

On the Waterfront (1954)

This should probably be higher. Brando is in other films on my list, but this is the movie on the list most fueled by his presence. It’s not that this is his most searing performance. That’s probably still Streetcar, in my opinion, but this is a better movie. Brando is Terry Malloy, a not-too-bright dock worker whose brother, Charley, is the lawyer for the local mobbed-up union boss. Brando’s performance is an all-time great, and the supporting cast lives up to it: Lee J. Cobb as the corrupt boss, Rod Steiger as Charley, Karl Malden as the waterfront priest, and Eva Marie Saint as Edie, Terry’s love interest. The most famous scene is one of the most famous scenes, when Charley threatens Terry and then Terry builds up to “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.” But there are plentiful other gems, most notably the scene where Terry strolls with Edie, absentmindedly playing with her glove and issuing great, casual Brando-isms (“I don’t like the country, the crickets make me nervous.”).

Novelist Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay, and according to Wikipedia: “Schulberg later published a novel just called Waterfront that was much closer to his original screenplay than the version that was released on-screen. Among several differences is that, in both the screenplay and the novel, Terry Malloy is brutally murdered.”

The Movie List: 40-36

40. “You broke my heart.”

The Godfather II (1974)

Plenty of people prefer this sequel to the original. I don’t, though I obviously like it quite a bit. Among other things, it has maybe the best moment in the two movies. (I say two movies, because even though I haven’t seen the third, I’ve come to accept the conventional wisdom that it was a total disaster and should be kept apart from the first two. I still remember my parents and older sister going to see it in Dallas. When the three of them got back, I could hear them in the garage, still laughing.) I suppose I could save what follows for my analysis of the first movie, but here goes: There are so many obvious strengths to both installments, but the one thing that always bothers me is the transition of Michael from innocent son to Godfather. Pacino is tremendous in both movies, don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming him. But there’s a tendon missing—for me, at least. And while you might think this is more damning of the original movie than the sequel, since the original is when the transition happens, there’s something about Michael being at the top for the whole running time that bugs me in a way the first didn’t. Even I’m not sure if that makes any sense. Let’s revisit it when the time comes, shall we?

39. “It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.”

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Adapted from my post about this movie back when I first saw it, in September 2008:

The most often repeated fact about Kind Hearts and Coronets is that Alec Guinness plays eight parts, and he's amazing. But that gimmick is not what makes the movie so great. In this black comedy from Britain’s legendary Ealing Studios, Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini, who is in line to be a duke. But it's a long line. In front of him stand eight members of the D'Ascoyne family (all played by Guinness), including Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne. Louis narrates the story of how he methodically picks off family members in order to inherit the dukedom. It's beautifully written, and funny in ways both morbid and goofy. I'm a big critic of voiceover narration in movies, but this is mostly when it's done in the third person—Little Children and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, to name two fairly recent examples. First person can be more successful (see also: recently listed Badlands). In any event, the level of writing here makes the narration more like a novel than a movie. On the commentary for another DVD, Guinness said of Kind Hearts, “I read [the screenplay] on a beach in France, collapsed with laughter on the first page, and didn't even bother to get to the end of the script. I went straight back to the hotel and sent a telegram saying, ‘Why four parts? Why not eight!?’ ”

38. “Ghosts don’t cry.”
“Nothing is simple.”

Volver (2006)
Talk to Her (2002)

I put these two movies by Pedro Almodóvar together because I can remember Volver well and Talk to Her less well, but I loved them both. My cloudy memory of Talk to Her makes it impossible to decide which of these is my favorite of his, but I think they would be the two finalists. They both feature Almodóvar’s typically beautiful compositions and saturated colors and strong ensemble acting. In Talk to Her, two women, one a dancer and one a matador, are comatose in a hospital. The movie follows the men who love them. In Volver, three sisters deal with the death of their mother, one of them believing that her ghost is living with her. The entire cast is terrific, but Penelope Cruz carries the most weight, and as always in Almodóvar’s movies, she’s brilliant and seems even more gorgeous than usual.

37. “We'll be listening to you.”

The Conversation (1974)

Given that this movie and The Godfather Part II both came out in 1974, I’d say it was a pretty impressive year for Francis Ford Coppola. (And for me; I was born.) The Godfather sequel won Best Picture, but I think you could make a case that this is the better movie. Less epic, for sure, but that might be the very reason this tightly crafted story wins out. It’s got a great 1970s flavor and a wonderful ensemble cast, starting with the leading man. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, who specializes in audio surveillance. He becomes obsessed with accurately transcribing one conversation that he taped between a couple in a San Francisco park, and concerned about the couple’s possible fate. In the last scene, one of my favorites in any movie, Harry’s paranoia is turned on himself as he searches/destroys his apartment looking for possible bugs. According to Wikipedia: “On the DVD commentary, Coppola says he was shocked to learn that the film utilized the very same surveillance and wire-tapping equipment that members of the Nixon Administration used to spy on political opponents prior to the Watergate scandal. Coppola has said this is the reason the film gained part of the recognition it has received, but that this is entirely coincidental. Not only was the script for The Conversation completed in the mid-1960s (before the Nixon Administration came to power), but the spying equipment used in the film was discovered through research and the use of technical advisers and not, as many believed, by revelatory newspaper stories about the Watergate break-in.”

36. “Nothing that happens is ever forgotten, even if you can't remember it.”

Spirited Away (2001)

Roger Ebert called this movie “a visual feast,” and that’s an understatement. Another critic, Scott Tobias, very accurately and concisely said, “much of what is great about Spirited Away defies description and simply must be experienced.” The story, by renowned Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, revolves around Chihiro, a young girl whose family is moving. On the way to their new home, they take a wrong turn, go through a tunnel, and end up in a strange, fantastical world. The movie gets compared to Alice in Wonderland for obvious reasons, but aside from that broad similarity Spirited Away is unique. Separated from her parents, Chihiro gets a job working at a bathhouse for spirits. Miyazaki introduces a dizzying progression of wildly imaginative creatures and characters. To try and summarize them (or the movie’s more subtle themes) in a post this size would be ridiculous. If you haven’t seen it, you should.

The Movie List: 45-41

45. "And it's love which is awakened."

Toto the Hero (1991)

This one should either be here, five to 10 slots higher, or 40 slots lower. Or maybe 140 slots lower. I really have no idea, not having seen it for a while. But I obviously remember liking it a great deal. It tells the story of Thomas, who nicknamed himself Toto during a wildly imaginative childhood that has given way to a wildly imaginative adulthood and old age. Even as he nears the end of his life, Thomas retains his faith in a paranoid fantasy that he was switched at birth, during a hospital fire, with a man named Alfred, a rich man whom Thomas both envies and loathes. Part of the reason for this is that Thomas is in love with his sister from an early age, and not being officially related to her would be a help. The movie hops around a lot in time, and there are many flights of fancy, including tulips that sway back and forth while someone sings Charles Trenet's jaunty "Boum." Still, despite the sweet nature of some of the material, as one fan on imdb put it, “This is a tight, mean, well-constructed tale about the feeling that dogs us all -- is this all life is? Could I have been happier as someone else? Are they happier than me? Am I lucky or unlucky? And most importantly, this: Why, when life seems so hard at times, can we find so much joy in small things . . . ?” If memory serves, I agree.

44. “Sure, I lie from time to time.”

The 400 Blows (1959)

Among other things, one of the best full-length directorial debuts in movie history. Truffaut modeled the story of troubled adolescent Antoine Doinel (brilliantly played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) on his own life. In her essay about the movie for the Criterion Collection, Annette Insdorf writes:

Born in Paris in 1932, [Truffaut] spent his first years with a wet nurse and then his grandmother, as his parents had little to do with him. When his grandmother died, he returned home at the age of eight. An only child whose mother insisted that he make himself silent and invisible, he took refuge in reading and later in the cinema.

Like Antoine, Truffaut found a substitute home in the movie theater: He would either sneak in through the exit doors and lavatory windows, or steal money to pay for a seat. In The 400 Blows, Antoine and René reenact the delinquency and cinemania of the young Truffaut and Robert Lachenay (who was an assistant on The 400 Blows). Their touching friendship is captured in René’s unsuccessful attempt to visit Antoine at reform school.

Insdorf also relates the casting of Léaud, and Truffaut’s instructions to him, “not to depict adolescence from the usual viewpoint of sentimental nostalgia, but . . . to show it as the painful experience that it is.” This clip of Léaud (and other kids) auditioning for the movie is one of my favorite things. Truffaut went on to make four more movies starring the character, none of which I’ve seen. I need to remedy that. Also, I just discovered that The Simpsons recreated the movie’s famous last shot, this time with Nelson. Hilarious.

43. “A person doesn't change just because you find out more.”

The Third Man (1949)

Rarely have I seen a movie stolen as brazenly as this one is by Orson Welles once he finally appears as Harry Lime, closer to the end of the picture than the beginning. The theft is especially impressive because the rest of the cast is also terrific. Joseph Cotten plays Holly Martins, an American pulp writer who goes to Vienna in the wake of World War II because his friend Harry has promised him work. Instead, he arrives to learn that Harry has died in a car accident. Or has he? Well, no, he hasn’t. And when he’s first seen, it’s suddenly, lit in a shadowed alcove in one of the great moments in movie history. At one point, Lime, trying to rationalize his crimes, says to Holly:

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

That line got parsed by a lot of people. Welles later said, “When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks.” And writer John McPhee said that at the time of the Borgias in Italy, Switzerland was “the most powerful and feared military force in Europe,” not the Switzerland we know as a punchline to jokes about neutrality.

42. “My years are not advancing as fast as you might think.”

Groundhog Day (1993)

Groundhog Day is very funny. The scenes with Ned Ryerson alone make for a comic gem. But there is also a great deal of philosophical depth to the movie, and not just for a Hollywood comedy. As Phil Connors (Bill Murray) relives the same day over and over again (director Harold Ramis has estimated he does this for 30 or 40 years’ worth of days), he perfects both himself and his relationships with other people. His move from frustration (Why is this happening?) to narcissistic fun (I’m gonna sleep with everybody! I’m gonna drive drunk!) to despair (I’m gonna kill myself!) to self-improvement and enlightenment make the movie a natural fit for religious groups of all stripes. Ramis said:

At first I would get mail saying, “Oh, you must be a Christian, because the movie so beautifully expresses Christian belief.” Then rabbis started calling from all over, saying they were preaching the film as their next sermon. And the Buddhists! Well, I knew they loved it, because my mother-in-law has lived in a Buddhist meditation center for 30 years and my wife lived there for 5 years.

Whatever your spiritual persuasion, Groundhog Day has something to make you think about, and it will make you laugh while it does it.

41. “Suppose I shot you. How’d that be?”

Badlands (1973)

The second post in this blog's long, illustrious history was actually about this movie. Here is that post, in slightly altered form:

Terrence Malick wrote and directed Badlands, and released it in 1973, shortly before pulling a Salinger-like disappearing act. He released Days of Heaven in 1978 and then fell off the map for 20 years.

Just like Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), Badlands depends heavily on a slowly gathered sense of dread and a liberal use of voice-over narration by one of its main characters. It's a much smaller, more modest story, though, and it's the better movie because of it. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek play Kit (25) and Holly (15), a pair of disaffected South Dakotan youths (is there any other kind?) in the late 1950s. It's not giving anything away to reveal that someone gets killed and the pair hits the road to outrun the fuzz and then several other people get killed and no one gets any less disaffected. It’s sort of what Natural Born Killers might have looked like if Raymond Carver had written it -- What We Talk About When We Talk About Going on a Killing Spree.

Sheen is extraordinary, and though I've never been a big fan of Spacek, she does a terrific job with the voice-overs, which are often spare but poetic:

He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us. I'd stopped even paying attention to him. Instead, I sat in the car and read a map and spelled out entire sentences with my tongue on the roof of my mouth, where nobody could read them.

Despite its brilliance, the movie does have quite a silly tagline, according to imdb: “In 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people.” This is nothing, though, compared to my favorite tagline of all time, which is from The Lift, a Dutch horror movie about a demented elevator: “Take the stairs! Take the stairs! For God's sake, take the stairs!”

The Movie List: 50-46

Man, that was a long time to have Phil Collins at the top of the page. Sorry about that.

My friend “Dez,” God bless him, is paying close attention to this list, and he has complained (as I knew he would) about the “ties.” A quick note about them: They’re not ties. They’re simply movies that, for one reason or another, go very well together, and they just give me an excuse to add (and discuss) more movies. Of course, they do fall in a similar place in my ranking, but they’re not technically tied. To Dez and anyone else who is bothered by this, there’s only two instances left. Not counting the one below. Counting that one, there’s three.

50. “He’ll flip ya. Flip ya for real.”

The Usual Suspects (1995)

I saw this three times in the theater when it was released during my senior year of college. The Washington Post said, “The Usual Suspects may be too clever for its own good,” and I can see that. Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars out of four, and included it on a “most hated” list, proving that, despite his recent high-quality blogging and Twittering and deserved public sympathy, his taste has never been the most reliable barometer. I enjoyed the complexities of the caper, but it wasn’t the Keyser Soze “reveal” that kept me coming back, it was the ensemble cast, especially Benicio Del Toro (shockingly young-looking) as the marble-mouthed Fenster. Haven’t seen this one in years and years, but the initial impression it made on me is enough to put it this high.

49. “I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen.”

Say Anything... (1989)
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
High Fidelity (2000)

John Cusack is the cinematic avatar of my generation, and we could have done a lot worse. If any of your heads are about to explode because this entry contains three movies—hi again, Dez—just be glad it’s not four. I almost added Better Off Dead at the last second. These movies constitute a progression, or a non-progress: Lloyd Dobler holds up that boom box, teaches a generation to yearn for girls out of their league to a Peter Gabriel soundtrack, and then a decade later, Rob in High Fidelity is still trying to figure out him and women (and soundtracks) as he approaches mid-life. In these three movies, Cusack—sorry, the characters he plays—deals (or doesn’t deal) with getting older, something my generation was never going to be very naturally talented at, for a multitude of reasons. Maybe the most appropriate pairing in pop-culture history is Cusack and High Fidelity, since the novel the movie was based on included this passage:

What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

Likewise, no one warned me off John Cusack movies.

48. “You don't look out for yourself, the only helping hand you'll ever get is when they lower the box.”

Hud (1963)

Few phrases in the English language are as appealing as young Paul Newman. In this adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s debut novel, Horseman, Pass By, Newman plays Hud Bannon, the son of a Texas rancher. Hud is a drunken, brawling, womanizing . . . well, tool. (“The only question I ever ask any woman is ‘What time is your husband coming home?’ ”) His father, Homer (Melvyn Douglas), is an upstanding, old-school exemplar of manly decency. The conflict between them is the center of the story. I think I’ve read understandable criticism that says Newman is too cool as Hud, that he makes it too easy to sympathize with and want to be the character who is tragically flawed. I say, who cares? He’s great in the role, and I think the more you can side with Hud, the better and more complicated the story becomes—otherwise, it’s almost too neatly Manichean. Maybe I’m making up that I ever read that criticism, in which case thanks for reading a conversation between me and myself. The black-and-white movie is full of great dialogue, beautiful cinematography, and a stark, incredible scene involving the mass killing of cattle.

47. “You gonna finish that?”

Diner (1982)

OK, so maybe my Cusack-educated generation doesn’t have a monopoly on having trouble growing up. Barry Levinson’s semi-autobiographical directorial debut is set in Baltimore at the end of the 1950s, and follows a group of friends in their 20s reunited for a wedding. The cast is a 1980s potpourri: Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Tim Daly, and Paul Reiser. There’s something blessedly universal in the American experience about sitting around a diner late at night and bullshitting with friends. The sometimes ad-libbed scenes in Diner capture it as well as almost any other movie (there are a couple of movies still to come on the list that strongly compete in the Male Banter category). One blogger points out that the movie was in a distribution purgatory because the studio heads were mystified by its lack of incident. Then Pauline Kael wrote a rave in The New Yorker that gave the movie life. She called it “wonderful,” and wrote of the men in it: “Conversations may roll on all night, and they can sound worldly and sharp, but when these boys are out with girls, they're nervous, constricted, fraudulent, half crazy.” Kael’s right; this is very much a movie about boy-men trying to wrap their heads around women, and thus life in general. Geoffrey Macnab wrote, “the film expresses perfectly the incomprehension these men have for the women in their lives.” Levinson makes gentle fun of that incomprehension, as when one character devises a football quiz for his fiancee, and makes the wedding dependent on the results.

46. “I wrote a hit play and directed it, so I'm not sweating it either.”

Rushmore (1998)

Having loved Bottle Rocket, loving Rushmore had me figuring that Wes Anderson could do no wrong. Well, you live, you learn. I’d still say everything he’s done is worth seeing, but as I’ve probably already written a hundred times (apologies), it’s been dispiriting to watch his style devolve into a calcified set of tics. (They’re tics that fully survived the transition to stop-motion animation in The Fantastic Mr. Fox.) I’m sure you all know about Rushmore, when the tics were fresh (refreshing, even), so I’ll just close with an excerpt from Anderson’s funny essay about personally screening the movie for Kael, a hero of his:

Finally, the movie ended, and I took Ms. Kael's hand and walked with her out of the theater.

“I don't know what you've got here, Wes.”

I nodded.

“Did the people who gave you the money read the script?”

I frowned. “Yeah. That's kind of their policy.”

We started slowly down the steps. “Just asking,” she said. It was a short walk to the car. “At this point, I would usually tell you not to worry if you have to carry me, since I only weigh 85 pounds. But you look like you don't weigh much more than that, yourself.”

The Movie List: 55-51

55. “See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you're not missing out on anything.”

Before Sunrise (1995)

I think there’s something like a critical consensus that the sequel, Before Sunset, is a better movie, and that might be true. But this one has a larger claim on me. I was in college when I read Anthony Lane’s enthusiastic review in The New Yorker. Finding the movie in San Antonio wasn’t going to be a cinch, but it did play at what passed for the local art house. I remain a sap, but I was a real sap back then, and the movie’s chatty flirtation knocked me over. It’s also associated with an anecdote I’ve probably shared before here, and that I love: I raved about it to a post-college girlfriend with whom I felt a strong connection. We rented it and watched in silence. I imagined, of course, that her silence was a product of rapt appreciation. As the credits rolled, she turned to me and asked, “Why did you like that?” Ah, love. In the glimpses I’ve seen since, I can imagine age might lessen this movie’s impact on me, but Richard Linklater’s calm touch still makes it a treat.

54. “You have no respect for order, you are arrogant, you’re disruptive, and you celebrate chaos!”

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

I wrote a full post about this movie soon after I saw it, which is here. It begins like this:

Albert Camus famously wrote that the most important philosophical question, the one that must be answered before any others can even be asked, is whether or not to commit suicide. It’s a question that wouldn’t occur to Poppy, the playful, tittering center of Mike Leigh’s terrific Happy-Go-Lucky.

Happiness is something that philosophers and artists alike largely ignore as a subject of study. Torment, tumult, grief, unrequited love, and boredom are more common inspiration. And the ledger shows that this is a good thing. On the one side, you have Anna Karenina, Mozart’s Requiem, David’s The Death of Marat, hell, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. On the other, you have “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

To examine the causes of suffering, and how we react to them, tends to be both more interesting and more edifying than portraying how we surf along on times of joy. But sustained happiness is another thing, and it would be fascinating -- maybe even helpful -- to see it depicted more often.

53. “I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion with you.”

Manhattan (1979)

This would have been a lot higher if I hadn’t rewatched it recently. It’s not that it’s bad (53 ain’t chopped liver). It’s just that . . . well, OK, parts of it are bad. Allen’s worship of New York is probably stronger when it’s less blatant than it is here, but still, Gershwin on top of black-and-white shots of the city is a good combination any way you can get it. And even though Allen's character's relationship with Muriel Hemingway’s character was stilted and creepy even before, you know, real life unfolded, and even though Diane Keaton’s character takes some time to like . . . OK, I’m going to talk myself out of this choice if I’m not careful. No, no, I’m still a sucker for the New York stuff, and the movie is funny, like when Allen says, “My first wife was a kindergarten teacher. She got into drugs, and she moved to San Francisco; went into est, became a Moonie. She’s with the William Morris Agency now.” Or when he accuses someone of being “the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald Emotional Maturity Award.” I no longer think this is his second-best movie, which is the position it occupies on this list. But I think the world will survive the error.

52. “A minute of silence can be a long time.”

Band of Outsiders (1964)

I’m more of a Truffaut guy than a Godard guy. There, I said it. God, I feel liberated. But I love Band of Outsiders. You can still see its impact on filmmakers all the time. Quentin Tarantino’s production company is called A Band Apart, a play on the film’s French title, and Wes Anderson should be paying royalties to Godard’s estate. (Tarantino was also reportedly influenced enough by the movie’s famous dancing scene that he echoed it in Uma and Travolta’s dance together in Pulp Fiction.) In Outsiders, Odile (Anna Karina) and two new male friends, Franz and Arthur -- who both fall for her, and why not? -- plan to rob the villa where Odile lives with her aunt. The movie only features the kind of suspense that description would imply toward the very end. Until then, it’s all slow charm. The three friends run through the Louvre, trying to see the entire thing in a world-record time. (The previous record was 9:45.) Criminals exist in a distinctly New Wave mode, with their fashionable caps and argyle sweaters and guns under the kitchen sink. Watching it again not long ago, I also remembered it uses soundtrack better than most movies on the list. Only the sag of some early scenes keeps it from being even higher.

51. “I demand to have some booze!”

Withnail & I (1987)

Some cult movies, like Spinal Tap or Rocky Horror, actually outgrow the cult label. I don’t think this one has. Set in London and the English countryside at the end of the 1960s, and based on the experiences of writer-director Bruce Robinson, Withnail & I follows two struggling actors as they run out of money in the city and go to an uncle’s estate for some R & R. Paul McGann is very good as Marwood (the “I” of the title), but Richard Grant as Withnail is just brilliant. (In fairness to McGann, the script favors Grant tenfold.) Withnail is a raging drunk, and Grant, who allegedly never drank in real life, gives perversely entertaining line readings in scenes like the one where he takes to drinking what I'm pretty sure is lighter fluid, or when, biblically hung over, he moans, “I feel like a pig shat in my head.” When the two do get to the country, they realize they’re singularly unsuited for it. (A local rides by, and Withnail frantically tells him, “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”) Almost nothing at all happens in Withnail & I. The sole drama is whether Withnail’s portly uncle, played by Richard Griffiths, will have his way with Marwood. But the script is great, the performances are four stars all-around (leave that to the Brits), and the final scene, in which Withnail recites a soliloquy from Hamlet in the rain, standing at the outskirts of the London Zoo, is profound, revelatory, and on a short list of the very best endings I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen the movie, you really should watch it before seeing the finale. But if you have seen it, and just want to be reminded, it’s here.

The Movie List: 60-56

60. "My boy's wicked smart."

Good Will Hunting (1997)

I’ll undoubtedly take my lumps for this one, too. There’s a personal reason for its inclusion, as you might imagine. When it was released, in 1997, I was a daydreamy 23-year-old living in Dallas and wondering fairly constantly if I should move, and if so, where. Plus, I had girl trouble. Plus-plus, Ben Affleck wasn’t Ben Affleck yet. (And he's never been as well cast as he was here.) So it was easy for me to overlook or forgive some of the movie’s weaker elements (and there are several). It ends with a shot of Will hitting the New England highway en route to California, and that was a moment the 23-year-old liked quite a bit. But I can explain my affection for the movie on more objective grounds. I think it’s especially interesting as an example of what can happen when an auteur (in this case, Gus Van Sant) is constrained by the aims of a more conventional project. Some of the distinct mood that permeates a movie like Paranoid Park is present in Good Will Hunting (partly in the lilt of the Elliott Smith soundtrack, which might be partly responsible for the fact that every minor surgery on Grey's Anatomy has to be accompanied by a Joshua Radin song but sounded quite fresh at the time).

59. “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday.”

Kicking and Screaming (1995)

I don’t know what happened to Noah Baumbach. Lots of people love The Squid and the Whale, but I had a Randy Jacksonesque reaction to it: I thought it was a little pitchy, and it was just OK for me, dawg. The reviews of Margot at the Wedding were forbidding enough to keep me away. I’ll probably see Greenberg, though it sounds dreary. But Baumbach’s debut, Kicking and Screaming, is a hilarious (if sometimes stiffly acted) look at post-collegiate life. I’m willing to admit that if this hadn’t been released within a year or so of my own college graduation, it might not have had the impact it did -- not just because of its overlap with my own timeline, but because its brand of absurdist, highly quotable humor is generational. My generation. Sloane Crosley parsed the quotability here.

58. “You are a sad, strange little man.”

Toy Story (1995)

I’m a vocal fan of Pixar, and the studio really came storming out of the gate with its first full-length feature. The animation may have been less mind-boggling than it is now, but the story is still one of the best Pixar has created. Buzz Lightyear, the toy who doesn’t understand he’s a toy, is a great character. (And the scene in which he discovers the truth while watching a TV ad for himself is genuinely touching.) He and Woody have a classic odd couple dynamic, and the movie is full of funny gags, like the arcade toys who worship the mystical claw that plucks them away for children. (Go to 5:20 in this clip. “The claw chooses who will go and who will stay.”) The sequel was strong, too, and we’ll see if the upcoming third installment is a good idea soon enough.

57. “My real message? Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.”

Don't Look Back (1967)

D. A. Pennebaker’s chronicle of Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour is one of the great documentaries for all kinds of reasons. First, there’s the access. While you get a sense of Dylan controlling things, more or less, the camera goes places in a fashion that it’s impossible to imagine a major star allowing today. We see Dylan’s tense silences with Joan Baez, his interaction with Donovan at a party, his conversations with manager Albert Grossman in taxis. We see him performing in Royal Albert Hall, and we get amazing vintage footage of him singing at a 1963 voter registration rally in Mississippi. But mostly we get him as a contradictory bundle: star and regular guy, joker and jackass, manipulator and cipher. I’ve seen it several times now. After the first time, I came away a bigger fan of Dylan the artist and a bigger skeptic of Dylan the legend. His dealings with the British press, in particular, are maddening, as he greets vapid questions with adolescent jousting, and those exchanges foreshadow the total, unceasing triviality of entertainment “reporting.” A female journalist asks him, “Would you say that you cared about people, particularly?” And he answers, “Well, yeah, but we all have our own definitions of all those words, ‘care’ and ‘people’ and . . .” An exchange we could certainly do without, on both sides.

56. “I don’t wanna talk to some flunky pig tryin’ to calm me, man.”

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

I’ve already mentioned how my respect for Al Pacino has only grown while putting together this list. I’m going to keep mentioning it. Pacino is incredible, and this is one of his best roles. As a Brooklyn bank robber with a struggling family and a boyfriend who wants a sex change, Pacino erupts through the famously loud scenes, like “Attica!,” but the subtler dimensions of the character are lost when that scream is what’s remembered best. A. O. Scott put it very well in his video review of the movie for the Times (this series of smartly condensed capsules is addictive). He said, “[Dog Day Afternoon] turns the archetype of the solitary, antisocial outlaw on its head. What motivates Sonny to rob the bank in the first place is an almost oppressive, desperate sense of responsibility -- to his family, to his mother, to his boyfriend. And this proves to be his undoing as an effective criminal. Because once he’s taken all of these innocent people hostage, what he ends up doing is spending the rest of the day trying to keep them safe.”

The Movie List: 65-61

65. "Kid's got alligator blood."

Rounders (1998)

I’m willing to half-apologize for this one. Several movies below this on the list -- and several that were left off altogether -- are better movies. There are distracting flaws here: In a minor role, Gretchen Mol is terrible, and even Matt Damon is a little stiff in the lead. And Damon’s voice-over work (voice-overs are a common complaint of mine) strikes a consistently annoying, explaining-things-to-people-who-have-never-played-cards-or-seen-a-narrative-unfold tone. But I like stories about gambling, and the movie’s huge strength is Ed Norton as “Worm,” Damon’s friend from prep school who’s just been released from jail for fixing high school basketball games. His charismatic performance carries things, and once you accept that the rest of the movie isn’t Citizen Kane (not on my list, by the way), then even its cheesier elements, like John Malkovich’s insane Russian accent (and ridiculously obvious tell), are fun.

64. “This time I really think I have something.”

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Hannah has a few things going for it, including a strong trio of female leads in Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, and Mia Farrow. Woody plays himself, more or less, or at least the “himself” that is his usual character on screen. In fact, he probably nails hypochondria better in this movie than in any of his other works, and that’s saying something. His fear and grappling with mortality in the face of a possible brain tumor is hilarious and then somewhat poignant, a combo at which Allen once excelled. Despite the fact that the movie features relatively sober adult themes compared to movies like Sleeper and Bananas, it also has some great laughs, like when Allen’s character complains to his father that the Holocaust makes him question religious truth, and asks him to explain away the existence of Nazis in a universe overseen by God. “How the hell do I know why there were Nazis?” his father answers. “I don't know how the can opener works.”

63. "I'm gonna nail you for pickin' your feet in Poughkeepsie."

The French Connection (1971)

I caught this one a couple of years ago in New York, which was a good refresher. I don't think I would have remembered it well enough to put it on here otherwise. Its famous car chase gets most of the love when people talk about it now, and that scene is pretty great, though it's really a car-train chase scene as Gene Hackman's character, "Popeye" Doyle, races to catch a subway car that's been hijacked on elevated tracks. Doyle and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) are two Brooklyn narcotics cops, and the movie tracks their efforts to tie the mob to a drug smuggling ring in France. Hackman's performance is the best thing here (he won an Oscar for it, and the movie won a slew of others as well, including Best Picture), but there are plenty of runners-up: vintage '70s American moviemaking, great, gritty shots of New York, and a brilliantly built scene during which a car is taken apart in a search for drugs.

62. “Walter, you're wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way.”

His Girl Friday (1940)

This classic might get a little too screwball in its second half, but the chemistry between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell is A+. Russell is Hildy, an ex-reporter, and Grant is Walter, a newspaper editor; they’re divorced and he’s trying to get her back into both the journalism game and his heart. This exchange, early on, is something the makers of today’s putrid romantic comedies should study more often:

Walter: Been seeing me in your dreams?

Hildy: Oh, no, Mama doesn't dream about you anymore, Walter. You wouldn’t know the old girl now.

Walter: Oh, yes, I would. I'd know you anytime.

Hildy: (mockingly, over his continuing voice) “Anyplace, anywhere.” Ahh, you're repeating yourself, Walter. That’s the speech you made the night you proposed.

Walter: I notice you still remember it.

Hildy: Of course I remember it. If I didn't remember it, I wouldn't have divorced you.

Walter: I sort of wish you hadn't done that, Hildy.

Hildy: Done what?

Walter: Divorced me. Makes a fellow lose all faith in himself. Gives
him a . . . almost gives him a feeling he wasn't wanted.

Hildy: Ah, now look, Junior, that’s what divorces are for.

Walter: Nonsense, you've got an old-fashioned idea [that] divorce is something that lasts forever, till death do us part. Why, divorce doesn’t mean anything nowadays, Hildy. Just a few words mumbled over you by a judge. We've got something between us nothing can change.

Go here, and the exchange above starts (more or less) at the 3:50 mark. Just the way Russell says “Mama doesn’t dream about you anymore” would be enough to get this move on the list.

61. "Anyway, we delivered the bomb."

Jaws (1975)

Kind of like His Girl Friday, but with a shark. Well, no. In fact, if you could go back in time and show the opening night crowd at His Girl Friday a screening of Jaws, their heads might explode. And that’s OK, because it’s what followed Jaws that was a problem. And no, I don’t just mean Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, Jaws 4: Fool Me Three Times, and Jaws 5: The Fulfillment of Louis Gossett Jr.’s Contract. I mean a solid 98% of everything that has come out of Hollywood since. But looking back, Jaws is quaint. Spielberg famously had to keep the shark largely off-screen, because from most angles it looked like what it was, a giant fake shark. This had the benefit, however unintentional, of building suspense and of keeping the focus on a human-scale story. (My friend Dez made the same point on his movie list, where Jaws occupied the top spot.) Would that all filmmakers had such constraints.