Bearing in mind the fundamentally mercurial nature of any such list (at least as far as I’m concerned), apt to alter its constituent membership with the swiftness of a weathervane buffeted by hurricane-force winds, I hereby present the 10 films that rank as my current favorites.
10. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
Luchino Visconti’s film is quite simply the most lavish historical epic ever captured on celluloid, to which every subsequent sprawling sudser owes an incalculable debt of gratitude. It’s also a perversely luxurious ode to the irretrievable past, to what Prince Fabrizio (Burt Lancaster) calls voluptuous immobility, that is, to death itself. Visconti was the arch-poet of decadence; in The Leopard, he fills every painterly frame with a palpable sensitivity to the beauty of enervation, the transports of degeneration, and the delights of decay.
9. The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1977)
Roman Polanski’s black-hearted jeu d’esprit examines brittle identities and repetition compulsions without pity but with much bitter laughter. The lamentably lesser-known final entry in his “apartment trilogy,” The Tenant stars Polanski as a stranger in a strange land, a political exile (shades, perhaps, of Polanski’s own banishment from Hollywood) seeking shelter in the apartment of a young woman who’s just attempted suicide. Alienated from his fellow lodgers, prey to progressively paranoid delusions, the man soon follows in her footsteps. Talk about taking somebody’s place! And not just once, mind you, but twice—proving, as a result, Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.
8. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)
Ingmar Bergman performs an autopsy on his own faith. Laying bare the presumptuousness of speaking for God in the face of that God’s steadfast refusal to speak for himself, Winter Light probes the fecklessness of faith. And never with more devastating results than in the scene where Jonas (Max von Sydow) seeks surcease from his cosmic-political anxieties from pastor Tomas (Gunnar Björnstrand), only to be told in no uncertain fashion, “I’ve got nothing to give you.” Experiencing Winter Light always reminds me of a quote from Ezra Pound: “Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light/And take your wounds from it gladly.”
7. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
From its stunning opening panorama (a party of conquistadors and native guides picking their way along a mountain path like a column of ants) to the startling final shot endlessly circling the monkey-festooned raft that bears the prone figure of Aguirre (Klaus Kinski in Richard III mode), Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a textbook example of pure cinema—the enchantment that sometimes results from the association of compelling sights and bewitching sounds (in this case, Popol Vuh’s haunting music). Transcending even its ever-timely allegorical wallop, the film feels like an epic mythological poem that’s just been ripped from the bosom of the still-shrieking jungle.
6. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
A list within a list: the opening strains of Anton Karas’s deceptively zippy zither score; the rubble-strewn streets of divided Berlin; a shadowy doorway and Orson Welles’s legendary entrance; Harry Lime’s cuckoo-clock speech; the climactic pursuit through those chiaroscuro sewers; Alida Valli striding off into the tree-lined distance. From first to last, Carol Reed, whether or not he was cribbing a page from the Welles playbook, fashions with The Third Man the ne plus ultra of postwar Brit noir, and a devastating threnody to friendship and innocence lost. As if all that weren’t sufficient, the literary satire remains scalpel-sharp.
5. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Stanley Kubrick turns the Stephen King novel inside out, maintaining like a fly in amber whatever he finds compelling (madness, marital discord), and wisely jettisoning the rest. (Menacing topiary animals, anyone?) Switching out operant metaphors, we get eternal confinement in an icy maze rather than explosive self-destruction in a furnace blast. Layers of meaning, philosophical and sociological, begin to accrue. According to The Shining, the history of America is a ghost story, after all, and “white man’s burden” comes to mean taking an axe to the American family, just as surely as the film applies that same axe to the paraphernalia (skeletons! Cobwebs!) of the traditional horror film.
4. Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
Melodrama as Trojan horse, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life takes a wrecking ball to the iconography of complacent, conformist Ozzie and Harriet America. James Mason dominates with his magisterial turn as increasingly megalomaniacal schoolteacher Ed Avery (whose thunderous declamation “God was wrong!” ranks as one of cinema’s great lines). Ray frequently toys with the CinemaScope frame, upending its stretchy horizontality with bizarre canted angles, slathering it with symbolic swaths of Technicolor. What’s more, this is something of a Janus-faced horror movie, rooted in the delirious visual grammar of German Expressionism, as well as paving the way for the domestic horror that Stanley Kubrick would bring to perfection in The Shining.
3. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
Jansenism never looked so good. In Au Hasard Balthazar, a spiritual sequel to Mouchette, Robert Bresson uses the symbolically laden figure of a donkey to underline the crass exploitation and vicious abuse human beings ladle out to each other, as well as any other living things they can get their greedy mitts on. Lacking even a single glimpse of euphoria (along the lines of Mouchette’s bumper-car ride), this is an unrelentingly bleak anatomy of human destructiveness. By the time Balthazar meets his doom in that snow-capped valley, the mournful notes of Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 20 resounding like an apocalyptic trumpet blast, even this coldly cast eye has a tendency to tear up.
2. The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, 1974)
Luis Buñuel’s penultimate film, The Phantom of Liberty, boasts one of his most subversive narratives, eschewing linearity for a garden-of-forking-paths approach that keeps wandering away from matters at hand in order to investigate the lives of its minor characters. Also, it’s one of his funniest films, its segments overflowing with slap-happy statuary, gambling monks, naked piano players, and assless chaps. Don’t be fooled, though, by all the surface hilarity. At bottom, the wily Spanish surrealist aims to go gunning for the most dangerous game: the specter of human freedom (hence the title, an oblique nod to The Communist Manifesto).
1. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
Disburdened from the distracting clutter of romantic subplots and gratuitous musical numbers, Duck Soup is an unadulterated blast of comedic anarchism. The Marx Brothers nail every register of funny from the ineluctable slapstick logic that culminates in Harpo splashing around in the lemonade to the cynical cadences of Groucho’s verbal arabesques. Most audaciously, Duck Soup makes sure that bellicosity (and its handmaiden, rah-rah patriotism) repeatedly get it in the neck, even as thunderheads of fascistic nationalism gathered on the horizon, an animadversion best evidenced in Groucho’s immortal line, “Remember, while you’re out there risking life and limb through shot and shell, we’ll be in here thinking what a sucker you are!”
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