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For the longest time, I�ve been meaning to compile my definitive list of the greatest movies of all time. I�ve always had a lot of lists and fragments of lists cluttering up my hard drive � I save them because when you�re a movie buff, people keep asking you to recommend something to them � but I�ve never edited these lists or put them into any kind of presentable order. Until a thread that asked for people's "Best" lists inspired me (9/11/06).
I whittled all my lists down to 210 movies -- that was as low a number as I had the heart to limit it to. These are the 210 movies that have given me the most pleasure over the years, which is why I�m prepared to say that they�re the 210 greatest movies of all time � what other criterion would make sense? Other movies may have arguably greater artistic merit, but the movies listed here are ones that deliver undiminished pleasure to me, viewing after viewing; they�re the ones I fire up when I need a surefire movie fix.
I�m dividing them into 7 lists of 30 movies. The top list is ranked. Ranking the other 6 lists was just a little too daunting. So the movies within each of these lists are merely alphabetized (the lists themselves are presented in descending order of personal favoritism).
THE TOP 30, RANKED
1. Psycho (Hitchcock, 60)
2. The Third Man (Reed, 49)
3. Playtime (Tati, 67)
4. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 58)
5. Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 51)
6. M (Lang, 31)
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 68)
8. Some Came Running (Minnelli, 58)
9. Atlantic City (Malle, 80)
10. Fargo (Coen, 96)
11. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 54)
12. Singin� in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 52)
13. The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 47)
14. Withnail & I (Robinson, 86)
15. 28 Up (Apted, 85)
16. The Godfather (Coppola, 71) + The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 74) --tried to separate them, failed
17. The Palm Beach Story (Sturges, 42)
18. Stroszek (Herzog, 77)
19. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Reisner, 28)
20. The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 39)
21. Carnival of Souls (Harvey, 62)
22. Freaks (Browning, 32)
23. Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 57)
24. Nights of Cabiria (Fellini, 57)
25. Pinocchio (Luske and Sharpstein, 40)
26. Casablanca (Curtiz, 42)
27. Detour (Ulmer, 45)
28. Nashville (Altman, 75)
29. Slacker (Linklater, 91)
30. Scarlet Street (Lang, 45)
#31-60, ALPHABETICALLY
All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 55)
Atalante, L� (Vigo, 34)
Birds, The (Hitchcock, 63)
Breakfast at Tiffany�s (Edwards, 61)
Charley Varrick (Siegel, 73)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 41)
Dodsworth (Wyler, 36)
Double Indemnity (Wilder, 44)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learning to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick, 64)
Duck Soup (McCarey, 33)
Eraserhead (Lynch, 76)
Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 73)
Funny Bones (Chelsom, 95)
Gone with the Wind (Fleming, 39)
History Is Made at Night (Borzage, 37)
Invisible Man, The (Whale, 33)
It�s a Gift (McLeod, 34)
Lost in America (Brooks, 85)
Manchurian Candidate, The (Frankenheimer, 62)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 44)
Metropolis (Lang, 27)
Peeping Tom (Powell, 60)
Seventh Victim, The (Robson, 43)
Stranger than Paradise (Jarmusch, 84)
Sullivan�s Travels (Sturges, 41)
39 Steps, The (Hitchcock, 35)
3 Women (Altman, 77)
Vanishing, The (Sluizer, 88)
Vitteloni, I (Fellini, 53)
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Aldrich, 62)
#61-90, ALPHABETICALLY
Apartment, The (Wilder, 60)
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 25)
Brief Encounter (Lean, 45)
City Lights (Chaplin, 31)
Clockwork Orange, A (Kubrick, 71)
Duel (Spielberg, 72)
Fury (Lang, 36)
Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The (Mankiewicz, 47)
Greed (von Stroheim, 24)
In a Lonely Place (Ray, 50)
It�s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Kramer, 63)
It�s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 46)
King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack, 33)
Lady Vanishes, The (Hitchcock, 38)
Ladykillers, The (Mackendrick, 55)
Melvin and Howard (Demme, 80)
Mon Oncle (Tati, 58)
Mr. Hulot�s Holiday (Tati, 53)
Night at the Opera, A (Wood, 35)
North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 59)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, 68)
Passion of Joan of Arc, The (Dreyer, 28)
Play Misty for Me (Eastwood, 71)
Remember the Night (Leisen, 40)
Rosemary�s Baby (Polanski, 68)
Searchers, The (Ford, 56)
Touch of Evil (Welles, 58)
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (Huston, 48)
12 Angry Men (Lumet, 57)
Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The (Demy, 64)
#91-120, ALPHABETICALLY
Asphalt Jungle, The (Huston, 50)
Battle of Algiers, The (Pontecorvo, 66)
Big Heat, The (Lang, 53)
Blue Angel, The (von Sternberg, 30)
Blue Velvet (Lynch, 86)
Bob le Flambeur (Melville, 55)
Breathless (Godard, 60)
Bride of Frankenstein, The (Whale, 35)
Four Feathers, The (Korda, 39)
Girl Can�t Help It, The (Tashlin, 56)
High Noon (Zinnemann, 52)
How to Marry a Millionaire (Negulesco, 53)
Incredible Shrinking Man, The (Arnold, 57)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The (Siegel, 56)
La Strada (Fellini, 54)
Long Goodbye, The (Altman, 73)
Love Me Tonight (Mamoulian, 32)
Monsieur Hire (Leconte, 89)
My Darling Clementine (Ford, 46)
Nosferatu (Murnau, 22)
Notorious (Hitchcock, 46)
Red River (Hawks, 48)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Uncredited, 37)
Sons of the Desert (Seiter, 33)
Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 51)
Student of Prague, The (Galeen, 26)
Summertime (Lean, 55)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 76)
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 53)
Unfaithfully Yours (Sturges, 48)
#121-150, ALPHABETICALLY
Affair to Remember, An (McCarey, 57)
Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004)
Black Orpheus (Camus, 59)
8 � (Fellini, 63)
Grapes of Wrath, The (Ford, 40)
Great Expectations (Lean, 46)
Gun Crazy (Lewis, 49)
Halloween (Carpenter, 78)
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (McNaughton, 86)
High Hopes (Leigh, 88)
History of Violence, A (Cronenberg, 2005)
Honeymoon Killers, The (Kastle, 69)
I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 43)
Jaws (Spielberg, 75)
King of Comedy, The (Scorsese, 83)
Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 55)
Lady Eve, The (Sturges, 41)
Last Laugh, The (Murnau, 24)
Last Picture Show, The (Bogdanovich, 71)
Lavender Hill Mob, The (Crichton, 51)
Letter, The (Wyler, 40)
Local Hero (Forsyth, 83)
Modern Times (Chaplin, 36)
On the Town (Donen and Kelly, 49)
On the Waterfront (Kazan, 54)
Out of the Past (Tourneur, 47)
Raging Bull (Scorsese, 80)
Shock Corridor (Fuller, 63)
Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)
Topsy-Turvy (Leigh, 99)
#151-180, ALPHABETICALLY
Abigail�s Party (Leigh, 77)
Alice in the Cities (Wenders, 74)
All About My Mother (Almodovar, 99)
All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone, 30)
Bay of Angels (Demy, 63)
Big Combo, The (Lewis, 55)
Blackmail (Hitchcock, 29)
Bunny Lake Is Missing (Preminger, 65)
Clean, Shaven (Kerrigan, 95)
Day the Earth Stood Still, The (Wise, 51)
Dead Zone, The (Cronenberg, 83)
Diner (Levinson, 82)
Don�t Look Now (Roeg, 73)
Fly, The (Cronenberg, 86)
42nd Street (Bacon, 33)
Gleaners and I, The (Varda, 2000)
Hard Eight (Anderson, 96)
Killing, The (Kubrick, 56)
Lost Weekend, The (Wilder, 45)
Louisiana Story (Flaherty, 48)
Man Who Laughs, The (Leni, 28)
Moonlighting (Skolimowski, 82)
Pickup on South Street (Fuller, 53)
Saint Jack (Bogdanovich, 79)
Shining, The (Kubrick 80)
Swimmer, The (Perry, 68)
Thin Blue Line, The (Morris, 88)
Unholy Three, The (Browning, 25)
World of Suzie Wong, The (Quine, 60)
Wrong Man, The (Hitchcock, 56)
#181-210, ALPHABETICALLY
Act of Violence (Zinnemann, 1948)
Alice Doesn�t Live Here Anymore (Scorsese, 74)
All the President�s Men (Pakula, 76)
Artists and Models (Tashlin, 55)
Babe: Pig in the City (Miller, 98)
Bachelor in Paradise (Arnold, 61)
Caro Diario (Moretti, 94)
Caught (Ophuls, 49)
Chungking Express (Wong, 94)
Comfort and Joy (Forsyth, 84)
Cool Hand Luke (Rosenberg, 67)
Crime Wave (De Toth, 54)
Getaway, The (Peckinpah, 72)
Goldfinger (Hamilton, 64)
Lusty Men, The (Ray 52)
Modern Romance (Brooks, 81)
Old Dark House, The (Whale, 32)
Paris, Texas (Wenders, 84)
Pee-wee�s Big Adventure (Burton, 85)
Perfect World, A (Eastwood, 93)
Phantom Lady (Siodmak, 44)
Raising Arizona (Coen, 87)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 59)
Seconds (Frankenheimer, 66)
Shivers (Cronenberg, 75)
Shop around the Corner, The (Lubitsch, 40)
Short Cuts (Altman, 93)
Silence of the Lambs, The (Demme, 91)
Tin Men (Levinson, 87)
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (Fassbinder and Fengler, 70)
BB
Reviews
Der Student von Prag (1926)
Sadly neglected horror masterpiece
You never know what you'll come up with when you go bottom-fishing in the budget bins at Tower Video. Last week, for 6 bucks, I scored a movie I'd been questing a long time. It's the silent German chiller, "The Student of Prague." So what if the print (from an outfit called Alpha Video) is scratchy, fuzzy, and discolored, and if the contrast is so poor at times that I wasn't sure which character I was watching. Hey -- life isn't always a Criterion disc. At least it didn't cost me $40, and at least I finally got to see this movie. It's a gem, and it should be much, much better known. It tells the Mephistophelean tale of a university student named Balduin (the great Conrad Veidt), a dashing fellow and the best fencer in Prague. Unfortunately, he's also penniless, which puts him out of the running for the hand of the beautiful countess with whom he has become smitten. This makes him an easy mark for the Devil, who arrives in Prague one day in the guise of a mysterious stranger named Scapinelli. Scapinelli offers Balduin the astounding sum of 600,000 gold pieces, with only one string attached: Scapinelli gets to take whatever item he wants from Balduin's room. Balduin, glancing around his spartan crib, recognizes that it's filled with nothing but worthless junk. In short, the deal seems to be a no-brainer, and Balduin hastens for the dotted line. No sooner does Scapinelli hand over the dough than he announces which item he wants: it's Balduin's reflection in the mirror. And, in an amazing scene, he calls it forth. The special effects are primitive, of course, yet smashing. The rest of the movie is basically a series of confrontations between Balduin and the unleashed reflection, which has transmuted into a malicious doppelgänger. I won't reveal the final confrontation, which is astounding, both dramatically and cinematic ally, but it's not a spoiler to reveal Balduin's epitaph (which is revealed at the fade-in before the story is told in flashback): "This monument is dedicated to Balduin, the best fencer in Prague. He gambled with Evil and lost
.Adieu, Balduin."
The only things I know about director Henrik Galeen are that he directed "The Golem" and wrote "Nosferatu." But I am willing to maintain that he was a movie genius of the first order. His work is full of wonderful expressionistic flourishes, reminiscent of "Caligari," which is probably not surprising since the two movies share the same production designer, Hermann War (they also share Veidt of course). The movie's highlights are unforgettably effective, including the fantastic moment when Scapinelli's giant shadow snatches a love letter that Balduin has sent to the countess. In another scene, Galeen uses a shaky hand-held camera for a drunken POV shot. There's also a neat bit of foreshadowing in an early scene in which Balduin fences with himself in the mirror. I noticed some other shots that anticipated future movies:
o A long shot of Scapinelli, in silhouette, alone on a hilltop next to a solitary tree, vowing revenge ("Gone With the Wind") o A fox hunt captured through hand-held cameras and jerky editing ("Tom Jones") o A lovelorn girl sublimates her unrequited feelings for a guy by secretly cleaning his apartment ("Chungking Express") and get a load of the way she fondles his saber! YOW!
Either these shots are coincidences, or "The Student of Prague" was far more influential than is generally known.
Well, now that I have finally bagged "The Student of Prague," I can turn my quest to two other objects: (1) a decent print of it (preferably in a theatrical screening); and (2) the original 1913 movie, of which this 1926 version is just a johnny-come-lately remake.