100 Greatest Movies of the 20th Century
The way I see it, and I’ve got the conch, the best movies of the last 100 years were made by mavericks who busted rules to follow their obsessions. We’re talking about a century of cinema, but it’s still rock & roll to me. I had certain criteria: Each movie had to embody that rock spirit of artful defiance. Each director had to be limited to only one movie – otherwise you could just list the collected works of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Ford, Billy Wilder and Martin Scorsese and end it. Anything dutiful I tossed. Don’t look for the biggest cash cow (Titanic), the winner of the most Oscars (Ben-Hur) or film-school staples like Battleship Potemkin. The 100 maverick movies on this list have one more thing in common: They’re alive.
1. The Godfather Trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990, Francis Ford Coppola): The flawed Part III barely slides in on goodwill. No matter. This is entertainment raised to the level of art: an offer you can’t refuse. Coppola gives us the Corleone clan of killers, and we identify. How does that happen? Alchemy, that’s how; magic you can’t explain except to say that Don Vito and his three sons are as familiar to us as our own family. We remember all the lines, profound (“I believe in America”) and silly (“Leave the gun, take the cannolis”). These films grow in stature with the years, their power to move us undimmed, their influence as up-to-date as The Sopranos. Marlon Brando’s don is an icon, but Al Pacino’s performance as his son Michael – taken in toto – is arguably the finest in cinema. Coppola had just turned thirty when he started work on the first chapter. Even later (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now), he never topped it. Nobody has.
2. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock): The master of suspense felt secure enough – he was nearing sixty – to direct the mad, perverse tale of romantic obsession that had always obsessed him. James Stewart gives his riskiest performance as a detective in thrall to a dead woman, forcing Kim Novak to walk, talk, move and make love according to his definition of beauty and truth. Do you know a better definition of filmmaking?
3. The Searchers (1956, John Ford): Ford had been making westerns for almost four decades before he acknowledged the racism inherent in cowboys vs. Indians and directed his masterpiece. John Wayne found the role of his career as Ethan Edwards, an Indian hater torn apart by the thought that his kidnapped niece (Natalie Wood) has been raped by savages. He doesn’t know whether to rescue or kill her, a theme Martin Scorsese picked up later in Taxi Driver. Few film images are more haunting than that of Wayne standing alone in a doorway, cut off from his family by torments he can’t define.
Editor’s picks
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick): It kills me to pick just one Kubrick – Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita and The Shining all exert a powerful hold – but it’s hard to resist this visionary epic about the dawn of man, the birth of technology and the death of language and imagination. On its initial release, 2001 hit home mostly with acid trippers (dig that time warp) and intellectuals (deconstruct that star child). These days Kubrick’s daring is justly celebrated as a landmark of cinematic ambition and reach.
5. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles): Pauline Kael claims that Welles’ debut film – the wonder boy was just twenty-five – is “more fun than any other great movie.” You can still sense Welles’ enthusiasm for film as “the biggest toy-train set any boy ever had.” The techniques he used to tell the story of a tycoon destroyed by ambition and childhood neglect revolutionized movies in ways that are still being felt. It is, however, wrongly assumed that Welles never lived up to his huge potential. I’ll stand by The Lady From Shanghai, Chimes at Midnight and especially Touch of Evil, in which he played – brilliantly – the fat, corrupt slob his detractors later accused him of becoming.
6. Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese): The best director currently working in American movies hit a career peak by turning the life of boxer Jake La Motta into a poetic meditation on the nature of violence. Robert De Niro gives the performance of his life as the trim rebel and the flabby mess he became. Still, it’s the heightened urgency with which Scorsese prowls macho rituals, in and out of the boxing ring, that puts the Bull a hair ahead of such Scorsese classics as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and GoodFellas.
7. Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski): Corruption and political coverups in 1930s Los Angeles are the hooks on which Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne hang this definitive allegory of the Watergate era. Who can forget the shock of Jack Nicholson, as detective Jake Gittes, when client Faye Dunaway confesses that her sister is her daughter by an incestuous father, played to the glorious hilt by John Huston. The last scene and the last line (“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”) give off an indelible chill.
8. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, this superb tale of how greed eats at the soul, casting heroic Humphrey Bogart as a murderous panhandler looking for gold in Mexico and Walter Huston, the director’s father, as a toothless prospector. The son directed his dad to a well-deserved Oscar.
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