Top 100 Films of the 20th Century – Part 20: 10-6

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Rank: 10

Title: Singin’ in the Rain

Release Year: 1952

Genre: Musical/Comedy

Director: Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly

Cast: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and, Debbie Reynolds

Plot Summary: With the advent of sound, the transition for silent film companies and actors is a bit awkward, many left behind. Silent movie star Don Lockwood is determined to make the jump, doing everything he can to succeed – but will it all be enough.

What Makes It Special: Singin’ in the Rain does what few musical do, and does it extraordinarily well – it both puts on a brilliant show with grand, wonderful, and even funny musical numbers and it tells a great story (a cinematic imperative). Kelly, O’Connor, and Reynolds are fantastic, creating many of cinema’s most memorable moments. Though this film came out over sixty years ago, it still feels as fresh as ever and its music is just on the tip of our tongues. 

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

Rank: 9

Title: The Godfather

Release Year: 1972

Genre: Gangster

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Diane Keaton

Plot Summary: Don Vito Corleone is facing a choice. He must decide who will take over his crime syndicate. He has three sons to choose from: Sonny his eldest is a hothead, Fredo is very ill-suited, and Michael is reluctant (having never really taken an interest in the family business).

What Makes It Special: The Godfather is the quintessential gangster film in American cinema, building off all the great genre films that came before it (like: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, Scarface, White Heat, and The Big Heat), creating a crime drama that is emotionally dense, with some of film’s most iconic characters, moments, and aesthetics. In many ways, it is still the genre film that all other genre films look up to and aspire to be.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

Rank: 8

Title: 8 1/2

Release Year: 1963

Genre: Drama

Director: Federico Fellini

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo, and Barbara Steele

Plot Summary: While working on his latest film, film director Guido Anselmi retreats into his memories and fantasies for inspiration.

What Makes It Special: 8 ½ is Federico Fellini’s surrealistic narrative, built on wonderfully evocative imagery. It is a film about creativity and inspiration, which can come from anywhere. It also about embracing passions: artistic, emotional, and physical. Simply, it is about life, and what we make of it. Aesthetically, it is utterly compelling as Fellini blends fantasy, memory, and reality into one continuous stream of consciousness. Life is inherently chaotic – we grasp for meaning through our passions, but like Guido we too can become overwhelmed as our own creativity is stymied by our own assigning of meaning – if everything is meaningful then nothing is meaningful. Fellini uses 8 ½ to project artistically the emotional turmoil of life (and more specifically, one’s mid-life crisis, as one realizes that death is ever on the horizon). It is smart, flashy, and essential.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

Rank: 7

Title: The Rules of the Game

Release Year: 1939

Genre: Satire

Director: Jean Renoir

Cast: Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Roland Toutain, Jean Renoir, and Mila Parely

Plot Summary: At the onset of WWII, a rich French family throws a hunting party for their friends. Everyone seems to be gracious, but they hide how they really feel, often involving their poor servants in their tangled affairs. Theirs is a frivolous existence.

What Makes It Special: Jean Renoir released The Rules of the Game in 1939 to an audience that was not ready to accept the truth about their decedent and trivial lives and decaying culture. The film was a disaster critically and commercially. Satirizing the dominate culture of one’s country is a bold move. Renoir was fed up with the way the upper classes lead unsubstantial lives at the cost of everyone else. Following WWII and the advent of New Wave Cinema in the 1950s-1960s in France, his film finally found its audience and has been regarded as a masterpiece ever since. The film works very well as a romantic dramedy, but it is also very cynical towards its characters. In fact, Renoir actively seems to detest them. It is funny, biting, and dramatically resonate.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

Rank: 6

Title: Apocalypse Now

Release Year: 1979

Genre: War Drama

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, and Sam Bottoms

Plot Summary: During the Vietnam War, American soldier Captain Willard is tasked with a dangerous mission. He must travel deep into the jungle of Cambodia to assassinate a renegade U.S. colonel. Kurtz has set himself up as a god among a local tribe. It is a journey into the darkness of man’s heart.

What Makes It Special: Francis Ford Coppola almost killed himself making his adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The production was marred with delays, tragedy, and hardship; but, Coppola emerged with something magnificent and utterly compelling and absorbing (the documentary chronicling the making of the film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is very good as well). The film goes down the rabbit hole, showcasing the horrors that man’s heart is capable. It is beautifully filmed (Vittorio Storaro’s photography and lighting are wondrous) and acted. It is wholly iconic.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

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Top 100 Films of the 20th Century – Part 12: 50-46

55-51

Rank: 50

Title: The Wild Bunch

Release Year: 1969

Genre: Western

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien, and Warren Oates

Plot Summary: As the Wild West disappears around them, a gang of aging outlaws looks to make one last big score.

What Makes It Special: Director Sam Peckinpah made a statement about violence in the world (possibly and probably directed at the conflict in Vietnam) with The Wild Bunch, especially in its final scene (a brutal shootout). With the death of the Production Code in 1967, films were suddenly much more graphic (films like Bonnie and Clyde and Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs), as a new generation of filmmakers began to completely transform cinema artistically and content wise. The Wild Bunch is also a testament to the death of the classic Western. The world was just no longer a place for clear cut heroes and villains.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

Rank: 49

Title: M

Release Year: 1931

Genre: Mystery

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Peter Lorre

Plot Summary: There is a child-murderer on the loose in Berlin, and the police cannot seem to catch him. As fear and anxiety grip the city, criminals too join the manhunt (while the man they are looking for, Hans Beckert, feels the rope ever tighter around his neck).

What Makes It Special: M is a beautifully shot and wonderfully designed film, creating a dark and suspenseful moody atmosphere. Peter Lorre gives the performance of his career as Hans Beckert, a child-murdering psychopath. Director Fritz Lang masterfully captures the emotional depth of his characters, especially Beckert – in a way creating a protagonist out of a villain. Lang also sets up an absolutely gripping and thrilling third act. Arriving in cinemas in 1931, M became the benchmark by which all thrillers and mystery films would be judged – even today.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

Rank: 48

Title: The Apartment

Release Year: 1960

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray

Plot Summary: C.C. Baxter wants to get ahead at his company. He comes up with an idea of how to get in good with the executives. He will let them use his apartment for trysts. It is all going along splendidly until Baxter falls for one of the girls an executive brings to his apartment.

What Makes It Special: With The Apartment, auteur Billy Wilder made one of the quintessential romantic comedies, and possibly the best of the genre, a romantic comedy that would influence the genre for decades to come (something that continues today). The film works so well because its characters are developed very well and most importantly it is very funny. The romantic comedy developed out of the screwball comedy (taking out most of the physical comedy, but not all of it, and digging deeper into the characters their relationships).Wilder, one of Hollywood’s greatest writers, perfected the storytelling style for the genre with this film.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

Rank: 47

Title: La Grande Illusion

Release Year: 1937

Genre: War Drama

Director: Jean Renoir

Cast: Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Dita Parlo, Marcel Dalio, and Erich von Stroheim

Plot Summary: During WWI, two imprisoned French soldiers try to escape from their German POW camp several times, until they are sent to an impenetrable fortress, thought to be impossible to escape from.

What Makes It Special: La Grande Illusion is an antiwar masterpiece from French auteur Jean Renoir. Set during The Great War, a war that was supposed to end all wars, and yet Renoir made this film just as the world was on the brink of WWII with Europe and Asia in chaos. But, La Grande Illusion goes deeper. Something that is always very powerful about combat is that from afar opposing forces appear as enemies, but close up, in different circumstances, these men and women in conflict find that really they are not so much different – that they all want, dream, and fear the same things, which then begs the question of why are they fighting each other, killing each other. Renoir touches on this beautifully in his film.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Video On-Demand

Rank: 46

Title: Touch of Evil

Release Year: 1958

Genre: Mystery

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, and Orson Welles

Plot Summary: After an American building contractor is killed (via car bomb) in a small US-Mexican border town, Mexican Narcotics officer Ramon “Mike” Vargas has to interrupt his honeymoon to investigate, as the bomb was planted on the Mexican side of the border. American Police Captain Hank Quinlan tries to take charge of the investigation and already has a suspect (a Mexican); however, Vargas catches Quinlan planting evidence on his suspect. Vargas now realizes that this crime goes much deeper and that he is alone in town run by corruption. He begins to go after Quinlan, but this leaves his new American wife Susie vulnerable as a target.

What Makes It Special: The long-take tracking shot that opens A Touch of Evil is alone enough to make this a cinema classic, as is Orson Welles’s villainous Captain Quinlan. Welles’s neo-noir mystery thriller is utterly gripping. The opening shot grabs the viewer and the cat-and-mouse game that follows keeps them hooked throughout. Welles displays a complex storytelling that is often not found in Hollywood films. The black & white cinematography is also top notch. The original theatrical release was edited from Welles’s true vision; however, his cut was released on DVD in 1998.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray

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Movie of the Week – The Rules of the Game

This week’s movie: The Rules of the Game (1939).

The comedy/drama is a sly look at bourgeois life through an assorted cast of characters who all assemble at a French chateau for a hunting party (both the rich and their servants).

Writer-director Jean Renoir describes the film as a look at a civilization and culture that had become so self-indulgent and grotesque that it needed to die. And thus, the French upper-class did not find the satire of the film to be very funny when it premiered in Paris, leading to it being banned by the government. Years after WWII, France had gone through a transformation (France’s identity during the war, especially after Vichy France which collaborated with the Nazis, had taken a major hit, which prompted its new leaders like Charles de Gaulle to usher in political and social change and reform) and Renoir’s film found its audience finally. In 1959, the film was restored to a version that Renoir approved (as most of the original prints were lost or destroyed during the war), and has since become one of most revered films of all-time (Sight & Sound for example has it ranked number four on its Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time list).

Renoir worked with four cinematographers on the film: Jean-Paul Alphen, Jean Bachelet, Jacques Lemare, and Alain Renoir, creating a photography that was ahead of its time (and is still praised today). He also worked with composer Joseph Kosma and production designers Max Douy and Eugene Lourie.

The Rules of the Game and La Grande Illusion are Jean Renoir’s masterpieces (both considered to be among the best films ever made). My personal favorite of the two is The Rules of the Game, but they are both must-sees for fans of French Realism and those looking to have a strong working knowledge of cinema’s greatest films.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray, DVD, and Streaming