Movies: Favorite Films

The storied French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma has polled 76 French filmmakers, critics, and industry executives on their favorite films. The 100 top vote-getters have been compiled in a new book titled 100 films pour une cinémathèque idéale. For those interested in seeing the list of films named, click here.

It's fun to see what the French are big on right now, and I have to admit I was surprised to see certain films listed (and sometimes ranked quite highly) that I wouldn't have expected to see at all. But rather than quibble with their list--they certainly have a right to it--I decided to put together one of my own. I've limited it, though, to a top ten list (albeit one with 12 films). Here are my favorites:

The Fabulous Baker Boys (Steve Kloves, 1989; USA)

The Fabulous Baker Boys is my all-time favorite film, which Pauline Kael described as "a romantic fantasy that has a forties-movie sultriness and an eighties movie-struck melancholy [...] a movie in which eighties glamour is being defined." I came of age in the eighties, and the movie's atmosphere, which combines the hard-boiled tone of forties movies with the cool-jazz ambience of the early sixties, was one I fell in love with right away. The story, about three nightclub musicians who come face to face with the good, bad, and ugly of their ambitions and relationships, hit me where I lived as well. Writer-director Steve Kloves stunningly realized his story with sharp characterizations, crackling dialogue, and one terrific setpiece after another. The three stars--Jeff Bridges, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Beau Bridges--are all terrific. The film is best known for featuring Pfeiffer's signature performance, and the various plaudits for her work here--Academy Award nomination, Newsweek cover story, Best Actress prizes from the Golden Globes, the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Board of Review--were all richly deserved.

City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931; USA)

City Lights is my pick for Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, and it is perhaps the sweetest, most touching film ever made. It follows the Little Tramp as he tries to raise money to cure the girl he loves from blindness. The millionaire who can only remember his friendship with the Tramp when he's drunk is perhaps the funniest running gag in any of Chaplin's films, and the scene featuring the Tramp's boxing match is just about the greatest slapstick sequence on film. One aspect of the picture that I always get an enormous kick out of is the fact that a "silent" film features some of the most inventive use of sound effects that I've ever encountered. However, these all pale in comparison to the ending, which is one of the most beautiful moments to be found in any work, regardless of the medium. This film was ranked 17th in the Cahiers poll.

The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939; France)

"You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons."

There are so many things to admire about Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, including the extraordinarily sophisticated staging, the beautiful deep-focus cinematography, and the dynamic construction of the story, which shifts from comedy to tragedy and back and forth again. However, the aspect of the film that always stays with me is the sophistication of the character development throughout the ensemble. Everybody has their reasons at the weekend hunting getaway at a French estate just before World War II, and no matter how much those reasons change, they're always clear. It never once seems discordant when the various characters drop one lover for another; the shift in their whims always seems harmonious. It's moral and emotional relativism made lyrical, and it's charming and horrifying all at the same time. The Cahiers poll ranks this film third, and justly so. I know a lot of people who prefer Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert's Children of Paradise, but The Rules of the Game is the greatest of all French films, and it's good to see Renoir's countrymen acknowledge it.

L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960; Italy)

No filmmaker has ever combined anomie and glamour as well as Michelangelo Antonioni did in L'avventura. As in The Rules of the Game, prosperity destroys one's sense of moral direction; all that matters is one's whims. A woman (Lea Massari) disappears during a boating excursion to an island, and concern for what's happened to her quickly falls by the wayside. Not even her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) or her best friend (Monica Vitti) can maintain their interest in finding her; they ultimately become more interested in each other before their attention wanders again. The story development is epiphanic; the point is not what happened to the missing woman, but what the lover and the best friend gradually discover about themselves. The quiet, deliberate pacing gives the movie the feel of an unusually subtle novel. In terms of staging and cinematography, the film is nothing less than exquisite--the compositions and scene choreography are so extraordinarily realized that the film is like a painting come to life. Antonioni, as James Monaco once observed, is one of the few directors who can make it on visual style alone. L'avventura, in my opinion, is the acme of post-WWII European film, and it's ranked 36th in the Cahiers poll.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971; USA)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman's melancholy, atmospheric Western centers on John McCabe (Warren Beatty), who is the American entrepreneurial spirit personified--he sees a market for liquor, gambling, and whores in a Pacific Northwest mining community, and he brings the place a brothel and a saloon. Julie Christie plays Mrs. Miller, the madam who becomes his business partner. Their biggest challenge comes from the mining company, who see their success and want it for themselves. All the clichés of the genre are present--the outlaw gunfighter trying to settle down and go straight, the hard-nosed businesswoman seen through sentimental blinders, the dastardly established interests trying to step on the little guy, and even the climactic gunfight in the town streets--but all are presented in a way that had never been shown in movies before, although it is probably as close as can be to how things really were. That, when combined with the remarkable use of ambient sound and Vilmos Zsigmond's extraordinary cinematography, which evokes the candlelit interiors and outside weather with equal delicacy, makes one feel that one has stepped out of a time machine into the past. One looks at later revisionist Westerns--Unforgiven, Deadwood, There Will Be Blood, etc.--and regardless of their prizes and acclaim, they all stand clearly in the shadow of this film.

The Godfather/The Godfather, Part II (Francis Ford Coppola 1972/1974; USA)

With The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, Francis Ford Coppola, working from a potboiler novel by Mario Puzo, accomplishes for the gangster film what McCabe & Mrs. Miller did for the Western. However, Coppola's style is as different from Altman's as can be. Altman used a naturalistic, documentary approach; Coppola's work is operatic in tone, with a Shakespearian sense of characterization--the Corleone family and those who surround them have become cultural archetypes. At the center of it all is the family's youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino), who sought to escape life in the family's criminal empire, but whose sense of honor and duty ultimately lead him to rule it. In the process he becomes a greater monster than any he beheld. The films present the story of two generations of the Corleone family, from the arrival of Michael's father in the U.S. as a boy, to the moment of Michael's crossing the point of no return into evil. It's an epic story of the underside of the American Dream. In the Cahiers poll, the first film ranked number 40.

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975; USA)

Nashville, Robert Altman's greatest film, accomplishes what one would think impossible--it's a successful naturalistic satire. Satirical techniques work at cross-purposes with naturalism: they're rooted in exaggeration, and their aim is to heighten absurdities until they're unmistakable. Altman meets the challenge by centering the film on the outsize personalities of show business, specifically the performers and hangers-on in the country-music capital. The film's two dozen characters include the stars, the press and businesspeople who surround them, and the talented (and untalented) wannabes. They're parodies of themselves and, as Altman shows, human to the core. The character who's the center of attention is the star singer Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely), and she's a microcosm of the film's contradictory approach: warmly observed, deeply sympathetic, and an utterly vicious parody of singer Loretta Lynn. (Lynn is alleged to have been so offended by the portrayal that she commissioned the biographical book and film Coal Miner's Daughter in response.) Altman's open-minded, ground-level approach opens up a world of possibilities, and one feels anything can happen and probably will--from the bedroom farce that climaxes with Keith Carradine's performance of "I'm Easy," to the assassination attempt on a singer that uncomfortably anticipates the murder of John Lennon. The film was reportedly cut from a four-hour running time to its present length of two hours, forty minutes, and one can easily imagine the truncated material being just as rich as what's in the final version. The film leaves one wanting more.

Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982; USA)

Tootsie is perhaps the finest farce to come out of Hollywood. All the classic elements are there--the false/mistaken identity, the cross-dressing, the ambitious fool of a protagonist--and they're perfectly attuned to the story's milieu. Dustin Hoffman stars as Michael Dorsey, a fanatical perfectionist of an actor whom no producer can stand to deal with. Unable to find work, he creates the alter ego of Dorothy Michaels to audition for a soap opera role and lands the part. The gender confusion humor finds rich veins to mine in every aspect of Michael's life, whether it's with his relationship with his girlfriend (Teri Garr), life with his roommate (Bill Murray), or just about everything to do with the soap opera, whether it's with the show's actresses, its aging-lothario star (George Gaynes), or its sexist-pig director (Dabney Coleman). Things get especially complicated when Michael falls in love with an actress on the program (Jessica Lange), only to find that her father (Charles Durning) has fallen in love with him as Dorothy. Director Sydney Pollack keeps the outstanding script (by Larry Gelbert, Murray Schisgal, Don McGuire, and an uncredited Elaine May) crackling along. Hoffman gives a masterful performance--Michael and Dorothy manage to be both distinct personalities and yet recognizable as part of the same person. The supporting cast, which also includes Pollack as Michael's agent, is nothing less than outstanding. The film was a career peak for nearly everyone involved.

Carlito's Way (Brian De Palma, 1993; USA)

Brian De Palma is perhaps the most brilliant of contemporary Hollywood directors, but he is also the most erratic, with a taste for violence, raunch, and black humor that makes him the most disreputable major filmmaker out there. Even the cheesiest of his films have passages that are nothing short of astonishing; one can dismiss Dressed to Kill as a ridiculous upscale slasher movie, but only the most insensate viewer could look at the romantic chase in the museum without being awed by De Palma's ability. His most artistically accomplished film is probably the Vietnam War drama Casualties of War, but my favorite by him is Carlito's Way, a tour de force of filmmaking flamboyance that is perhaps the most strikingly directed film to ever come out of Hollywood. Nearly every scene leaves one blown away by De Palma's directorial imagination and skill, whether it's the sharply executed drug deal gone bad in the first act, the through-the-door flirtatious thrust-and-parry between Carlito (Al Pacino) and his girlfriend (Penelope Ann Miller), or the climactic chase that begins in a Spanish Harlem nightclub, continues through the New York subway, and ends in Grand Central Station. (The Steadicam shot in the moments at the Grand Central escalators is my nominee for the greatest shot in movie history.) De Palma is especially enamored with shooting scenes in a single take, and the complex staging he creates in response to the challenge is nothing less than extraordinary. His most remarkable achievement is in never letting the filmmaking pyrotechnics get in the way of the story. The story is about the efforts of a reformed drug kingpin trying to go straight against all odds, and it is never less than compelling. A number of viewers find the ending infuriating, but even that is a testament to De Palma's storytelling ability: he generates so much narrative momentum that he makes one forget that he showed how the story would end at the beginning. The film is a surprising omission from the Cahiers list. A poll the magazine conducted at the beginning of the decade ranked Carlito's Way as the best film of the 1990s.

Before Sunrise/Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 1995/2004; USA)


By itself, Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise is a lovely romantic fantasy. The two main characters, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy), are an American and a Frenchwoman in their early twenties who meet on a transcontinental European train and fall in love during a one-night stopover in Vienna. The film follows them through the city, guiding us through their infatuation, their awkward efforts to charm the other, the rapport they develop, and the passion for each other they eventually feel. No film has better captured the high of falling in love, and the couple's innocence and idealism made it especially sweet. However, the film ended on an unresolved note: Jesse and Céline's outside obligations demanded they go their separate ways in the morning, but they agree to meet again at the train station in six months. At the beginning of Before Sunset, which reunites the characters in Paris nine years later, we learn that they didn't meet again at the train station. Yet despite the passage of time, they fall in love all over again. The difference is that this time, their feelings have none of the purity and naivete of youth: their rapport is colored by the disappointments and anxieties that come with being an adult. Together, the two films are an extraordinarily rich treatment of the nature of love: the rush of it when one is younger, and the emotional complications that challenge it later in life. There's been talk of making subsequent installments in the years down the road. I, for one, look forward to them being made, and I hope they deepen our view of their subject as much as the second film did with the first.