My Consequential Movies

I was brought up in a movie-loving home.  My mother was a casual watcher of movies, preferring much more TV, but my father was, if not a fanatic, then certainly a fan, if that makes sense.  His tastes ran almost exclusively to westerns and war pictures, with detours here and there.  He was raised on those type movies and enjoyed entertainment where a clear delineation existed between the good guys and the bad guys and none of the wishy-washy stuff that emerged in the sixties with the appearance of the “anti-western” and pacifist pictures.  Strangely enough I did not follow him down such a cinematic path.  My boyhood movie loves were horror flicks, initially the wonderful old and creaky fantasies produced by Universal Studios at the onset of the Depression and replayed for years on Saturday afternoon TV; and when I got a little older I began paying more attention to foreign-language films, because certain celebrated critics considered them more “profound” than American output.  Eventually, with my first VCR in 1985, I opened up a good bit and began watching the “horse operas” so beloved by Daddy and have never looked back. 

Dr. Clyde Wilson has kindly asked me to contribute a list of films that have had an endearing impact on me.  The below roster is not necessarily a compilation of my choices for the BEST movies ever made, although a number of them would certainly earn a place on that rollcall as well.  These are movies I’ve seen a number of times, dozens of times, and have never grown tired of; even with repeated viewings they never fail to move me, emotionally, intellectually, and otherwise.

1. THE EARRINGS OF MADAM DE (France, 1951).  Based on a slim novella by Louise de Vilmorin, this may very well be the most romantic motion picture ever made.  It is not a bit treacly or sentimental; the romance comes from the movie’s tone and technique.  Its director, Max Ophuls, was a German émigré who worked all over continental Europe and briefly in the United States.  He was a master of camera movement, and the late critic Andrew Sarris once wrote that “all the dollies in the world snapped to attention at mention of his name.”  But his was not a showy technique, movement for movement’s sake.  His camera limned the emotional turbulence and occasional triumphs of his characters.  In Madame De, a foolish society woman (Danielle Darrieux) has an affair with an associate of her husband’s, played by Vittorio de Sica, which leads ultimately to tragedy.  In ravishing black and white, with a haunting musical score, this is the last word in adult film romance.  
2. THE SEARCHERS (USA, 1956).  To my mind this is the greatest of all American films by the greatest of all film directors, John Ford, and certainly one of the most influential.  Directors such as Martin Scorsese and George Lucas have admittedly drawn on the movie in creating their own iconic works.  (See Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Lucas’s Star Wars, each featuring a quest to save a young woman from destruction).  John Wayne is an ex-Confederate soldier who seeks his niece (Natalie Wood), who has been kidnapped by Comanche Indians and more than likely compromised sexually; his goal is not to rescue and redeem her but to kill her and thus remove a stain from the family name.  To show the enduring foolishness of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Searchers received no Oscar nominations, while the big winner that year was a piece of ephemeral puff, Around the World in Eighty Days, which has had no influence on major filmmakers to the best of my knowledge.  In a just world, The Searchers would have been nominated for, and won, Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor (Ward Bond), Cinematography, Art Direction, and Original Music, among others.  Max Steiner, of Gone with the Wind, provided the music, and Winton C. Hoch was responsible for the glorious Technicolor photography.  Based on a fine novel by Alan LeMay, also worth one’s time and attention.          
3. PSYCHO (USA, 1960).  Southerners have always had a penchant for gothic horror.  In fact it is a Southerner, Edgar Allan Poe, who can rightly be attributed with the creation  and perpetration of the Southern Gothic in American letters.  Psycho, director Alfred Hitchcock’s most infamous film, is not Southern Gothic, although in the novel by Robert Bloch, the story’s setting is Texas, not Arizona/California, and for years I’ve been convinced that Bloch knew Faulkner’s macabre tale “A Rose for Emily” well enough to have had it influence his novel; there are a number of undeniable similarities.  These same similarities are evident in the movie as well – the mentally disturbed lead characters, the refusal to give up the beloved dead, the isolated houses.  Even Faulkner’s image of a silhouetted Emily Grierson sitting in a lighted window of her home for all the townspeople to see is repeated in the movie with “Mother” reclining in a similar pose.  Psycho is the granddaddy of all “slasher” movies that found a renaissance in the late 1970s and 1980s and which still glut the movie market, but it is done with inimitable wit and startling artistry.  The shower scene, lasting all of forty-five seconds, may well be the most talked about and analyzed movie sequence ever.  (It at least gives the Odessa Steps massacre in Potemkin a strong run for its money).  Avoid the horrendous, misguided 1998 “remake” at ALL costs.
4. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (USA, 1962).  The last of director John Ford’s “memory westerns,” this film was panned by critics upon its initial release but then grew in stature with audiences and movie historians as the years passed.  This is perhaps the movies’ best depiction of the civilization of the Old West; certainly it is the most personal.  James Stewart, an idealistic lawyer, represents those civilizing forces, Lee Marvin (in the title role) is unharnessed individualism, and John Wayne stands as a sort of arbiter between the two.  The key line from the film comes from a journalist:  “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”  Watch this very moving film to see what he means.  
5. THE RULES OF THE GAME (France, 1939).  This is yet another masterpiece that was maligned in its day but subsequently achieved cinematic classic status in ensuing decades.  The critic Myron Meisel has even gone so far as to compare it to Shakespeare and Mozart.  Jean Renoir paints an elegant portrait of Europe in moral and cultural decline, filled with memorable set pieces.  He even takes a role in a love story that turns tragic.
6. RIO BRAVO (USA, 1959).  John Ford was such an inestimable figure in the movie western, films he did not actually direct are often attributed to him.  Red River, for instance, and this one, both helmed by Howard Hawks.  Here Hawks blends broad humor with his usual theme of the value of professionalism and communities, even ragtag ones, banding together to achieve a goal.  The opening set piece, involving blood in a beer mug, is a classic.
7. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (USA, 1942).  After his astonishing debut with Citizen Kane, Orson Welles followed up with a film many think is even greater.  While he was away in South American scouting for his next picture, production heads at RKO Studios took the scissors to his masterwork and imposed a “happy ending” onto it.  Based on Booth Tarkington’s much neglected Pulitzer winner, The Magnificent Ambersons, in whatever form, remains an acute portrait of Middle America transformed by industrialism and materialism, tossing out traditional values and snapping familial ties.
8. THE AGE OF THE MEDICI (Italy, 1973).  Famed Italian director Roberto Rossellini abandoned commercial cinema in the mid-1960s to embark on series of historical films, the first of which was The Rise and Fall of Louis XIV.  He felt movies had an obligation to educate as much as to entertain.  This trilogy of films made for Italian television is probably the most ambitious of the series.  Rossellini eschews movie stars and movie spectacle to give us a detailed picture of the machinations of the Medicis of Florence, their ups and downs, their triumphs and failures.
9. VERTIGO (USA, 1958).   This Hitchcock film, another failure upon initial release, has of late deposed Citizen Kane atop Sight and Sound’s list of the greatest films ever made.  Starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, this dream-like move shows the perils of romantic obsession.  Unforgettable in every way, with a Bernard Herrmann score reminiscent of the Liebstod from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. 
10. NASHVILLE (USA, 1975).  I had an old VHS copy of this Oscar-nominated film in college and showed it to a dorm mate.  He lasted twenty minutes with it before asking me to shut it off.  It got on his nerves that quickly.  Robert Altman’s innovation in multi-channel soundtrack, which allowed for a realistic overlapping of actors’ voices, and mosaic storytelling were not and are not to every cinephile’s taste.  Yet this movie remains an enthralling depiction of celebrity-obsessed America in the mid-seventies, blending country music and populist politics.  A stunning ending.
11. THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL (USA, 1985).  If this were a list of my choices of the best films ever made, I’m afraid this Peter Masterson production of an old Horton Foote teleplay and Broadway play would not be on it.  Lovely as it is, it is just not cinematically ambitious enough to place on such a list.  But it is a movie that has meant a lot to me since the first time I saw it some thirty years ago, and that is chiefly for the glowing performance of the late Geraldine Page in the lead role.  Missouri-born and Chicago-raised, Page was an exemplary interpreter of the works of many of the leading Southern writers of the day, including Tennessee Williams (Sweet Bird of Youth) and Truman Capote (A Christmas Memory) and, of course, Foote.   Here she plays Carrie Watts, an elderly widow yearning to leave crowded, noisy, impersonal Houston for her old homestead in the country.  She is thwarted in this ambition by her son and garrulous daughter-in-law until one day she manages to escape the both of them.  This is a hymn to home, to family, to spirituality, and Page, in the role that would finally win her the Best Actress Oscar, leads the choir unerringly. 
12. THE BEGUILED (USA, 1971).  Geraldine Page returns to the list, this time co-starring Clint Eastwood, in the Gothic story of a wounded Union soldier taken in by the proprietors of an all-girls school in Louisiana.  True to form, once he regains his strength, he takes advantage of the women as only a Yankee can; still, he has not reckoned upon Southern female resourcefulness.  Directed in grand baroque style by Don Siegel (Dirty Harry), this was Eastwood’s only box-office bust at the time.  There are a number of fiery, delicious confrontations between Eastwood and Page.  It was remade in 2017, but I have no plans to see it.  Nicole Kidman is no Geraldine Page.