Daily Blague

Now that I've finally seen every movie on Jim Emerson's list of 102 films that everyone ought to see, here is my version, with eight substitutions. They are:

¶ The Awful Truth, for Bambi
¶ Evil Under the Sun, for Monty Python and the Holy Grail
¶ Get Shorty, for The Searchers
¶ The Palm Beach Story, for Days of Heaven
¶ The Philadelphia Story, for The Wild Bunch
¶ Shall We Dance, for Modern Times
¶ Unforgiven, for Dirty Harry
¶ What's Up, Doc?, for Bringing Up Baby

See the complete list at Portico.

Bambi, The Searchers, Days of Heaven, and The Wild Bunch were dropped to make room for four important comedies; as noted earlier, comedy is seriously underrepresented on the original list; The Awful Truth, Get Shorty, The Palm Beach Story, and The Philadelphia Story are in this sense not substitutions. With Katharine Hepburn on the revised list (and in a much stronger picture), however, I can comfortably exchange the delightful Bringing Up Baby for its even more delightful remake, What's Up, Doc? "There's a person named Eunice?"

Shall We Dance is a state-of-the-art movie that, to my mind, shows Charlie Chaplin's dismal attempt to recreate a silent film the year before for the anachronism that it is. Evil Under the Sun is a much more amusing English movie than the ham-fisted Monty Python and the Holy Grail - I don't believe that Monty Python works at feature length. Finally, Unforgiven is a more grown-up picture than Dirty Harry in every way. Dirty Harry has not aged well - except for folks who are avid listeners of red-state talk radio.

Why eight? I might have changed as many as twelve titles - a baker's ten percent. But the point is not to proselytize my taste. The point is to strengthen the list by adding as many urgent titles as I can think of and then to subtract as many of the less successful pictures as it takes to make room for them. There are still a lot of movies on the list that I would not put there. But I'm glad that I worked through the dozen-odd films that I hadn't seen before. I didn't care for most of them - in fact, I liked only one, The Best Years of Our Lives. But I know more about the movies than I used to. Aguirre, the Wrath of God shows how a director can suggest an overwhelming menace of doom without actually filming much violence. The Big Red One is a solid "man's movie" with sharp edges. The General is funny and engrossing at the same time - Buster Keaton really was sui generis. (What an acrobat!) It's also full of what must have been spectacular tracking shots.

Of course, I'm already tempted to make room for Murder on the Orient Express.