My Twenty Favourite Films (Part 2)

With and without my movie critic cap on

Of course there are hundreds of films that would be at home on this list. One that was hard to leave out was nineties crime thriller ‘Heat’. It was the first time Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro shared a screen, and is utterly gripping from start to finish. Another from recent years that really struck me was ‘The Kindergarten Teacher’, about how creativity just doesn’t work when you force it too hard, and that life beats it out of us.

Other films that were originally on the list but had to make way include ‘The Third Man’(1949) and ‘The Night of the Hunter’ (1955). That does not diminish their greatness, but I prefer the ones I have included.

Here they are:

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)

My worst year at school was 1997/98 when I was 13-14 years old. This was partly because it was the year I started learning guitar, and also the year I read JRR Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. My mind was on things other than homework.

By the early 2000s, Tolkien’s stock was even higher. In the 2003 BBC national poll ‘The Big Read’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was voted Britain’s favourite novel.

When it came to committing Tolkien’s trilogy to celluloid, the pressure was on New Zealand director Peter Jackson. The passion, professionalism and panache with which these films were made are as good as it gets when it comes to big-budget Hollywood filmmaking.

The critical drinker described this as ‘the perfect marriage between artistic integrity and crowd-pleasing spectacle’.

Paths of Glory (1957)

French directorial master Francois Truffaut famously argued that there was no such thing as an anti-war movie. This is because the big screen, by its very nature, glamorises. Paths of Glory, which was Stanley Kubrick’s second feature, has some battle sequences and they are done well, but the focus of this movie is military politics.

Instead of courage, it is all about cowardice, the soldiers who are wrongly accused of it, and the senior officers who are actually guilty of it in their cunning political manoeuvrings.

Like all good art, it addresses deep philosophical issues from fresh new angles without ever hitting you over the head with its profundity. The final scene in particular is one for the emotions rather than the intellect.

The Red Shoes (1948)

In 1948, Britain was bedevilled with rationing, bombed-out cities, and the beginning of the Cold War. The team of director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger, who had already made stone-cold classics such as ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’ and ‘Black Narcissus’ came out with the lavish and ambitious back-stage drama ‘The Red Shoes’.

The dance sequences are mesmerising, and the film’s settings include the stunning scenery of southern France, but the film is anything but escapist. It is a movie about the sacrifices that are needed to achieve greatness. Aspiring dancer Vicky Page is about to fulfil her professional ambitions when she falls in love with composer Julian Kraster. Impresario Boris Lermontov insists that “a dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer.”

Vicky’s internal conflict plays out spectacularly and tragically. I wrote in more depth about the film here.

Rome, Open City (1945)

When it came to picking my favourite Italian film, it was hard to leave out Vittorio De Sica’s ‘Bicycle Thieves’ (1948) or Federico Fellini’s ‘La Strada’ (1954). The follow-up to the latter, ‘The Nights of Cabiria’, has one of the most iconic endings of all.

In the end, I have gone with ‘Rome, Open City’, a film about resistance to fascism. Here in the Anglosphere, we have fallen into the habit of lionising the generation that fought the Nazis. The expressions ‘The Dunkirk Spirit’ and ‘The Blitz Spirit’ appear on the Life in the UK citizenship test. In America, the soldiers who fought in World War 2 are often described as The Greatest Generation.

In this movie, we are reminded that people in the 1940s were not superior beings, just fallible humans with better hairstyles. Memorable characters include Aldo Fabrizi’s Don Pietro, a priest who starts out as a figure of fun, before discovering his inner dissident. There is also Marina, who unwittingly sells out her countryman, just for a nice fur coat, reminding us that acts of evil often happen because of apathy rather than malice.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Hollywood is often at its best when biting the hand that feeds it. Films that narrowly missed out on this list include ‘Sullivan’s Travels’ (1941), a comedy in which a rich and coddled filmmaker sets out to make something highbrow and abandon slapstick, sex, and chases, and ends up in an adventure that involves all of those things. There is also ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950), a film noir about the cruelty of Hollywood and the way it treats people who aren’t players.

But for a favourite film about filmmaking, I have gone with ‘Singin in the Rain’. The dancing is stunning, and every song is a showstopper. The standout performance, among many, is that of Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont, the world’s most adorable villainess. My favourite song is ‘Make ‘em Laugh’, for which Don O’Connor did multiple backflips despite already being in his thirties and smoking four packs a day.

Unforgiven (1992)

The undisputed master of the Western genre is John Ford. His many masterpieces include ‘The Searchers’ (1956), in which John Wayne’s confederate veteran spends five years tracking down his captured niece, and ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962), made when the Wild West-era was disappearing out of living memory and films about it were becoming more self-reflective.

These and several other Westerns were hard to leave out, but I have included 1992’s ‘Unforgiven’. Visually and aurally majestic, it is a brutal and multi-layered corrective to the myth of the wild west. It contains all the tropes, from vicious outlaws, to skilful gun-slingers, to corrupt lawmen, to whores with a heart, and humanises all of them without ever romanticising them.

The number of Westerns being made by Hollywood had long been in decline by 1992, and it stopped altogether for several years because ‘Unforgiven’ was so good It left the genre with nowhere else to go.

Vertigo (1958)

Judging by many of his protagonists, Alfred Hitchcock had a profound empathy with mentally disturbed men. These include Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ (1943) and Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) in ‘Marnie’ (1964).

Since then, it has emerged that Hitchcock’s fascination with cruelty and abuse was not purely academic. Of all the problematic men in Hitchcock’s work, the most relatable is John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson in ‘Vertigo’ (1958).

Played by John Stewart, who had made a career of appearing on-screen as a wholesome, all-American everyman. Scottie is a detective, traumatised with survivor’s guilt and a new fear of heights. When hired by an old friend to keep an eye on his wife over her erratic behaviour, Scotty develops an obsession with the woman, which brings out his own dark side.

And as someone who met the world during the era of lads’ mags, the struggle of being attracted to idealised women instead of real ones is relatable.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)

For this film, Hollywood beauty Elizabeth Taylor piled on the pounds and dyed her hair grey long before that sort of dedication was normal. Taylor plays Martha and her real-life husband Richard Burton is also her on-screen spouse, the under-achieving, beta-male George.

After inviting younger couple Nick and Honey as house guests, their tumultuous marriage goes through the entire range of human emotions. Everybody involved did the best work of their glittering careers. During the filming, what must the lunch-breaks have been like?

The Wild Bunch (1969)

The wild west looms large over American culture, but it was in fact a short-lived period of time, ranging from no earlier than 1860 to no later than 1918. The year is 1913 and outlaw Pike Bishop (William Holden) is determined to make one last big score before retiring. His former associate Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) is sent after him as a bounty hunter.

As in most of Peckinpah, powerful figures on both sides of the law are corrupt to the core, violence is ever-present, and the visuals and soundtracks are beautiful. The outlaws’ code of honour gets audiences rooting for them in spite of it all, and they make a climactic moral decision to combat evil, albeit while drunk in a brothel.

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

This Norwegian romantic comedy takes a well-worn trope, the messy young woman, and spins it into a multi-layered instant classic. It is full of flourishes that are as inventive as vintage-era Woody Allen, and the acting, writing, and cinematography are flawless.

The wisdom of this film is the understanding that there is no such thing as flawless when it comes to making life choices. Every decision could turn out to be wrong, and protagonist Julie is in the kind of paralysis that is common with millennials, unable to settle on a career or life partner.

It knows when and when not to take itself seriously and never uses its comedy to undermine the serious moments. The conclusion that love and life are ultimately sad and every decision involves massive sacrifices rings true.