TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 (+6) BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME
Chosen by Film Critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel
This is going to be a mostly civilized article, but I have to begin by saying, where the fuck are “2001” and “Vertigo?” And “The Third Man?” And where are the Russians? No Tarkovsky, no Eisenstein?
Now that I’ve got that out of my system…what emerges from reading this list is how we are all prisoners of our language and culture. Corliss and Schickel should be lauded for making a more international list than “Entertainment Weekly’s” Top 100, with picks from India, China, Japan, and Europe. But the Richards haven’t just picked over 50 American movies for their list, they’ve picked movies that are accessible to Americans and that students of American film have been taught to appreciate. It takes a particularly strong brand of isolationism to not “get” movies from Western Europe, and even if you hate the French, come on, they invented the movies and so much of what we think of as “normal.”
Multiple Japanese movies are present, but how different is the post-war Japanese film industry from America’s? It’s no accident that Akira Kurosawa, America’s favorite Japanese director, made Westerns (“Yojimbo,” “The Seven Samurai”), Shakespeare (“Ran,” “Throne of Blood”), and detective movies (“High and Low”). Even Yasujiro Ozu, whom “Entertainment Weekly” described as “the most Japanese of Japanese directors,” was so influenced by America and American film that he showed one of the boys in “Tokyo Story” learning English and whistling the theme to “Stagecoach.”
The Richards have done good work here and I don’t want to sound critical, but sometimes it seems that subtitles and a passing knowledge of a foreign land aren’t enough to “get” a movie. “Citizen Kane,” “The Godfather,” and “Raging Bull” all hit me in part because I am an American—I get the cues, the subtexts, the nuances of the language, the little tics and gestures of our cultural neuroses. (The TIME 100 makes the AFI Top 100 American movies seem more reasonably, even if it might not be as good a collection of movies.) But do I get, say, Korean nuances? Thai? Andean? To make a truly objective Top 100, to rise above our time and place, would require a God’s-eye-view or superhuman international sympathies. Acquiring that knowledge would almost certainly eclipse one’s ability and time to learn about film. So, to quote a movie that might never appear on one of these lists, “like anyone can even know that!”
This is probably why there is no Russian film on the list, no “Battleship Potemkin,” no “Alexander Nevksy,” no “Andrei Roublev.” Outside of two spots on the Vatican’s Top 45, it doesn’t seem that poor Tarkovsky gets any respect. Still, in an objective sense, America, France, and Japan do deserve an inordinate amount of movies on this list. Cinema was born in France, America was the first to commercialize and mass-produce the industry, and countries like Japan, with thriving economies, have the disposable income to pour into making great movies.
Anyway, the TIME 100 can be divided into 5 groups, or can be said to have been driven by 5 impulses: the obvious picks, the populist picks, the alternates to the obvious picks, the obscure picks, and the crazy ones. First: the “obvious picks.” These are the movies upon which most everyone can agree: “Citizen Kane,” “Tokyo Story,” “8 ½,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” the “Apu” trilogy, “Raging Bull,” “Casablanca,” “The Godfather,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Psycho,” “The Searchers,” “On the Waterfront,” etc. It’s a reliable set of movies. A little bit less popular, but generally agreed upon by most critics, are the films of Sergio Leone, Werner Herzog, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, and Luis Bunuel, and the enormous influence of Siegel’s sometimes stiff and clunky “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
The second group is made up of the populist picks for a populist magazine. TIME may have higher standards that “Entertainment Weekly” or “People,” but it is still a glossy magazine found in supermarket checkout lines, in which nuggets of fact and opinion come at the reader like crack-cocaine. Are the Dicks being honest? Or are they pandering to their audience by balancing out “Camille” and “Day for Night” with “Lord of the Rings?” Does any sane critic really believe “Finding Nemo” is a better movie than “Nosferatu” or “Apocalypse Now?” Fortunately this is kept to a minimum. My wife said “this list is dead to me” the instant she found out “The Third Man” had been overlooked. But at least she didn’t have to hear how it lost a spot to “The Matrix” or “The Usual Suspects.” A less cynical approach to this category might be to call it “predictions,” in the sense that the Richards are trying to guess which of today’s most critical and audience favorites they feel are poised to stand the test of time. That would explain their inclusion of “Decalogue” and 2002’s “City of God,” which sound a lot less silly on a Top 100 list than 9 hours of suppressed gay jokes.
The third group is what I call “the alternates.” This group gives the impression that Corliss and Schickel ended their first draft of their Top 100 with too many obvious picks. So they took, almost at random, about half of the traditional obvious picks and replaced them with lesser-known or “second best” films from the same director or in the same vein. A cynic would say that the Richards did this just to be snooty, to imply that they sniff their noses at how prosaic the rest of us are. It’s also just as likely that they hoped to broaden our horizons; somewhere in my travels I’ve actually read a “100 Best Movies That You Haven’t Seen” list.
Instead of “2001” we have Kubrick’s overlooked 1975 masterpiece “Barry Lyndon.” Instead of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” we have “Notorious.” “Persona” replaces “The Seventh Seal,” “City Lights” instead of “The Gold Rush,” “His Girl Friday” instead of “The Philadelphia Story,” “In a Lonely Place” instead of “The Maltese Falcon,” “Olympia” instead of “Triumph of the Will,” “Pinocchio” instead of “Fantasia” or “Snow White,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo” instead of “Annie Hall,” “Miller’s Crossing” instead of “ Fargo,” “Children of Paradise” replaces “Rules of the Game,” “Sherlock Jr.” instead of “The General,” and “Umberto D” instead of “The Bicycle Thief.” French New Wave Top 100 regulars like “Breathless,” “Jules et Jim,” and “Contempt” are scooted aside for “Band a Parte” and “Day for Night.” Toughest of all is that “Yojimbo” and “Ikiru” replace “Sight & Sound’s” picks of “The Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon.” I like “Yojimbo” and “Rashomon” about the same, but I think I like “Ikiru” a little better than “Seven Samurai,” so I can’t decide where my loyalties should lie.
The Richards could have kept going in this vein, replacing “Citizen Kane” with “Touch of Evil,” “The Godfather” with “The Conversation,” “Chinatown” with “Rosemary’s Baby,” “8 ½” with “Amarcord,” “Lawrence of Arabia” with “Dr. Zhivago,” “The Manchurian Candidate” with “Seconds,” “Pulp Fiction” with “Reservoir Dogs,” and “A Hard Day’s Night” with “Help!” But they didn’t.
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