At least as of this writing, it’s still the 4th of July. And because of the time of day I typically set aside for writing, the distant echoes of the last fireworks are just now fading into the background and I’m biting into one last late-night hotdog leftover from dinner. And between Captain America marathons, parkside gatherings and family get-togethers, I’ve been desperately trying to wrack my brain about what to write about.
It had to be suitably festive, of course, but I had already done a review of an ironic holiday favorite. At this point, my opinions of the fabled “star-spangled man with the plan” are thoroughly committed to the public discourse. I’ve even started in on the Purge movies already (which are fast becoming a holiday staple in and of themselves).
Despite coving the list numerous time in recent weeks, the AFI “Best American Movies” list teasingly stroked my thoughts on-and-off throughout the day’s festivities. It actually occurred to me that although I’ve written at length about what should or shouldn’t be on the list, I’ve yet to actually address what, if left to my druthers, I would make a point to include in one of my own making: nothing enshrining the most “important” or “influential” movies from this proud nation of mine, but, quite simply, the best — what I would endlessly drone on about as the pinnacle of American cinema.
That seemed as good of a topic as any to talk about on a day such as today and so, submitted here for your review are what I think of when I think about the best in the American pantheon of film. Or, perhaps more accurately, here are my picks merely for the fleeting here and now: a list that would doubtless change considerably if asked to remake it even in a day or two).
The General (1926)
Let it never be said that I don’t give the comedy genre its fair due. Despite my preference for “genre” films and decidedly more dramatic narratives, I love to laugh just as much as anybody else. It’s just that it takes quite a bit more to get me there. And to that end, at least, nothing gets me guffawing faster than this silent Buster Keaton masterpiece: an action-packed and gag-laden adventure about a train engineer desperately trying to do the right thing despite his comically stumbling into (and out of) trouble.
Modern Times (1936)
I’ll be the first to admit that I have a certain love for late silent and early sound films (which basically runs the gamut from the mid-twenties to the early thirties). The period exists at the perfect cross-section of highly polished visual story-telling and rapidly solidifying (but not yet rigidly applied) cinematic language: developed enough to really show off what the medium is capable of but still loose enough to nevertheless surprise you. And while Chaplin’s most sacrosanct production of this era is undoubtedly 1931’s City Lights, the one that I feel best encapsulates what I love about these kinds of films is Modern Times: a sterling film that both emblematizes the ending of the first era of filmmaking and predicts many of the ways that the rapidly-changing medium would look and feel in the coming decades.
Casablanca (1942)
Between the standardization of “talkies” in the early thirties and the rise of “New Hollywood” in the mid-sixties, Hollywood was rigidly defined by the Studio System: an era of monopolistic business practices and unparalleled control over movie production by a scant handful of studios (and, subsequently, executives). Filmmakers were under ironclad contract, theaters directly owned by the very studios whose films they exhibited and the entire industry ran like a tightly wound, profit-driven machine. I have considerably less patience for this era of filmmaking than most critics (who often call it Hollywood’s Golden Age) do, but there are a few unquestionable masterpieces to come out of the clockwork. And while most are more likely to cite George Orwell’s Citizen Kane (1941) from the year before, I have to go with 1942’s Casablanca as the idyllic hybrid of Hollywood glitz and glamour and old-school style. Besides, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more quotable script committed to film.
Psycho (1960)
Although some of the shock in this cannily self-aware thriller is doubtless lost on modern audiences (ranging from Hitchcock’s characteristically droll ad campaign and the then-unheard of conceit of killing off its famously cast lead in the first third of the movie), the power of this film survives everything from its time-lost gimmicks to its invariably spoiled plot-twists (the victim of decades of cultural ubiquity). All the same, it is Hitchcock — one of the great masters of the medium — on display at the pinnacle of his craft, with a perfectly assembled cast and a dynamite script adapted from a schlocky, shocking, utterly salacious novel. In short, it’s damned near the perfect horror movie ever assembled.
The Exorcist (1973)
Although, if there ever was to be a contender for its place on the horrored throne of cinema, The Exorcist would be the movie brazen enough to challenge it. For all of its qualities, Psycho is so singularly unique in both its medium and genre that it’s sometimes called into question whether its modern mundanities and unflinchingly human dangers really typify the horror film: which has been traditionally the realm of ghosts, ghouls and other ghastly creatures of the night. And for those hardline critics, this William Friedkin masterpiece is just as perfectly crafted, but steeped so satisfactorily in the occult that even classic masterworks like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976) seem amateurish by comparison.
Schindler’s List (1993)
If ever there was an American auteur that could give the likes of Alfred Hitchcock a run for his money, it’s Steven Spielberg: a man whose best-known second-tier work (1993’s Jurassic Park) would be the absolute best any other director could have reasonably hoped for, and whose genuine, bar-raising masterpiece was released the exact same year as it. Even in the decades since its release, there really has been nothing to rise to meet the dramatic masterwork that is Schindler’s List: an emotional tour-de-force that finds the gripping heart in the Jewish Holocaust and squeezes it for all its worth — not to be maudlin, but because that’s exactly what that tragic chapter in history called for. And the resulting production is nothing short of the last, soulful mourn of a generation lost in the war-torn rubble of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Mullholland Drive (2001)
Although most movie-goers want to watch movies for straightforward and entertaining narratives — a linear progression from cause to effect, with a beginning, middle and end, housed in a harrowing narrative that offers some respite from the harsh realities of the real world — not all movies are designed with that simple aim in mind. Although more common in the arthouse cinema of Europe and beyond, America’s sporadic dalliances with challenging cerebral filmmaking have been as extraordinarily rich as those four elsewhere in the world. Arguably, none has been more affecting or memorable than Mullholland Drive: a bizarre neo-noir with a story so arresting that it had the gumption to tell it twice — in a matter that is both infinitely enlightening and endlessly confounding, but none-the-less mesmeric as anything else in the medium’s storied history.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
I have a challenging relationship when it comes to writer-director Quentin Tarantino. Despite their bombastic and visionary nature, I rarely like them on the fist pass: in fact, more often than not, I hate them the first time I watch them — only coming around to their merits slowly, over time and after repeat viewings. A lot of this probably comes down to Tarantino being a far better writer than he is a director: a font of spellbinding theatrics that the helmsman in him is far too enamored by to ever cut down to more reasonable lengths. No where is this more apparent than in Inglourious Basterds, a revisionist history of the final days of World War II that has perhaps the single greatest script ever written, despite every scene droning on well past the point that it should have ended. Despite this, however, its compelling prose is so innately powerful that it more than bears out against any scrutiny that might fall upon its less-than-up-to-the-task direction.
Nightcrawler (2014)
I will never understand how this movie didn’t make more of a splash when it first arrived on the scene nor garnered more of a following in the years hence. In what is easily a career-best performance for leading man Jae Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler follows the rise of a sociopath to the heights of the American Dream. Essentially Citizen Kane with a killer edge, it’s the film that my wife found so disturbing that she couldn’t make it more than halfway through its gripping narrative, and one that I found so endlessly engrossing that I couldn’t help but press “play” again the second that it ended.
Mother! (2017)
While it is tempting to compare this to Mulholland Drive in the sense that both are dense, contemplative films that actively confound any semblance of concrete understanding, even that it fails to encapsulate everything that the madcap passion project born of writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s unassailable imagination. Equal parts high art and depraved lunacy, the mere fact that it received a wide release from a major studio — feature a star-studded cast of reliable thespians — seems like a cruel joke played on an unsuspecting public that was not even remotely prepared for what it was about to witness. It is the bold, auteur-driven storytelling that the medium is best equipped to handle — that is, when it wants to — that almost never gets made (and certainly never on this scale). Its critical (and perhaps popular) reappraisal over time will be one of the most fascinating discourses to witness in the unfurling century.
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