Sight and Sound magazine just invited me to contribute to its list of the Greatest Movies of All Time. It’s probably an honour, though I suspect they are spreading the net wider these days in hopes of a more representative selection. Whether this will change the mix is debatable, DVD and streaming having carried the most obscure films to the furthest corners of the world. Cinéastes in Ouagadougou or Ulan Bator are just as familiar with Tokyo Monogatori and Céline et Julie vont en bateau as those in Far Rockaway or Alice Springs - more so, probably.
Hopefully the survey’s focus will never be as narrow as it became in the seventies, when a Maoist element in the French critical community ensured that The Red Detachment of Women gave a run for their money to Les Enfants du Paradis and October - both of which, incidentally, do make the current list, while Zhou Enlai’s dancing infantry have gone the way of the Chairman director himself.
In the past, not everyone took the Sight and Sound poll seriously. The predictable presence of Citizen Kane at the top became wearisome, as irrelevant as the playing of the national anthem at theatrical events. We all stood up dutifully but often with a sidewise glance, a raised eyebrow or a shrug. Its replacement by Vertigo doesn’t so much honour Hitchcock as reflect that fatigue.
The remaining choices are very much the usual suspects – which is not to say that they include Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, despite that film’s oblique look at narrative and the recycling of the phrase from Casablanca having given it a pop culture currency out of proportion to its modest ambitions. The fact that such recent works are not considered eligible, at least by those making the selection, is part of what’s wrong with the list.
In self-limiting themselves, those voting exclude vast swathes of cinema. The yardstick appears to be critical acceptance. Nothing crude or camp (unless you count Some Like It Hot) can be allowed to intrude, nothing catchpenny, nothing vulgar. Well, almost nothing. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre sneaks in, probably because someone called it “the Citizen Kane of meat movies”. But the Saw series, The Ring or The Blair Witch Project? Forget it.
One knows from conversations and correspondence that not all contributors maintain so high-minded a critical stance. But one can understand their rationale. What does it say about them if they include Masters of the Universe or Pretty Woman or Porky’s? And worse, what if they are the only one to vote for them? Better play it safe with Campion or von Trier.
Hence a list that includes numerous films by alumni of the Roger Corman stable but not one of his own productions, let alone those he inspired; no Little Shop of Horrors nor Easy Rider, for example. No music or concert films – not real films. No Ken Russell, Robert Parker or Adrian Lyne – nix The Devils, Fame and Flashdance . No Silence of the Lambs or Godzilla or Jaws. No serials. No Raiders of the Lost Ark. Nor any von Stroheim or von Sternberg. Seek in vain for Greed, Shanghai Express or The Blue Angel.
Most glaring of all, the list has one one animated film: Pixar’s Wall-e. No Chuck Jones? No Walt Disney? No Fantasia, no Bambi, no Pinocchio - no MICKEY MOUSE?
In a race to the middle ground, it’s easy to forget the expressed intention of the survey – to acknowledge which films are truly great. Greatness is a more significant and elusive attribute than modishness. Film-makers considered great today were more iconoclastic in their choices than their present-day admirers. Stanley Kubrick included Citizen Kane, Wild Strawberries, La Notte, City Lights and I Vitelloni in his top ten but also The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Bank Dick with W.C. Fields, and William Wellman’s Roxie Hart. Federico Fellini liked City Lights too, but also Laurel and Hardy in Fra Diavolo, as well as Stagecoach and Frankenstein.
Greatness does not reside simply in survival. It shouldn’t be enough that a film has been honoured by retrospectives and reissued by Criterion. That qualifies it for Eminence. Greatness demands what James Mason calls in A Star is Born “that little something extra.” And one reliable index of greatness is the degree to which something has influenced those who came after. By that yardstick, Cukor’s film with its numerous progeny surely deserves inclusion. In fact, since the 1954 version was a re-make, should we not rather honour its Ur text, the 1932 What Price Hollywood?, also Cukor-directed?
“Let us now praise famous men,” urges Ecclesiastes, then adds, significantly “…and our fathers that begat us.” Quentin Tarantino acknowledges Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential as the source of Reservoir Dogs but few science fiction film-makers credit the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials of the nineteen-thirties, just as the makers of Taken, John Wick, The Transporter and their many sequels and imitators never mention – again with the exception of Tarantino - Bruce Lee and the school of martial arts that coalesced around him. Who watches Satyajit Ray or Dovzhenko or even Max Ophuls today? For good or ill, they belong to history – while Feuillade’s Les Vampires, a century after it was made, is reincarnated on Netflix as Irma Vep and, seventy years after he first shuffled ankle-deep through Tokyo, Godzilla still roams the earth. Hey, Dad!