Bob Racine's100 Favorite Movies, Segment 2 of 7

COOL HAND LUKE (2 hrs & 7 min, color, 1967)

A drunken loser (Paul Newman at his best), finding himself on the chain gang, exerts a powerful influence over his fellow prisoners that is measurable only in the most intangible of terms.  Faced with the threat of annihilation he transcends his cosmic despair and finds spiritual resilience he never knew he had.  Under the influence of growing admiration and respect among his fellows, he becomes an unwitting role model and leader – “a natural born world shaker”.  His saga is by turns disquietingly funny, heartbreaking, tender, wistful, fiercely confrontational and oddly inspiring. 

DARLING (2 hrs & 2 min, b&w, 1965)

A London fashion model (Julie Christie) flits promiscuously from pillar to post, coming off as a kind of bitch goddess whom Christie makes us care very much about without ever dulling her fangs.  The lively narrative of moral descent, under John Schlesinger’s brilliant direction and Frederic Raphael’s super writing, unfolds with style-plus, every scene terse and sharp.  Dirk Bogarde is the sensitive intellectual whose life she ruins and Laurence Harvey the decadent advertising tycoon who does so much to corrupt hers.  These three star players have never been better. 

DAVID AND LISA (1 hr & 34 min, b&w, 1962)

Director Frank Perry and Screenwriter Eleanor Perry (husband and wife at the time) made motion picture history with this forty-carat diamond that still casts a resplendent glow into the dark side of the human mind.  David (Keir Dullea) and Lisa (Janet Margolin) are two deeply troubled souls who meet at a home for emotionally disturbed youth and find ways, over and beyond the limits of therapy, to reach and help heal each other.  Almost every scene in the film invades our primal emotions.  We are placed at once on the edge of calamity and left there until the last few minutes.

DAYS OF HEAVEN (1 hr & 33 min, color, 1978)

Writer/Director Terence Malick emblazons on our memories the tragic intermingling of four lives.  Three migrant laborers in the Texas Panhandle wheat fields during the Wilsonian era – Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and a child, Linda Manz (Gere’s sister) – become implicated in the mixed fortune of Sam Shepherd, the wealthy land baron for whom they go to work.  How loneliness, mistrust, alienated affection and the struggle for survival consume their loves and labors is the essence of a beautiful narrative, framed by phenomenal photography.  A jewel of a film!

DOCTOR, THE (2 hrs & 8 min, color, 1991)

A distinguished surgeon, who believes a doctor should be detached emotionally from the patients, has his mindset about his career reworked, when he contracts throat cancer and has to start taking some of that detached medicine himself.  His experience also brings to light his deepest human flaws affecting his wife and a terminally ill young woman he meets.  Based on an autobiography, it is a deeply moving tale of transformation, under the sensitive supervision of Director Randa Haines and embellished with a superbly nuanced character portrayal by William Hurt in the title role. 

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1 hr & 47 min, b&w, 1944)

My favorite film noir, derived from a James M. Cain novel and put together by the ingenious Director Billy Wilder.   Fred MacMurray is an insurance salesman and Barbara Stanwyck a seductive siren, who plot together to murder her husband and collect on a fraudulent policy.  We are carried through the process of a man’s beguilement, corruption and ultimate disintegration as a self-respecting human being.  Edward G. Robinson gives one of his crack performances as MacMurray’s shrewd claims manager, who smells mischief early in the game.  Thoroughly hypnotic!

DR. STRANGELOVE, or HOW I LEARNED TO STOP

WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1 hr & 35 min, b&w, 1964)

Stanley Kubrick’s absurdist portrayal of a nuclear emergency!  Sterling Hayden plays a berserk Air Force commander who sends warplanes to bomb Russia.  George C. Scott is a pushy Pentagon general.  Peter Sellers fills three roles: a droll U.S. President, a cool, proficient British officer, and Dr. Strangelove, a paraplegic ex-Nazi adviser to the President, full of spastic jerks and slurring speech.  Slim Pickens is an outrageous U.S. bomber pilot.  Hyperbole though it be, this remains a living reminder that mad generals and warlords are among us still.  Brilliant in all departments!        

ET: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL (2 hrs exactly, color, 1982)

Steven Spielberg struck pure gold with his rapturous fantasy fable about a twelve-ish boy (Henry Thomas) who becomes the solitary protector of a dainty but genius-endowed extra-terrestrial separated from his fellow space travelers on a visit to earth.  There is great dimension in Spielberg’s work.  Mellow and reflective moments, visual wonders, great humor, cliffhanging excitement, a struggle of cosmic proportions, marvelous animation and special effects – “E.T.” has them all, plus the score by John Williams, one of the finest ever composed. 

ELMER GANTRY (2 hrs & 27 min, color, 1960)

The sawdust trail is treated with gusto, fervency and inspired imagination in Director/Writer Richard Brooks’ great award-winning work, from the novel by Sinclair Lewis.  Burt Lancaster gives the performance of his career as a traveling salesman, who insinuates himself into the work of a tent revivalist (Jean Simmons) after whom he lusts and becomes both a boon and a liability to her.  Shirley Jones ratchets up the heat as an old flame turned prostitute.  Revivalism collides with scandal and controversy, before the film reaches its blazing climax.  All along it moves fast and probes deep.

ENGLISH PATIENT, THE (2 hrs & 42 min, color, 1996)

Director Anthony Minghella, working from a novel by Michael Ondaatje, gives us a cinematic mural full of restless, tormented and dreamy people whose pathways intersect at tumultuous points.  The setting happens to be World War II, but the human struggles are timeless.  Ralph Finnes, Juliette Binoche, and Kristin Scott Thomas, among others, give us great portraits of misplaced people, normally decent and harmless, teetering on the edge in strange places and subject to the lowest common denominators of moral conflict and blinding passion.  A movie of rare poetic beauty!

FACE IN THE CROWD, A (2 hrs & 5 min, b&w, 1957)

In the 1950s nobody wanted to be told that the TV medium was dangerous, hence this brilliant, high voltage film’s box office flop.  Director Elia Kazan is the master magician who made it happen, along with Screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who first conceived of it.  Andy Griffith is a dissolute deadbeat, who is discovered by a roving radio journalist, Patricia Neal.  First local then national audiences get hooked on his sassy, cracker barrel humor, until he becomes over time a destructive force that politicians as well as TV executives must contend with.  The movie deserves a rebirth! 

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (2 hrs & 59 min, color, 1971)

Life in a small, poor Jewish settlement in Russia circa 1905 is the setting for the magnificent musical, based on some Sholom Aleichem stories, and brought splendidly from stage to screen under the direction of Norman Jewison.  The Israeli actor Topol gives a commanding performance as the milk vendor torn between his beloved traditions and the new freedoms toward which his three daughters are inclined.  The film ranges between the ecstatically happy and the profoundly sad, between the charmingly funny and the passionately serious.  Adorable in every respect!

FINDING NEMO (1 hr & 40 min, color, 2003)

Nemo is a baby clownfish, whose father Marlin has to travel all the way across an ocean to find him, after the son is scooped up by a fishing boat for display in a fish tank.  This animated feature from Pixar and Disney, the best of the non-musical ones I ever remember seeing, is swift, beautiful, frisky, exciting, soulful, ever so funny and utterly charming. The dialogue and the direction are furnished by Andrew Stanton and a delightful musical soundtrack is turned in by Thomas Newman.  The visuals are out of this world.  They do not make family fare more pleasing than this!

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1 hr & 58 min, b&w, 1953)

The setting is an army base in Hawaii just prior to World War II.  Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra give us no-nonsense portraits of pathetic low-rank types with trampled dignity but a puerile sense of gallantry useful to their country more so than to themselves.  Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed also score high as women who get the worst end of their men’s foolhardiness.  Director Fred Zinneman squeezes every ounce of pathos and poetry possible in movie terms out of the James Jones novel.  The film agonizes, throbs and sings like an extended eulogy.

THE GODFATHER (2 hrs & 51 min, color, 1972)

Under Francis Ford Coppola’s towering direction Mario Puzo’s rather pulpy novel becomes a metaphorical nightmare commentary on the misuse of power.  The Mafia-like Corleones are a darker, more sordid version of an American dynasty.  Marlon Brando shines as the aging Don and Al Pacino is fantastic as the educated (at first independent) son Michael, who slowly gets pulled into step with his father.  Class A acting is offered up as well by James Caan and Robert Duvall as the other sons.  What a gorgeous tapestry Coppola weaves!  And he misses nary a stitch.

                             [To be continued tomorrow]

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Bob Racine's 100 Favorite Movies, Segment 1 of 7

AMADEUS (2 hrs & 38 min, color, 1984)

Peter Shaffer’s award-winning play pertaining to the tense encounter of the young Mozart (Tom Hulce) with much-older Italian court composer Antonio Salieri (a flawless F. Murray Abraham) is translated to the screen by Milos Forman, and he makes it worlds more than a two-hour plus aria.  In his hands it becomes an absurd, bleakly humorous, electrifying, explosive, thrilling and amazing story, in which Mozart’s death is orchestrated by the envious Salieri.   Largely fiction, the film is a morality play in which that sin of envy pays its drastic wages!  A stupendous production!

AMAZING GRACE (1 hr & 58 min, color, 2007)

William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd), a member of the English Parliament, hammered away at the minds of his political fellows for a quarter of a century before he finally succeeded in 1807 at putting a legal end to the slave trade.   He was inspired by John Newton (Albert Finney), a converted slave trader, composer of the famous hymn “Amazing Grace.”  For two heart-stirring hours we share Wilberforce’s passion and pain, his gains and losses, his spent youth and his spent health, en route to the noble objective.  A much-neglected footnote of history! 

BEATIFUL MIND, A (2 hrs &14 min, color, 2001)

          The struggle of Nobel Prize winning scientist John Nash (Russell Crowe) with paranoid schizophrenia starting at age thirty is a brilliantly acted out drama.  Under Ron Howard’s astute direction it celebrates the loving care of wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) and others, love that had to fight its way through many monstrous barriers to make the comeback he has experienced happen.   The frightening and bizarre dynamics of the disease during Nash’s darkest periods of delusion are portrayed in movie terms with great imagination.  A beauty of a story from every angle!      

BECKET (2 hrs & 28 min, color, 1964)

In 12^th century England, scholar/statesman/prelate Thomas Becket (Richard Burton) enters into a life-or-death warfare with King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) over church/state priorities and ends up a martyred archbishop.  The two men, carousing friends while Becket is Chancellor, are abruptly estranged after the King appoints him Archbishop of Canterbury.  Both actors are stupendous in their performances.  And the lucid script by Edward Anhalt, based on the Jean Anouilh play, gives the medieval drama strength and lasting quality, despite certain inaccuracies.   

BOUNTY, THE (2 hrs & 10 min, color, 1984)

What really happened in 1789 aboard that legendary British vessel?  Director Roger Donaldson and his writers give us the best of the four movie versions.  It is an immense tale of blind ambition, obsession and human failing, based upon research by a historian named Richard Hough.  Anthony Hopkins fills the role of Captain Bligh (not exactly the villain) and a young Mel Gibson portrays Fletcher Christian (not exactly the hero).  There is good and evil, sanity and insanity on everyone’s part, the outcome a strange mixture of tragedy and triumph in odd proportion to each other.  

BOYHOOD (2 hrs & 45 min, color, 2014)

          The chronicle of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), an American boy with one sister, a divorced mother (Patricia Arquette) and a somewhat loving though stumbling absentee father (Ethan Hawke), is traced from elementary school to college entrance, the film having been shot over twelve years with the same cast.  What a gamble, and it pays off!  “Life’s little moments!”  That is what writer/director Richard Linklater calls the focus of his attention in this modest gem.  The boy faces the “voluptuous panic” of choosing the road to his future, and it is all done seamlessly and with uncompromising realism.

BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE (2 hrs & 41 min, color, 1957)

Director David Lean took war pictures into a new dimension adapting Pierre Boulle’s novel, about the building of a bridge of strategic importance to Japan by the use of Allied POWs during World War II.  Two British officers (Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins), an American combatant (William Holden) and a Japanese colonel (Sessua Hayakawa) are the bedeviled souls that destiny brings together in this complex and brilliant masterwork.  Private wars within the War prove crucial in exploring the boundaries between human prerogative and military imperative. 

BROADCAST NEWS (2 hrs & 11 min, color, 1987)

Director/Writer James L. Brooks gives us a crazy satire about the world of television journalism.  The script is consistently razor sharp.  Holly Hunter is the superb center of attention as a workaholic, perfectionist production executive with a bit of a short fuse and a volatile personality.  Her co-leads, playing two of her character’s subordinates with whom she enjoys brief romantic dalliances, are William Hurt and Albert Brooks, each with remarkable talent and adorable limitations.  The interplay of these three produces nothing less than pure magic. 

CABARET (2 hrs & 2 min, color, 1972)

The festering life of Berlin, Germany just before the Nazis came to power is the setting for the famous stage musical, superlatively adapted for the screen by Bob Fosse.  Liza Minelli goes over the top as Sally Bowles, an amoral performer in a sleazy café.  Joel Grey is the devilish master of ceremonies, and Michael York is the young Englishman who gets involved with their antics.  Fine acting, brilliant juxtapositions of image, stupendous choreography, and electrifying music combine to give us a forceful evocation of the enemy around and within.  Is there, after all, a difference?

CASABLANCA (1 hr & 43 min, b&w, 1942)

The universally embraced classic has transcended its time.  It now belongs to the ages!  Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, parties to a love triangle, are brought together in the famed Moroccan city, which has been rendered a refugee center for anti-fascists during World War II.  But the socio-political crisis and the romantic crisis are all of a piece.  We have an account of people who are forced to live on the precipitous edge of destiny and make life-and-death decisions that transcend private problems of the heart.  We can thank the versatile skills of Director Michael Curtiz.

CHARADE (1 hr & 54 min, color, 1963)

In my opinion the greatest of the romantic thrillers!  Audrey Hepburn searches, with mysterious Cary Grant’s assistance, for a fortune her late husband has stashed away somewhere in France, with others in hot pursuit of the loot as well, James Coburn, Walter Matthau and George Kennedy among them.  Director Stanley Donen gives it just the right dollop of suave comedy, Hitchcockian intrigue and smiling affection to mix with a fine-tuned script, gorgeous music by Henry Mancini, and delicious atmosphere.  How perfect can the chemistry be among a movie’s many elements! 

CHINATOWN (2 hrs & 11 min, color, 1974)

A gutsy thriller from the hand of Director Roman Polanski!  Detective Jack Nicholson’s work on a domestic spying case leads him inadvertently into a cesspool of political scandal and corruption in 1930s Los Angeles.  Involved in the shadowy doings are mystery woman Faye Dunaway and a business tycoon John Huston.  Robert Towne’s screenplay takes us through a nightmare with a shattering climax, which almost defines bald evil itself. Film noir was given a new face and new stylistic form that has had a profound influence on the work of others in this genre ever since.

CITIZEN KANE (1 hr & 59 min, b&w, 1941)

          Charles Foster Kane is a flamboyant, egomaniacal, headstrong (and quite fictional) newspaper tycoon who shakes up the world – socially, politically, economically, financially, and theatrically over the space of a lifetime.  An unforgettable Orson Welles plays him, also directing and co-authoring the much-written-about screenplay.  Volumes have been composed about the awesome visuals invented for this masterpiece, ones that have had colossal influence on the way films have since been made.  A singular work of art from its somber opening to its stirring last frame!

CITY LIGHTS (1 hr & 22 min, b&w, 1931)

Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp gambles upon the precarious friendship of a high society sot and the affections of a young blind woman selling flowers, taking from the former to finance healing surgery for the latter.  At times the movie (silent with a musical soundtrack) is raucously funny, at others serene and gentle, at still others painful in its reminder of human cruelty and folly.  After some alienation and deprivation of dignity, the Tramp is not without his reward.  His final encounter with the blind woman he saves, as she sees him for the first time, is beyond words.

CONSPIRACY OF HEARTS (1 hr & 50 min, b&w, 1960)

During World War II, a convent becomes a secret refuge for Jewish girl children sought by the Nazis.  The endangerment visited upon the mother superior (Lilli Palmer), as she performs her ministrations of mercy right under the nose of the Fascists and in affiliation with the partisan underground, provides the basis for a gripping, heart-in-the-throat drama and a parable of mercy that will consume one’s soul and spirit.  The British film has been out of circulation for many years and I regret that I do not have the director’s name.  I never cease to pray and hope for its re-release. 

                             [To be continued tomorrow]

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Bob Racine's 100 Favorite Movies

Introduction

                                     

Those of you who read my blog entries with any regularity are aware of the fact that most of what I write about (though far from all) has to do with the movies – reviews of them, comments about them, essays that touch upon them, etc.  What I am about to do starting tomorrow and proceeding for seven consecutive days is share with you my favorite one hundred.  I have done this twice before on my church’s (KC’s) e-mail, long before I had a blog or had any expectation that I would ever have one.  That means that many of you have heard from me before on this subject.  The last time I sent forth a list was five years ago, and that one was the first since 2005.  So it seems I have started the habit of revisiting the selection process every half decade.  At 82 years old, I am not sure how many more half decades are left to me to keep up the habit or to update, but while I last, I expect the blog will most likely last.

                                     

For the sake of the newcomers, and as a reminder to the long time readership, let me be very clear about the category of media I am addressing.  These are my FAVORITE – ENGLISH – LANGUAGE – THEATRICAL – MOVIE – FEATURES, and ONLY those.  Not entered in this competition are foreign language films, short subjects, documentaries, movies made directly for DVD, network TV movies or TV miniseries.  I am dealing strictly with those dramatic and/or comedic feature films made in English for showing on the big theater screen.  Some refer to them still as “movie movies.”  (Actually the choices the American Film Institute has made in its previous listings, ones that were announced on television, were likewise limited to these criteria, even though nobody from the AFI has ever publicly said so.) 

                                     

Please do not interpret the absence of a film from my list as an indication that I do not like it.  These are nowhere near all the movies I have ever seen over my lifetime that I am fond of.  They would probably range in the hundreds.  It would take a multiple volume catalog to cover them all.  These are only my top 100, not a total list of what I would recommend. 

                                     

A great movie by my definition is one that has staying power, lasting value and lasting appeal.  Its richness beckons to my taste countless times; I gladly keep it in my sights, either purchasing my own copy to be kept on my shelf or at the very least keeping my finger on the sources from which it can be rented or borrowed or streamed.  They are jewels to be valued and revisited.  These are in great contrast to merely commendable movies I have somewhat enjoyed but would not go out of my way to watch a second time.  Once seen and experienced they become just a pleasant memory.   Poor and/or disappointing, commendably good or first rate great!  All that you will read about in the coming week in these postings fall into the third category.    

                                     

Any film evaluation, even on the part of a seasoned critic, is of necessity subjective.  You would not find any two reviewers on this planet who would pick out the same list of one hundred.  So I do not claim to speak for anyone but myself.  The remarks I make are mine alone.  The choices I have made were not made in committee with any other viewers or in collaboration with any source outside my own mind.  Nor do I call these “the best”.  They are FAVORITES of mine, not my divine, Sinai, Olympian, judgmental rulings.  Only God knows what is best, absolutely speaking, and God is not likely to tell me or any of us any time soon.  I am speaking out of my own mind and experience, not the mind of God. 

                                     

To be worthy of a place in my top drawer of quality a movie must transcend time and period and region.  It must be inspired and magical and substantive.  All the ones you will read about on the following list meet these tests to my satisfaction.  I judge them in terms of how effectively they reflect upon those humanistic values that give meaning and resonance to life’s struggles, tragedies, triumphs, blights and rewards.

                                     

Each movie will be treated in a short, thumbnail blurb.  There will be no in depth analysis this time around.  And there is one major difference in my arrangement from the first two listings.  EVERYTHING, I repeat EVERYTHING will be printed out in alphabetical order.  In those other years I displayed some or all in an order of priority.  Each title had a number next to it.  Not so this time!  All will be read in alphabetical order by title, A-Z.  And the same amount of space will be used for each and every blurb. 

                                     

The publishing will be spread over seven days, beginning tomorrow.  About fourteen or fifteen will show up each day, until I finish the list. 

                                     

I hope my comments about these selected motion pictures will be stimulating and enjoyable enough to take with you and ponder.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.