If you see a line outside a club or bar, before you queue up, count the number of men wearing striped button-down shirts. If that count numbers at least 75% of all sausages in line, move on.[1] That club screams "tools only."
:
Senator Schumer: "It's as if I asked you what kind of movies you like. Tell me two or three good movies and you say, I like movies with good acting. I like movies with good directing. I like movies with good cinema photography. And I ask, no, give me an example of a good movie, you don't name one. I say, give me an example of a bad movies, you won't name one, and I ask you if you like Casablanca, and you respond by saying lots of people like Casablanca. You tell me it's widely settled that Casablanca is one of the great movies."
...Judge Roberts: "First, Doctor Zhivago, and North by Northwest."
Foreign:
1. "Contempt" (1963, dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
2. "Cries and Whispers" (1972, dir. Ingmar Bergman)
3. "Gate of Hell" (1953, dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa)
4. "In the Mood For Love" (2000), dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
5. "The Last Emperor" (1987, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci)
6. "Red Desert" (1964, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)
7. "The River" (1951, dir. Jean Renoir)
8. "Satyricon" (1969, dir. Federico Fellini)
9. "Senso" (1954, dir. Luchino Visconti)
10. "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (1964, dir. Sergei Paradjanov)
Invaders from Mars and Moby Dick would make nobody's canon but Marty's, I suspect. And I've never even heard of this 1943 version of Phantom. Wtf? My overall impression is Marty goes ga-ga for broad melodramas in lurid colors like Duel in the Sun and Leave Her to Heaven, though it's kinda surprising the more accomplished bold melodramas in lurid colors from Sirk and Nick Ray didn't make the cut. Scorsese's possibly trying to promote lesser-known favorites here. Meanwhile, the foreign films betray a strong bias for movies that enforces a strict symbolic color scheme (Red Desert, Satyricon, Cries and Whispers), with an emphasis on primary colors. It's astonishing to see In the Mood For Love in there, but good job, Marty. One question: Is In the Mood the most canonized film since the turn of the century? My impression is yes, but I'm not an unbiased observer.
Sorry for another pointless list. A real post will arrive sometime soon, I hope. This is mainly a chance for me to sneak in a still from Contempt.
Besides those two standouts, though, it's remarkable many well-known movies screened in that series: To Kill a Mockingbird, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Miracle Worker, Days of Wines and Roses. Those were screened alongside cineaste classics like Ride the High Country and Bergman's Through the Glass, Darkly (technically a 1961 movie released in the US in '62).
But I'll posit a theory to avoid the stench of unmitigated navel-gazing: It's true that using these "greatest year" debates rely on something essentially arbitrary -- the calendar year as the time interval of measurement. It's probably more instructive to look at a "great" year as a peak of a golden period, a burst of creativity and accomplishment that might last anywhere from two to five years. 1962, like other commonly-cited great years such as 1955, 1974, or 1939, aren't flukes. Those years instead mark a crest in an uncommonly fertile period for movies. For me, the early 60s stand out as the peak period for cinema because it's at the nexus of a number of developments: you have the Nouvelle Vague just exploding on the scene, the "mature" (not quite "late") period of classic Hollywood auteurs, the transition point between the Old Japanese Masters and the Japanese New Wave, and the intersection of Italian neo-realism and the Italian new wave, and generally a much greater willingness on the part of filmmakers to tackle political material. The remarkably fecund early Sixties marked a transition from an art form's classical period to its modernist period, a tantalizingly brief window of time where Ford and Godard share movie marquees.
1962 is the peak of that awesome period. That year included many elegiac, autumnal pictures like Ozu's last movie (appropriately titled) An Autumn Afternoon, John Ford's last great western Liberty Valence, Hatari!, which is probably the purest "Hawks movie" Hawks ever made, and his last great picture. Kubrick, Polanski, Bertolucci, Pasolini, and Peckinpah were just starting out, with both Polanski and Peckinpah making one of their very best. Bunuel made arguably his greatest picture The Exterminating Angel, the most potent lampooning of bourgeois dependence put on film. The two great modernist masters, Antonioni and Godard, were operating at the height of their powers. And the two most incisive, urgent political movies to ever come out of Hollywood were from this year: The Manchurian Candidate and Otto Preminger's compulsively watchable Advise and Consent, my pick as the most astutely observed movie about American politics ever made. And Jack Lemmon boozed it up and Bette Davis camped it up in two of their most memorable roles. It's a list filled with masterpieces and near-masterpieces, with some signature works by the artform's most luminous practioners.