An Unhappy Artifact
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen AN UNHAPPY ARTIFACT By Raphael Shargel In a burst of millennial enthusiasm, the American Film Institute (AFI) has released a list of the top 100 American movies of all time....
...AFI polled 1,500 prominent Americans, including critics, filmmakers and politicians...
...Apparently it was reasoned that any film financed with dollars was fair game...
...The voters hit the same notes again and again, reflecting the taste of a particular type of cinéaste instead of the diverse opinions that have prevailed through the century in our movie-loving nation...
...Miller, Nashville, Three Women—combines the obsessions of Cassavetes and Sayles to depict the sickness and emptiness of American culture...
...Heroines did badly, particularly when they were not played by Katharine Hepburn...
...His disturbing and profound oeuvre—McCabe and Mrs...
...And they are likely to serve as an artifact for cultural critics of the next millennium trying to determine how we assessed the century's most popular art form...
...Perhaps the voters would have concocted a more balanced list if they had been asked to name their favorite film from each decade from the 1910s to the 1990s, with a tenth "wild card" nominee...
...Thus the selection of the Indian Western Dances With Wolves rather than earlier, better and more serious works like Fort Apache or Broken Arrow was not unexpected...
...More baffling than their shying away from films that saw America as a melting pot, though, was their choosing a handful that had nothing at all to do with this country...
...Such exercises rarely do justice to their subject, and since this one was sponsored by Hollywood studios and cable movie networks, it is easy to dismiss it as another commercial effort to keep back titles in circulation...
...Think of all the other vintage movies starring Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Paul Muni, or Edward G. Robinson...
...Thus the choices tell us quite a lot about this elite group's conception of cinematic preeminence...
...Citizen Kane was the sole Welles movie on the list...
...Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, for example, was a reasonable candidate for best American movie...
...The inclusion of the odd musical or animated film seemed, in context, a grudging concession...
...The Coen brothers' Fargo and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, low-budget movies done by small studios tied to the purse strings of the majors, were hardly compensation...
...Titanic was not eligible, but considering the voters' obvious predilections, it is not likely to have been a winner...
...Nevertheless, his one chosen film was M*A *S*H, an early effort that has had its popularity insured by the comparatively antiseptic television series it inspired...
...Terms of Endeannent, Out of Africa and The English Patient were left off, while the heroines who were recognized negotiated the bloody worlds of The Silence of the Lambs and the Oscar-nominated Fargo...
...The names of everybody who voted have not been published by AFI, but I'm willing to wager that the vast majority were men...
...Excluding the American avant-garde is forgivable, but not turning a blind eye to everything that could fairly be characterized as an "independent" film...
...To suggest that the outcome could have been worse, however, is not to say it was good...
...Similarly, Stanley Kubrick, the director of A Clockwork Orange, may have been born in the Bronx, but his futuristic nightmare about an English street gang was absurdly out of place...
...I had feared it would be dominated by selections from the 1980s and '90s, the two worst decades for American film, and was pleased to discover so many genuine classics...
...The absence of Erich von Stroheim's Greed, which charts the degradation of the American bourgeoisie and, along with some of Griffith's later films, rivals Citizen Kane in magnificence, is embarrassing...
...Chaplin's Modem Times and City Lights, both tapped, were made in the '30s with music and sound effects...
...John Cassavetes, whose Shadows and A Woman Under the Influence penetrated the facade of the traditional American family, and John Sayles, whose Matewan, City of Hope and Lone Star studied the effects of political corruption on the disenfranchised, were totally overlooked...
...Black and female filmmakers, even Spike Lee and Joan Micklin Silver, fared worse...
...The list dripped with testosterone...
...Although films by William Wyler and Billy Wilder made the grade, the entire output of Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang and Rouben Mamoulian—who wittily satirized American ethnocentricism, law and show biz optimism—was ignored...
...The voters failed, for instance, to illustrate the wonderful heterogeneity of American cinema...
...The brilliantly photographed, highly entertaining works of leading silent directors like Rex Ingram, Henry King, F. W Murnau, King Vidor, and Tod Browning were ignored...
...They heavily favored Baby Boom directors and those who influenced them...
...The silent period (1900-26), considered by many to be our richest, was represented by merely two works as well, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush...
...Akira Kurosawa's quintessential ly Japanese Ran and Dreams were funded in part by American companies...
...Where, then, did the boundaries begin and end...
...And they were so completely enthralled by his starry-eyed New Age sentimentalism that they embraced Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T Though some of the chosen films criticize their subjects, the voters gave the impression of siding with heroes who were most like them, or who acted out fantasies about what they would like to be...
...Reportedly, AFI members were surprised and disappointed by the barrage of articles attacking their project...
...The top 10 included popular favorites that are also worthy...
...After Welles, the most iconoclastic director at the big studios has probably been Robert Altman...
...The Third Man and Lawrence of Arabia are two of my personal favorites, but what were they doing on a list of American movies...
...They were made abroad by British filmmakers...
...Recent major films like The Big Lebowski and Men With Guns demonstrate that even the film industry of today does not always tell stories from the perspective of the high and mighty...
...Following the Institute's logic, these films, each a unique masterpiece, should have been close to the top...
...His Do the Right Thing and her Hester Street, two of the superior movies about ethnic conflict in New York City, did not score...
...Despite the occasional appearance of nonconforming wonders like Kane, The Manchurian Candidate and Raging Bull, the list brims with success stories where the beautiful, the cool and the well-armed triumphed over their adversaries and won, if not the audience's hearts, then—as in the case of Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather—at least its admiration and respect...
...Exhibiting a bias toward films that won or were nominated for the top Oscar, particularly recent ones (the four "Best Picture" winners from 1990-1994 appear), the voters slighted every winning romance of the last 20 years...
...In a truly representative selection, two or three of these would have stood for the whole...
...Reading the list, I was initially relieved...
...Five Steven Spielberg movies were picked as opposed to four by Alfred Hitchcock, three by Wyler, David Lean and John Ford, and one each by Welles and Howard Hawks...
...disregarded were his later American works like The Magnificent Ambersons, showing a family's deterioration in direct correspondence to the rise of the automobile, and Touch of Evil, about a respected but despicably unscrupulous police officer...
...The bullet-ridden movies I have already mentioned were joined with the equally violent Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The French Connection, Chinatown, Mean Streets, GoodFellas and Unforgiven...
...Ditto such silent masterpieces as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Big Parade, The Crowd, and Sunrise—not to mention silent stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Janet Gaynor, and Buster Keaton...
...It Happened One Night, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music contained elements of the three genres, but their appearance still did not do justice to the popular love stories and melodramas featuring enduring performers like Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, Rosalind Russell, and so many others...
...It would be a shame if anyone took the AFI list as an accurate indication of what the American cinema offered its audiences in the century of its birth...
...Annie Hall did, but the voters clearly preferred a New York teeming with the brutal criminals of The Godfather and Martin Scorsese's gruesome gangsters...
...As it turned out, the effort failed to capture the eclecticism of great American films—their social criticism, their sense of humor, their affection for the downtrodden, the intellectual and the passionate...
...Casablanca, Gone with the Wind and On the Waterfront certainly belong on any comprehensive roster of great American movies...
...Yet there are good reasons to take the enterprise seriously...
...Nor was another indication of contemporary Hollywood's mealy liberalism, the picking of Schindler's List over more honest and profound Holocaust films like The Diary of Anne Frank and The Pawnbroker...
...I suspect even Spielberg knows he isn't in a class with these others...
...As I have said, there was no getting around his Schindler's List, but the voters also were sufficiently enraptured by his nonstop action pictures to celebrate Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark...
...The most financially successful filmmaker of this generation was the voters' favorite director...
...They seemed to think the 1960s was the most important decade in cinematic history...
...This explains the high regard for Citizen Kane and the three Vietnam films on the list: Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone's Platoon...
...The list featured one example apiece of broad genres like sophisticated comedy (The Philadelphia Story), screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby), and unlikely romance (The African Queen), and all of them starred Hepburn...
...A considerable number of our finest movies were created by European-born directors, but the group is sadly underrepresented...
...Warner Brothers, once famous as the people's studio, produced many of Hollywood's best social dramas in the 1930s and '40s, yet only three films from its heyday were deemed worthy: Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and, squeaking in at number 100, the flag-waving Yankee Doodle Dandy...
...Since my impression was that the compilers were chiefly interested in mainstream favorites, I was willing to concede a few fan movies like Star Wars and Tootsie.A quota of recent politically correct epics seemed inevitable, too...
...The much broader class of World War II combat film is represented only by Patton, cowritten by Coppola...
Vol. 81 • August 1998 • No. 9
