Amph Filmmakers & Critics' Top Ten Movies: Liv Ullmann

I like all the films Maltin lists -- a lot! They're all in my Top 50, except His Girl Friday, which I've never seen. But the only two that make it to my Top 10 are Maltese Falcon and King Kong.

 

You've never seen "His Girl Friday"? You're in for a treat, then, if you can find it on TCM or DVD. Competes with "Some Like It Hot" as the best and most sustained American comedy.

 

Okay, thanks for the recommendation! Some Like It Hot is probably my favorite comedy of all time, certainly of the period, along with Design for Living (a bit earlier), so if His Girl Friday compares favorably with those, I'll keep an eye out for it.

 

STR was released when Leonard Maltin was two-years-old, and he hasn't seen anything since that
qualifies for his Top Ten list.

This is Leonard being soooo Maltin.

 

Todd McCarthy
(Film Critic: Variety)

Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Scarlet Empress (1934, Josef von Sternberg)
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1935, Jean Renoir)
To Have and Have Not (1944, Howard Hawks)
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
Shoot the Piano Player (1960, Francois Truffaut)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean)
Contempt (1963, Jean-Luc Godard)
Chimes at Midnight (1966, Orson Welles)
The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)

Nothing past 1974 here, either. "Trouble in Paradise" is the best sustained rom com I've ever seen; "The Scarlet Empress" is a deeply silly exercise in style. Haven't seen the Renoir; the Hawkes is good, but not this good.

 

Todd McCarthy is one of the very few "major" film critics I have much respect for. I read his reviews for years when he was the lead critic for Variety, the industry publication of record, and when he moved to the Hollywood Reporter, I followed him there.

He is incredibly well-informed and knowledgeable, very even handed, and there's never a single note of malice or personal attacks in his reviews. A filmmaker gets a fair assessment of their work from this guy. McCarthy knows film, and he's never guilty of "cut and paste" film criticism where he uses the same attacks on a filmmaker over and over.

His list is a little more obscure than I would have expected, but no big deal.

 

Russ Meyer
(Filmmaker: Vixen; Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!)

Cool Hand Luke (1967, Stuart Rosenberg)
The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)
Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
My Little Chickadee (1940, Edward F. Cline)
The Bank Dick (1940, Edward F. Cline)
42nd Street (1933, Lloyd Bacon)
Gunga Din (1939, George Stevens)
The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994, Frank Darabont)
Sahara (1943, Zoltan Korda)

"The Bank Dick" gave me pause, in this case...

 

Not surprising, considering it's on the Top Ten list of a man who had

King of the Nudies -- I'm Glad I Did It

carved on his tombstone.

 

Errol Morris
(Filmmaker: Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, The Fog of War)

Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)
There's Always Tomorrow (1956, Douglas Sirk)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson)
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1935, Jean Renoir)
Stray Dog (1949, Akira Kurosawa)
The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966, Roberto Rossellini)
Human Desire (1954, Fritz Lang)
Ace in the Hole (1951, Billy Wilder)
Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)

"Monsieur Lange" again! I'll have to see it.

 

Camile Paglia
(Professor: University of the Arts in Philadelphia)

Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
La Dolce Vita (1959, Federico Fellini)
Gone with the Wind (1939, Victor Fleming)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean)
North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)
Orpheus (1949, Jean Cocteau)
Persona (1966, Ingmar Bergman)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
The Ten Commandments (1923-56, Cecil B. DeMille)
Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)

A vote for DeMille!

 

Alexander Payne
(Filmmaker: Election, About Schmidt)

The Landlord (1970, Hal Ashby)
The Man from Laramie (1955, Anthony Mann)
A Moment of Innocence (1996, Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
La Notte (1961, Michelangelo Antonioni)
Red Beard (1965, Akira Kurosawa)
Ride the High Country (1962, Sam Peckinpah)
Room at the Top (1959, Jack Clayton)
A Special Day (1977, Ettore Scola)
Viridiana (1961, Luis Bunuel)
White Nights (1957, Luchino Visconti)

 

Alex Proyas
(Filmmaker: The Crow, Dark City)

Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
Dr. Strangelove (1964, Stanley Kubrick)
The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)
The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean)
North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975, Milos Forman)
The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)

"The Exorcist" jumps out...

 

Those are all fine films, but that's an exceptionally boring list. Not totally surprising, though.

 

Mario Puzo
(Film Writer: The Godfather, Superman)

The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969, Sydney Pollack)
Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
The Informer (1935, John Ford)
Gone with the Wind (1939, Victor Fleming)
Chariots of Fire (1981, Hugh Hudson)
Fiddler on the Roof (1971, Norman Jewison)
Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)
Out of Africa (1985, Sydney Pollack)

 

Solid list, but with that first pick I can't help but think "Biased, much?"

 

Yeah. I read that and I thought, "wait a minuet, can you pick your own movie?"

 

You can, but why stop with the first one?

 

Well, III would just be ridiculous. As for II, he was less involved on that one.

 

Why wouldn't he be? Coppola turned his little minor potboiler into the Greatest American Film. Honestly, there shouldn't even be any other movies on his list.

 

Terrence Rafferty
(Film Critic: New Yorker)

The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir)
Charulata (1964, Satyajit Ray)
L'Atalante (1934, Jean Vigo)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971, Robert Altman)
The Navigator (1924, Buster Keaton)
The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
Sans soleil (1982, Chris Marker)
Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa)
Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau)
The Wild Bunch (1969, Sam Peckinpah)

 

Carol Reed
(Filmmaker: Odd Man Out, The Third Man)

City Lights (1931, Charles Chaplin)
Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch)
Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carne)
Gone with the Wind (1939, Victor Fleming)
La Ronde (1950, Max Ophuls)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone)
Carnival in Flanders (1935, Jacques Feyder)
Variety (1925, E.A. Dupont)
The Baker's Wife (1938, Marcel Pagnol)
Pygmalion (1938, Anthony Asquith/Leslie Howard)

This list is probably from the 50's, given Reed died in 1976, and the latest film--"La Ronde"--which is a bad pick, I think--there are plenty of better Ophuls films--is 1950. In fact, this is early 50's, I'm willing to bet. In the first 50's poll of film critics all but three of the films were silent.

 

Carol Reed was a fan of Gone with the Wind? I find that surprising. Perhaps I shouldn't, I think what
it is is a fine example of epic, over the top melodrama, traditional Hollywood filmmaking from the golden age. I
just didn't think it would be something tht would appeal to a Brit that made a film like The Third Man.

 

Gone with the Wind in conjuction with Children of Paradise would indicate that big, lavish epics with lots of moving parts had some appeal to him, which would explain Oliver!.

Not The Agony and the Ecstasy, though, which is a very contained and intimate story set against an opulent background.

It's surprising that Reed was eventually able to do those sorts of films though, and was a fan of them too, given that his calling card films like The Third Man, Odd Man Out, The Man Between and The Fallen Idol are all extremely claustrophobic - uncomfortably so.

 

Donald Richie
(Film critic: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Ozu)

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Earth (1930, Alexander Dovzhenko)
Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
Tokyo Story (1953, Yasujiro Ozu)
Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa)
Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray)
Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman)
L'avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)
Au hasard Balthazar (1966, Robert Bresson)
Mirror (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky)

Some interesting choices...

 

Earth is a fantastic, gripping Soviet movie that not enough people have seen. It's muscular, energetic filmmaking.