Greatest Movie of All Time

December 13, 2007

Movies have not been around long enough to acquire a degree of prestige comparable to music and literature. The older art forms are generally regarded as monumental artifacts, cornerstones of Western culture, looming like formidable monoliths over everything that came later. For many, the prevailing ideal of Western culture stems from the classic Romantic works of 19th-century music and literature, which until recently helped define popular conceptions of what art is. Regarded as a popular pastime since the days of the Nickelodeon, it's not surprising that movies took a while to acquire any form of prestige.

Hence, even the accord given to such admired filmmakers as Hitchcock and Kurosawa is often diminished by an implication that their mastery is of a lesser art form. A young composer must stand in Beethoven's shadow, but a budding filmmaker stands alone, uncertain and perhaps indifferent to an emerging heritage that has yet to fully take hold. This may help account for the fearless lack of talent coupled with great conviction displayed by many independent filmmakers. It may also explain why film historians, seeking to give film a greater mantra of prestige, extol the technical perfection of Citizen Kane and The Seven Samurai but seldom include on their top 10 lists the more widely remembered and more elusive artistry of Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights.

Today's film critics must grapple with the effects of new technologies that threaten to trivialize movies by pushing them toward the form and function of video games. Many newer films have been marked with the doldrums of reality television or are made by filmmakers whose myopic projects pose as social commentaries.

Young Males

More than any other group, young males, the movie industry's favorite target audience, have been manipulated to thrive on such insipid "natural" role models as the recently touted but mediocre Knocked Up, which desensitizes audiences from what critic David Denby calls the "manners of the spirit." Scorning traditional art forms, living in a world lacking in idealism and blithely indifferent to signs of cultural decline, younger audiences often derive masochistic delight in the gleeful decadence of a movie like Grindhouse. The long-term result not only coarsens audience expectations, but verges close to dangerous self-contempt.

It wasn't always so. In the 1930s and '40s, the golden age of Hollywood, movies reached a pinnacle of popularity and were perceived as a major cultural force. Sound was in its glory. Those early films, contemporary in mode but radiating the idealism of 19th-century aestheticism, still resonate for us today.

This was to change dramatically with the worldwide disillusionment to follow. In a world dominated by the Holocaust, nuclear weapons and inconclusive foreign wars, movies became more brittle and ugly, corresponding to the "real world" events of an ever more relentless news cycle. Films now seemed astonishingly insignificant, parroting our shrinking self-confidence in humanity. This shift toward a brutal, prevailing cynicism took place almost immediately at the close of World War II. Films such as Casablanca and Now, Voyager, embodying faith in the inherent resilience and virtue of human nature, could not have been made after 1945, although some of the European and Japanese films of the '50s handled cultural changes with great delicacy.

Steven Spielberg at his creative pinnacle once called movies "the literature of our time." Nowadays his comment can barely be understood. Recently, an 18-year-old friend of mine blurted out in exasperation that there is no such thing as a life-altering movie, that films are for diversion only and that it's foolish to take them seriously. From his undernourished frame of reference, he is correct. Film is turning into a platform for propagating narrow concerns or an extension of video gamesmanship.

In keeping with Spielberg's old optimism about the future of cinema, I have chosen outstanding, recommended films grouped into seven tiers of three movies each. All have strong emotional resonance and an aesthetic integrity free of social proselytizing. They are films that speak to the human condition and are independent of specific time and place, films that balance the heart without confusing gratuitous cynicism with social realism. They are films that combine the most appealing aspects of 19th-century Romanticism with the "bite" and immediacy of advancing technology. If I have neglected many late 20th-century films that never achieve this balance, this was not unintentional.

Tier One:

Wuthering Heights, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane

In each film a single house, elusively photographed, becomes a powerful poetic metaphor and takes on a mythic significance that illuminates a sense of irretrievable loss.

Tier Two:

Vertigo, The Gold Rush, Casablanca

Realism is carefully cloaked in poetic irony in these very different films, their intuitive stories hauntingly out of reach.

Tier Three:

Godfather, Tokyo Story, Panther Panchali

The eloquence of these American, Japanese and Indian films transforms social significance into the wider realm of art.

Tier Four:

La Strada, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Battleship Potemkin

Strong stories from different times and places; bittersweet, topical, eloquent.

Tier Five:

Wizard of Oz, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

They represent the beauty of the impossiblethe loss of childhood innocence remembered.

Tier Six:

Streetcar Named Desire, Psycho, All Quiet on the Western Front

Realism battles with the poetic in three films with a touch of the magnificent.

Tier Seven:

Queen Christina, Brokeback Mountain, Brief Encounter

Unforgettably classic, wonderfully moving stories of love and tragedy.