'Have You Seen...?' Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Nicole Kidman

  The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood

  The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

  In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance

  The Alien Quartet

  Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts

  Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles

  4–2

  Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick

  Silver Light

  Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes

  Suspects

  Overexposures

  Scott’s Men

  America in the Dark

  A Biographical Dictionary of Film

  Wild Excursions: The Life and Fictions of Laurence Sterne

  Hungry as Hunters

  A Bowl of Eggs

  Movie Man

  “Have You Seen…?”

  A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

  DAVID THOMSON

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALLEN LANE

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random

  House, Inc., New York, 2008

  First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane, 2008

  2

  Copyright © David Thomson, 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192658-2

  For Laura Morris

  Build your film on white, on silence, and on stillness.

  —Robert Bresson

  … the frenzy on the wall…

  —Jean-Paul Sartre

  Acknowledgments

  I was first approached to try this book by Nigel Wilcockson of Penguin in London. It was a prolonged process. After The Biographical Dictionary of Film, I did not believe it was a sane idea to write another very long book on the same subject. But Nigel was not to be told no and saw little evidence that I was sane. He talked to me. He sent me superb books on the churches of England as inspiration. He never stopped until he had persuaded me to say yes. Then he left Penguin, and for all I know he is now leading other authors astray for other houses. The one thing Nigel omitted to say in his campaign—that I would enjoy doing the book—came through with such surprise that I knew I must always thank him first. His role at Penguin, as my editor, was then filled by Simon Winder, who proved to be a dedicated friend, a patient and invaluable editor, and a tower of strength, even though I declined illustrations and a rating system.

  In America, the book was taken up by Knopf, who had published me often before: thus, I fell into the hands of a proven team—Bob Gottlieb as editor, Katherine Hourigan as managing editor, Kevin Bourke as production editing maestro, Kathy Zuckerman as publicity director, and Carol Carson, who designed the jacket. These people are some of the best friends I have had, in or out of publishing. If I mark Bob Gottlieb down as captain of the team, it is only fair. Bob is a book man, and a very good writer (though he only found that out, I think, after he had stopped commissioning and editing so many books). There’s a lot that we don’t agree on, but there is no one with whom sporting disagreements can be so thoroughly enjoyed and explored. I have been lucky enough to be there in need at a time in his life when his passion moved toward film. He is a great editor—and all he does is read you, think about it, argue, and guide you into being a little better.

  Beyond the publishing assistance, I rely on a group of friends and family with whom I see or discuss films. Again, we do not agree all the time. But we have seen that as the point. I have benefited from remarks, recommendations, and insights, and helpless cries of pain and ecstasy from so many people. But these are the ones I can remember now: Mark Feeney; Tom Luddy; Edith Kramer; Pierre Rissient; Jean-Pierre Gorin; Scott Foundas; Richard and Mary Corliss; Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell; Richard Schickel; Richard Roud; Richard Jameson and Kathleen Murphy; Patrick McGilligan; Greil Marcus; Peter Bogdanovich; Mark Cousins; Ty Burr; Michael Ondaatje; Anthony Lane, Quentin Curtis, Gilbert Adair, and Jonathan Romney (all in their time fellow film critics at the Independent on Sunday in London); Antonia Quirke; Jim Toback; Paul Schrader; David Packard; Steven Bach; Jeffrey Selznick; Holly Goldberg Sloan and Garry Rosen. Many of these people are all the more remarkable for being interested in many things beside film. And that leads me to the vital company in any filmgoer’s life—the other people in the dark—Anne, Lucy, and five children (Kate, Mathew, Rachel, Nicholas, and Zachary), most of whom know the problem of keeping me awake at some films. It is the just reward for insomnia that I sleep most easily at the movies. Why not? I always suspected they were dreams.

  Introduction

  I wanted a “bumper” book for your laps, a volume where you could keep turning the pages and coming upon juxtapositions of the fanciful and the fabulous (Abbott and Costello go to Zabriskie Point?) or some chance alphabetical poetry that might make your scalp tingle—like Bad Day at Black Rock leading into Badlands. I wanted old favorites to be neighbors with films you’ve never heard of. I wanted you to entertain the unlikely possibility that “everything” is here. Of course, it is not—everything remains out in our scattered “there.”

  Choosing their top ten is a game most film critics are accustomed to—and one that allows depressives to ask, “Are there really ten worth keeping?” (This is a healthy doubt, more useful than the routine thumbs up on two or three fresh masterpieces every week.) Writing about a select hundred is a regular form of bookmaking—the exercise of taste makes a moderate-sized book and a harmless pantheon. But going for a thousand is a gesture toward history—it seems to require that the selector weighs the old against the new. It’s like wondering whether Beowulf can talk to Lolita.

  How is it that a thousand seems to omit so many more than a whimsical ten? How can ten hundred escape being an outline of the history of the medium and of our jumping tastes? If you’re picking ten, you may not consider the silent era in Sweden. But if you’re doing a thousand, then those Stillers and Sjöströms deserve reappraisal. And they may be among the best early films we have.

  Equally, it’s touching to find in Irene Mayer Selznick’s private letters that, in 1927, the cool
, inside crowd in Hollywood reckoned Sunrise was the best film they’d ever seen—and surely the harbinger of great creative changes. (The newly founded Academy actually created two types of Best Picture—the Hollywood prize, for Wings, and an arty one for Sunrise.) So it’s a surprise that in Brussels in 1958, a gang of historians put Murnau’s The Last Laugh way ahead of his Sunrise. I can recall a time when “film writing” took that estimate for granted. Yet now The Last Laugh feels like an academic exercise—while Sunrise is different and dangerous every time you see it.

  This book is not simply my one thousand preferred films offered with whatever mixture of authority I can muster or generosity you will allow. I like or love many of these movies and I hope you will feel that in the reading and come closer to sharing my pleasure. The first purpose or wish behind the question in my title is not to establish you as an expert in film studies but to give you a good time—or a better time than you have been having.

  More than that this is a book created to meet the question frequently asked of anyone with a reputation for knowing about films. It’s “What should I see?” So “Have you seen…?” is a response to that uncertainty.

  I knew early on in thinking about this book that I could not face it as David Thomson’s “best” films. My favorites are here—but there is a monotony in writing or reading about just the splendid. As my editor, Bob Gottlieb, observed on reading an early draft, “We’re snowed under with ‘greats’ and I’m still on B!” Enthusiasm is too easy and it can lead to lazy writing and formulaic thinking. Very often in a book like this you can signal your critical stance to a reader with just one bad-tempered dismissal as easily as and more rapidly than a hundred raves will permit. (So The Sound of Music is in here, along with Doctor Zhivago, The Ten Commandments, The Last Laugh, and others. You’ll find them.) A little severity in such writing can be as welcome as the song of the blackbird at the end of a hot day.

  So this is a thousand fiction films, going back to 1895 and ranging across the world—the landmarks are here, the problem films, a few guilty pleasures, a few forlorn sacred cows, some surprises, a thousand for you to see. They are arranged alphabetically—but in the back of the book you will find a chronology, too.

  The pantheon of film culture is an untidy place: it is every year’s top ten or the survey of critics and filmmakers that Sight & Sound attempts every ten years—with Citizen Kane rated the best film on every survey since 1962 (yet nowhere on the first such list in 1952). It is what “everyone” thinks and knows and takes for granted. God bless “everyone,” but watch how slippery he is. For example, I write for The Guardian in London. I have read that paper most of my life; I love it and its readers. But not so long ago, in 2007, it took it into its head to poll readers on the best foreign language films ever made. Cinema Paradiso won (and it had won a previous poll in 1993). And that’s not the fault of the film in question or of those who made it—and it has little to do with whether Cinema Paradiso is sublime or pleasant. Or not. But Cinema Paradiso surpassed M, L’Atalante, Les Enfants du Paradis, Belle de Jour, L’Eclisse, La Ronde, Ugetsu Monogatari, The Travelling Players, Pierrot le Fou, Tokyo Story, La Règle du Jeu, and Pather Panchali because, clearly, more people in the Guardian’s electorate had seen Cinema Paradiso than the others. If you haven’t read much else, then Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger may be the best book you’ve ever read.

  And as we have to learn sooner or later, it is no counter to democracy and general education to deplore the public’s not voting for people not on the ticket. History is, first of all, what happens; and historians know the terrible fallacy of wishing that something else (wiser, more honorable, or funnier) had happened. So the Guardian results in 2007 and 1993 were inescapable history, even if most film writers on the paper kept their fingers crossed and their remarks guarded.

  To compile a book like this, you immerse yourself in the history of the best—but in film studies the best has sharply different meanings. One is all about numbers: it deals with which films did best at the box office. And from Birth of a Nation to Titanic, those landmark films claim that their ripeness was our taste. Their sensation testifies to our innocence—or worse. The other measure is all about opinion—and generally speaking it is in the area of opinion that any chance for art in film remains. So I was intrigued to discover a poll in Brussels in 1958 at one of those exhibitions that now and then occur. On that occasion 117 historians and critics were asked to vote on the twelve best films ever made. The results were as follows: Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein), 100 votes; The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin) and Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica), 85; La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Dreyer), 78; La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir), 72; Greed (Erich von Stroheim), 71; Intolerance (D. W. Griffith), 61; Mother (V. I. Pudovkin), 54; Citizen Kane (Orson Welles), 50; Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko), 47; The Last Laugh (F. W. Murnau), 45; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine), 43.

  First of all, don’t doubt that this was an honest vote by an informed electorate. In which case you have to allow that in 1958, nine out of thirteen films chosen were silent. But did 1958 really believe that the great work in film had been done thirty years earlier? There’s another remarkable conclusion to that list by today’s standards. It seems unaware of so many things from the fifties that now impress us: for instance, The Searchers (John Ford); The River or The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir); Diary of a Country Priest and A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson); Madame de… or Lola Montès (by Max Ophüls); Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff (by Kenji Mizoguchi); Seven Samurai and Living (by Akira Kurosawa); In a Lonely Place (by Nicholas Ray); Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville); Europa ’51 (Roberto Rossellini); Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder); The Third Man (Carol Reed); Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen). Further, the poll was just too early for Wild Strawberries, Touch of Evil, Vertigo, and the thing called the New Wave (though Touch of Evil played in another part of the Brussels fiesta—and won a prize).

  Some observers in 1958 pointed out how much the Brussels poll lagged behind history. But in those days it was an orthodoxy that Chaplin, Griffith, and Eisenstein were the rocks on which film was built. And notice how few conventional or mainstream films made the list. The only Hollywood films (Intolerance, Greed, and Kane) were notable for having been made against the grain of box-office and popular expectation—and they were all flops. For the rest, so many pictures had come from countries or production systems that could be said to favor individual (or subsidized) expression. That fact predicted the omission of so many “mainstream” things that now seem personal and important—the work of Lubitsch, Hawks, and Keaton, film noir, the musical, screwball comedy.

  But 1958 was more of a cusp than anyone appreciated. A year later—at Cannes—we would begin to see the films of a young French generation who had been critics (Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and Chabrol). These writers had been steadily building an auteur theory for Hollywood and proclaiming the virtues of many of the directors just mentioned. But in the late fifties, the pantheon of film criticism was still closed to this point of view. Sight & Sound (the most reputable film magazine in English) was horrified and amused by the outrageous things being said in Cahiers du Cinema. And film magazines, festivals, and archives held sway in film culture. There was as yet nothing like film academia (we had the Academy instead). There were few books on film. There was hardly any film history. And the ways of seeing films were restricted. There was nothing like video. It was very difficult to see old films, except at the archives, the museums, and the film societies. The Brussels poll was the voice of those film societies and voters who had been young in the twenties or thirties. That Citizen Kane never figured in the Sight & Sound poll for 1952 was because, a failure on release, Welles’s film had gone out of circulation. It was hard to see.

  In retaliation against the Brussels poll, the Cahiers du Cinema writers declared their own top twelve in December 1958. They voted first on the best twelve directors, and then the best film by those directors. The result i
s Cahiers-like in its show-off long-shots, but it’s a more interesting list than Brussels managed: Sunrise; La Règle du Jeu; Journey to Italy (Rossellini); Birth of a Nation; Confidential Report (Welles); Ordet (Dreyer); Ugetsu Monogatari; L’Atalante; The Wedding March (Stroheim); Under Capricorn (Hitchcock); Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin).

  This matter of youth is important, and not the least thing about 1958 in my mind was my being seventeen and available to discover the movies for myself. Young people had always made the movies and gone to see them, but in the forties, say, that was less palpable—perhaps because there was never an age when the cinema was so much everyone’s sport. But by the late fifties, and not just in Paris, a group of young firebrands stood ready to redefine the movies. You could find them all over the world just as young people seemed determined to make movies—as opposed to writing novels or poetry. These people became the first great wave of film students in a climate that saw film ushered into the academy and become a part of general knowledge—not just as film-buff trivia, but as a general, educated awareness of Renoir, Hitchcock, and Welles, say, as styles and attitudes.

  That audience found its reward: not just the New Wave films from France but the next generation in Italy (Antonioni, Fellini, Bertolucci), in Germany (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders), to say nothing of Scandinavian film, Indian, Japanese, Latin American, and even American. For it’s clear now, I think, that just as Hollywood was in decline by its own standards in the late fifties and sixties, so at the end of the sixties film students were pushing to make their first pictures. Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, led that generation and helped deliver a “silver age” of Hollywood in the early seventies—from about the time of Bonnie and Clyde to Taxi Driver.

  One way of tracing that shift is to look at the films voted in the top ten in the Sight & Sound polls of 1952, 1962, and 1972. Like it or not, this is the movies changing from current sensation to a subject for study and reflection. It’s the dark now giving way to the library.