I didn't have time to review my list in a mad rush to beat TCM's 11:59 pm deadline, and surprise, surprise, I see that I failed to include not one but
four of
my picks by genre from last year. I suppose I could live with
Vampyr (1932, Dreyer),
The Band Wagon (1953, Minnelli) and
The Night of the Hunter (1955, Laughton) being excluded from my top tier, but I find it impossible to part with Kaneto Shindo's sui generis
Kuroneko (1968) which I've treasured from the moment I encountered it in my 20s and which remains, eerily enough, the most hauntingly erotic movie I've seen. So that makes six picks from the '60s... which maybe makes it the bestest decade evah!
A couple more glaring omissions, again not necessarily in my top tier of all-time faves but but deserving of at least honorary mentions:
- Day of Wrath (1943), apart from being arguably the greatest of all Resistance films, is perhaps at the same time Dreyer's most erotic. (Now don't get the wrong idea. I'm not a horndog, I assure you.)
- The precise chronological placement of Eisenstein's masterwork Ivan the Terrible is tricky as its second installment, which I prefer to the first one, was completed in 1946 but Soviet censorship prevented its release until 1958. So I'll just group the two parts together and say the whole thing is from the '40s, which makes 'em another decade with at least six picks! (I'll be generous to the '60s and say DoW is a slight notch below this 1st tier.)
- But then a TB between the '40s and the '60s may not be necessary as I'm tempted to add at least one of the former's classic noirs including Scarlet Street (1945, Lang), Mildred Pierce (1945, Michael Curtiz) and Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur). 1940s, you win the crown after all!
- Or maybe not! After seeing and revisiting his best works recently I'm now more convinced than ever that Buñuel is among the top 10-12 filmmakers in history. And one could make a case for all but one of his '60s features (most would agree that his barely feature-length 1965 Simón del desierto or Simon of the Desert is a notch below the rest). So I'll go with Viridiana (1961)... and declare a tie between the '40s and the '60s with seven titles apiece!
- I knew I was forgetting several big ones from the last decade and Sorrentino's La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013) is indeed one of 'em. Having witnessed from his recent outings just how deep(er) his Felliniesque obsession runs I can't say I still respond to his (likely) best work as favorably, but I don't regret having it on Blu-ray, either.
In all seriousness, if you ask cineastes to pick the Golden Age of Cinema most would probably go with anywhere from the mid-1920s to the early to mid-'70s. There are myriad reasons why but the biggest one happens to correspond with how the US became the most powerful country in the history of human civilization that saw unprecedented growth during and following WWII: lack of meaningful competition, in this case not only from other countries/industries but also from TV which had yet to take over every middle-class household and from good old-fashioned literature which would begin a long, slow decline among the proverbial common reader. People simply didn't have as many things to occupy themselves with as we do now, and film studios were happy and eager to fill that void. And it also helped that studio heads then actually cared about film as an art form, as opposed to their current counterparts who are content to spawn and recycle umpteenth sequels and franchises as long as they bring in the dough.
Of course excellence and taste don't always go together and certainly each decade has much to recommend it, but I do wonder how many of you would be so favorably inclined towards the recent past if you'd been subjected to similar marketing efforts devoted to earlier years. With the possible exceptions of Petzold's
Transit, Gerwig's
Little Women (which I suspect will become something of an Xmas classic) and Pedro Costa's
Vitalina Varela (which I've yet to see) I can't think of anything from last year that I expect to endure as long as even 2nd-tier classics from Hollywood's heyday - and trust me, I almost certainly saw more new releases last year than any of you - and I really had trouble coming up with as many "favorites" from the '1980s-'2010s. Is that because I'm an old fogey trapped in a millennial's body? Perhaps, but if that's true there sure are a whole lot more us.
In fact even classical Hollywood isn't immune to this marketing-as-taste creep. Take 1939, recognized to this day as the most competitive year in Oscar history. Here are the Outstanding Production (read: Best Picture) nominees, with the winner on top (of course):
- Gone with the Wind (Fleming)
- Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding)
- Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Sam Wood)
- Love Affair (McCarey)
- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra)
- Ninotchka (Lubitsch)
- Of Mice and Men (Milestone)
- Stagecoach (Ford)
- The Wizard of Oz (Fleming but uncredited were Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe, Cukor, King Vidor AND Mervyn LeRoy!)
- Wuthering Heights (Wyler)
Now I've always felt the Garbo vehicle is among Lubitsch's lesser efforts and have little patience for
Capra's populist schtick which would reach its zenith two years later in
Little John Doe, and I'm not sure I'll ever check out the workmanlike Wood's entry, but at least four of these nine are certified classics which obviously can't be said for most other fields of Oscar contenders. Almost certainly not this year's (for 2019), and I'm struggling to think of any from this century. Case closed, right?
Ah, but that's what the TCM crowd would have you believe. Au contraire we actually need go no further than 1940 for serious competition (the winner remains atop):
- Rebecca (Hitchcock)
- All This, and Heaven Too (Litvak)
- Foreign Correspondent (Hitchcock)
- The Grapes of Wrath (Ford)
- The Great Dictator (Chaplin)
- Kitty Foyle (Wood)
- The Letter (Wyler)
- The Long Voyage Home (Ford)
- Our Town (Wood)
- The Philadelphia Story (Cukor)
I'm seeing at least three recognized classics (though I don't place TPS in Cukor's top drawer of masterpieces), and while TGoW probably isn't among Ford's very best TLVH is one of his most underappreciated and may well be the most successful Eugene O'Neill screen adaptation ever (the great playwright himself commended Ford for a job well done). And while I've yet to see either of Wood's pictures or Litvak's I'm guessing they weren't a whole lot worse than Wood's own from the year before. Not much of a difference here, no?
But how about those contenders not nominated? Limiting them to English-language ones for now here's what I see for 1939:
- Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks)
- The Women (Cukor)
I'd say the Hawks is another indisputable classic, but not the Cukor. Now let's move on to 1940:
- Christmas in July (Preston Sturges)
- The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch)
- The Thief of Bagdad (Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell and Tim Whelan)
The first two are among the most sophisticated comedies ever made, and while it's been a long time since I saw Bagdad for the first and only time it probably is in that same class among fantasies. Now I dunno about you but I'm thinking 1940 may get the nod over 1939!
But that leaves out "foreign" titles, right? So let's dig deeper into '39:
- Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, Carné)
- La Regle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, Renoir)
- The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi)
The latter two are serious GOAT contenders, and while the reputation of Carné's celebrated picture precedes its actual worth it's still a classic of poetic realism that would leave its mark on classical noir. Suffice it to say I don't see any comparable title from 1940.
So maybe 1939 does deserve its rep as the greatest year in film history, but only if you look at offerings from outside the Anglosphere. My point here is not to dispute this received wisdom per se but rather to explain that we owe many of our similar narratives and preferences to the publicists whose job is to get us to buy what they think will sell the most. Doesn't matter whether we're dealing with independent, prestige or other niche markets, as this example amply demonstrates.
