1900s:

1. A Corner in Wheat (DW Griffith)
2. A Trip to the Moon (George Melies)
3. The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter)
4. The Pan-American Exposition by Night (Edwin S. Porter)
5. The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edwin S. Porter)

1910s:

1. Intolerance (DW Griffith)
2. The Musketeers of Pig Alley (DW Griffith)
3. The Immigrant (Charles Chaplin)
4. Regeneration (Raoul Walsh)
5. Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade)

1920s:

1. Sunrise (FW Murnau)
2. The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg)
3. The General (Buster Keaton)
4. Sherlock Jr (Buster Keaton)
5. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov)

1930s:

1. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
2. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey)
3. Stagecoach (John Ford)
4. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)
5. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)

1940s:

1. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
2. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
3. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch)
4. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne)
5. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)

1950s:

1. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
2. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. The Searchers (John Ford)
4. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
5. Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)

1960s:

1. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard)
2. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)
3. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy)
5. Playtime (Jacques Tati)

1970s:

1. Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
2. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick)
3. Manhattan (Woody Allen)
4. F for Fake (Orson Welles)
5. Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman)

1980s:

1. Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
2. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
3. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
4. Sans soleil (Chris Marker)
5. The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer)

1990s:

1. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai)
2. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)
3. The Big Lebowski (The Coen Brothers)
4. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch)
5. Rushmore (Wes Anderson)

2000s:

1. The New World (Terrence Malick)
2. Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
3. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai)
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson)
5. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

2010s:

1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
2. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
3. Oki’s Movie (Hong Sangsoo)
4. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
5. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

There’s simply no way I’m going to be able to write about this massive backlog of movies I’ve watched over the last six months.  And since I’m trying anyway to transition from writing a little bit about every movie I’ve watched to writing a lot about the movies that most catch my interest, it seems kind of foolish to keep this list of films staring at me, waiting for me to write about them and judging me when I don’t.  So I’m just going to list them here, along with their current ranks in The Big List.  Since my current plan for The BIg List is to have updatable entires for every movie in every year (I’ve done the first two already), these will all eventually get written about, at least a little, someday far into the distant future.  Some I hope to write about in more depth, I have ambitions of posts about King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Satyajit Ray and pre-Code films dancing around my head, laughing at me.

Cabiria – 1,1914
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – 4, 1921
The Phantom Carriage – 7, 1921
Camille – 9, 1921
He Who Gets Slapped – 4, 1924
The Thief of Bagdad – 6, 1924
The Sea Hawk – 8, 1924
What Price Glory? – 2, 1926
The Scarlet Letter – 4, 1926
The Wind – 4, 1928
Two Tars – 6, 1928
Show People – 10, 1928
Spione – 11, 1928
Un chien andalou – 2, 1929
The Broadway Melody – 7, 1929

People on Sunday – 3, 1930
Not So Dumb – 13, 1930
Street Scene – 3, 1931
One Way Passage – 5, 1932
Three on a Match – 15, 1932
American Madness – 16, 1932
Payment Deferred – 30, 1932
White Zombie – 35, 1932
Wild Boys of the Road – 9, 1933
Man’s Castle – 10, 1933
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse – 12, 1933
Heroes for Sale – 22, 1933
Heat Lightning – 14, 1934
Carnival in Flanders – 5, 1935
Annie Oakley – 16, 1935
She – 23, 1935
Things to Come – 14, 1936
The Plough and the Stars – 17, 1936
History is Made at Night – 7, 1937
Swing High, Swing Low – 16, 1937
A Damsel in Distress – 19, 1937
Pygmalion – 12, 1938

Night Train to Munich – 19, 1940
Son of Fury – 17, 1942
Passage to Marseille – 9, 1944
Jammin’ the Blues – 11, 1944
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes – 18, 1945
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House – 27, 1948
The Black Book – 7, 1949
I Was A Male War Bride – 12, 1949
Colorado Territory – 17, 1949
A Woman’s Secret – 28, 1949

Born to be Bad – 24, 1950
Annie Get Your Gun – 26, 1950
The Crimson Pirate – 23, 1952
Blackbeard, the Pirate – 25, 1952
Night and Fog – 16, 1955
The Curse of Frankenstein – 22, 1957
The Music Room – 6, 1958
Elevator to the Gallows – 12, 1958
Jazz on a Summer’s Day – 12, 1959

Les bonnes femmes – 8, 1960
The Innocents – 11, 1961
Mahanagar – 6, 1964
Charulata – 10, 1964
Journey to Jerusalem – 21, 1968
Paper Moon – 10, 1973
Edvard Munch – 13, 1974

Mon oncle d’Amérique – 5, 1980
Sherman’s March – 22, 1986
All for the Winner – 24, 1990
God of Gamblers 2 – 26, 1991
God of Gamblers 3 – 38, 1991
The River – 13, 1997

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench – 12, 2009
Alamar – 22, 2009
Another Year – 8, 2010
Boxing Gym – 17, 2010
Film Socialisme – 18, 2010
The Trip – 31, 2010
Bill Cunningham, New York – 33, 2010
Senna – 38, 2010
Tiny Furniture – 44, 2010

Drive – 2011
The Muppets – 2011
Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown – 2011
Hugo – 2011
Moneyball – 2011
Super 8 – 2011
Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films – 2011
Don’t Expect Too Much – 2011
Page One – 2011
Rango – 2011
These Amazing Shadows – 2011

Knowing nothing about Annie Oakley, either the true story or the legend, but always up for a musical or a Barbara Stanwyck film, I watched two versions of her story a couple weeks ago, thanks to the good people at TCM.  The first was a musical version, Annie Get Your Gun, based on a hit Broadway show that starred Ethel Merman and featuring songs by Irving Berlin (“There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” being the two big hits).  The film adaptation stars Betty Hutton, who I’m almost completely unfamiliar with, I liked her in Preston Sturges’s Miracle at Morgan’s Creek, which is the only other movie I’ve seen her in, and Howard Keel, a giant ham whose hand-on-his-hips pomposity I’ve come to find quite endearing in films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Kismet and one of my favorite musicals, Kiss Me Kate.  The director of that last film, George Sydney directed this one as well, and I’ve generally found his films (Anchors Aweigh, The Harvey Girls) to be pleasant if unexceptional (my Kate love notwithstanding), so all things considered, my hopes were relatively high.  Instead, I found Annie Get Your Gun to be an abomination.

The film starts reasonably well, but takes a drastic turn for the worse the moment Hutton appears, bug-eyed and dressed like one of Peter Pan’s lost boys exclaiming her dialogue in a ridiculous accent at an incredible volume, like a ten year old girl doing a Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel impression in a wind tunnel.  Hutton’s Annie is a great marksman who takes up the challenge of dueling the star attraction of Buffalo Bill’s traveling Wild West show, Howard Keel’s Frank Butler.  However, the moment she sees Butler, she’s stunned into mouth-agape lust at his beauty.  Setting that aside for now, she wins the contest and joins the show.  As the months go on, Butler becomes increasingly distressed that Annie’s a better shot than he is, which complicates their budding romance.  Annie learns to read and be more ladylike (wearing dresses, taking baths).  Eventually, Butler leaves her after Annie performs a breathtaking stunt in the show, proving that she is the bigger star.  The two are apart for awhile, with Butler having joined a rival show, but come together again in the end after a grudge match Annie throws, allowing Butler to be proclaimed the best sharpshooter in the world.  Running alongside the love story plot is Annie’s relationship with Sitting Bull, the great Sioux Indian chief who was part of the Buffalo Bill show.

There’s three things that offended me most about the film.  The first is on the basic level of craft, and by this I don’t just mean Hutton’s performance.  Ethel Merman originated the role on Broadway, and I can see how she would work playing the role this big: Merman was a titanic force of nature, everything she did was huge.  Hutton though, seems like she’s playing at being big and every note comes out false.  Judy Garland was originally going to star in the film, and her unique dramatic intensity would probably have made the film work.  I certainly can’t imagine her mugging about the way Hutton does.  This was pretty much the end of the line for Garland as a major star though.  During this time she was replaced in The Barkleys of Broadway and Royal Wedding was released from her MGM contract.  At age 28 her film career, aside from a brilliant performance in George Cukor’s A Star is Born and an Oscar nominated, supporting role in Judgement at Nuremburg, was essentially over.  

Be a clown by tobiagorrio

Garland wasn’t the only person fired from the film though.  It was originally directed by Busby Berkeley, who was replaced by Charles Walters, who was then replaced by George Sydney.  There’s a hint of Berkeley left in the film in the final shot, an arial view of dancing horses forming one of Berkeley’s trademark geometric patterns, but for the most part the film feels completely generic.  More than that though, there’s an incongruity between the apparent attempt at verisimilitude in the directing and the other major elements of the film.  Not just Hutton’s performance, which is jarringly unnaturalistic next to the supporting performances by Louis Calhern, Keenan Wynn and Howard Keel (none of whom were ever particularly notable for their restraint, this is a side effect of Hutton’s egregious broadness), but also in the musical numbers.  Some of Irving Berlin’s music, especially the film’s signature song “There’s No Business Like Show Business” indicate an artificiality in the production.  They seem to acknowledge that they exist as a part of a musical comedy on a Broadway stage.  But in the film, they take place entirely in natural settings.  Actors singing about Broadway while on a dusty Indianapolis fairground is just weird, which can be a virtue, but Sydney never develops the incongruity in any way.  This should be as playful a film as Vincente Minnelli’s The Pirate, where Garland and Gene Kelly’s performances, along with the screenplay and Minnelli’s direction of the musical numbers create a constant back and forth between fantasy and reality which leads to a fundamental, ecstatic declaration of the joy of performance at the film’s climax with Cole Porter’s “Be A Clown”.  I’m not sure exactly whose fault this is, but Sydney did a fine job walking this tightrope in Kiss Me Kate, another musical written by Cole Porter that plays with the conflict between performance and reality.  I guess, then, the issue is not so much a matter of Sydney’s inadequacy for the material (though Berkeley and Garland might have made something of it) but rather simply the difference between Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.

The next two major issues I have with the film are political in nature, and I’m not sure which is more off-putting.  The first is the inherent sexism of the story.  Annie is the best sharpshooter in the world, but she can’t have the man she loves because his ego demands that he be superior to her in every way.  The conflict in the film is her independence, and only when she throws a final match to him, allowing him to be the dominant, superior one can they live happily ever after.  The parallels to the post-war issue of men returning home only to find their wives occupying the workforce, and the need therefore to assert them back into the home via a hollow ideology of male superiority are obvious and needn’t be lingered on.  Suffice it to say that the fact that we are expected to cheer and swoon with romance when Annie finally puts herself in her proper place is nauseating at best.

The racism in the film is only slightly less obvious, and has to do with the way it treats its Indian characters.  A couple weeks ago I ranted about the way the documentary These Amazing Shadows used John Ford’s The Searchers to show the negative ways in which Hollywood has portrayed Indians throughout the years, despite the fact that The Searchers is itself about that very issue and is very much against it.  They should have used Annie Get Your Gun instead.  Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, in reality, had a fairly complex relationship with Indians.  On the one hand, the shows itself generally cast the Indians in the role of villain, with big set pieces wherein Indian attacks are fought off by settlers and cavalry.  On the other, Bill encouraged the Indians to set up traditional camps, which onlookers could walk through and see the people as they actually lived.  (See his wikipedia entry:  “He called them “the former foe, present friend, the American”, and once said, “Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government.”‘)  None of this tension is present in Annie Get Your Gun.  The Indians are presented as cartoons on-stage, with Sitting Bull as goofy comic relief, and even worse off-stage.  Our first introduction to them has them destroying a train car for no apparent reason (literally, the shot foregrounds an Indian meaninglessly tearing apart a seat cushion with a tomahawk).  When they go to France they destroying a pastry shop devouring eclairs left and right.  The Indians in the film are children at best, monsters at worst.  That the best they come off is in the goofy, casually hideous “I’m an Indian Too” number is saying something.  That this film was made the same year as Anthony Mann’s defiant Devil’s Doorway, two years after John Ford’s nuanced yet damning Fort Apache, and was more popular than either is appaling.

Fortunately, all these issues are resolved in an earlier version of the Annie Oakley story, directed by George Stevens and starring Barbara Stanwyck, though it is by no means a perfect film.  To begin with, Stanwyck, in my opinion the greatest star in motion picture history, was constitutionally incapable of giving a false performance, one without nuance or intelligence or, most in contrast to Hutton’s work, dignity.  The contrast between her Annie and Hutton’s is apparent from the very start.  Hutton literally walks out of a bush, Stanwyck lives in a town, a small town, but one populated by recognizable human characters.  She has a mother, a wagon, dresses and washes like any other human and can even read and write.  In other words, she’s just a small town girl who knows how to shoot, rather than a freak of nature (a competent woman?  Egads, how bizarre!)  Stanwyck too falls in love at first sight of Buffalo Bill’s star sharpshooter (here renamed Toby Walker for some reason, Frank Butler was the name of Oakley’s real-life husband), and their first contest proceeds along the same lines as in the musical.  But, after seeing how good Annie is, the crowd begins to heckle Toby and Annie misses on purpose to let him save face.  Afterwards, she’s quite open about her throwing the match (to everyone, including Toby), but Bill hires her anyway and she joins the show.  The vital difference here is that as Annie and Toby fall in love, he insists they pretend to be rivals for the sake of showmanship.  In reality, he doesn’t care one bit that’s she’s a better shot than he is, in fact, he’s quite proud of her skill, but he understands that the audience is more likely to be hooked if he plays the role of the villain.  In other words, Toby is a recognizable human being, well-rounded and thoughtful, whereas the musical’s Frank Butler is defined only by his one neurosis (along with his prettiness and height).  Also, this construction of the plot sets up a tension between reality and performance that the musical could have profitably explored.

Similarly, the Indians fare much better in Annie Oakley than they did in Annie Get Your Gun.  Sitting Bull still functions as comic relief, though his cultural misunderstandings are far fewer here and less signs of his own idiocy than the fact that he just doesn’t particularly care about white people’s sense of propriety.  Sitting Bull here is almost a tragic figure, played by Chief Thunderbird, a Cheyenne actor and technical advisor (the musical cast J. Carrol Naish, an Irish-American actor who played General Sheridan that same year in John Ford’s Rio Grande) as a man out of step with reality, but determined to survive regardless of how ridiculous or bleak his and his people’s situation becomes.  This is nowhere more apparent than at the film’s climax, where Sitting Bull on his horse looks into the crowd and sees Toby (he and Annie have broken up over a misunderstanding, and he’s left the show to run a shooting gallery in New York City).  Toby knows he’s been spotted and takes off, with Sitting Bull in hot pursuit.  He tracks him through the city streets, creating a wonderfully incongruous image of an Indian chief in full regalia stalking through a modern metropolis.

Annie Oakley is a flawed film.  The plotting is full of the kinds of conflicts that would easily be resolved if only everyone let everyone else speak.  In fact, the big dramatic scene that causes Annie and Toby’s breakup is a textbook example of this kind of lazy screenwriting, as Annie is literally interrupted by everyone every time she tries to explain what actually happened.  But still, given just how purely awful my experience of Annie Get Your Gun was, watching it was a revelation.  I’m not sure if this is always the case with 1950s remakes of 1930s films.  Both John Ford’s Mogambo and George Cukor’s A Star is Born build on their antecedents (Victor Fleming’s Red Dust and William Wellman’s A Star is Born, respectively) in interesting and thoughtful ways.  But the parallel I’m best able to draw between what 1950 did to the 1935 Annie Oakley story is the contrast between the two film versions of Show Boat.  The first, by James Whale from 1936 is a nuanced portrait of a racially complex society, with dignified performances from its minority characters (including the electrifying Paul Robeson) which is turned into a much simplified musical starring Howard Keel and directed by George Sydney.

An annual tradition here at The End, here are my favorite movies I saw for the first time over the past year, excluding newly released films:

1. La Commune (Paris 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000)
2. The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
3. Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer, 1983)
4. Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931)
5. Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957)
6. Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty, 1948)
7. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1983)
8. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1958)
9. Run of the Arrow (Samuel Fuller, 1957)
10. Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
11. The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, 1960)
12. An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)
13. Gone in 60 Seconds (HB Halicki, 1974)
14. The Mission (Johnnie To, 1999)
15. People on Sunday (Siodmaks, Ulmer & Zinneman, 1930)
16. Mahanagar (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
17. Culloden (Peter Watkins, 1964)

20. Street Angel (Frank Borzage, 1928)

21. One Way Passage (Tay Garnett, 1932)
22. Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
23. The Sign of the Cross (Cecil B. DeMille, 1932)
24. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)
25. Man’s Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933)

31. The Aviator’s Wife (Eric Rohmer, 1981)
32. Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915)
33. Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder, 1935)
34. History is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)
35. Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929)
36. Two Tars (James Parrott, 1928)
37. The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, 1976)
38. Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka, 1937)
39. There was a Father (Yasujiro Ozu, 1942)
40. What Price Glory? (Raoul Walsh, 1926)

41. Bonjour tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)
42. Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960)
43. My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (Eric Rohmer, 1987)
44. The Masseurs and a Woman (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1938)
45. Mon oncle d’Amerique (Alain Resnais, 1980)
46. My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine, 1955)
47. Socrates (Roberto Rossellini, 1971)
48. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
49. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921)
50. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)
51. Avanti! (Billy Wilder, 1972)
52. Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Aram Avakian & Bert Stern,1959)
53. Election (Johnnie To, 2005)
54. The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965)
55. Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941)
56. Leaves from Satan’s Book (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1921)
57. The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick & Buster Keaton, 1928)
58. The Prowler (Joseph Losey, 1951)
59. The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)
60. He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjöström, 1924)

61. Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949)
62. American Madness (Frank Capra, 1932)
63. The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926)
64. Colorado Territory (Raoul Walsh, 1949)
65. Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard, 1938)
66. Full Moon in Paris (Eric Rohmer, 1984)
67. God of Gamblers (Wong Jing, 1989)
68. Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943)
69. Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)
70. The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
71. Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)
72. The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)
73. A Good Marriage (Eric Rohmer, 1982)
74. Heat Lightning (Mervyn LeRoy, 1934)
75. Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964)
76. Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)
77. Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976)
78. The Only Son (Yasujiro Ozu, 1936)
79. Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958)
80. Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)
81. Run for Cover (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

82. A Damsel in Distress (George Stevens, 1937)
83. Spione (Fritz Lang, 1928)
84. The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (Robert Siodmak, 1945)
85. The Moon is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953)
86. My Young Auntie (Lau Kar-leung, 1981)
87. Midnight Mary (William Wellman, 1933)
88. HM Pulham, Esq. (King Vidor, 1941)
89. Mademoiselle Fifi (Robert Wise, 1944)
90. Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)
91. The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)
92. The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929)
93. Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914)
94. Night Train to Munich (Carol Reed, 1940)
95. The Pajama Game (George Abbott & Stanley Donen, 1957)
96. A Hero Never Dies (Johnnie To, 1998)
97. Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932)
98. September Affair (William Dieterle, 1950)
99. Camille (Ray C. Smallwood, 1921)
100. Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949)
101. The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1956)

102. Drunken Master (Yuen Woo-ping, 1978)
103. Born to be Bad (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
104. The Plough and the Stars (John Ford, 1936)
105. All for the Winner (Jeffrey Lau & Corey Yuen, 1990)
106. Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)
107. Free and Easy (Edward Sedgwick, 1930)
108. The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957)
109. Blackbeard, the Pirate (Raoul Walsh, 1952)
110. The Tale of Zatoichi (Kenji Misumi, 1962)
111. Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
112. Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974)
113. The True Story of Jesse James (Nicholas Ray, 1957)
114. Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
115. Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967)
116. Samson and Delilah (Cecil B. DeMille, 1949)
117. What! No Beer? (Edward Sedgwick, 1933)
118. Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)
119. A Woman’s Secret (Nicholas Ray, 1949)
120. Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)
121. The Lady Hermit (Ho Meng Hua, 1971)