The Screengrab : jean renoir

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever! (Part One)

1. Double feature: THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939) & GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

2. THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...(1953)

The balance of visual beauty, depth of sophistication in terms of character psychology, high wit, and unsentimental yet warm humanity that Jean Renoir achieved in his greatest works would earn him the title of World's Greatest Filmmaker if it could be laid on anyone's shoulders without smirking. Max Ophuls' love tragedy is one of the few movies that can be mentioned in the same breath as Renoir's without embarrassing it. By an odd concidence, all these movies are, in varying degrees, about the death of the aristocratic class; all manage to satirize these people without cheap condescension or programmatic rage, and all manage to partake of the seductiveness of opulence without ever slipping into the Merchant-Ivory vice of seeming to have been made by snobs for tourists. We may never get another movie that looks on such people and their way of life with such clear eyes again; it's hard just to believe that these films were made in the same century that saw the birth of reality TV.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
4. Double feature: THE GODFATHER (1972) & LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1973)

For people who were young when Marlon Brando first burst into movies, it must have really been something getting to watch him grow up. For those of us who were born when Brando was considered washed-up, with his impossible comeback still on the horizon, the older man is the Brando we first got to know--the broken-down, wise old monster of The Godfather and Paul, the middle-aged expatriate loser who might have been a success at something if he hadn't decided to instead be extraordinary. A case can be made that The Godfather, Part II is actually a greater film than its predecessor--I may have been known to make it myself a time or too--but even though Don Vito is present, in the singular and essential form of the young Robert De Niro, Brando is absent, all because he felt the need to throw his weight around (no jokes, please) and demand an exorbitant fee instead of doing a cameo as a favor to the director who'd made him relevant again. It was not entirely uncharacteristic and very petty of him, and they should have paid the son of a bitch whatever he asked for anyway.

5. HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Speed kills.

6. UMBERTO D. (1952)

Some goddamn way, Vittorio De Sica found a way to make direct contact with the human heart without any spillover into bathos, and he did it again and again. Eager to repeat this feat, and figuring that it would help if they could label it, some folks listed some of the methods the director seemed to favor, as if they were ingredients in a recipe, and called it "Neo-realism". Many people since then have since followed the recipe, with varying degrees of success. Some of them made pretty good movies, but nobody else has done quite what De Sica did.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Set Your DVR: April 13 - 19, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Yes, it's been a while since I've done one of these. Life is busy and these take a lot of research, y'know? But this week is full of great movies on cable, so I couldn't resist making a few recommendations. After all, if I can't share this stuff with Screengrab readers, who can I share it with?

Let's start with tonight! On Monday, April 13 at 10 pm eastern/9 pm central, TCM has The Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir's great movie about war and class and prejudice and sorrow and about a million other things. This is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I suspect it's the same for many of you.

I have nothing else this week until Friday, April 17. At 3 pm eastern/2 pm central and again at 6 pm eastern/5 pm central, Ovation is showing Living In Oblivion, a fun movie about the frustrations involved in making a bad movie. It stars Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener, and features a showstopping tirade by Peter Dinklage. Ovation has a few problems when it shows movies - bleeped words and lots of commercials are the worst - but it also keeps the original screen aspect and goes out of its way to find quality programming, so there's that. Later, at 8 pm eastern/7 pm central, TCM is showing The Maltese Falcon, and there's rarely a good reason not to watch that. If, however, you'd rather take your murder with teenage ennui instead of hardboiled cynicism, IFC is showing Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park at 8:15 eastern/7:15 central. If you can't stand to miss either, IFC is showing it again at 1:30 am eastern/12:30 am central.

The next morning on Saturday, April 18 at 8 am eastern/7 am central, IFC has The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa's strangely familiar movie about a couple of bumbling peasants who get involved with a movement to shepherd a princess across enemy territory before the Evil Empire can discover the location of the hidden rebel base on the fourth moon of Yavin and... Wait, I got off track there somewhere. Anyway, it all takes place a long time ago in a country far, far away. See you next week!

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

PARKER POSEY AS DARLA IN DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

The first time I ever saw Parker Posey on screen, a camera was swooping down on her ‘70s mean girl, Darla, as the dominatrix in bellbottoms screamed, “All right, you little freshman bit-ches!” in the midst of a bizarre Texas hazing ritual in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused...and for me, it was love at first sight, both for the character and the actress portraying her. Darla was the epitome of the smart, formidable high school queen bee nerds like me pretended to hate but secretly wished we were cool (or hot) enough to hang with...the sort of girl that fuels class reunion fantasies of all varieties. And Posey zaps every precious second of the character’s too-brief screen time with megawatt voltage, whether helping Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson keep L-I-V-I-N by grabbing a meaty handful of his aging stoner ass or advising some hapless underclassman to “wipe that face off your head, bitch!” Despite later good roles in the likes of Party Girl, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming and the Christopher Guest oeuvre, Posey was never quite this incandescent again...not unlike the real-life Darlas of the world, who eventually graduate and somehow never recapture that brilliant spark of absolute adolescent power. (AO)

SEAN PENN AS JEFF SPICOLI IN FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

There have been a lot of stoner comedy routines in movies, but nobody has ever acted being toasted with the Method intensity of Penn as Spicoli, while making it funny. Penn is the kind of actor who aims to convince you he's morphed into whoever he's playing, but as Spicoli, who's "been stoned since the third grade", he doesn't just transform himself physically and spiritually, he declares his emancipation from gravity. Sweetly pledging that all he needs in life are tasty waves and a cool buzz, he blurs the line between being out of it and being in a state of grace. (PN)

WALTER MATTHAU AS COACH BUTTERMAKER IN THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Few things are funnier in the movies (though not real life) than adults being mean to children. And, with the possible exception of Billy Bob Thornton’s bad Santa, no adult character has ever gotten more mileage out of behaving unsuitably around kids than Walter Matthau’s Coach Morris Buttermaker in Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears. An ex-minor league ballplayer who takes a job as the coach of a lousy little league squad, Buttermaker is the exact opposite of a role model, showing up to work hungover, endlessly smoking and drinking beer in front of his young charges, and putting them down with droll callousness. Of course, Buttermaker and the Bears’ story is an ultimately redemptive one, a narrative arc which presumably goes some way toward excusing the coach’s early, improper conduct. But people learning and growing isn’t why Ritchie’s film endures as a comedy classic; the sight of the peerlessly cranky Matthau passed out next to the pitching mound, empty beer cans lying nearby, is. (NS)

REX HARRISON AS SIR ALFRED DE CARTER IN UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948)

Who doesn't love a movie where the fool is the pompous highbrow? As pointed out in the excellent commentary in the attached clip (the only clip of this movie on youtube, sadly), Preston Sturges directs this one fairly close to the heart. Rex Harrison plays Sir Alfred de Carter (the "de" in the middle is an exquisite joke all on its own), a conductor who suspects his younger wife of infidelity. The movie proceeds with a fantastic comic plot: De Carter conducts three orchestral pieces, and in each imagines a different way of murdering his wife. In the final part of the movie, he heads home to put his nefarious plans into action, which is where the movie tips into some first-rate slapstick. That's what you call black comedy! Harrison plays an excellent upper-crust twit, being believably competent in his privileged artistic role but an inept bungler at the fairly simple crime of murder. There's hilariously great screwball dialogue throughout and a kneeslapper of an overwritten slice of purple cheese to cap off the movie. Skip the remake and go straight to the source for the good stuff. (HC)

MICHAEL SIMON AS BOUDU IN BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (1932)

Boudu is the holiest of holy fools, a vagrant who is unexpectedly drawn into a comfortable middle-class existence where he destroys every social rule he faces. It is a testament to the skill of Michel Simon, who played Boudu, that he remains a comic, and mostly sympathetic, force of nature even as his behavior ranges from merely obnoxious to outright felonious. Jean Renoir was a master of ripping asunder the veil of the French class system with the deftest of touches. Consider the scene above, in which Boudu eats sardines with his bare hands. The French public apparently rioted at this. And at the scene where he wiped shoe polish all over a fine bedroom. But the scene where he seduces/rapes his benefactor's wife? That left them unfazed. The movie ends with Boudu finding a way to yet again subvert his benefactor's attempts to give him the Eliza Doolittle treatment in a way that suggests that he never needed to be saved from drowning in the first place. Don't subject yourself to the awful remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills; stick to the original for the real comic masterpiece. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Set Your DVR!: February 23 - 27, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

I'm having to break my pledge to stick to a handful of movies per week. Because this week is just so freakin' chock-full of goodness! It's so movie-riffic that it would be absurd for me to try to cut it down to three or four. I don't remember being made the Mayor Of Television, but since there's no other reasonable explanation, I expect to be cutting a bunch of ribbons until my corrupt administration is thrown in jail. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Only two movies to mention on Monday, February 23. At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern, OVATION is showing Spalding Gray's Swimming To Cambodia, a monologue that highlights what a fun and nimble mind Gray had. It's directed by Jonathan Demme and scored by Laurie Anderson, both of which add extra layers of cool. Then overnight, TCM is showing Jean Renoir's The Southerner at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern (2/24). I'll be honest: The Southerner can be a tough movie. Renoir at his best was perhaps the most sympathetic and humanist director of the 20th century. But he was quite out of his depth with this movie. It's not terrible, but it's not his first tier. Still quite worthwhile for fans of Renoir or star Zachary Scott.

On Tuesday, February 24, TCM is out of control with awesomeness. First, at 11:15 am central/12:15 pm eastern, TCM is showing Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday, which is a funny and charming, if not uproarious, movie about the habits of the French middle-class during the 50s. Afterwards, TCM is showing François Truffaut's The 400 Blows at 12:45 pm central/1:45 pm eastern. It's not just one of the earliest classics of the French New Wave, but also a powerful semi-autobiographical story about institutional mistreatment of juvenile delinquents. The misbegotten memories of mistreatment of French youth continues at 2:45 pm central/3:45 pm eastern with Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants, which is a semi-autobiographical work about a boarding school that hides a few young Jews during the Second World War. Afterwards is René Clément's Gervaise at 4:45 pm central/5:45 pm eastern. I have not seen this movie, but I don't believe that it has been released on DVD.

TCM leaves France for Japan in the evening with four stone classics of Japanese cinema: The Burmese Harp at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, then Rashomon at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern, followed by The Seven Samurai at 10:30 pm central/11:30 pm eastern, and finally Kwaidan at 2 am central/3 am eastern (2/25). The Burmese Harp is an anti-war story, Rashomon is (of course) about the shifting nature of narrative and observations (or so I recall), The Seven Samurai is the greatest film the world has ever known (although I don't mean to overpraise it - and, well, I'm not) and Kwaidan is a collection of ghost stories.

Also of note on Tuesday night is The Order of Myths, appearing on the show Independent Lens, which most PBS channels run at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern on Tuesdays. The Order of Myths is one of the best documentaries of 2008, which was an unusually strong year for documentaries. The movie deals with the racially divided Mardi Gras of Mobile, Alabama with a deft touch that makes villains of none while carefully examining the history of racism and power that created the situation. It's stunningly great, and I don't just say this because I grew up in Mobile and am intimately familiar with the sticky racial and familial issues that filmmaker Margaret Brown bravely tackles. If you miss this because of your dedication to the Kurosawa movies on TCM, check your listings. My PBS channel is showing it again overnight on Wednesday night/Thursday morning at 3 am central time.

TCM is showing three excellent movies on Thursday, February 26, as well. In the morning is Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush at 5 am central/6 am eastern. In the evening, there's Bogey and Hepburn in The African Queen at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and later Roman Polanski's masterpiece Chinatown at 11:15 pm central/12:15 am eastern.

Monte Hellman's Desert Island DVDs

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

What are Monte Hellman’s 10 favorite Criterion DVDs? The answers may surprise you! “Picking ten is worse than trying to choose between my wives, my dog, and my kids,” says Hellman, and…his wives? I hope he means his spouses served their terms consecutively, not concurrently. And if he has a current wife, I hope she doesn’t see this and learn that he’s having a hard time deciding between her and his past wives…or even his dog.

But I digress. The fact is that Mr. Hellman did manage to pick 10 Criterion DVDs, among them 8 ½ (“I had the pleasure of watching Fellini shoot a scene from City of Women at Cinecittá. I was flattered when he said, ‘Ah, you’re the young director I’ve heard so much about,’ although I was barely younger than he.”), Scenes from a Marriage (“At the time the film first played theatrically in the U.S., I was invited to a private screening of the five-hour television version. As one who’s addicted to marriage, it was a devastating experience.”) and Grand Illusion (“I had the privilege of being a member of a festival jury led by Jean Renoir, and subsequently replaced him as a cameo actor in a film.”) Hellman! What’s with all the name-dropping? Did Peter Bogdanovich ghost-write this list?

Other choices include Notorious and The Lady Eve, but Hellman’s top pick is a bit out of left field: Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive from 1972. “I’ve probably seen this film more than any other. Nestor Almendros turned me on to it when I was looking for a DP to shoot Iguana. He recommended Luis Cuadrados, but I soon discovered he’d died of a brain tumor, having shot Spirit while 95 percent blind.” You can check out the full list here.

Related:
Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman
Video of the Day: It's Monte Hellman Time!

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Until Jack Nicholson’s kooky Colonel Nathan Jessep made fun of Tom Cruise’s faggoty white uniform over lunch in A Few Good Men, I’d never heard of America’s Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Oh, for those carefree days of yesteryore.

Today, of course, most of us are sick-to-death of (and mostly just sickened by) references to all the terrible, terrible shit that’s gone down at Gitmo since America went torture-happy in 2002 and turned the base into a slightly less awful Abu Ghraib, where (according to our terrible, terrible 43rd president) the Geneva Conventions, legality, common sense and human decency no longer applied.

As of this writing, our hopefully much, much better 44th president has, according to Reuters, ordered a 120-day halt to all pending Guantánamo Bay prosecutions “to give the new administration time to evaluate the cases and decide what forum best suits any future prosecution.”

In the meantime, your pals here at the Screengrab would like to commemorate President Obama’s pledge to shut down one of the worst prisons in our nation's history with a salute to THE BEST PRISON MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

THE ROAD TO GUANTÁNAMO (2006)

Time will tell if Barack Obama truly represents the hope and change upon which he campaigned, but it was a good sign when his first act upon assuming office was to begin the process of shutting down the prison camp maintained during the Bush administration at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Meant to detain enemy combatants and terror suspects captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Guantánamo did almost nothing to fight al-Q’aeda, instead becoming a symbol of the degraded state of civil rights during the War on Terror. Michael Winterbottom’s powerfully effective documentary The Road to Guantánamo tells, through a clever mixture of documentary interviews and dramatic reenactments, the story of young British Muslims who visited Pakistan for a friend’s wedding; through foolhardiness or naivety, they ended up taking a detour into Afghanistan, and before they knew what was happening, they were captured, turned over to U.S. forces, and ended up in the world’s most infamous prison camp. Eventually released without charge two years later, their story is especially harrowing not only because a true prison tale is always scarier than an invented one, but also because it’s illustrative of how little it takes to destroy someone’s life in an atmosphere of paranoia and political fear.

COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

Given the timing of its release, Cool Hand Luke will probably always have the aura of a counterculture artifact, although in many ways it's your basic meat-and-potatoes prison flick. The conflict between our anti-hero Luke and the establishment – that is, the Bosses who keep him and his fellow prisoners in line – is certainly emblematic of the cultural divide of the Sixties, but it's also a well-worn standby of the genre. What makes Luke memorable, in addition to Newman's iconic performance, is the sweat-soaked Southern atmosphere and the rogues gallery of rugged character actors lined up on the chain gang, including George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Ralph Waite, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker and Wayne Rogers. Sure, they may seem a little too comfortable playing grabass in their underwear, but prison does strange things to a man. The horrors of the work farm, from the backbreaking labor to solitary confinement in "the hole," are so far out of proportion to Luke's crime of cutting the heads off parking meters out of boredom, we'd root for him even if he wasn't a lovable rogue who settles the great question once and for all: can a man eat 50 eggs?

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

Pigeonholing the Coen Brothers' perpetually underrated Americana romp as a prison movie would be just as ludicrous as studying The Big Lebowski for bowling tips, but the plot is indeed set into motion by a good old fashioned escape from a chain gang, and those big bold prison stripes really bring out the best in George Clooney. Although the Coens draw some of their imagery from classic prison flicks like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (their sunglasses-wearing pursuer appears to have stepped straight out of the latter picture), none of these influences have ever delved so deeply into the importance of the proper hair care product. Indeed, O Brother was the first prison movie that dared to depict the potential danger of the escaped fugitive being transformed into a toad by bewitching sirens. For speaking such hard truths, O Brother deserves a better reputation than it currently enjoys.

GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir’s WWI opus about French and English pilots captured by the Germans is a film of startling depth and grace, a testament to the power of movies to reveal elusive truths about humanity, and a hell of a good time, to boot. I realize that critical opinion of this movie is such that the last statement is akin to affirming the wetness of water, but sometimes we have to acknowledge the waters in which we swim before we dive. It is hard to describe The Grand Illusion as a prison flick, even though most of the action takes place in various prisons. The movie is about class and prejudice and war and love and honor and this list could seriously go on for a while. At the height of his powers, Renoir was an artist of amazing scope, and his little prison flick manages to illuminate the contradictions at the heart of human psychology while judging no character for behaving as they have been taught to behave. The movie is a veritable who's-who of great European (and even American) cinema. It stars Jean Gabin, one of Renoir's favorite leading men, as Lieutenant Maréchal, the central figure of the movie. Renoir himself was an aviator during WWI, and the uniform Gabin wears was Renoir's during the first World War. Pierre Fresnay plays Captain de Boeldieu, the aristocratic aviator shot down alongside Maréchal. The director Erich von Stroheim plays Captain von Rauffenstein, the aristocratic German officer who shot them down and later acts as their warden. Marcel Dalio, credited at IMDB with 177 film appearances, plays Lieutenant Rosenthal, a Jewish French officer. The gorgeous Dita Parlo also appears, along with her L'Atalante co-star Jean Dasté. But the cast is only a component of the greatness; far more important is Renoir's sweeping vision of humanity, both in confinement and in freedom.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs

Thursday Morning Poll for October 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s intrepid writing staff unveiled its list of the greatest war movies ever made, and topping our list was Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. But when we asked the readers to pick their favorite, they settled upon something a little more American. So cue up the Wagner and break out your surfboard, because according to our readership, the greatest war movie of all is none other than Francis Ford Coppola’s incendiary Apocalypse Now, which outpaced Renoir’s film 33% to 25%. Tying for #3 were Robert Altman’s MASH and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory with 17% apiece, and bringing up the rear was Casablanca, a fine movie but undoubtedly the least war movie-ish of the bunch.

This week, we remember the late Paul Newman. Earlier today, we ran our picks of Newman’s greatest performances, and now we’ll let you choose your favorites from our top five choices. Which of these films represented Newman’s finest hours?

Favorite Paul Newman performance? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. PATHS OF GLORY (1957)

One of Stanley Kubrick’s earlier films, Paths of Glory stands as both a link to his later style and a curious anomaly. While it contains many of the technical hallmarks of his later work, often in embryonic form, it also bears – at least partly thanks to notorious pulp novelist Jim Thompson, who Kubrick recruited to whip the screenplay into shape – an incredibly powerful emotional resonance that belies his later reputation as a cool, bloodless artisan. Paths of Glory is set during the grimmest stretches of the First World War, at a time when the French army was said to practice a variant of decimation in order to prevent desertion and insubordination as the troops increasingly perceived the war to be a pointless and horrid waste of lives. Colonel Dax, played with uncharacteristic depth by Kirk Douglas, is ordered to lead his men on a charge that goes disastrously awry; following a battle scene legendary for its grim, ugly, almost sightless realism, his commanding officer, to save face, orders a quartet of men – chosen for no other reason than that they are largely friendless and undesirable – executed for cowardice. More than Kubrick’s first great film, Paths of Glory also marks a turning point in the way modern cinema treats war, and the movie’s unforgettable final scene provides an emotionally troubling catharsis, as doomed men are serenaded by a captured German woman (played by an actress, Susanne Christian, whom Kubrick would later marry), that is one of the most devastating punches in war cinema.

4. M*A*S*H (1970)

Ask someone – ask anyone – to name the greatest film about the Korean War, and they’ll tell you it’s Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The only problem is, M*A*S*H isn’t about Korea at all. Robert Altman clearly intended it to refer, in all its blackly funny glory, to the then-raging war in Vietnam. However, 20th Century Fox, already nervous about how the film would be received, understandably panicked at the thought that this hilariously subversive treatment of the madness of war and the use of near-nihilistic dark comedy as the only reasonable response to it. Altman, who by his own lights “had practice working for people who don’t care about quality, and I learned to sneak it in”, had utterly failed to mention Korea at all, so the studio stuck in a title card in post-production and added some clumsy radio announcements that made it clear to Mr. & Mrs. America that no, this was a different Asian anti-communist crusade. Their minds eased, Mr. & Mrs. A took the movie to heart – or at least didn’t demand the public immolation of its director; the next thing you know, the movie was turned into a beloved ‘70s sitcom that maintained the formal structure of the movie, if none of its deeply antisocial content. If M*A*S*H has been superseded as an anti-war film, or as even an uplifted middle finger to authority, it’s still the funniest war movie ever made.

3. CASABLANCA (1942)

If Casablanca is no longer the consensus pick as the greatest movie of all time – and there are plenty of people who will make a damn convincing case that it is – it’s at least one of the very few films that almost everyone agrees is great. And that’s especially surprising, because it’s not only a war film, but one made during wartime – hardly an environment conducive to greatness. But while it’s never particularly subtle (even people who have never seen it know within the first hour that the self-centered Rick is eventually going to stick his neck out and do what’s right), it’s simply so jam-packed with greatness that its power cannot be denied. Skillfully directed, beautifully filmed, and crammed with so many iconic performances that it’s practically a primer on what good acting looked like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Casablanca is also, amazingly, a fiercely patriotic picture that manages, through sheer force of its goodwill and beauty, to not come across as jingoistic. Roger Ebert once wrote, in his review of Paths of Glory, that the folk song performed by the German woman at that film’s end was the ultimate condemnation of patriotism, just as the triumphant singing of “Le Marseillaise” at Rick’s Café is the ultimate celebration of it. Unlike many of the greatest war films, Casablanca never makes you wonder if it’s all worth it or which side you should be on; but unlike many of the worst war films, it also doesn’t make you feel dirty for cheering on the good guys, or cheat you into a false sense of smugness. It’s the purest expression of the notion of a good war, and sometimes, that’s not so bad.

2. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

"My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam." That sounds like a crazy person talking, and it must have been a crazy person who made Apocalypse Now, surely the greatest "war as acid trip" movie ever made. Who among us is not intimately familiar with all the Stations of the Cross by now, from "Saigon. Shit." to "Charlie don't surf" to "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and finally, "The horror. The horror"? There's no point trying to defend Coppola's greatest folly in terms of coherent narrative or classical Hollywood structure -- you're either aboard for the ride with Willard, Chief, Clean and the rest, or you're reaching for your new set of Godfather DVDs. Even among those of us for whom Apocalypse was a formative experience in mind-expanding cinema, it's clear that the finished product teeters on the brink between genius and nonsense, and you need only spend an evening with the misguided Apocalypse Now Redux to see how thin the line between the two actually is. But the ambition, spectacle, weirdness, and pure guts of the original version is more than enough to secure it a place of honor on my list of desert island discs.

1. GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir's masterpiece uses a pair of actors with grand theatrical styles, Erich von Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay, and France's leading exponent of the unadorned, working-class style, Jean Gabin, and by putting them together in a prison camp during World War I, means to convey a powerful anti-war message of universal brotherhood. In this it was so successful that the Nazis ordered all the prints be seized after they marched into France. For years the film was thought to be lost, and Renoir, who really had hoped to have some detrimental impact on the coming of World War II, felt that he had as much solid proof that he had failed as any filmmaker had ever had. Instead of bringing us world peace, he had to settle for having made one of the four of five greatest movies in history, the poor sap.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent