The 100 Favorite Movies project at movies.msn.com takes another twenty clicks toward the top of the list, and your Straight Shooting correspondents have written up two of the entries (nos. 53 and 46). Check out the whole package at http://movies.msn.com/100-favorite-films/60-41/photo-gallery/feature/ Meanwhile...
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
A grufty figure shambles out of the forest and fires up a cigar. Shivering in Pacific Northwest cold and rain we feel in our very bones, we're drawn to that flare of warmth and color, and to McCabe, silver-tongued gambler (Warren Beatty) come to parlay a smattering of lean-tos into the thriving town of Presbyterian Church. Business and bed partner Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) sees through clutzy con-artistry to the poet McCabe is at heart; but only profit can warm this sad "winter lady." (The movie's potent images of shelter and exclusion everywhere reflect gravel-voiced Leonard Cohen's lyrics.)
What glorious refuges from dank wilderness McCabe & Miller Inc. create! Raw-timbered saloon and brothel are wombs of golden lamplight, music, creature comfort. Forget the spired, dark house of worship on the hill; McCabe's joints offer palpable community, sensual sanctuary. His lowdown Eden is populated by a motley tribe of sinners and misfits, "sisters of mercy" and cowboys and holy fools.
Cold capitalism drives McCabe outside his clean, well-lighted places into a snowfall cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond somehow magicks into flakes of gold, burying the "dealer who wanted to trade his game for shelter." Such a soft and silent end to this killer parable about commerce and creativity, the high cost of dreaming in Presbyterian Church—or the City of Angels. —Kathleen Murphy
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Should I risk saying that Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise is a perfect film? I will because a) it is, and b) I can't imagine anyone failing to be delighted by this most sublime example of the "Lubitsch touch"—that precision of comic timing, visual elegance and Continental sophistication which enabled the director to get away with the naughtiest innuendo while the censors tore their hair.
Two supremely talented con artists (Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall) meet and fall in love in the Venice moonlight, then set out to steal Paris blind. Deliciously unlikely circumstances lead to them both being employed in the home of a rich and lovely widow (Kay Francis), which leads in turn to, well, trouble in paradise as the widow and her new male secretary fall in lust.
This isn't just as fine a comedy as anyone's ever made; we could make a case for it as a triumphant and distinctive musical. Its only "songs" are a perfume commercial on the radio and an impertinently repurposed Enrico Caruso performance, but every aspect of the film's design—camera movements, cutting, sound, behavior, verbal patterns in Samson Raphaelson's intricately composed screenplay—contributes to a brilliantly sustained rhythm ... and no small measure of enchantment. —Richard T. Jameson