2.
What to say about a movie whose hero is hollow at the core, yet has the grace to make a proud joke of it—Roger O. Thornhill, the "O" standing for "nothing"—and, yes, has the luck to be played by Cary Grant. Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest is many folks' idea of the most entertaining movie they know. Hitchcock himself was a bit bummed at the time; his perverse, poetic Vertigo had not gone over well (in 2012 it would be voted greatest film ever), and so he ran for cover, making the supreme example of the comedy-thriller genre for which he was renowned. Few noticed, in 1959, that it was also a masterpiece. If a movie has Eva Marie Saint as a blond Eve on the Twentieth Century Limited, James Mason as the suavest of sinister aesthetes, Martin Landau as his spiderlike lieutenant, a murder at the United Nations, an attempted assassination amid acres of Midwest emptiness, and a chase across the faces on Mount Rushmore, who would demand that it also be a scintillating meditation on the allure of false appearances? Ernest Lehman's screenplay shimmers with wit, and Bernard Herrmann's score plays on the audience like a drum. –RTJ
4.
In praise of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, begin with Mr. Gower's drugstore: the wraparound, fussy/accidental conviction of the place, as Capra layers setups with shelves and cloudy vials between us and what's happening. But the layering is "what's happening"—the mix of sharp and soft focus simultaneously supporting realism and intimacy, plainness and mystery; a public area with pockets of privacy, secrets shared (young George Bailey will never reveal that his grieving employer accidentally "put something bad" in the Johnson kid's prescription) and unshared (George won't hear the declaration of eternal love Mary Hatch whispers in his ear, because it's his bad ear). A thousand such particulars give us Bedford Falls, the most cherished of movie small towns, a dream America is having about itself. Too often Capra gets pegged as a goopy sentimentalist, so let's note that It's a Wonderful Life speaks to an acute sense of loss, frustration, entrapment, anger (even in mid–marriage proposal!), and suicidal desperation; George Bailey was James Stewart's entry into the richest phase of his career, the obsessive, tortured heroes he would play for Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock. This isn't just a great film, it's a miracle, and much too fine to be relegated to holiday institution. –RTJ
10.
Arguably the finest Western that John Ford, master of the genre, ever made, The Searchers towers like a Monument Valley butte in our native cinema; its magnificent shadow extends over complex American morality plays to come, from Ford's own The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to The Wild Bunch and Taxi Driver. In Red River, Howard Hawks directed a surprisingly dark and conflicted John Wayne to one of the actor's best performances. Ford upped the ante: As Ethan Edwards, Wayne embodies the archetypal American isolato, in whose volatile character D.H. Lawrence saw the divided soul of America.
I love that Ford imbues his cracking-good Western adventure with so much of our checkered history, simultaneously celebrating and deconstructing his Texicans' brave claim to a new Eden—already the home of red-skinned Adams and Eves. In a nation just riven by a war between brothers, Ethan Edwards externalizes killer impulses and lays them on an Indian Cain (aptly named Scar), the Comanche who steals the little girl Ethan yearned to father. But nothing here is simple: by bringing "son" and "daughter" home, Ford's hero becomes a father of his country, from which he—tainted by guilt—is eternally exiled. In the eloquent landscape that is John Ford's American West, The Searchers' iconic final image speaks volumes. —KAM
Read about all 100 at http://movies.msn.com/100-favorite-films-intro/photo-gallery/feature/.
[[In-content Ad]]