Top Ten:
1 The Rules of the Game: Haha, this thing is like the Jordan-era Bulls on here. And like the Jordan-era Bulls, it's on top because it's goddamn amazing.
2 The Testament of Dr. Mabuse: I don't know that this one especially needs defending, since it wound up pretty high on the list, but it's probably rare to put it above
M. As much as I love
M, though, it's pretty straightforward-
Testament is perverse, in plotting, goals, and montage, and it's one of the few movies I know that uses sound so expressionistically.
M is a cynical portrait of Berlin, a normal metropolis.
Mabuse is a deranged portrait of a city that's going mad.
3 City Girl: Again, this placed high, but I think I placed it higher than anyone else. I actually like this one even more than
Sunrise- it feels as though Murnau's characters here are people, not abstract figures being pulled through a dreamworld. That's true occasionally of both
Tabu and
Sunrise, but I think in
City Girl it's true throughout, without compromising the heightened nature of either the story or the visuals. It's probably my favorite Murnau overall.
4 Make Way for Tomorrow: I want to note that I was really resistant to watching this one, because it looked like misery porn, just a straight downward arc that I'm watching out of masochism. I'm glad I got past that, because that's not the structure here
at all- and it wouldn't be a fraction so devastating if it were.
5 The Scarlet Empress: This one got a huge, huge bump for me when I rewatched it, and the fact that it's my top von Sternberg may well reflect the fact that it's the only one I've gotten to see twice. It's also the one that ends with the most utterly unfettered Marlene: she's riding rampant, ready to conquer the world, no punishment and no possibility of punishment. How could it possibly get any better?
6 Modern Times: I went back and forth between this one and
City Lights, and I think what wound up giving this one a bump for me is that it feels less like a penny dreadful structure gussied up into something pretty- Chaplin's social interests felt far more alive here, far less like something that he'd dug out of a childhood memory of a terrible play (and while
City Lights is absolutely a great movie, it really is a terribly maudlin plot. It doesn't matter, much, because Chaplin sells it so well, but still.) It's stunning that this is within ten years of Chaplin butchering his own
Gold Rush- it's almost unimaginable the man playing the beautiful games with sound we see here could be the one who shit words all over a silent comedy.
7 Vampyr: This is another one that gained enormously with rewatching. I'm not even entirely sure I can explain what I like about this movie- I don't really remember what happened, the performances are frequently so minimal as to be almost non-existent, and while its full of visual invention so is
The Blood of the Poet, and I wasn't about to vote for that one. Something about the way Dreyer encodes this movie gives it an incredible force, though, a metaphysical jolt that reminds me of later people like Kubrick and Malick.
8 Duck Soup
One of the things I rediscovered doing this project is that I really like this kind of 30s comedy, where smartassed vaudeville patter was married to the unlogic of silent comedy- and I don't think there's ever been a better example than this one. 'Anarchic' gets applied to a lot of comedies, but usually only in form and not in aim- here, the Marxes make fun of every human institution they can get their hands on, and unburdened by romantic leads or a plot that needs to make sense they can float off into an almost abstract war against order of any kind. The only movie I can think of that's anything like it is
Strangelove
9 Mad Love
The fact that one didn't make the list kills me. I can only assume that too few people got the chance to see it, though evidently nobody rated it higher than I did- it's almost impossible for me to imagine anyone actually not liking it.
Mad Love is one of those movies that opened a new door for me, as however many American 30s horrors I watched before this one I never really responded to any- here, there's no sense of making allowances for date or genre- this one hit me in much the same spot
Mabuse did, and probably for much the same reasons. A lot is made of the expressionist, Germanic nature of things like
Frankenstein,
Dracula and the like, but while they're in there they're buried under pounds of stagey drivel- this is the uncut stuff.
10 Fury: Lang's misanthropy has never been more pointed or more effective, and yet it feels honest and not like Code-enforced bullshit when
Spencer Tracy manages to let go of his anger long enough to stop himself getting the lynch mob killed.
There are few things more deserving of righteous anger than a lynch mob, and few movies that summon righteous anger better than this one- yet Lang reminds us of the paramount need of remaining human in the face of it.
All but one of my top 10 made the list, and most of them made it fairly high, so either I should be happy that I'm in good company or angry that I'm so dull and predictable. My attempt to have only one movie per director in the top ten got all shot to hell, since both Lang and McCarey are on there twice- and
The Devil is a Woman and
M have the next two slots, so it would only have gotten worse.
Also Rans:
Mad Love
See above
It's a Gift
I talked about this in the thread, but it's one of those movies that stands out from a very funny crowd (it being part of the same vaudeville meets silent comedy strain as the Marx Bros movies) in the relentlessness with which it applies the logic of its plot: everyone screws everyone, and nobody means it, and it's funny. Fields' comic universe is often an unkind one, but rarely is it so perfectly cruel as here- until the happy ending, which (given how unlikable the leads fundamentally are) is itself an even crueler joke. Wealth and those who deserve it are never even vaguely connected in a Fields movie, and here wealth just means a chance to do nothing and drink yourself stupid. Perfect.
An Optical Poem
I'm guessing the huge placement difference between this and
Study No. 7 has to do with what got repped more and more effectively, and that this one's not on the CVM disc. If you liked
Study and didn't get to see this, though, seek it out- you can find it streaming online.
The Good Fairy
I wound up watching a fair number of Sturges, but of the rest even the best of them (
Easy Living) felt like a Sturges movie that wasn't entirely risen. This one actually adds something- I'm not too familiar with the director, but he brings a different personality to the script in a way that puts the delightful Sturges touches into sharp relief, and makes for one of the most thoroughly entertaining movies I saw throughout the project.
The Most Dangerous Game
This one feels a bit like the hipster version of voting for
King Kong, but I really do like it more- it's shorter, sharper, better characterized, and more chilling. Similar feel of 30s adventure and heading out into the great unknown, but a much better evocation of savagery and what it means to resist it.
The Thin Man
Man I don't even care this is funny and charming as hell and all the Renoir in the world won't change that. I could watch the scene with Nick playing with the little gun Nora got him, or her catching him up in drinking in the bar, all day. And since I have the box set, I more or less can.
The Petrified Forest
I talked about this one in the thread, too, but I was delighted by how much real humanity the movie managed to invest into a fairly schematic setup- though everything's very acting-class characterization in how the oppositions between the characters are set up, that's also true of
The Rules of the Game. While this one obviously isn't anything like as deft, it has a similar sense of underlying humanism, and a similar ability to surprise me with someone suddenly coming to life or making a decision borne of being a person and not of plot necessity.
The Adventures of Robin Hood
It's silly and it's childish, but I don't know that there's a world I'd rather live in than this one. It brings back the sort of unfiltered joy in a story that you feel like you got when you were a little kid (which may not actually be accurate, but who cares) and it doesn't break the spell. That fits my definition of a great movie, for sure.
Horse Feathers
This is one of the other least adulterated and therefore best Marx movies. "Whatever it is, I'm against it" is also one of the most deftly accurate satirical jabs at a political position held by many that I can think of.
Swing, You Sinners
This is so fucking strange that I can't believe it exists, much less that it was shown to children. That, in my view, makes it great.
Easy Living
As I mentioned above, this is the best of the Sturges without Sturges that I saw, and that's enough to snag a spot on the lowest ranks of my list. It's not perfect, but all the parts are pretty great.
You Can't Take It With You
I was just talking about this one in the thread, but while I have issues with it, it's funny, it conjures a group of distinctive and real-seeming people, and it's got a killer performance on Barrymore's part. That put it at the top of the Capra I got to see, and thus made the low reaches of my list.
The Music Box
There's not much to this, but as with
It's a Gift, it's incredibly pure: Sisyphus played for comedy. That it actually winds up being really funny is almost just a bonus.
Orphans:
The Milky Way
I blame myself for not pushing anyone else into voting for this- if I had watched it sooner, or written more about it, maybe I could have. It's slight, but it's pretty flawless, and again an excellent marriage of smartass verbal humor (largely supplied by Adolphe Menjou and Helen Mack) and the visual panache of a silent comedy. It's a movie with a lot of strengths and almost no weaknesses.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
I completely understand why I was alone in this one, but a dandy that foppish deserves a vote, dammit.
The Fatal Glass of Beer
A Griffithean family drama played out at length, with nobody even considering taking any of the underlying sentiment such structures had held seriously. The punchline is great, though inherent to the casting, but the jokes around the edges are up there with the best slapstick shorts.
