Ten Years After: CITIZEN KANE Tops AFI’s 100 Best List Again
Last Wednesday, June 20th, the American Film Institute announced their updated list of the 100 best movies of all time, an enlightening, schizophrenic document with all the usual victories and disappointments. The list was compiled by polling 1,500 film professionals, critics and historians, all of whom chose from a ballot of 400 English language films released between 1895 and 2006. Each expert voted by listing his/her own 100 best, and picking a personal top ten to break any ties. They were asked to make their judgments based upon a film’s historical and cultural significance, lasting popularity, critical recognition and awards (either received or denied, I assume).
The filmmakers’, critics’ and historians’ new, all-time Top Ten: 10. The Wizard of Oz (1939) … 9. Vertigo (1958) … 8. Schindler’s List (1993) … 7. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) … 6. Gone with the Wind (1939) … 5. Singin’ in the Rain (1952) … 4. Raging Bull (1980) … 3. Casablanca (1942) … 2. The Godfather (1972), and of course, the perennial #1 of our age, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941).
Let me say right off that many people are tired of Citizen Kane winning the top spot in poll after poll, and I do sympathize with their position, it’s hard, I know, to see the same film at number one all the time, but I’m not tired of it.
I like it that a bold, innovative film, which terrified Hollywood and New York and cities in between, and which was literally buried by several factions of American culture working overtime — successfully, mind you — to destroy its young creator’s chance of ever having a decent filmmaking career, a movie so threatening to the fabric of consensual reality that it was hardly screened anywhere in the world for the first 20 years of its existence, has triumphed over all and is recognized by today’s moviemakers and pundits as a beacon for what movies should aspire to and be.
I like that a lot. Certainly nothing else in the AFI’s top ten has anything like that kind of history, never mind Kane’s formal and stylistic originality, or its cultural impact since first being “rediscovered” in the sixties. Only Vertigo shares with Kane the distinction of being rejected by the audiences and critics of its time, and then only because it was felt to be kind of slow and disappointing. Alfred Hitchcock’s career was not hurt in the slightest by Vertigo’s initial snub. The other eight top ten-ers were box-office and/or critical successes when they were first released, very good for their directors’ and stars’ careers, and have since enjoyed frequent re-releases and continually renewed appreciation.
As a matter of fact, scan down the full AFI list and you may find a few other films that were box-office flops (Intolerance, It’s a Wonderful Life) or were misunderstood by critics (Blade Runner) or that angered the film community (Sunset Blvd.), but you won’t find another film with Kane’s historical cache of artistic suffering and eventual triumph (the requisite happy ending, you know). Citizen Kane is the Phoenix of film history, and Orson Welles is its Van Gogh. Whether we blame it on Fate, hubris or just the breaks, Welles left some monumental shoes to fill.
So, I would say that Kane is not necessarily my personal number one, unless I’m wearing my historian’s hat, but I understand why more critics and filmmakers vote for it than any another film.
Herewith, other reasons I found to like and dislike the AFI’s revised Top 100 Movies:
DISLIKED: TOO MANY GREAT MOVIES DROPPED TO MAKE ROOM FOR THE MERELY GOOD. The Third Man off the list? Titanic on? In what universe did these people study filmmaking/criticism/history-of-any-kind?
In all, 23 films from the 1997 list were deleted, some of which I won’t miss (A Place in the Sun, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), some that I liked sufficiently enough to, at the very least, be agreeable with their presence last time (All Quiet on the Western Front, Amadeus). But some — Stagecoach, The Third Man, The Manchurian Candidate — are films I’ve seen again during the last decade, and I can tell you they are gathering new fans as I type. I don’t hate Titanic, as many people seem to, but it ain’t no Third Man, either. At most, I’d rank it high on a list of Really Good Cecil B. DeMille Pastiches.
LIKED: DROPPING GRIFFITH’S “THE BIRTH OF A NATION” (1915) AND ADDING HIS “INTOLERANCE” (1916). Birth has a place in graduate film studies but it gets very tiresome holding up a racist diatribe as some kind of great achievement that everyone should “get,” just because it was the first time D.W. Griffith synthesized film technique for all of us. The idea behind choosing it just doesn’t translate when it comes to beginning film appreciation. Besides, the man made several landmarks of form and style, which also happen to not make bile rise in the throat of all decent human beings, and Intolerance, which was an apology for Birth of sorts, is one of those landmarks.
A RELATED LIKE: ADDING SOME GREAT MOVIES THAT MISSED THE FIRST LIST, in particular Spike Lee’s pugnacious Do the Right Thing (1989), which is a genuinely innovative film about race in America, and In the Heat of the Night (1967), ditto. How many times do black actors have to remind us that Sidney Poitier, as Virgil Tibbs, instantly returning the slap of a Southern aristocrat in that film, is one of the defining moments in modern American cinema before tastemakers finally reevaluate its place in the, er, canon?
There are a total of 19 added films on the list. Particular favorites of mine: Buster Keaton’s The General (1927), Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), Redford and Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976).
DISLIKED: ONLY TWO ANIMATED FEATURES MAKING THE LIST. I know, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Toy Story (1995) are technical watersheds, heralding the feature film potential of, respectively, hand-drawn and computer animation. But if we’re talking Walt Disney, Pinocchio (1940) was more of an artistic leap, while the Pixar organization seems to top themselves with every film, redefining family entertainment for a new century. Corny-but-true, which is a Pixar specialty.
LIKED: MORE SILENT FILMS THIS TIME. The first AFI list only acknowledged four films from the silent cinema, even though the 1910s and 20s were the era in which the structure and syntax of film “language” was developed, just about in its entirety, and when film companies and business practices (like the star system) were founded around the world that lasted out the 20th century.
This time there are six silent films. As mentioned above, Birth of a Nation was wisely ejected. Chaplin’s wonderful comic triad, The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) made the pantheon again, and Intolerance and The General were added, along with F.W. Murnau’s highly influential Sunrise (1927). It’s a good start. Now if someone will only show our expert panel Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), we might start to have ourselves a list.
DISLIKED: AGAIN WITH THE “FORREST GUMP” (1994). Enough already. We drop Frankenstein (1931) and keep this? They cannot make me like this movie. I know my own mind, I know movies, this is not a movie to rank on the same list with The Maltese Falcon (1941), On the Waterfront (1954), Network (1976) and Pulp-freakin’-Fiction (1994). Gump cheapens them, just as it cheapens thirty years of modern American history. The film is anti-intellectual mumbo jumbo, and so is the continued reverence for it among people who should know better. There are others on the list that I’m unhappy with, but none so much as Gump, an unnecessary film if there ever was one.
OTHER VITALS FROM THE AFI WEB SITE: Steven Spielberg is still the most represented director, with five films in the top 100. Directors with four films on the list: Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder. Directors with three: Frank Capra, Charles Chaplin, Francis Ford Coppola, John Huston and Martin Scorsese.
Actors appearing in the most films: Robert De Niro and James Stewart, five each. Actresses: Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton and Katharine Hepburn, three each.
The list has more films from the 1970s, at 20 titles, than any other decade.
There are 6 musicals on the list according to the AFI. Allowing for cross-fertilization among genres, I count 7 musicals and 8 “biopics,” plus: 33 dramas, 19 comedies, 12 mystery/suspense thrillers (including film noir), 7 anti-war dramas and 2 anti-war comedies (nothing pro-war here), 6 Westerns, 6 certifiable epics, 5 fantasy films, 4 crime films, 4 science fiction films, 2 animated features, 2 adventure dramas, and 1 action movie. Horror films, I’m sorry to say, remain movie criticism’s crazy relative locked in the basement. Hitchcock’s Psycho qualifies as horror in a way, but I consider it more of a suspense film with horrific elements than a straight horror drama or comedy or whatever.
ADDITIONAL, APALLING OMISSIONS, IF YOU ASK ME: Bride of Frankenstein and Top Hat (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Lady Eve (1941), any Shakespeare adaptation by Laurence Olivier, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), any Coen Brothers film, Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001), and the rest of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Though the AFI acknowledges the first LOTR film, at #50 no less, surely the whole trilogy is a modern landmark of movie-making and -going. I’m sure there’s one or two, or six or ten I’m missing. Such is list-making.
You can find the complete list of AFI’s 100 movies, along with a brief commentary, at RogerEbert.com.
The AFI also offers the list in an attractive PDF file, if you don’t mind going through the free registration at their site.
June 28th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Bernard Shaw, when asked to name the books and plays he cosidered to the best, responded by saying that he was not disposed to give marks to literary works as if he were a pedantic schoolmaster judging students’essays. Anyhow, it was absurd, he added, to say that “Oedipus Rex” was better or worse than “Hamlet” — they were two different plays. That’s how I feel about the AFI’s list. It’s ridiculous to say that”Raging Bull” is better than “Singin’ in the Rain” and inferior to “Casablanca.” On what grounds would such absurd assessments be made?
June 29th, 2007 at 10:11 am
I don’t think the AFI’s list is really saying that “Singin’ in the Rain” is either lesser than “Raging Bull,” or better than the 95 films “below” it on the list. The ranking is largely a promotional gimmick to gain a three hour slot in prime time on CBS, and keep people watching once they’ve tuned in.
The list’s real purpose is to promote awareness of all its films to a large audience, to give Americans a very small taste of their own cultural heritage, which we’re all-too-ready to consider disposable at any second. It works, too, or at least it did last time. People hunted up the films on the list and widened their horizons. Briefly.
For that reason, and in spite of my complaints, I’m in agreement with Roger Ebert (not always, but in this case) that the AFI is a worthwhile organization doing good work in front of a tough crowd. Part of that work is keeping the discussion stirred up, lest “Singin’ in the Rain” is forgotten.