Just about everyone I’ve spoken to regarding the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American movies—presented on a stultifyingly vacuous three-hour CBS special last week—has been depressed about it, in a hangdog sort of fashion. Part of this is the lackluster list itself and part is the absolute failure of the show to offer anything resembling an interesting justification of any of the titles that got picked. But it’s not at all the sort of deflation that comes when outsize hopes are dashed. Rather, it’s a kind of grim acknowledgment that what we call “business as usual” these days automatically follows a law of diminishing returns, yielding an increasing dumbing down of film culture that outpaces our already shrinking expectations. “Of course it’s going to keep getting worse and worse,” we all seem to be assuming, and then it gets to be even worse than we imagined.
But the malaise I’m talking about, provoked by the aforementioned list of 100 movies, isn’t just a response to the long-term uselessness of the AFI; it’s about the increasing lack of any viable distinction between what used to be called Public Works and corporate greed. Whether in the present circumstances this has grown out of a holy or unholy alliance between the AFI, Blockbuster Video, CBS, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, and the home video divisions of 13 film studios—all of which have planned a summer full of jolly hoopla around this tacky list to promote their joint efforts—doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the rise of corporate cultural initiatives bent on selling and reselling what we already know and have, making every alternative appear more scarce and esoteric, and not even attempting to expand or illuminate the choices made in the process. (As an academic friend points out, it’s almost as if most of the masterpieces in the Louvre were cleared out to make room for the work of Sunday painters.) Let me hasten to add that if I were drawing up my own list of the 100 greatest American movies from scratch, roughly a quarter of the AFI’s list would be on it. But because I’m writing for an alternative newspaper, it seems more useful to offer an alternative list of 100 features rather than an unwieldy composite of the 25 or so AFI titles I can live with and 75 others. I’ve also decided to list my choices alphabetically rather than impose any kind of order based on merit, which would be tantamount to ranking oranges over apples and declaring cherries superior to grapes. For if these lists have any purpose at all from our standpoint (as opposed to the interests of the merchandisers), this is surely to rouse us out of our boredom and stupor, not to ratify our already foreshortened definitions and perspectives. Above all, the impulse to provide another list is to defend the breadth, richness, and intelligence of the American cinema against its self-appointed custodians, who seem to want to lock us into an eternity of Oscar nights. And the most salient fact about my own list is that it’s far from exhaustive; I haven’t even found room on it for such miracles as Adam’s Rib, The Band Wagon, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Blonde Crazy, John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, Crumb, Dog Day Afternoon, Duel in the Sun, Family Plot, Gun Crazy, Ice, Lives of Performers, Me and My Gal, The Old Dark House, Paths of Glory, Pickup on South Street, Point of Order, Rope, Ruggles of Red Gap, Safe, Salt of the Earth, Two Lane Blacktop, and God knows what else.
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Robert Mulligan, who directed To Kill a Mockingbird, is a talented filmmaker, but better pictures by him would have found their way onto the list if his mise en scene were the issue. One can safely bet that the inclusion of To Kill a Mockingbird—like the preference for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? over the infinitely superior Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Adam’s Rib—is merely a function of the kind of liberal self-congratulation that brings standing ovations to Oscar nights and tears to Valenti’s eyes. It has nothing to do with either the art of cinema or the reality of America—check out The Phenix City Story if you want to learn something about Alabama, as opposed to Gregory Peck’s virtue—but a great deal to do with the industry’s guilty conscience. Indeed, what the AFI in one of its press releases has called a “celebration of the 100th anniversary of American movies” reminds me of Haven Hamilton’s glib country-western national anthem at the beginning of Robert Altman’s Nashville: “We must be doing something right to last 200 years.” I would submit that if this piss-poor representation of the best that American cinema can do is all we have to celebrate, we must be doing something wrong.
I’ve deliberately sought to make my list conservative rather than provocative, and grounded in pleasure rather than any dutiful sense of historical importance. But since I’ve already stressed the significance of access and cultural conditioning in forming tastes, I should clarify the nature of my own background, which inevitably slants my list in a particular direction. Twenty-five of my selections were released in the 50s, while I was growing up, and my acquaintance with American cinema was based on two atypical forms of access that determined my cultural conditioning. The first came from being the grandson of a man who ran a chain of movie theaters in Alabama and the son of a man who worked for the chain, which meant that I had virtually unlimited access to Hollywood movies throughout most of the 50s, seeing practically everything that came out without having to pay admission. And the second form of access came from living in Paris and London between 1969 and 1977, when the American movies I saw in both places—bolstered in Paris by the Cinematheque and numerous revival houses, and in London by the British Film Institute, where I was an employee—were not always the same things that one could see in New York and Chicago. And apart from this kind of access, the criticism I was reading in both cities was reeducating me on the subject of American movies, because French and English critics were discovering important things about these movies that my cultural conditioning in Alabama didn’t reveal. Discoveries of this kind are still going on across the world, illuminating certain aspects of American film history that we’re still catching up on—though we might never pick up on the signals if all we’re listening to is the American film industry and its deputies.
Rosenbaum’s Alternate 100
An Affair to Remember (1957)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Avanti! (1972)
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
The Big Sky (1952)
Bigger Than Life (1956)
The Black Cat (1934)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Broken Blossoms (1919)
Cat People (1942)
Christmas in July (1940)
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
The Crowd (1928)
Dead Man (1995)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
The Docks of New York (1928)
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974)
11 x 14 (1976)
Eraserhead (1978)
Foolish Wives (1922)
Force of Evil (1948)
Freaks (1932)
The General (1927)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Gilda (1946)
The Great Garrick (1937)
Greed (1925)
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! (1933)
The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
Housekeeping (1987)
The Hustler (1961)
Intolerance (1916)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Judge Priest (1934)
Killer of Sheep (1978)
The Killing (1956)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
The Ladies’ Man (1961)
The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977)
Laughter (1930)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
Lonesome (1929)
Love Me Tonight (1932)
Love Streams (1984)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Man’s Castle (1933)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
My Son John (1952)
The Naked Spur (1953)
Nanook of the North (1922)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Nutty Professor (1963)
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Panic in the Streets (1950)
Park Row (1952)
The Phenix City Story (1955)
Point Blank (1967)
Real Life (1979)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Scarface (1932)
The Scarlet Empress (1934)
Scarlet Street (1945)
Scenes From Under Childhood (1970)
The Scenic Route (1978)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
Shadows (1960)
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
The Shooting (1967)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
The Sound of Fury/Try and Get Me! (1950)
Stars in My Crown (1950)
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
Sunrise (1927)
Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
The Tarnished Angels (1958)
That’s Entertainment! III (1994)
This Land Is Mine (1943)
Thunderbolt (1929)
To Sleep With Anger (1990)
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969)
Track of the Cat (1954)
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Vinyl (1965)
Wanda (1971)
While the City Sleeps (1956)
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)
Woodstock (1970)
The Wrong Man (1957)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
American Film Institute’s Top 100
Citizen Kane (1941)
Casablanca (1942)
The Godfather (1972)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The Graduate (1967)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Schindler’s List (1993)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Star Wars (1977)
All About Eve (1950)
The African Queen (1951)
Psycho (1960)
Chinatown (1974)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Raging Bull (1980)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
30 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Annie Hall (1977)
The Godfather, Part II (1974)
33 High Noon (1952)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
North by Northwest (1959)
West Side Story (1961)
Rear Window (1954)
King Kong (1933)
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Jaws (1975)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Amadeus (1984)
All Quiet on the Western Front(1930)
The Sound of Music (1965)
MAS*H (1970)
The Third Man (1949)
Fantasia (1940)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Vertigo (1958)
Tootsie (1982)
Stagecoach (1939)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Network (1976)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
An American in Paris (1951)
Shane (1953)
The French Connection (1971)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Ben-Hur (1959)
Wuthering Heights (1939)
The Gold Rush (1925)
Dances With Wolves (1990)
City Lights (1931)
American Graffiti (1973)
Rocky (1976)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Modern Times (1936)
Giant (1956)
Platoon (1986)
Fargo (1996)
Duck Soup (1933)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Frankenstein (1931)
Easy Rider (1969)
Patton (1970)
The Jazz Singer (1927)
My Fair Lady (1964)
A Place in the Sun (1951)
93 The Apartment (1960)
GoodFellas (1990)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Searchers (1956)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Unforgiven (1992)
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
