Yes, I Guess You Will


                        


#15: Pather Panchali/Aparajito/Apur Sansar (Satyajit Ray, 1955/56/59)

I was whining and cajoling and instigating about being too deferential to the canon the other
day. It’s my turn now, so different rules.

I’m exceptionally lucky to have seen these at the Cinematheque back-to-back-to-back in a sin-
gle sitting something like 15 years ago--a little under six hours, plus a short break between
each film. I saw them again on consecutive days a few years later, and last week I watched
them all at home over the course of four or five days. But it’s still that first encounter I
think back to. There are certain screenings in my life that I carry around in my head the way
you might remember famous bands you saw in your 20s, and seeing The Apu Trilogy (as it’s gen-
erally called) shown as the one long movie it essentially is occupies a place at or near the
top of that list. I want to call it a time-lapse version of a human life lived, but that’s
just what it feel likes when it’s all over; in actual fact, Pather Panchali begins before Apu
is born, and Apur Sansar only takes him up to about the age of 30.

I could have limited myself to just Pather Panchali, which I think most people would agree is
closer to perfection than the two later instalments. (There’s one moment that doesn’t hit me
right--the father’s reaction to Durga’s death--otherwise I’d say it is perfection.) Chunibala
Devi as the old aunt is like Charles Crumb: you will literally never encounter anyone else
remotely like her in any other film. I’ll again link to the montage of Ravi Shankar music I
used for the song countdown, which is basically Pather Panchali in miniature. You get our intro-
duction to the boy Apu just past the 1:40 mark (a moment as joyous as anything I can think of),
some nature footage around 4:00 that ranks with the riverboat sequence in Night of the Hunter,
Durga’s otherworldly communion with the monsoon around 7:00, and the lingering sadness of the
film’s final image. On its own, Pather Panchali just barely snuck into Sight & Sound’s Top 10
list in 1992--the year of Ray’s death, although I don’t know if there’s any connection; he
died in April, and I thought the poll was published early in the year--but dropped out again
last time.
 
I’m voting for the trilogy, though, because there are moments in Aparajito and Apur Sansar I
simply would not want to be without. I’m thinking especially of Apu in Aparajito after his
teacher gives him the books, and he starts breathlessly sharing his discoveries about eclipses
and Africa with his mother. Again, joyous--the simplest, most joyous expression of opening
one’s eyes to the world that you’ll ever see. (A sly echo of the first film, therefore, a me-
taphorical opening of one’s eyes rather than literal.) Or the scene where the children watch
the puppet show, clearly the inspiration for a similar scene in The 400 Blows. And more death,
of course, a part of Apu’s journey in every film; in Aparajito, he loses both parents. Apur
Sansar belongs to Sharmila Tagore, Apu’s accidental wife as he struggles to find his place in
the world as an adult--her and Alok Chakravarty as Apu’s estranged son Kajal. You can’t find a
speck of information about him online (Apur Sansar was his only film), but the sequence of him
running around with that silly mask on, or his cat-and-mouse maneuvering with his father at the
end of the film, brings everything full circle back to the young Apu in Pather Panchali. He’s
amazing.

We can take this up later, but I’ve argued elsewhere that I agree with Sight & Sound’s decision
to combine votes for the first two Godfathers in their annual poll (which is how Coppola ended
up fourth on the 2002 critics’ list). They don’t do it with the Apu films, though, and I’m not
sure what their rationale is there.  If they had combined votes, according to Wikipedia, the
trilogy would have ranked #4 on the ’92 list, and #14 last time; in the Voice’s “Films of the
Century” list done in 2000, it would have finished fifth combining votes for all three.




#14: The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

I used the word “joyous” three times in my last post. Not much joy here--Alan Garfield’s Wil-
liam P. Moran is even funnier (and scuzzier) than his ad-man in The Candidate, but that’s
about it for laughs. I won’t try digging up the quote, but somebody I once came across called
Vertigo, Richard Lester’s Petulia, and The Conversation San Francisco’s great trilogy of ali-
enation, or ennui, or existentialist despair, or one of those really grim philosophical dispo-
sitions that people write papers about in grad school. The Conversation may also have been the
film I was trying to remember earlier in this countdown when I said there was something else
that had been blessed with serendipitous timing the equal of The China Syndrome. IMDB has its
American release date as April 7, 1974, placing it somewhere in the middle of Alexander But-
terfield’s testimony before the Watergate committee (July 16, 1973, when he revealed Nixon’s
in-house taping system) and Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974. You could certainly say
that that was savvy marketing on Coppola’s behalf, but seeing as he had completed the script
for The Conversation as far back as the late ‘60s, I’d say that whatever delays held up its
completion as a film until 1974 transformed prescience into serendipity.

I have often felt that The Conversation is an even better film than the first two Godfathers.
It’s a meaningless comparison ultimately: one is small and moody and cerebral, the other is
large and effusive and emotional, and it’s almost difficult to reconcile them as being the work
of one director. (I’m simplifying, of course--there’s lots of moodiness in the Godfathers, and
if cerebral just means smart, then they’re cerebral, too.) I believe Coppola has gone on record
as saying he felt closer to The Conversation, but that doesn’t count for much as far as my own
response goes (besides which, artists are not always their most insightful critics). What is
less open to dispute, I’d say, is that it’s either the definitive Nixon film, or at the very
least one of two or three on which you might hang that title. And, as you may have guessed by
now, that’s worth a whole when it comes to ranking my favourite films.

The Conversation is a Nixon film not just because of the obvious, that Gene Hackman’s grubby
surveillance expert is like a composite of Hunt, Liddy, Segretti, and all of Nixon’s other low-
level operatives, the plumbers and dirty-tricks experts who themselves functioned as a subver-
sive extension of Nixon’s paranoia. You don’t need all the middlemen; in many ways, Hackman’s
Harry Caul is Nixon himself. He’s socially inept, ultra-secretive, conspiratorial, shadowy and
anonymous, and he’s able to dissociate himself completely from the morality of his actions if
called to account. Pestered by Moran about a job of his that once led to someone’s gruesome
murder, Harry just brushes it aside: “It had nothing to do with me--I just turned in the
tapes.” As Caul skulks around San Francisco in his grey, rumpled raincoat, trying to remain
as invisible as humanly possible as he implicates himself deeper and deeper in some shady cor-
porate power-play he only dimly understands, he’s like a phantasmagoric embodiment of the last
miserable months of Nixon’s presidency. He’s Nixon and Nixon’s henchmen rolled into one, try-
ing to navigate his way through a maze as murky and unknowable as Watergate. (American films of
the ‘70s housed all kinds of different Nixons, something I wrote about in a piece I’ll link to
below.) 

I overdo the Nixon stuff, I know. The Conversation is just as spooky as a Big Brother parable,
or as a foreshadowing of the YouTube/Facebook/Google world we live in today, where notions of
privacy are (voluntarily and otherwise) slipping away. There’s a recurring moment in The Con-
versation where Harry is suddenly horrified to find his universe flipped on its head and him-
self the one being surveilled--happens at least four times. If the film had been made today,
he’d be a computer hacker who gets hit with identity theft.

Hackman’s performance is one of the greatest ever, I think, while character acting never got
any better in the ‘70s than Garfield and John Cazale (more on them in the linked piece). One
last thing: much like Marathon Man, you’ll always remember The Conversation for a single line
of dialogue. You hear that line two different ways by the time the film’s over, and--ingeni-
ously on the part of Coppola--the puzzle at the center of everything hinges on the difference.


#13: The Heart of the Game (Ward Serrill, 2005)

It may turn out otherwise, but I’m fairly sure this will be the most obscure pick by any of
us from this point forward. Relatively obscure; it’s been rated by 669 people on IMDB (for
purposes of comparison, Pulp Fiction has been rated by just under half a million, Welfare by
124), and you can link to 51 external reviews, including Ebert, the Voice, and Rolling Stone.
So it’s not exactly an experimental film from the ‘60s, or one of those Ukrainian silents from
the ‘20s that were once all the rage with film undergrads. But I figure my yearly screenings
in class have single-handedly accounted for 17% of this film’s viewership over the past half-
decade.

I haven’t provided many plot summaries (or maybe just descriptions--this is a documentary)
during this countdown so far, but as briefly as possible: The Heart of the Game follows Darn-
ellia Russell, a high school basketball player, and Bill Resler, her coach, for a period that
begins with the season before Darnellia arrives as a freshman at Seattle’s Roosevelt High, and
carries through to her graduation five years later. Yes--it’s basically Hoop Dreams, which
Steven listed earlier. I like Hoop Dreams a lot. I absolutely love The Heart of the Game.

Darnellia and Resler are one of my favourite screen couples of all time. (It would seem as
wrong to call her by her last name as it would to call him by his first.) Not in that way,
no--nothing unseemly here, although we do learn that one of Darnellia’s teammates is indeed
being sexually preyed upon by her private basketball instructor, a brief but powerful detour.
They’re like a template for one of those opposites-attract romantic comedies: Darnellia an
intense, quiet, intimidating, mercurial black teenager, Resler a dishevelled, philosophical,
avuncular, wildly outgoing white 50-something who’s also--much to the amusement of Darnellia
and her teammates--slightly unhinged. Or at least that’s the image he cultivates in order to
get the most out of his players. They even “meet cute” when Resler sidles up anonymously to
Darnellia the day tryouts begin:

“They tell me you play some basketball.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the coach.”
“Oh.”

Add long pauses and an appropriate level of disdain for full effect.

I won’t detail the ups and downs of Darnellia’s time at Roosevelt, other than to say (just
like Hoop Dreams) the film encompasses so much above and beyond basketball--and the basketball
stuff is thrilling. Somewhere, I think it may have been one of those annual Time Out guides,
I read a reviewer who brushed off The Heart of the Game to the effect of “nothing you haven’t
seen before.” It struck me as just a supremely stupid comment. I mean, if you reduce the film
to its basic trial-tribulation-big game arc, sure. Just like if you reduce Citizen Kane to “guy
who has everything loses it all,” it looks kind of ordinary on paper too.

I had my students this year write fan letters just as school was ending, and I posted them using
whatever addresses we could track down online. One of my girls wrote to Darnellia. We couldn’t
find anything for her, so I actually sent her a short message via Facebook explaining what we’d
done and would she mind providing an address where I could send my student’s letter. Never heard
back--she undoubtedly thought I was a nut. The letter’s still sitting in my car. I just found
the film’s website, though, and there looks to be a couple of options there.


#12: Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

Bert Schneider, 1969: “If I could find a no-name American director who has the Bergman look
and the Bergman feel, I could make a billion dollars.” I’m just making that up, of course, and
I’m not even sure if, beyond an obvious Wild Strawberries homage, Five Easy Pieces has much to
do with Bergman (“Of course, the people are all wrong for Bergman”--Geraldine Chaplin in Nash-
ville). It’s probably got more of an Antonioni feel. In any event, it’s very definitely an
American attempt as the ‘70s got underway to make a European-style art film of the 1960s. Con-
tinuing on from The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and a few others that set the
stage, I imagine Five Easy Pieces felt like something new at the time.

I can only guess--my own history with FEP is blurrier to me than most of what I’ve listed. I
remember seeing it with my first-year roommate at university, and how much he loved it--this
would have been ’79 or ’80--and while I’m positive I’d seen it a time or two on television
before that, that was probably when it permanently lodged itself in my own imagination too.
That Tom would have gravitated towards such a film doesn’t surprise me; he may have been the
most Bobby Dupea-like person I’ve ever known, an incredibly bright guy who lasted all of one
year at UT before first heading back home to Indiana, and then drifting (back to Toronto, for
a while) for a few years after that. He was similar in broad outline, anyway--maybe I just
want to say I’ve known a Bobby Dupea, since I’m not much of a Dupea myself.

Director Bob Rafelson turned into such a cipher after a couple of more films, I’m not sure
how to explain the almost perfect pitch he achieves in Five Easy Pieces. Only once, when he
has Nicholson tell off a pompous writer, does he (badly) telegraph anything. Rafelson quickly
redeems himself, though, first in the incredible scene I’ll link to below, Nicholson trying to
explain his whole life in a few halting sentences to his paralyzed, unresponsive father, then
again in the how-could-it-end-otherwise? final scene. Nicholson’s monologue with his father
contravenes a rule I think films are generally wise to observe: show, don’t tell. Nicholson
tries to tell--very poorly--and it works. (The Dupea family reminds me somewhat of the Berk-
mans in The Squid and the Whale.) Watching Five Easy Pieces tonight, the ending seemed very
much in line with those lingering, unresolved endings already discussed from The Graduate,
The Heartbreak Kid, and The Candidate; just like in the latter, the third time Nicholson says
“I’m fine” he does so silently.

What else...László Kovács’ cinematography: even a decades-old VHS on a 17” screen looks pain-
terly in the best sense. Some of my favourite shots are when Nicholson wanders around town
the night after he hops on that truck with the piano. Try to imagine The Last Picture Show
in colour--no less desolate, but a vivid wash of neon rather than dust. Karen Black and Susan
Anspach are a couple of iconic actresses of their day who only make sense in the context of
the ‘70s. Black, especially--she’s got to be up there with Shelly Duvall as the decade’s most
unconventional conception of female beauty. The expression on Nicholson’s face when she starts
counting sheep as a come-on to sex defies description. Billy Green Bush, Lois Smith, Fannie
Flagg, they’re all great.

I will, of course, provide a second link, the diner scene. I’ve played it for my students many
times, and I always tell them it’s the key scene of the decade. May be true, may not be--it
sounds dramatic, and I don’t think it’s an indefensible statement. I wonder sometimes whether
actors have any idea that they’re doing a scene that will become famous. There’s a brief shot
near the beginning of the diner scene, just after the waitress says “No substitutions,” of
Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil looking on in such a way that it almost feels like they’re
bracing for something historic. I also love the punch-line to the scene back in the car, which
is easy to forget after Nicholson’s show of bravado: “Yeah, well I didn’t get it, did I?” His
toast, that is. New decade.


#11: Les Quatre Cents Coups (François Truffaut, 1959)

Just this past Sunday, I was at the Jays game where they retired Roberto Alomar’s number. It
was the first time the club has ever done that; my guess is it’ll happen again 15 years from
now with Roy Halladay. So what does that have to do with a half-century old French film? Well,
Taxi Driver was slated for this spot a few weeks ago, before Steven listed it as his #30. I
knew it’d be a tough one for me to drop, but that’s what I’m doing. Which is fine: it’s a film
that I’ve seen too many times, thought about too much, quoted too often, and written about
enough. So if you can direct your attention over to the scoreboard in centerfield, you’ll see
that I’m retiring Taxi Driver’s number. That also drops Scorsese from my list. C’est la vie,
say the old folks, etc.

This will also give me a chance to amend something I think I was wrong about earlier, when I
listed Shoot the Piano Player: “I could have gone with The 400 Blows...but I still feel closer
to Tirez sur le pianiste.” And indeed, such was true for years and years--through my 20s and
30s, The 400 Blows was just one of those canonical, good-for-you films that I’d see periodi-
cally, enjoy, and never give a second thought to. But the last two or three times, including
another look soon after I listed Shoot the Piano Player, it has deepened in ways I wasn’t
expecting. It’s a film about a kid, but it took me a few decades to really see it.

The first change was something I briefly mentioned in my Piano Player comment: the idea that
I now experience The 400 Blows from the other side of a divide that I crossed somewhere along
the way. Through my 20s and into my early 30s, even though I wasn’t all that close to Antoine
chronologically anymore, I retained enough of his adolescent sense of aggrievement that I still
saw The 400 Blows more or less through Antoine’s eyes. It wasn’t teachers and parents giving me
grief, but it was still me against the world, and I still felt put-upon and crowded from all
sides, much like Antoine. Today, it’s different. Watching Antoine now, I think of all the time
I spend nagging at kids--getting on them about unfinished homework, telling them to turn around
or stop talking or get back to work, making sure at every turn that they don’t do the kind of
silly things 12-year-olds do for fear of having the class slide off into something resembling
the anarchic pillow fight in Zéro de conduite. I embody the drudgery that’s there waiting for
kids when they come back from the weekend or summer vacation. I’m no longer Antoine, or even
someone who can relate to Antoine tangentially; I’m now one of the people who makes Antoine’s
life miserable. As a teacher, and a pretty strict one by disposition--a control freak, essen-
tially--I feel all of this acutely, but maybe I would have ended up on the other side of that
divide anyway, I don’t know.

There’s something else I find tremendously moving about The 400 Blows now, specifically having
to do with the famous ending, something more elusive and harder to explain. If you watch a lot
of films, and know something about film history--enough that you’re able to step back and take
a longer view than whatever you’re watching at any given moment--certain images acquire the
power to resonate far above and beyond their function within a film itself. I don’t know if
there’s an equivalent as far as music goes; songs are songs, and I hear them whole. But I
remember sitting in a rep theatre three or four years ago, watching Antoine running along
the beach as if for the first time, and when the camera swooped in and locked on that famous
freeze-frame, I felt myself suddenly caught up in an awareness that film history was never
going to be the same after this shot--that Truffaut had, in a single image, opened the door
to all the New Wave films of the ‘60s, and more generally to the European art films of the
‘60s, which in turn would lead to all the American films of the ‘70s that mean so much to me,
so on and so forth. No matter how much of a simplification that is, that’s exactly how it
felt, and I still remember that flash of awareness vividly.

So here’s the ending, plus the puppet show Antoine and his friend happen upon during one of
their truancy adventures around the streets of Paris. You can clearly see the influence of a
similar puppet show in Pather Panchali there, and Ray can also be felt in the way Truffaut
presents Antoine’s parents: an ineffectual, somewhat bumbling but well-meaning father, and a
mother who’s resigned and businesslike to the point of seeming aloof at times. Wish I could
add a third clip of Antoine on the gravity-defying carnival ride, but no luck.


#10: Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

I think with everything I’ve listed so far, and everything I’ll be listing after this, I’m
able to quickly zero in on what it is I love about a particular film. (In my mind, I mean--
how well I’m then able to explain myself is a separate issue.)  Not so easy with Zodiac, least
of all why I’ve got it in my Top 10. It’s a serial-killer movie--an unusually long one (almost
three hours), but superficially it has more in common with The Bone Collector or The Eyes of
Laura Mars (or David Fincher’s own Se7en) than with Citizen Kane or The Seven Samurai or what
more typically ends up near the top of these lists. The easiest explanation is that the ranking
is simply a reflection of how often I’ve watched Zodiac since it came out: after another look
yesterday, I’m probably closing in on my 10th viewing. Eventually I’ll wear it out, the mistake
I always make with my favourite films, but for now, based solely on what sabermetricians deri-
sively call counting stats, it belongs in my Top 10.

The less easy explanation is something I hinted at weeks ago: This is important. This means
something. You’ve heard that already during this countdown. It’s the mantra voiced by two or
three characters in Close Encounters of the Third Kind--by Dreyfuss, by Truffaut, and I think
(not sure) by Melinda Dillon, too. You never hear the exact same words in Zodiac--Jake Gyllen-
haal speaks a variation on them a couple of times when cornered as to why he’s so obsessed
with solving a case others have abandoned--but they’re the foundation upon which a film that
fascinates and puzzles me like no other the past few years is built. And, just as with Close
Encounters, the something that is so important is a blank canvas left for you to fill in your-
self. Steven and I had a bit of back-and-forth about this on his blog a while back. He thinks
the failure (intentional or otherwise) to provide some sort of explanation for Gyllenhaal’s
obsession is a weakness of the film; for me, it’s one of Zodiac’s major strengths.

Because of its length, Zodiac is a serial-killer movie like no other. There’s time enough for
it to be a meticulously detailed procedural--theories and facts and criss-crossing timelines
accumulate inexorably (in the space of a minute or two, subtitles will hurl you forward hours,
then weeks, then months)--but that largeness also begins to take on a dreamlike quality as the
film progresses, creating space to wander around in and get lost. So you get sequences like the
time-lapse construction of a skyscraper (with Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City” playing underneath),
or the what-we-do-is-secret “Hurdy Gurdy Man” opening, where the visuals have a beauty and an
intensity that belie the gruesome subject matter; a narrative where the killer will disappear
for long stretches of time, becoming more amorphous and elusive with each passing year, almost
to the point of abstraction; and a feeling for period that seems both unreal (I’ve never seen
a recreation of the late-‘60s and ‘70s that looks or feels anything like this) and absolutely
right.

One of the things I love most about Zodiac is the way the three leads play off of each other.
There’s something very classical and very satisfying about the way they’re triangulated. Gyl-
lenhaal, a veritable Boy Scout--Eagle Scout, to get technical--is on one side, Robert Downey’s
sardonic drunk is on the other, and caught somewhere between them is Ruffalo, the Hawksian cop
who just wants to be left alone to do his job with as little fanfare as possible. That’s not
really a triangle...I think Ruffalo’s especially great. Downey is showy, as always, but I like
him fine here, and Gyllenhaal projects wide-eyed befuddlement as credibly as the kid in Il
Posto. Ruffalo, though--I think he’s my favourite movie cop ever, and the way he interacts
with his partner, played by Anthony Edwards, reminds me of Cooper and Truman in Twin Peaks.
(Stuff you learn checking IMDB: Edwards was also in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Heart
Like a Wheel, where he was Shirley Muldowney’s son. Hadn’t a clue.) I could single out another
dozen performances, but I’ll limit myself to one: Chloë Sevigny makes a great hippychick circa
1970.

In the end, Gyllenhaal’s obsession is never explained and the killer is never caught. But as
defined by Gyllenhaal earlier in the film, we are left to believe that, in a single instant,
closure has come for him. It’s an amazing moment--perversely religious in a way, like Moses
looking upon the burning bush up on Mount Sinai.


#9: On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

Steven’s #9 caught me by surprise--he’s been saying that his Top 10 is “pretty standard,” and
while Streetcar is indeed a venerated, highly-awarded film, it’s not to my mind something that
turns up on those Sight & Sound lists we keep talking about. And, as I’m sure I’ve made clear
by now, for me that’s a good thing. (Which is not to say that the films that do turn up on
those lists are a bad thing...geez, here I am heading down that same dead-end road again.)
Anyway, since he’s got Brando at #9, I’ll drop my #8 one spot so I can have him there too.

Here’s a brief history of three decades of American film that’s simplified to the point of be-
ing meaningless: the ‘30s were stylish people in evening dress exchanging barbed witticisms;
the ‘40s brought shadowy dread and film noir; and the ‘50s were wide open and epic--the films
that come to mind when I think about the ‘50s are East of Eden and Shane, The Searchers and
From Here to Eternity, The Ten Commandments and The Bridge on the River Kwai. The advent of
Cinemascope obviously had something to do with that; for all I know, maybe Eisenhower did too.
(He seemed like kind of a wide open and epic guy.) There are a few thousand examples to the
contrary, but I don’t want to undermine my theory with facts--The Night of the Hunter, to name
one, has got enough shadowy dread for a half-dozen film noirs.

On the Waterfront was not shot in Cinemascope, and its running time is a fairly modest 108
minutes. It certainly feels epic, though, especially in memory--its emotions and ambitions
are large. I almost want to quote two words from Steven’s Streetcar comment--“But Brando...”--
and leave it at that, but when I first saw and fell in love with the film some 25 years ago,
I discovered that there really was a lot more here than just him. For starters, we’ve already
got a director who’s placed two different films in our Top 10s--he was no slouch. Boris Kauf-
man’s cinematography, Leonard Bernstein’s music, Rod Steiger and Eva Marie Saint and Lee
J. Cobb, there’s landmark work all over Waterfront. (Karl Malden, a little less so.) And if
you’re so inclined, it’s also a film that dives right into the great political issue of its
day, McCarthyism and the ethical calculus of turning state’s evidence when cornered. But not
exactly objectively: Waterfront is widely perceived as Kazan’s self-exculpatory parable for
his own role in the HUAC hearings of the early ‘50s. (I should mention here that Waterfront’s
script was actually written by Budd Schulberg.)

I read Richard Schickel’s biography of Kazan, and without detouring into specifics, most of
which I don’t remember anyway, Schickel (a Kazan advocate) says it’s a gray area. People still
have very strong feelings about Kazan’s testimony (and, as a consequence, Waterfront’s alleged
role in excusing that testimony), on full display when Kazan was given his honorary Academy
Award a few years ago, just prior to his death. I don’t know--in the context of the film,
detached from the events of Kazan’s own life, Terry Malloy’s testimony against the mob rack-
eteers who control the docks is difficult to question. But I can see why the very clarity of
Malloy’s situation, and the fact that he’s made to nobly agonize over his decision, infuriates
Kazan’s critics.

The first scene I’d show from Waterfront to illustrate Brando at work is not the cab ride he
shares with Rod Steiger. The cab scene is tremendous--I’ll provide a link to that too. (Ideally,
I could set this up so you could look at a triptych of Brando and Steiger alongside De Niro’s
quotation in Raging Bull, next to Mark Wahlberg’s quotation in Boogie Nights of De Niro quoting
Brando.) But my absolute favourite scene is Brando and Eva Marie Saint in the park. I can’t
think of a more perfectly acted scene in the whole history of movies--by both of them--or one
that’s more romantic. It also has one of those moments that steps outside the film and seems to
reach into the future: at 2:20, when Brando touches his nose and then says, “Well, some people
just got faces that stick in your mind.” On cue, Bernstein’s music reappears. Brilliant--absol-
utely brilliant.



(For purposes of comparison, I’ll also link to Bobby Bittman’s ill-fated On the Waterfront
Again remake. Brando notwithstanding, this acting stuff’s just not as easy as it looks.)


#8: Goin’ Down the Road (Don Shebib, 1970)

I think all three of us hope for lots of comments every time we post. I’ll have to count on the
Canadians in the group here, as I’m not sure if it’s even possible to see Goin’ Down the Road
in the States. You could, if you wanted to, spend between $50-$80 for a copy on Amazon--a
Canadian company named Seville put it on DVD a few years ago. (It currently sits at #145,239
on Amazon’s movie/TV sales rankings, something I found pretty funny until I saw that I Wanna
Be Sedated ranks #2,062,727 among books--now that’s funny.) I don’t know if it’s the kind of
thing that Netflix ever makes available. It did have one bit of high-profile exposure to
Americans four decades ago: Kael reviewed it for The New Yorker, later collected in Deeper
Into Movies.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to call Goin’ Down the Road the Canadian Birth of a Nation--
maybe someone else would say that designation belongs to Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye from
a few years earlier, but I suspect there was a much more rapid expansion of the Canadian film
industry after Shebib’s film than Owen’s. (Another film around the time of Goin’ Down the Road,
Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine, would have factored in too.) In saying that, though, I mean
much more than just its role in clearing the way for other Canadian films to get made; what I’m
really referring to is its place of privilege as a national epic, and the way it gets at some-
thing very fundamental about the Canadian psyche. Truthfully, if I understood the first thing
about the Canadian psyche, I wouldn’t have stopped watching hockey 35 years ago. So let me ap-
proach that idea from a different direction. When I listed Bruce Cockburn’s title song on the
music countdown, Mike Rawding posted this comment: “No word of a lie, Phil: this movie is the
life story of my dad and his brothers and sisters.” There--that does a much better job of
capturing what I’m trying to get at.

Goin’ Down the Road has some affinities with Midnight Cowboy. It’s the story of a couple of
rubes who find themselves lost in the city, especially clueless as they try to process the
cultural changes exploding around them. There are many more differences between the two films
than similarities, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Shebib had seen and was somewhat influenced
by Schlesinger’s film. Midnight Cowboy has 42nd St. for ambience, Goin’ Down the Road has Yonge
St. And that’s where I connect most deeply to Goin Down the Road as a Canadian: the romance
that Yonge St. held for me as a teenager growing up in the shadow of Toronto in the ‘70s. I
mean, my friends and I would actually take a bus downtown just to play pinball at Funland.
There was Sam’s every Boxing Day, of course, and then when we were a little older--well, let’s
not get into that. The Taxi Driver screening I mentioned yesterday was on Yonge St. By the time
I started university in ‘79, the Yonge St. of Goin’ Down the Road was probably starting to dis-
appear--I think there was some kind of clean-up after the Emanuel Jaques murder in ’77. I’ve
written before about the scene where Joey and Petey go into Sam’s--incredibly evocative of a
moment long gone, and now, for the first time, I can link to it. Yonge St. is absolutely a
central character in Goin’ Down the Road.

Quick story. I recently attended a Toronto Film Society double-bill where Don Shebib was sched-
uled to speak beforehand. As I stood in line to buy my ticket, he was standing off to the side
talking to somebody. I waited until they finished, then approached him, introduced myself, and
said how much I loved Goin’ Down the Road. I mentioned that I showed the Sam’s scene in my
grade 6 class every year (on Erik Satie’s birthday), reminded him that I had asked a question
at a Q&A he gave a few years earlier (about the woman at the 10:40 mark), and said that I was
planning to list Goin’ Down the Road very high in a countdown I was in the midst of doing on
Facebook. He politely thanked me, but didn’t seem all that interested. The next day a friend
e-mailed me this, which helped shed some light on his standoffishness. Disappointing--under-
standable, but disappointing. Goin’ Down the Road is the one time he got it exactly right,
though, whether he ever makes his peace with that or not. 


#7: Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz, 2002)

Last documentary for me, meaning my favourite one ever. I’ve got an inside track that Steven
and Jeff still have at least one each left.

Spellbound is a film I’ve written about twice for Scott’s rockcritics.com site, first as my #1
film on a 2002 year-end, then again as my #1 on a decade-end list. I don’t want to repeat a
bunch of stuff I said there, so I’m going to link to those two pieces. I’m not tired; there’s
just a finite amount of thoughts I have on this or any other film, and I’ve already hit the
wall with Spellbound.

This past week, I finished conducting a documentary poll on the message board I’m always making
reference to. Spellbound snuck into the Top 40, barely--I gave it a lot of points, and someone
else gave it a few. Crumb finished first.

Something came up as the countdown progressed that seems to me to be very pertinent to Spell-
bound. Without getting too specific, there was some carping that things like Anvil! The Story
of Anvil* (about a hapless metal band) and The King of Kong (middle-aged guys addicted to ‘80s
video games) were landing in the Top 40, while there was nothing in there from the likes of
Frederic Wiseman or Chris Marker. There seemed to be the suggestion at one point--it was hard
to tell, and someone said I was misinterpreting--that documentaries were valid only in propor-
tion to the seriousness of their subjects. Shoah and Night and Fog and Winter Soldier were in
the Top 40 too, plus films about murders and child abuse and labour strife, but they shared
space with the likes of Spellbound, about a National Spelling Bee for kids. And that seemed
to bother some people.

When I think about the many documentaries I’ve seen the past 15 years--I always use Crumb as a
convenient benchmark, after which I’d estimate that half the new films I’ll see in any given
year are documentaries--the ones that make the deepest impression on me are often those that
come completely out of left field. The King of Kong would be one example, as would A League
of Ordinary Gentlemen (the decline and fall and attempted resurrection of professional bowl-
ing), Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey (that insane background music you hear in ‘50s sci-fi
films), Mayor of the Sunset Strip (Zelig bangs a gong), and Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
(a guide to amateur scrapbooking). The subjects of these films, and many others like them, are
not of world importance. The people in them tend to obsess over nothing. They take place in
universes parallel to the one I inhabit. I feel like I do come out of them a better person, but
not in the way that you might feel that after seeing Night and Fog or a Frederick Wiseman film.
I’ve quoted Bruce Springsteen during this countdown, so I may as well quote Shakespeare, too
(I know approximately as much about one as the other): “There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”--that’s the flash of awareness I get as
I watch a Russian guy from a hundred years ago produce sound by waving his hand between two
pieces of metal.

Spellbound follows eight kids as they try to outlast each other spelling words that neither
they, nor nobody else, will ever use for the rest of their lives. Some of them are as likeably
kidlike as can be, a couple are unusually intense, and at least one deserves a documentary of
his own, although I’m not sure I could handle even five minutes more of him than what you get
here. The first half of Spellbound gives you each kid’s story, while the second half is given
over to the competition. Were you to step back and give a moment’s thought to what you’re see-
ing, it would all seem rather inconsequential and maybe even a little corny. I never step back,
and I don’t think you will either. As the field continues to narrow, and one by one the eight
kids drop out, you may even begin to feel as if the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

*As I mentioned on the thread, now my official choice as greatest title ever.


#6: Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

Here’s another film set in a universe parallel to the one I inhabit. The people speak some-
thing resembling English, but it’s a language unto itself. At least I think it is--I may have
just dreamed it in a dream.

As memorable first screenings go, Sweet Smell of Success is way up there for me. The film
seemed to be completely out of circulation for a time in the ‘80s--it was almost certainly
Kael who first got me interested, and there was also the kid in Diner (a film I otherwise
hated at the time--it looks okay now) who wandered around in a daze quoting lengthy sections
of dialogue verbatim. Anyway, one day it suddenly showed up at 3:00 in the morning on CFMT, a
local station that was primarily given over to a variety of ethnic programming. They sometimes
ran movies deep into the morning, though, and whoever was picking them did not seem to have
anyone looking over his shoulder; I’d caught The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Repulsion on
there at a similar hour. Sweet Smell of Success was everything Kael promised and more--it
just completely knocked me out, and when I was finally able to see it on a big screen a few
years later, and able to appreciate James Wong Howe’s noirish cinematography, it was that
much better.

Like On the Waterfront, it’s a film that is bound up with the McCarthyism of its day. Burt
Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker is a gloss on Walter Winchell, and he’s also a stand-in for McCar-
thy himself--he’s in the business of destroying lives, possessed of an absolute power that
corrupts and disfigures him absolutely. (Winchell was a McCarthy supporter.) Tony Curtis’s
Sidney Falco is sort of Roy Cohn, Hunsecker’s lapdog underling, although Cohn did not seem to
be terribly conflicted over his actions in the way that Falco is. The political allegory is
there, and it does deepen the film, but people like me don’t obsess over Sweet Smell of Success
because of its political subtleties. As brilliant as Lancaster and Curtis are (if someone had
wired up Nixon like they wire up Vincent D'Onofrio in The Cell, I think his id would have mani-
fested itself as a monster on the order of Hunsecker), they’re not the main attraction either.
Sweet Smell of Success is about Clifford Odets’ words--a torrent of them, so caustic and acer-
bic and insanely funny that you’ll be quoting them for the rest of your life:

• Now you take Sidney here. If Sidney ever got anywhere near Susie, I'd take a baseball bat and
break it over his head.

• J.J., you've got such contempt for people, it makes you stupid.

• You're dead, son. Get yourself buried.

• Son, I don't relish shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun, so why don't you just shuffle
along?

Just a sampling, skipping the Manny Davis line I’ve already made reference to three or four
times during these countdowns. The dialogue in Sweet Smell of Success mesmerizes--while you’re
dimly aware that nobody you’ve ever met or ever will meet in your life actually talks like that,
you enter the film’s world and it washes over you. I know that I’ve been waiting years for just
the right moment to drop the elephant gun line on someone who especially crosses me.

There’s one glaring weakness in Sweet Smell of Success (the fact that I have it at #6 anyway
tells you something about its strengths): the Martin Milner/Susan Harrison relationship on
which Lancaster and Curtis’s machinations pivot. They’re just so wholesome and earnest that
they seem to have been parachuted in from some other film. Their time on screen is relatively
brief. The best that I can say about them is that their dragginess brings the corrosive rot of
Hunsecker and Falco into sharper relief--and when Milner is required to confront them directly,
he’s actually not that bad.

The rest of the supporting cast is fantastic. There’s David White from Bewitched as Otis Elwell
(“I can’t even think of a bad reason”), Joe Frisco as Herbie Temple (“You tell him I stutter”),
Barbara Nichols as Rita the Cigarette Girl (“I don’t know, it’s a big apartment”), and, my
favourite, Emile Meyer as the fat cop Kello (“Sidney, I want to chastise you”). There I am
quoting dialogue again. Can’t help it.

For a clip, here’s the film’s most famous scene (about two minutes in), a companion of sorts
to Waterfront’s cab ride--they even manage to both make reference to the Polo Grounds. Listen
to Lancaster’s voice at 3:15 when he says “I want that boy taken apart.” His voice doesn’t rise
above a whisper. As they say about Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, I bet his pulse
never rises above 85, either.


#5: All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)

This is the last film on my list I’ve actually been looking forward to writing about. My next
two have been listed already, and my #1 and #2 I’ve written about before. Other than stray com-
ments on the message board, though, I’m pretty sure I’ve never written a word about All the
President’s Men, which has slowly but inexorably made its way into my Top 10 over a number of
years--going all the way back to its original release, really. I say I’m looking forward to
writing about it because, more so than the music countdown, where my comments sometimes only
addressed songs at a 45º angle at best, here I’ve been trying to zero in on what exactly it is
I love about the films I’ve been listing. So now I get to find out what it is I love about All
the President’s Men.

A good place to start is Richard Nixon, 37th president of the United States. Have I mentioned
that I have a long-standing fascination with Nixon? Every other film, you say?--okay. He only
actually appears once* in All the President’s Men, and his placement is just perfect: right at
the end, on a TV monitor nobody’s watching inside the offices of The Washington Post. He’s just
back from China and making a triumphant appearance before Congress, and his return coincides
perfectly (Hollywood does like to massage timelines) with Woodward and Bernstein having just
achieved a major breakthrough in their Watergate investigation. He looks distracted, but I may
just be projecting.

There have been two films the past few years where I saw a number of reviews that compared them
to All the President’s Men: Zodiac and The Social Network. (Both, of course, are David Fincher
films--no more on him, promise). Zodiac because it was similarly a meticulously detailed proce-
dural enacted on a large canvas, and there was also the newspaper angle linking them together;
with The Social Network, it was the challenge of documenting living history that more or less
happened yesterday. I would endorse the comparisons on both counts. No matter how many times
I watch All the President’s Men, I become completely immersed in the minutia of Woodward and
Bernstein’s detective work as if for the first time; like the three principals in Zodiac, they
make their way through a labyrinth of setbacks, small gains, and sudden moments of clarity. As
to the second point, I applaud the risk Pakula took in diving right back into Watergate at a
time when I imagine most of the American public was Nixoned out to the point of exhaustion--
even though it was probably commerce and star availability that dictated that decision.

I’ve read that journalism schools filled up to capacity after The Post led the way in bringing
down Nixon. That romantic notion of the investigative journalist as hero is on full display in
All the President’s Men, the culmination of Murrow and Cronkite beforehand, a moment worlds
away from the regard in which the media is held today. (Rather loud descendents like Glenn
Greenwald and Matt Taibbi keep the moment alive, I suppose.) Hoffman and Redford carry it off
with just the right balance of movie-star dash, gonzo scrambling, and odd-couple tension. (“Is
there anywhere you don’t smoke?”) Kael had problems with what she perceived as the film’s fix-
ation on Bernstein’s Jewishness, and I can see that, but Hoffman’s pretty great nonetheless.

Character actors--three of my remaining films are pinnacles of character acting, beginning
with this one. Jason Robards won the Academy Award as Ben Bradlee, everybody remembers Jane
Alexander (just nominated, but she did get a job in the Clinton administration), Jack Warden
and Martin Balsam and Ned Beatty are inner-circle Hall of Fame character actors, and Robert
Walden as Donald Segretti is oddly affecting. Best of all, Hal Holbrook. When Steven posted
The Third Man the other day, I started thinking how it was a perfect segue into All the Presi-
dent’s Men and the character of Deep Throat, who has the same elusiveness as (and is shot
very much like) Harry Lime. I’ve also got to mention the woman at 1:22 of the trailer; she’s
as mythical to me as the Erik Satie woman in Goin’ Down the Road.

So here’s some of Holbrook, followed by the trailer. If I could link to anything, my first
choice would probably by the famous overhead shot inside the Library of Congress (referenced
in The Simpsons--makes me laugh just thinking about it). If you had to distill the idea of a
vast, unknowable conspiracy into a single image, that would be the shot.

*I've since corrected this; he in fact appears three different times in the film.


#4: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

I cannot hide from myself any longer; for the first time, I have no choice but to pull the
trigger on something already listed (by Jeff, back at #33).

There are movies throughout the course of film history that serve as benchmarks, with very much
of a before-and-after feel about them. The Birth of a Nation is an obvious one, and so are
Breathless and Bonnie and Clyde. It’s debatable whether you can point to anything more recent
that deserves that designation, but Pulp Fiction might be viewed as a dividing line of sorts,
at least in terms of how many imitations followed in its wake. The clearest before-and-after
film of all, of course, is Citizen Kane. 
  
In terms of my own movie timeline, Double Indemnity is a benchmark--it divides film history in
half the way Citizen Kane does in pretty much every official version of events. It’s no acci-
dent that it’s the earliest film on my list; for me, Double Indemnity is the first film that
feels completely modern to me, that establishes a tone--fatalistic, weary, caustic, sometimes
mean--perfectly aligned with titles all over my list, from Sweet Smell of Success to the Ameri-
can stuff from the ‘70s right up to No Country for Old Men. That’s in no way meant as a knock
on Citizen Kane, and I’m sure there’s lots of stuff from before Double Indemnity that caught
the same tone--I think there were French gangster films from the ‘30s that get written about
in those terms. I’m speaking 100% subjectively here: Double Indemnity has a look and a language
that feels completely new to me, and it points the way forward. 

My favourite moment along those lines--to me, the emblematic moment in any film noir--is when
MacMurray’s Walter Neff gets home the night of the murder, double-checks that he dotted every
last i and crossed every last t, and as soon as he realizes that yes, he’s in the clear, that
he’s just conspired to commit the perfect murder he always fantasized about, he has a sudden
moment of clarity:

That was all there was to it. Nothing had slipped, nothing had been overlooked, there was
nothing to give us away. And yet, Keyes, as I was walking down the street to the drug store,
suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy, Keyes, but it's true,
so help me: I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.

No idea whether that’s found in Cain’s original novel or whether it’s an invention of the film,
but it’s such an amazingly vivid articulation of formless dread; it’s another one of those mo-
ments that leaves the film behind and, I think, says something very profound about...I hesitate
to say “the modern world,” because I’m quite sure people have been experiencing various kinds
of formless dread since the beginning of time, so I’ll just say life in general instead. “Sud-
denly it came over me that everything would go wrong”--that’s good enough for Camus and all
those French philosophy guys. (The two-way street between existentialism and film noir has
been analyzed plenty.)

I don’t think I could pick a favourite performance from among Double Indemnity’s three princi-
pals. Two of them are archetypes. MacMurray is the forerunner of such noir patsies as Edward G.
Robinson in Scarlet Street, Kirk Douglas in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and Elisha Cook
Jr. in The Killing--not as pathetic as someone like Robinson, he nominally takes charge at
times, but there’s never any question as to who’s yanking whose chain (so to speak). I like
Barbara Stanwyck a lot in Meet John Doe, but her Phyllis Dietrichson is a different creature
altogether--she ought to sprout razor-sharp tentacles every now and again, like those femme
fatale monsters in movies like Species or Splice. And as great as they both are, Edward G. Rob-
inson’s Barton Keyes is a complete original. His whirlwind monologue on all the different ways
one can commit suicide--“suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under wheels
of trains, under wheels of trucks...”--is a masterpiece.

Some of the back-and-forth in Double Indemnity is, like in Sweet Smell Success, somebody’s fe-
vered invention of a whole new language. (When I showed the climactic confrontation between
Neff and Dietrichson to my class last year--yeah, I know, probably not advisable--one of my
students asked, “Why do they talk like that?”) My favourite exchange among many:

“I wonder if I know what you mean?”
“I wonder if you wonder.”

I think Billy Wilder is the third director to place two films on my list, with one more to go.
The Apartment and Sunset Boulevard are famously dark films, but for me, Double Indemnity is
even darker. Like Sunset Boulevard, it’s (almost) narrated by a dead man. The film begins with
you knowing that, yet somehow there’s still this paradoxically awful feeling throughout that
everything will go wrong.


#3: The Godfather I & II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972/74)

Not the first (Jeff had I at #36), and I think I can safely say not the last, either. I didn’t
know whether to use an ampersand or a slash in how I rendered the titles, or whether or not to
include “Parts” in there. If III weren’t such a sodden mess, I’m sure everyone would simply go
the Apu (or ‘50s science-fiction) route and call it The Godfather Trilogy.

Another jersey (or jerseys) that I’ve been trying to retire from my travels as a film-goer. I
saw I in the new Lightbox theatre a few months ago, part of their own 100-greatest rollout to
celebrate their launch, so I feel like I’m finished with that one. They didn’t play II for
some reason; if that should turn up one day at the new place--and that day may never come--
I’ll give that another go too. And that’s it--no more meetings, no more discussions, no more
Sollozzo tricks. As I once wrote somewhere else, the best approximation I can give for how
many times I’ve seen the first two Godfathers is some percentage of my life. TV doesn’t help--
I stumble over them somewhere once or twice a month. I want out, I really do.

I was very interested in Sight & Sound’s decision to combine votes for the two films in their
2002 poll. I assume they’ll do the same next year, but going by some of the pushback I’ve en-
countered in my own discussions on the matter, maybe they’ll back off. As I mentioned in my
Apu comment--and please, chime in on this--I think they made the right decision. The main
argument against combining them, as I understand it, is that you may have people voting for I
who don’t think nearly as highly of II, or vice versa. And in almost any other analogous case,
I’d agree with that; even with the Apu films, there’s a meaningful gap in how much I like the
first compared with the other two. (I cheated by listing them together--there are parts of
the second and third I just wouldn’t want to lose.) You’d have to survey all the people who
cast individual votes for I or II in the Sight & Sound poll to know for sure, but I strongly
suspect that almost everybody who voted only for I loves II almost as much, and that those who
voted the other way, II but not I, are in the same boat. (For a dissenting view, go back to
Jeff's Godfather comment and follow the link to his page.) So I doubt that actual Godfather
voters were bothered by the decision, but I can see where someone who would have preferred to
see something else in the top 10 would be.

I know--I’m shadow-boxing around the films themselves, because 1) I’m invariably going to
repeat stuff I’ve written and said elsewhere, and 2) I assume that everyone else knows them
inside-out too. They’re just such a fact of life by now. I remember last spring being in the
store down the street where I go to buy lunch sometimes, and I made some obscure reference to
The Godfather in a conversation with John and Andrea, the store’s owners. It was an incomplete
allusion, almost a test, and I looked immediately at John (Italian) to see if he could complete
it. Of course he did.

If you watch movies for big themes, the first two Godfathers have them. Like Citizen Kane, and
like one of my two remaining choices, it aspires to say big things about America. It’s not just
my being Canadian that makes we want to sidestep that stuff--as you may have noticed, I’m just
not in general a theme guy when it comes to movies. (Now and again I’ll figure something out
about some film that I think other people have missed, and I’ll feel really pleased with my-
self.) I’ve always been fascinated by the way Michael’s end in II--hunkered down inside his
compound, surrounded by his henchmen, obsessed with destroying not everyone (or so he says) but
“just my enemies”--eerily mirrors the final days of, sorry, the Nixon presidency, which came
about just a few months earlier. But I also realize that both films mostly draw their material
from Puzo’s novel, and also that films take a while to get made--the made-to-order parallel to
Nixon was probably accidental. You could just as easily see Hitler’s last days instead.

So the themes are there for me, even though I don’t dwell on them, and so is Gordon Willis’s
extraordinary cinematography (especially in I), a million little details in the art direction
(you can spot a poster for a Jake LaMotta fight at one point), towering lead performances, and
of course the audacity of Coppola’s direction. Meticulous, deliberate audacity--the audacity
of someone who has total control of every second.

With of all of that, I once again find that the supporting performances in the first two God-
fathers are what have made the most lasting impression on me over the years. If you could map
out a film’s characters in a hierarchy according to screen time--something like the way the
Corleone family is rendered on that chart during the Senate hearing--I and II would have more
unforgettable performances at the sixth, seventh, and eight levels than any film ever made.
The senator who says “No, I’ll allow it” with regards to Michael’s prepared statement--he’s
somewhere down around the seventh level, and I wait for that line every time. The way Johnny
Ola says “Anisette,” Enzo the baker’s touching loyalty (“For your father--for your father”),
the Cuban diplomat who introduces everyone down in Miami...there are just so many of these bit
parts scattered everywhere.

I’ve gone even longer than my usual longwinded entry. Single most memorable screening of my
life: seeing I and II back-to-back in the early ‘80s at the Nostalgic, a ridiculously tiny
upstairs rep theatre (long gone) that seated maybe 60 people. That was the night that did it
for me, and it's another reason why, 30 years later, I want to list the two films together.


#2: Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

Come--come see the child.

When I did a Top 10 for Radio On in the mid-‘90s, this was my #1; same thing on my ballot for
the aforementioned Lightbox poll, and same again for a list or two I posted on the message
board. No special reason why it’s not #1 this time. I guess I just wanted something different
there.

Rosemary’s Baby has something elemental in common with The Godfather and Jaws, albeit on a
smaller scale: it was critically acclaimed (even more now than then), made a ton of money, and
was a cultural phenomenon of sorts. The first time I saw it was around ’73 or ’74 on TV; it
was a “network premiere,” a big deal when they used to do that sort of thing, and I think I
even remember the network--NBC. I managed to Google some online corroboration in the way of a
user comment:

“I also remember how much they hyped the network TV premieres of movies back in the seventies.
It seems like they publicized Rosemary's Baby for weeks before it ran one Saturday night on (I
think) ABC. The commercials were so ubiquitous that CBS countered with one of their own, show-
ing a baby carriage on a mountaintop, just like the Rosemary's Baby logo. Lightning flashed
and thunder roared as the camera moved in to show Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol
Burnett inside the carriage, dressed as babies and shouting ‘Watch us instead!’”

We disagree on the network, but we both remember it as a certified event. (That commercial
sounds great!)

Thirteen or 14 at the time, I watched most of the film through splayed fingers, except for
the ending, where the fingers were no longer splayed. Which is pretty funny when you think
about how comparatively mild Rosemary’s Baby is when placed alongside its progeny, most obvi-
ously The Exorcist. Mild in terms of what you actually see, that is--in terms of mood, it’s
got as much foreboding and dread as anything I can think of. Unless you experience it as a
really good comedy, like Pauline Kael did. It’s what you might call a hybrid.

Let me completely contradict my Godfather comment and point to something thematic that I love
about Rosemary’s Baby. (Maybe I sidestep themes when they’re in plain view, and only like the
ones I invent myself.) In a weird way, Polanski’s film accidentally speaks to what was probably
the most chaotic year of the past half-century better than numerous other films that self-
consciously aspired to something similar. Accidentally, because it would have of course been
filmed in 1967, and also because it’s a film about a bunch of seemingly harmless octogenarians
who keep active by trying to conjure up the living Satan so he can impregnate a mortal woman
and begat a son--it doesn’t directly address the issues of the day. And yet, and yet...it’s also
about something unseen and awful, something beyond comprehension. It’s about betrayal, and
helplessness, and malevolent plots. And, appearing six days after Robert Kennedy’s assassina-
tion, and a couple of months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s--with the Democratic convention
just around the corner, not to mention everything else that was going on around the world--it
has a line that, once again, leaves the film behind: “This is no dream--this is really happen-
ing.” I hear that line as a bookend: there’s the close-up of Janet Leigh’s eye in Psycho at one
end of the shelf, and “This is no dream--this is really happening” at the other.

The first performance that people recall from Rosemary’s Baby is the one that won the Academy
Award, Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castavet. I love her, of course--hearing her bray “The carpet...
the carpet!” is music to my ears. Mia Farrow should have won every award out there. She’s win-
some and beautiful (aside from that Vidal Sassoon monstrosity and all the chalky make-up), and
you’re so much on her side at every point along the way that it’s basically a first-person
narrative. I just finished a John Cassavetes (not to be confused with Roman Castavet) series at
the Lightbox, which included Rosemary’s Baby among all the films he directed himself. I like
him fine here, although I find him a little blander than everyone else. (Not just the charac-
ter--him.) I think the two old British guys, Sidney Blackmer and Maurice Evans, are great,
though. Stanley Kauffmann called Evans “an elocutionary dud” for lines like “Well, we’ll assume 
Dr. Sapirstein knows whereof he speaks,” but I think he’s missing all the magical Bewitched
goodness in such rhetoric.

Polanski’s direction needs a book, not a comment. If I had to pick a favourite moment, I’d
probably go with the way the camera glides up and away from Cassavetes and Farrow the first
time they hear the chanting through the wall. Or the entire impregnation sequence, a disturbing
and masterful assemblage of dreamlike fragments. Or Laura-Louise sticking out her tongue right
near the end--it really is a great comedy.

Quiz: which three actors (to the best of my knowledge--I may have overlooked someone) appear
twice in my top 10? One of them is Sarah Palin entry-level easy. The second is more difficult,
but it’s not like he’s hard to spot in either film. The third, the one that pertains to Rose-
mary’s Baby, well, if you don’t know the answer already, don’t waste a minute of your time
trying to figure it out. You won’t.

No clips on YouTube (none that are English, anyway), but there are three different trailers.
I’ve linked to what seems to be the very first. It has less actual footage than the other two--
much less than the one that obviously went out with a reissue, taking note of Gordon’s Academy
Award--but it’s the weirdest one, and most effectively captures the mood of the film, I think.


#1: Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

In case you were asleep at the wheel (or, perhaps, tending to your life), Jeff and I gave this
away this morning.

Odd place to begin: unlike many of the films I’ve listed--more than half, I’d say--I don’t re-
member the first time I saw Nashville. I dimly remember that it was indeed in a theatre, but
there’s part of me that thinks it would have been a strange film for a 14- or 15-year-old to
be seeing first-run. Yet that must have been the case; I doubt that it would have showed up on
network TV until the end of the decade, and I’m positive I thought of it as being among my
favourite films as I began university in ’79 (underscored by the fact that I wrote about The
Long Goodbye later that first year).

About 15 years ago, Scott had someone interview David Edelstein for rockcritics.com., after
Edelstein (who I think is excellent) had just written a piece in GQ or somewhere about how he
didn’t think Nashville had held up that well. I started to write a long response, kept getting
hopelessly bogged down as I tried to refute the objections he raised, and when I finally got
about three thousand words (of mostly preamble, I remember) into it, my old Mac conked out.
The disk where I had the piece couldn’t be converted, and it ended up being the only big piece
of writing I’ve ever lost. To help me avoid the same fate, let me take the easy way out and
compile a list, like Jeff did for one of his picks. Nashville is like a perfect storm of so
many things that I’ve been fixated on throughout this countdown:

1) The ‘70s. Go back to early in the countdown where we tried to place films like Bonnie and
Clyde and Close Encounters on a timeline of “New American Cinema.” Well, Nashville is the mid-
dle of the middle. I think it’s fair to say that for a lot of people who consider the ‘70s the
greatest decade ever for American film, Nashville is the exact midpoint of a line that stretches
from Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate--maybe not the literal apex of that line, but squarely
in the middle chronologically and, at the very worst, pretty close artistically. (Maybe I need
to diagram that out...See what I mean about getting bogged down?)

2) Nixon. Yes, it’s another Nixon film, another one where he’s hovering there invisibly the
whole way. When Carradine contemptuously says, “Kill anyone today, Sarge?” that’s a Nixon mo-
ment through and through; when the Tennessee Twirlers meet Barbara Jean at the airport, that’s
Nixon too. Haven Hamilton’s Nixon (“his eyes flashing with paranoid gleam as he keeps the audi-
ence under surveillance”--yes, I’ve got Kael close by my side), Allen Garfield’s slobbishness
and Ned Beatty’s hapless everyman always make me think of Nixon, and Hal Philip Walker is Nixon
in that he just blathers on and on, and probably even accidentally makes sense now and again.
Finally, the film’s it-don’t-worry-me conclusion is such a perfect punch line to the Nixon pres-
idency in a dozen mysterious ways that I don’t think I’ve ever even tried to clarify in my mind
why I think that. And I won’t make the attempt here.

3) Kael. Her pre-emptive review of Nashville is her signature piece--more even than her reviews
of Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango, the Godfathers, The Sound of Music, Shoah, or anything else
that invariably gets mentioned whenever she’s under discussion. To go along with my favourite
movie, that’s my favourite movie review ever. I can’t think of another instance where a film
critic was so hard-wired to the moment, to the director, and to the film. Nashville and Kael
are inseparable for me.

4) Supporting performances. I’ve probably talked more about supporting players than leads dur-
ing this countdown, and Nashville is comprised of nothing but--in a way, the term has no
meaning here. Only Tomlin and Blakley were nominated--vote-splitting is the only explanation
for how Lee Grant managed to win for Shampoo--but I’m ready to hand out another seven or eight
right here, starting with Henry Gibson. I don’t know that there’s a single performer from among
Nashville’s ensemble of 24 who I don’t enjoy when they’re on screen...I don’t even mind Shelly
Duvall. I even look forward to some of the really small parts that support the ensemble. The
Smokey Mountain Laurels, the bartender at the Demon’s Den, the guy at the lunch counter who
engages Keenan Wynn, Frog, I love them all.

5) Music. If there’s a main complaint about Nashville, one I’ve addressed before, it’s that
Altman has contempt for country music, or, at the very least, condescends insufferably to it.
I think there was a time when I would argue that point, but now I’d just say yeah, probably--
some condescension for sure. It still doesn’t bother me, though, for the simple reason that I
like most of the songs too much. I can think of one case where I read someone who loved the
film but thought some of the songs were horrible. I don’t know--a couple, sure (discounting
Gwen Welles’ stuff), but there’s so much music throughout, I think you’ve got to like a decent
percentage of it as music to really love the film. My favourites: “Dues” (of course), “Since
You’ve Gone,” “Trouble in the U.S.A.,” “Memphis,” and “It Don’t Worry Me.” And, in context,
I’d add “I’m Easy.”

See if I can keep this to 1,000 words. The whole film’s on YouTube, and anyone who chooses to
watch it that way for the first time will disappoint me greatly. Ned Beatty joins Brando,
Balsam, and Curtis in making his second appearance in my top 10; newscaster Howard K. Smith has
the unusual distinction of playing himself for the second time in my top 20. I’ll link to the
same clip I used for the song countdown. I bet I’ve said this at least a dozen times already,
but now I’m telling the truth: my favourite scene ever.

Thanks to everyone who read along, and to Steven and Jeff for signing up. Before we started, I
told them some lie about why it would be helpful to me to post Wednesdays and Saturdays. In
actual fact, I just wanted to make sure I was in a position to do this:

End of countdown.

End of cinema.



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