Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever!

7. THE LADY EVE (1941)



Veronica Geng: "The American filmmaker Preston Sturges had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is... In [his films], politics is rigged, poverty is immune to charity, bosses are petty dictators and workers live on dreams of jackpots, romantic love is either a luxury of the rich or a fabrication of the con artist, and small-town America's morality is the kind that ostracizes an unwed pregnant girl while embracing a bogus war hero. Yet these movies sent waves of euphoria rolling through the audience." That's one way of putting it. Here's another: Once upon a time, in a place called Hollywood, there lived a great man who one day decided that, if he had anything to say about it, the world would never forget William Demarest.

8. Double feature: JULES AND JIM (1962) & BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)



The intellectual wild men of the French New Wave, in revolt against their country's "tradition of quality" and taking sustenance from the grungier products of the Hollywood dream factory, took their cameras to the streets and proved that, so long as they were left alone to get their movies made as best they could, the improvisational high spirits and smarts and humor and excitement and heady romance of their finest work would remain ever fresh. Then, after a few masterpieces, one of these directors settled down and practically turned into a one-man Tradition of Quality, while the other dependably went him own way, albeit with a destination pass that was frequently stamped "CRAZYTOWN." The fact that it all somehow resulted in an American movie culture where a movie starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis made for eight and a half million dollars could count as a triumph for independent filmmaking is actually one of pop culture history's better jokes.

9. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)



Apocalypse now, and then some.

10. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)



By the time Buster Keaton hit Hollywood, he had been performing in vaudeville since he was three, the son of comics who incorporated him into their act. No man has, by his very example, provided a more stirring argument against the child labor laws. Keaton was a simple sort of man for a great artist: he just happened to be someone who, by the time he grew to adulthood, had mastered every skill that might be helpful to the creation of physical comedy and then, having taught himself the mechanics of filmmaking, turned out to have as strong an eye as anyone who's ever lived at staging physical comedy for maximum effectiveness on camera. It is dizzying to imagine what he might have achieved--on top of what he did achieve, which make no mistake about it, was a titanic body of work--if there had been no studio to get in his way.

11. Double feature: CITIZEN KANE (1941) & CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1967)



People call Citizen Kane, the debut film that Orson Welles directed when he was 25, a young man's movie, and it is, though in a way that not everybody may fully appreciate. It is an exercise in high-spirited flamboyance, but it is also, crucially, a movie made by a man who doesn't care about burning his bridges behind him, a self-styled "man of the theater" who, as a lark and a fund-raising expedition, decided to take a movie studio up on its offer of "creative control" and make one of those talking picture dealies, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that he'd generate a lot of publicity and a wad of cash that he could then plow into the stage career that he did care about. It is a movie made by a man who thought he'd be spending his life and doing his real work elsewhere, and so whose attitude towards the faded press baron whose face he was dunking in mud, and the scaredy-cat old studio heads who so dreaded what the press baron might still be able to do to them that they tried to pool their resources to buy and burn the film, was: Bring it on. Chimes at Midnight, made a little more than 25 years and many, many lifetimes later, is a movie made by a man who, in the course of burning those bridges, fell so completely in love with the medium that he would do anything to make another one, patching a film together with whatever spindly resources he could pull together. Strange as it may be that the cocky young bastard and the inspired old wizard were the same guy, we were lucky to have ever had either one.

12. Double feature: ERASERHEAD (1977) & BLUE VELVET (1986)



David Lynch arrived just as the American moviemaking renaissance of the 1970s was winding down, with a $20,000 movie that he'd been working on, off and on, over the course of some five years and that looked as if he'd been quietly reinventing moviemaking, starting with the period of silent experimental film and moving on from there, in blissful innocence of anything else going on in the world. Almost a decade later, everybody's favorite homegrown Surrealist achieved his apotheosis with a movie that was released at a time when indie filmmakers were asking to be congratulated on keeping things safely small and lo-fi and film geeks were catching up on what had come before through the miracle of VCRs hooked to small screens, and served notice that some dreams demand to be appreciated on the biggest screens available, with Dennis Hopper's heavy breathing tickling your ear in Dolby while the lushest nightmare on record unfolded before your eyes. Nowadays, David checks in from time to time via his website, and has responded to the digital information age with Inland Empire, which loses nothing when viewed as a YouTube video, and in fact practically demands to be seen that way. Time for somebody else to step up.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Phil Nugent