The Library of Congress has announced its annual selections of the twenty-five films chosen to be added to those included in the National Film Registry, on the basis of their "cultural, historic, or aesthetic significance." (They've been doing this for nineteen years now; this year's inductees bring the total up to a neat 500.) As usual, the list features a number of Hollywood classics, including John Huston's caper film The Asphalt Jungle (1950); John Boorman's modern Southern Gothic Deliverance (1972); Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, one of the earliest indictments of the potential rabble-rousing power of television; Erich Von Stroheim's silent feature Foolish Wives (1922); King Vidor's 1929 Hallelujah, an early sound musical with an all-black cast, and the 1961 Broadway musical adaptation Flower Drum Song, an early break away from the tradition of casting Caucasian performers in Asian roles; James Whale's Universal horror classic The Invisible Man (1933), starring the voice of Claude Rains; Nicholas Ray's febrile Western Johnny Guitar (1954); the 1957 On the Bowery, an attempt to fuse documentary locations and non-professional actors in a story of skid row alcoholics; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), an adventure film featuring some of the best work of the special effects master Ray Harryhausen; and the obscure sci-fi B-movie,The Terminator (1984). There are also films that document moments in the careers of legendary performers, such as the 1926 W. C. Fields short So's Your Old Man and the early Buster Keaton two-reeler One Week, and such historical curios as Disneyland Dream (1956), a color home movie of a family trip to Disneyland that provides "a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956"; three year's worth of documentary footage that George Stevens shot during World War II; and a film directed by the late James Blue for the United States Information Agency documenting the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Also included are experiemental and student films such as Len Lye's "scratch" film Free Radicals (1979), Mitchell Block's 1973 No Lies, and Pat O'Neill's "city symphont", Water and Power, which dates from 1989--the first year that the National Registry began to make its selections.
The full list is as follows:
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