The Hinauslehnen Hundred

by David Benjamin 

“Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.” 

― Pauline Kael

MADISON, Wis.—My favorite movie maven, Nick Hinauslehnen, who publishes a film periodical called Flashback, poses an annual question for readers. This year, he asks, “What movies that we’ve watched during our lifetimes do you think future movie watchers will be looking at?”

In sum, which films of the past century will survive another hundred years?

Having had my fancy tickled, I tackled Nick’s issue feverishly. I had scribbled a list of a hundred films, directors and actors before yanking the reins and stopping the Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). It’s impossible, I realized, for anyone who has even an acquaintance with film history to either a) assemble a coherent list of worthy or merely “favorite” flicks, or b) one-up the American Film Institute’s magisterial but controversial Hundred Best list.

The AFI list, of course, includes most of my personal “absolutes,” starting with Modern Times (#79) and Citizen Kane (#1). I approve of Singin’ the Rain (#5), Casablanca (#3) and The Searchers (#12). But where the hell are Cool Hand Luke, Young Frankenstein, A Thousand Clowns and Roman Holiday?

Nick’s question spotlights an important point. As time goes by, Sam, we will see more clearly that film has become an allusive staple of 21st-century culture. During my school years, movie references were relatively new to a space where Biblical and classical allusions, as well as citations from Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and the Brownings, Dickens, Twain, Jane Austen, the Eliots (George and T.S.), Henry James, Faulker and Fitzgerald, etcetera, were the hallmark of sophisticated prose, poetry, plays, doctoral theses and—yeah!—movies. 

As of today, we’ve loaded more than a century’s worth of film into our canon. Writers and commentators now rely on characters, scenes and lines from film to evoke audience engagement. While references to Prometheus, Sisyphus, Solomon, Job, yon Cassius and Thomas Hardy might not entirely slip from the intellectual vernacular, they’re being ungently elbowed sideways by allusions to Vader, Khan, Skywalker and Spock, to Gilda, Annie Hall and Barbie, to Brando, De Niro, Pacino and De Caprio, to Spike, Woody, Zemeckis and Lina Wertmuller. 

As all this movie lore floods our senses, Nick Hinauslehnen’s question seems too broad to compass, which is why I chose to nominate no individual films. I decided, rather, to consider a few directors, one actor and a franchise whose influence, I fear, might be overlooked or misconstrued after another century’s accumulation of film, TV movies, live-streaming and videocasts, most of which—in Pauline Kael’s admonition—is gonna be trash.

For instance, I’ve already mentioned John Ford, whose place in the AFI 100 is rightfully occupied by The Searchers (John Wayne’s second best performance). But Wayne’s best work was in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (no, not True Grit), which also featured Ford’s cinematic forté, black and white film. Few directors demanded so much on so grand a scale, from a B&W cinematographer, as did John Ford. If you’re unconvinced, go back and take a closer look at Fort Apache or, better yet, Henry Fonda and Walter Brennan locking horns at the OK Corral in My Darling Clementine. Frame, contrast, and clarity in Ford black and white is paralleled only by Jacques Tourneur and by the early films of Billy Wilder.

Barry Levinson is a director whose body of work, starting with Diner—which introduced seven (7!) new stars to the Hollywood firmament, Steve Guttenberg. Mickey Rourke, Daniel Stern, Tim Daly, Paul Reiser, Ellen Barkin and Kevin Bacon—deserves more recognition than it will ever get. Levinson made the best political movie, Wag the Dog, ever filmed. Among other screen gems Levinson crafted are Good Morning, Vietnam, The Natural and Tootsie. The last of these contains one of my favorite movie rants, delivered by Dustin Hoffman.

“Nobody does vegetables like me. I did an evening of vegetables off-Broadway. I did the best tomato, the best cucumber. I did an endive salad that knocked the critics on their ass.”

You can’t talk movie history any more without talking Steven Spielberg, possibly our greatest mass-market moviemaker. Spielberg will be studied in film courses for groundbreaking flicks like Jaws and vivid glimpses into history—Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, The Post. With the breakneck pace of Raiders of the Lost Ark, he awakened filmgoers from the talky, grainy, pretentious Seventies. Oddly though, the Spielbergs I keep going back to watch again are his less epic, more charming movies: Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal.

Which brings me around to Tom Hanks. Few actors of any era have made us believe as many vastly different characters as this guy, who started out as a cross-dressing TV sitcom idiot in “Bosom Buddies” and whose first hit was playing second banana to Darryl Hannah in Splash. Like the tireless Gene Hackman, Hanks rejected few scripts and proved adept at comedy (Big, The Burbs), at dogs (Turner and Hooch), and eventually at drama (Philadelphia, Saving Private Ryan, Charlie Wilson’s War, Bridge of Spies, A Man Called Otto) that demanded depth, empathy and subtlety beyond many actors’ range. Some night, as Hanks receives one of those “life achievement” Oscars, the TV audience will be awestruck by the energy and eclecticism of the busiest actor since, well, Hackman.

Frank Capra has been rightly honored in the AFI 100 for It’s A Wonderful Life (#11), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (#29) and It Happened One Night (#35). But I have two quibbles. The first is that Capra’s best movie was none of these. In 1938, he made You Can’t Take It With You, with Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Stewart, Jean Arthur, Spring Byington, Edward Arnold, Ann Miller, Dub Taylor, Mischa Auer, Ward Bond, Ann Doran and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. This was an incomparable comedy ensemble bringing to life a glorious script by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. You really ought to see it!

And while we’re on the subject, if It Happened One Night deserves the Top 100, why not something—anything—by Preston Sturges, preferably Eddie Bracken in Hail, the Conquering Hero?

Okay, I love Hitchcock, and I’m glad the AFI gave him four spots in its Hundred. But I would prefer that they replace the overwrought and strangely boring Vertigo with the first espionage comedy ever conceived. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) teamed Robert Donat with the luminous Madeleine Carroll, who’s as sexy (and prickly) as any actress was allowed to be in those days.

I have to mention Stanley Kubrick, who has become a cult figure for making, I guess, the first religious outer-space flick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I quietly deplore while cherishing its best line: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Better we should honor Kubrick for Paths of Glory (1957), perhaps the most heart-wrenching war film ever made and, of course, Dr. Strangelove (1964), co-written by the ill-appreciated Terry Southern.

I think future film students will be both fascinated and troubled by the so-far deathless James Bond franchise, which—best of all—gave us Sean Connery, who was somehow equally seductive to teenage boys and grown women. Until recent revisions, Bond flicks were sexist, ahistorical, technologically preposterous and hopelessly British. But they were also snapshots of popular culture—its twists, turns, trends and follies—throughout the back half of the 20th century.

Finally, the matter of Peckinpah. The Wild Bunch made AFI’s 100. But Ride the High Country—in which Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott schooled Newman and Redford on how to be Butch and Sundance, was Sam’s only great movie.