...well, now we stop. Sorry: I just haven't seen enough exceptional movies from 1923 to fill a top 10 list. For the record, my favorite film of 1923 is Safety Last! and my favorite from 1913 is the opening chapters of Fantômas. (That isn't a putdown of the later chapters—it's just that they didn't come out until 1914.) Hang tight til December; we'll start on the 4 years then.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1933, it gave its Best Picture award to Cavalcade, which isn't nearly as good as a film based on a Noel Coward play ought to be. Aside from a couple of montages and the song "20th Century Blues," the thing is a study in tedium. These are all better:
1. Duck Soup
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby with Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
A cinéma vérité documentary filmed at the White House during the invasion of Iraq.
2. Zero for Conduct
Written and directed by Jean Vigo
Anarchy in the schoolhouse.
3. Snow-White
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Comparing this to the Disney movie is like comparing an R. Crumb comic to Richie Rich.
4. Land Without Bread
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel, Rafael Sánchez Ventura, and Pierre Unik
The first great mockumentary.
5. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
Directed by Lewis Milestone
Written by S.N. Behrman, from a story by Ben Hecht
When Harry Langdon and Al Jolson have their rhyming debate in the park, it's the closest an old-school Hollywood musical ever comes to being Marat/Sade.
6. I'm No Angel
Directed by Wesley Ruggles
Written by Mae West
"I see a man in your life." "What? Only one?"
7. Design for Living
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Ben Hecht, from a play by Noel Coward
"A man can meet two, three, or four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of interesting elimination, he is able to decide which he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice."
8. Outskirts
Directed by Boris Barnet
Written by Barnet and Konstantin Finn
Like Dovzhenko's best work, this is part naturalistic, part surrealistic, and part slapstick, sometimes tragic and sometimes comic, while never venturing anywhere near the dogmas of Socialist Realism. Despite the inevitable Bolshevik bits in the final 10 minutes, the politics feel more anarcho-pacifist than Stalinist. It's amazing that someone in the Soviet Union managed to make this as late as 1933.
9. Alice in Wonderland
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod
Written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and William Cameron Menzies, from two novels by Lewis Carroll
There was at least one genius involved with creating this film, and that was whoever got the idea to cast W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.
10. International House
Directed by A. Edward Sutherland
Written by Neil Brant
Fields is in this one too—and so are Cab Calloway, and Bela Lugosi, and Burns and Allen, and Rudy Vallee, and Col. Stoopnagle, and...
Honorable mentions:
11. 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley)
12. Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy)
13. Baby Face (Alfred E. Green)
14. Lot in Sodom (James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber)
15. Is My Palm Read (Dave Fleischer)
16. The Wizard of Oz (Ted Eshbaugh)
17. The Mad Doctor (David Hand)
18. Three Little Pigs (Burt Gillett)
19. The Sin of Nora Moran (Phil Goldstone)
20. The Fatal Glass of Beer (Clyde Bruckman)
Of the films of 1933 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Power and the Glory.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1943, it gave its Best Picture award to Casablanca—a great movie but a peculiar choice, since it actually debuted in 1942. Yes, I put it in my top 10 list for that year. No, I won't repeat it in this one.
1. Shadow of a Doubt
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, from a story by Gordon McDonell
Few film experiences are as enjoyably odd as watching Thornton Wilder's sensibility collide with Hitchcock's. Wilder's screenplay is an ode to conformity, and Hitch's picture drily undercuts the script at every turn.
2. Meshes of the Afternoon
Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid
Written by Deren
The most contemporary-feeling entry on this list: It's easy to imagine a giffable fragment of the film flickering in a tweet, a Facebook status, or an Instagram story, lending its uncanniness to an internet that itself feels awfully uncanny already.
3. Le Corbeau
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Written by Clouzot and Louis Chavance, from a story by Chavance
The Resistance denounced this Vichy-era story of small-town paranoia as an attack on the French people, but in retrospect it looks more like a critique of the culture of collaboration.
4. Red Hot Riding Hood
Written and directed by Tex Avery
The Male Gaze: A Comedy.
5. Ossessione
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Written by Visconti, Mario Alicata, Giuseppe De Santis, and Gianni Puccinim, from a novel by James M. Cain
The first and best of the pictures based on The Postman Always Rings Twice.
6. The Ox-Bow Incident
Directed by William A. Wellman
Written by Lamar Trotti, from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Ideologically I have mixed feelings about this noir western: I like its defense of due process, but I don't care for the implication—common in pictures from this period—that lynching was just a matter of mobs' passions getting out of control, rather than something a power structure did to keep people in line. Cinematically, on the other hand, this is practically perfect.
7. I Walked with a Zombie
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, from a novel by Charlotte Brontë
Long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this movie gave us Jane Eyre and Zombies.
8. Five Graves to Cairo
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Charles Brackett, from a play by Lajos Bíró
Like I said, Casablanca isn't on this list. But this sure feels a lot like Casablanca.
9. Day of Wrath
Directed by Carl Dreyer
Written by Dreyer, Poul Knudsen, and Mogens Skot-Hansen, from a play by Hans Wiers-Jenssen
This tale of a witch hunt would make an interesting triple bill with Ox-Bow and Le Corbeau.
10. The Eternal Return
Directed by Jean Delannoy
Written by Jean Cocteau
A fairy-tale romance. Remember, real fairy tales are cruel and weird.
Honorable mentions:
11. Tortoise Wins by a Hare (Bob Clampett)
12. Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, Orson Welles)
13. Lumière D'Été (Jean Grémillon)
14. Dumb-Hounded (Tex Avery)
15. Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone)
16. The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
17. The Fallen Sparrow (Richard Wallace)
18. Tin Pan Alley Cats (Bob Clampett)
19. Falling Hare (Bob Clampett)
20. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (Bob Clampett)
I'll spare you the trouble of counting: 6 of those 20 films are cartoon shorts, all from either Tex Avery or Bob Clampett. I've said before that if I allowed individual TV episodes onto these lists, there are years in the '90s that would be overwhelmed by installments of The Simpsons. I suppose this is the equivalent for World War II.
Of the films of 1943 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Phantom Baron.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1953, it gave its Best Picture award to From Here to Eternity. I like that one, but I like these better:
1. Glen or Glenda
Written and directed by Ed Wood
It draws heavily on found footage, espouses radical sexual politics, and refuses to obey any genre constraints. It jumps merrily from B-movie drama to mock educational film to surreal dream imagery. Unlike all those "socially conscious" liberal studio movies of the '50s, it actually challenges the consensus of its day, sometimes with arguments that adopt the era's assumptions and sometimes in ways far removed from the mainstream. And it casts the guy who played Dracula as God. Isn't it time we recognized this picture as a landmark underground film, as daring and unconventional as anything by Brakhage, Deren, or Conner?
2. Duck Amuck
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
Bugs and Daffy never had much use for the fourth wall to begin with, but in this short they pretty much obliterate it.
3. The Naked Spur
Written and directed by Anthony Mann
There's an intense psychological thriller lurking beneath this cowboy-movie setting, with James Stewart in one of his most complex and morally ambiguous roles.
4. Tokyo Story
Directed by Yasujirō Ozu
Written by Ozu and Kôgo Noda
Self-absorbed adults grow emotionally estranged from their parents. Quiet but devastating.
5. Eaux d'Artifice
Written and directed by Kenneth Anger
Not much happens in this film—there's a woman walking in a garden, and there's water, and there's the color blue, and there's a burst of a different color. As far as I'm concerned, it's Anger's masterpiece.
6. Ugetsu Monogatari
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Matsutarô Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, from stories by Akinari Ueda
A samurai movie about potters, not a potted movie about samurais.
7. El
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, from a novel by Mercedes Pinto
Sometimes I think Buñuel was never better than when he was helming Mexican potboilers. He certainly had a knack for transforming them into something strange.
8. Niagara
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard L. Breen
A Hitchcockian nightmare about death and marriage.
9. Stalag 17
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Edwin Blum, from a play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski
I could do without some of the supporting cast, but it's still the funniest movie ever set in a wartime prison camp.
10. Summer with Monika
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Written by Bergman, from a novel by Per Anders Fogelström
According to Eric Schaefer's Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, an abridged version of this movie—dubbed into American English, rescored by Les Baxter, and with marketing materials that played up the picture's nude scene—lit up the exploitation circuit while the full film was being screened in arthouses. I like to imagine that somewhere it landed on a double bill with Glen or Glenda.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot)
12. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang)
13. Pickup on South Street (Sam Fuller)
14. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli)
15. Little Fugitive (Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin)
16. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks)
17. Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati)
18. Daybreak Express (D.A. Pennebaker)
19. The Tell-Tale Heart (Ted Parmelee)
20. Eneri (Hy Hirsh)
Great unsung performance: Richard Boone in Vicki.
Worst narration: Apparently, Anatahan was Jim Morrison's favorite movie. Does that mean we can blame Morrison's habit of reciting bad poetry over Ray Manzarek's sometimes-sublime keyboards on Josef von Sternberg's decision to recite his monotonic narration over his own sometimes-sublime photography? Probably not, but of everything wrong with Anatahan—and there is a lot wrong with it—surely the narration tops the list.
Of the films of 1953 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Roman Holiday.