Welcome to 1922. We are in the pre-Oscar era now, so I can't start this my usual way by telling you what won Best Picture. I can say that the top-grossing movie in America this year is Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood—yes, the official title includes the star's name. I have never seen it. But I have seen these:
1. Salomé
Directed by Charles Bryant and Alla Nazimova
Written by Nazimova and Natacha Rambova, from a play by Oscar Wilde
Feels more like Kenneth Anger than Oscar Wilde.
2. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
Directed by F.W. Murnau
Written by Henrik Galeen, from a novel by Bram Stoker
Dracula, but less suave and more goblinny.
3. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, Part 2—Inferno: A Game for the People of Our Age
Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Lang and Thea von Harbou, from a novel by Norbert Jacques
Tired of superhero movies? Here's a vintage supervillain movie.
4. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, Part 1—The Great Gambler: A Picture of the Time
Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Lang and Thea von Harbou, from a novel by Norbert Jacques
It's good that part two is ranked higher. That means the story keeps getting better.
5. Cops
Written and directed by Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline
Buster has a run-in with the LAPD—and I mean all of the LAPD.
6. The Blacksmith
Written and directed by Buster Keaton and Malcolm St. Clair
Yes, it's Buster Keaton again. He was having a good year.
7. Grandma's Boy
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer
Written by Hal Roach, Sam Taylor, Jean Havez, and H.M. Walker
Harold Lloyd was also having a good year.
8. Pay Day
Written and directed by Charles Chaplin
Even Charlie Chaplin was having a pretty good year. I'm not a huge Chaplin fan, but none of my usual complaints about him apply to Pay Day: This is fast-paced, funny, and unsentimental—head-and-shoulders better than anything else the man did before Modern Times.
9. Jumping Beans
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Written by Max Fleischer
A 12-minute tale of space travel and cloning, with allusions along the way to Gulliver's Travels and Jack and the Beanstalk.
10. Witchcraft Through the Ages
Written and directed by Benjamin Christensen
If you don't mind mixing a little 1968 into your 1922, look for the version narrated by William Burroughs.
I haven't got a full list of 10 honorable mentions this time, but I'll give a shoutout to Walther Ruttmann's experimental advertisement Der Sieger. Here we are, barely past World War I, and already ads are absorbing the avant garde—or is it the other way around?
Of the films of 1922 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Phantom.
I have not watched enough movies from 1912, let alone enough good movies from 1912, to do another top 10 after this one. So this post is where this year's list-fest ends. For the record, my favorite movie of 1912 is Wladyslaw Starewicz's The Cameraman's Revenge. My favorite movie of 1902 is Georges Méliès' La Voyage Dans la Lune. My favorite movie of 1892 is Charles-Émile Reynaud's Pauvre Pierrot. And my favorite movie of 1882—if movie is the right word for it—is Eadweard Muybridge's The Kiss. If you have a brilliant fantascope disc from 1872 to recommend, drop me a line.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1932, it gave its Best Picture award to Grand Hotel, a movie that spawned a thousand imitators (including just about every well-known disaster movie and, indirectly, the whole hyperlink cinema genre). It is, alas, a mixed bag itself. These are all better:
1. Vampyr
Directed by Carl Dreyer
Written by Dreyer and Christen Jul, from stories by Sheridan Le Fanu
Forget Dracula: This is the best vampire movie I've ever seen.
2. Island of Lost Souls
Directed by Erle C. Kenton
Written by Philip Wylie and Waldemar Young, from a novel by H.G. Wells
A mad pre-Code picture based on H.G. Wells' best book, starring Bela Lugosi and the great Charles Laughton.
3. Ivan
Written and directed by Alexander Dovzhenko
Suppose you're a brilliant Ukrainian director working in Stalin's Soviet Union. Your last film upset the art commissars, and you've been assigned to put together a propaganda picture about the building of the Dneiper Dam. And then you turn in this crazy masterpiece. You, sir, have brass balls.
4. Freaks
Directed by Tod Browning
Written by Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Al Boasberg, Charles MacArthur, and Edgar Allan Woolf, from a story by Tod Robbins
Keep forgetting Dracula: This is Browning's greatest film. Even its flaws work in its favor: Stiff acting usually drives me crazy, but here it actually adds to the movie's mysterious aura, perhaps because it reminds us that these folks aren't actors in weird get-ups but honest-to-god circus freaks.
5. Love Me Tonight
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian
Written by Samuel Hoffenstein, George Marion Jr., and Waldemar Young
As good as a Maurice Chevalier movie gets.
6. Horse Feathers
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod
Written by S.J. Perelman, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and Will B. Johnstone
"You've got the brain of a four-year old child, and I bet he was glad to get rid of it."
7. Boudu Saved from Drowning
Directed by Jean Renoir
Written by Renoir and Albert Valentin, from a play by René Fauchois
The anti–My Man Godfrey.
8. Trouble in Paradise
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Samson Raphaelson and Grover Jones
To see the range of what filmmakers could get away with in the pre-Code era, watch this cheerfully amoral romantic comedy back to back with Freaks.
9. Million Dollar Legs
Directed by Edward F. Cline
Written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Henry Myers, Nicholas T. Barrows, and Ben Hecht
"What a marvelous country. Say, I'll bet you if they laid all the athletes end to end here, why they'd reach—" "484 miles." "How do you know?" "We did it once."
10. Blood of a Poet
Written and directed by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau denied that this was a surrealist film, but that's absurd. It is clearly a surrealist film. Maybe not as surrealist as the Betty Boop cartoons down in the honorable mentions, but surreal enough.
Honorable mentions:
11. Betty Boop, M.D. (Dave Fleischer)
12. Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg)
13. American Madness (Frank Capra)
14. Betty Boop for President (Dave Fleischer)
15. One Hour with You (Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor)
16. Minnie the Moocher (Dave Fleischer)
17. Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway)
18. Night at the Crossroads (Jean Renoir)
19. Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey)
20. The Idea (Berthold Bartosch)
WHAT'S THAT, WALKER? you ask. YOU HAVE ROOM FOR THREE GODDAMN BETTY BOOP CARTOONS BUT YOU DON'T MENTION SCARFACE, THE SHAME OF A NATION? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Look, I like Scarface, but it's an uneven movie. Now obviously I can forgive a certain unevenness if the high points are high enough: I listed Murders in the Rue Morgue, after all, and in the case of Freaks I pretty much counted the film's flaws as virtues. But with Scarface, I can't get past that awful crime-doesn't-pay lecture that the studio insisted on inserting into the movie.
Yes, I let in Ivan, and it's full of propaganda for a totalitarian regime—quite a bit worse, morally speaking, than telling viewers not to be gangsters. But Dovzhenko played off the material that he was forced to include, made it part of his art, and subverted it. Howard Hawks just walked off the set for a while, let another director shoot the scene, and shoved the ungainly thing in. So the film falls off the list. If you want to imagine that it's at #21, I can live with that.
Of the films of 1932 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in I Was Born, But...
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1942, it gave its Best Picture award to Mrs. Miniver. I don't like that one. I do like these:
1. Cat People
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by DeWitt Bodeen, from a story by Val Lewton
The first and arguably greatest of the Val Lewton horror cycle.
2. The Magnificent Ambersons
Directed by Orson Welles
Written by Welles, from a novel by Booth Tarkington
You can tell when the studio's excisions begin, because a perfect picture suddenly becomes a choppy mess. If the director's cut ever surfaces, this movie will almost certainly rise to the #1 spot.
3. The Talk of the Town
Directed by George Stevens
Written by Irwin Shaw, Sidney Buchman, and Dale Van Every, from a story by Sidney Harmon
"What is the law? It's a gun pointed at somebody's head. All depends upon which end of the gun you stand, whether the law is just or not."
4. Casablanca
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, from a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Whenever I see the beginning of this movie, I tell myself This isn't as good as I remember. By the time I get to the end, I say Oh, right. It is.
5. The Man Who Came to Dinner
Directed by William Keighley
Written by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, from a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
"I became a nurse because all my life, ever since I was a little girl, I was filled with the idea of serving a suffering humanity. After one month with you, Mr. Whiteside, I am going to work in a munitions factory."
6. The Palm Beach Story
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
"Sex always has something to do with it, dear."
7. The Major and the Minor
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Charles Brackett, from a play by Edward Childs Carpenter
"Those innocent little panzer divisions in sheep's clothing."
8. La Nuit Fantastique
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier
Written by Louis Chavance and Maurice Henry
A surrealist romance.
9. To Be or Not to Be
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Edwin Justus Mayer, from a story by Melchior Lengyel
Hey, Chaplin: This is how you do an anti-Nazi comedy.
10. The Male Animal
Directed by Elliott Nugent
Written by Stephen Morehouse Avery, Julius J. Epstein, and Philip G. Epstein, from a play by James Thurber and Elliott Nugent
The most political jocks-vs.-nerds movie ever made.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Road to Morocco (David Butler)
12. The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (Henri-Georges Clouzot)
13. Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy)
14. This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle)
15. Holiday Inn (Mark Sandrich)
16. Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti)
17. The Early Bird Dood It (Tex Avery)
18. The Hare-Brained Hypnotist (Friz Freleng)
19. Symphony Hour (Riley Thomson)
20. Headlights in the Fog (Gianni Franciolini)
Of the films of 1942 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in O Pátio das Cantigas.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1952, it gave its Best Picture award to The Greatest Show on Earth. That one is a ludicrous, bloated spectacle, and the conventional wisdom these days is to dismiss it, but I have to confess I kind of like it. Still, there never was a chance that it would make it onto my list.
1. Ikiru
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni
This would make an interesting double feature with It's a Wonderful Life.
2. The Tragedy of Othello, a Moor of Venice
Directed by Orson Welles
Written by Welles, from a play by William Shakespeare
My favorite Shakespeare movie. Or, at least, my favorite that isn't a loose adaptation set in Japan.
3. Singin' in the Rain
Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
This might have made it to the #1 spot but for Donald O'Connor, who wears out his welcome awfully quickly.
4. Viva Zapata!
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by John Steinbeck
"Now I know you. No fields, no home. No wife, no woman. No friends, no love. You'll only destroy. That is your love."
5. The Lusty Men
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by David Dortort and Horace McCoy, from a novel by Claude Stanush
The title makes it sound like it's a gay thing, but that's not what it's about at all. It's about a man and a woman who want to buy their own ranch, you see, but then the guy partners up with a rodeo star and enters the older man's footloose, risky, masculine world, and the woman starts to worry that her husband's losing sight of their domestic dreams, and...oh.
6. My Son John
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by McCarey, Myles Connolly, and John Lee Mahin
There is no other movie like this in the world. It's like someone crossed John Cassavates with Joe McCarthy.
7. Water, Water Every Hare
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
A sequel to Hair-Raising Hare. More dreamlike than the first film, and almost as funny.
8. The Narrow Margin
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Written by Earl Felton, from a story by Martin Goldsmith and Jack Leonard
Do you like movies about assassins on trains? Here's a hell of a movie about some assassins on a train.
9. Rancho Notorious
Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Daniel Taradash
"I'd wish you go away...and come back 10 years ago."
10. Casque d'Or
Directed by Jacques Becker
Written by Becker, Jacques Companéez, and Annette Wademant
Belle Epoque noir.
Honorable mentions:
11. Magical Maestro (Tex Avery)
12. Forbidden Games (René Clément)
13. Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica)
14. A Phantasy (Norman McLaren)
15. Bells of Atlantis (Ian Hugo)
16. Son of Paleface (Frank Tashlin)
17. The Beast Must Die (Román Viñoly Barreto)
18. La Jeune Folle (Yves Allégret)
19. Scaramouche (George Sidney)
20. The Happy Family (Muriel Box)
If you're an aficionado of westerns with gay undertones, you needn't stop with The Lusty Men. 1952 also gave us Anthony Mann's Bend of the River, a movie about whether "that kind" can "change." Officially, the line I just quoted is about robbers. But watch Jimmy Stewart flirt with Arthur Kennedy at the beginning of this picture, and see if you don't think something more is going on here.
Of the films of 1952 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The White Reindeer.