Top 100 Movies

The list so far:

#s 100 to 91: featuring His Girl Friday, Stand by Me and The Red Balloon
#s 90 to 86, including Five Easy Pieces, Ghost World and Confessions of Boston Blackie
#s 85 to 81, where you'll find The Edge of the World, Judge Priest and A Thousand Clowns
#s 80 to 76: including The Purple Rose of Cairo, Singin' in the Rain and Lawrence of Arabia
#s 75 to 71: boasting Le Samourai, Kiss Me Kate and Swing Time

"You're guarding space? That's stupid, isn't it? Because someone could break in there and steal all the space and you wouldn't know it's gone, would you?"
70. Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993) - There are some actors who give a single, revelatory performance, then spend the rest of their career struggling to live up to it. Emily Lloyd in Wish You Were Here, Ben Stiller in The Royal Tenenbaums or Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. And then there is David Thewlis. To say that his subsequent turns - in films like American Perfekt, The Island of Dr Moreau and Basic Instinct 2 - have been a bit disappointing after his blistering, hilarious, largely ad-libbed performance in Naked would be deeply kind. Like Kevin Smith before him, he appears to have made some bizarre pact with that feisty, horned chap, trading the promise of a great career for one irradicable blast of greatness. Here, he plays Johnny, a Mancunian motormouth who scoots to London after apparently committing rape. *SOME SPOILERS* There he inveigles himself into the lives of former girlfriend Lesley Sharp and her flatmate, gothic Cockney Katrin Cartlidge, and tours the streets in an intellectual rage - berating security guards, homeless eccentrics and lonely housewives - before getting the kicking of a lifetime. *END OF SPOILERS* Naked is a deeply troubling film, bearing witness to the complete breakdown of British society, and it boasts a hero who's little short of appalling. But it's riddled with brilliance, and boasts more blackly comic laughs and absurdist asides than any state-of-the-nation piece has any right to. That blend of misery, mirth, insightfulness and bristling intelligence is largely thanks to Leigh's improvisational approach, Cartlidge's wonderful supporting turn and Thewlis' stab at immortality.

Favourite bit: Thewlis reacts to the lush vegetation adorning the lobby of a company office. "They say it's a jungle out there - have you seen it in 'ere?"

See also: Life Is Sweet, an earlier effort from Leigh, also featuring Thewlis. It's a slightly spotty, seriocomic look at a working class family's tribulations that too often plays like caricature, but benefits from Timothy Spall's superb supporting characterisation as a wannabe restaurateur and a deeply moving climax.



69. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964) - There are many musicals out there, but not many feature a teenage mother finding security in marriage while the baby's father fights in the Algerian War. Welcome to Demy's musical masterwork, where every word is sung and everyone is sad. Catherine Deneuve is the heroine, whose mother owns an umbrella shop in the titular city, its houses painted in pastel shades, like Balamory. The story of her ill-fated affair and marriage of convenience is told in lushly romantic fashion, building to a glorious winter finale. It's melancholy, touching and unforgettable, with a tremendous score from Michel Legrand.

Favourite bit: Outside a service station, the lovers are reunited, the passing of time doing nothing to quell the passions pounding beneath the surface.

See also: Demy's Young Girls of Rochefort, an upbeat follow-up, also featuring Deneuve, as well as Gene Kelly and George Chakiris. It's almost as good. And get hold of Visconti's magnificent White Nights - also snow-tinged, bittersweet and featuring an inexplicably picturesque petrol station.



68. The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969) - Whilst inescapably a four-hour documentary about Occupied France, The Sorrow and the Pity is gripping as any thriller. Using nothing more than interviews and a little archive footage, it possesses a wrenching, cumulative power as it details the acts of collaboration and rebellion that followed the Nazi invasion. Resistance leaders, international politicians and unrepentant Nazi officers are among those giving staggering insight, along with a lengthy procession of ordinary people trying to justify what they did and didn't do when their nation came under threat. It's chilling, upsetting and utterly riveting, without a single dip or lull throughout its 249 minutes. The director is the son of Max Ophuls, the German director known for his florid melodramas, who was a key influence on Stanley Kubrick.

Favourite bit is a wholly inappropriate heading here. However, the extensively researched material about French officials' involvement in transporting Jews to the death camps is historically important.

See also: Annie Hall, Woody Allen's messy multiple Oscar-winner, where the film is a key plot-point. Which seems faintly inappropriate. It doubtless got Ophuls' film a larger audience, though.



67. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) - Scripts penned the night before they were filmed. Midget extras employed to cover up the "clipper to America" being too small. An attempt at the 11th hour to remove all references to 'As Time Goes By' thwarted by the lead actress' new haircut. The making of Casablanca was chaotic. And the result? A timeless romance: wittier than a roomful of Stephen Frys, more moving than a ride with Fishers of Harrogate, and with a propaganda message so effective it makes me want to sell my brothers for war bonds. Yes, Casablanca is a great advert for mayhem. Humphrey Bogart, who'd only graduated to leading roles the previous year with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, is Rick Blaine, a taciturn, unsentimental nightclub owner whose isolationist existence is shattered when a woman from his past (Ingrid Bergman) comes back into his life, her resistance hero lover (Paul Henreid) in tow. All three are superb and the supporting cast is the sort you dream about - I've watched movies just because Peter Lorre was in them, or Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt or John Qualen. They're all here, along with Dooley Wilson, Sydney Greenstreet, Leonid Kinskey and S.Z. Sakall. Don't be put off by Casablanca's "classic" status or the supposedly extensive running time (many seem to think it's three hours long, rather than 99 minutes) - it's superbly entertaining, and formidably funny despite, and occasionally because of, its weighty themes. It's a wonderful film.

Favourite bit: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine..." A night sky, a bottle of booze and a big clunking fist - Bogart takes out his misery on his office desk, after Bergman's re-appearance. The Le Marseillaise set piece is a triumph too, but they nicked that from our #62, so one point off there.

See also: Bogart's early parts as a crook opposite James Cagney, in Angels with Dirty Faces - as a shifty, weedy lawyer - and The Roaring Twenties - as an amoral crime kingpin - along with his breakthrough role in the 1941 remake of The Maltese Falcon. Falcon is a superlative private eye flick, written and directed by John Huston and with a stellar cast. Only Mary Astor's inexplicably nervy femme fatale appears in the "debit" column.



*A FAIR FEW SPOILERS, SO TAKE CARE*
66. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) - A distraught husband fiddles with the window fittings in a detective's office, after learning of his wife's infidelity. "All right, Curly," says a voice. "Enough's enough. You can't eat the Venetian blinds. I just had them installed on Wednesday." That's the opening of Chinatown, a scintillating neo-noir from the pen of Robert Towne. His screenplay, perhaps the finest in all cinema, weaves a labyrinthine plot populated by subverted genre characters. So Jack Nicholson's smartarse PI Jake Gittes doesn't really know all the answers, the "femme fatale" is the only selfless person in the movie and the baddie is ten times darker than anyone was ready for. Towne's dialogue is just spectacular. Here's Gittes sparring with a suspect after his nose is slit open by a very nasty little man (director Polanski in a cameo). "My goodness, what happened to your nose?" "I cut myself shaving." "You ought to be more careful. That must really smart." "Only when I breathe." It's that good all the way through. "How'd you get past the guard?" Lt Escobar asks Gittes. "Well, to tell you the truth, I lied a little." And here's a line that never gets mentioned, from the town hall scene, a masterclass of repetition that would see you thrown off Just a Minute within seconds: "Now you can swim in it, you can fish in it, you can sail in it — but you can't drink it, you can't water your lawns with it, you can't irrigate an orange grove with it..." The direction is understated but spot-on, aided by Jerry Goldman's score (a pastiche, but so much more than that) and the terrific acting. Nicholson's delivery, in particular, makes the most of Towne's script - the actor pretty much retired from being interesting after Chinatown, but this is a phenomenal last hurrah.

Favourite bit: The devastating last line. Gittes' low-fi detective techniques are memorable too, like checking when a car leaves somewhere by letting it run over your watch.

See also: For more great neo-noir, how about The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's fine deconstruction of the genre, released the year before Chinatown? Cutter's Way and The Last Seduction are well worth it too. The 1975 version of Farewell, My Lovely (filmed previously as The Falcon Takes Over and Murder, My Sweet), starring Robert Mitchum, is more traditional, and a touch less interesting, though both Mitchum and the first scene are exceptional. Chinatown 2, or The Two Jakes, is one big letdown.


For #s 75 to 71, please click on the link below right.