Films

David Blackburn

Wonderful list Susan. The Servant is hugely underrated and sinister - the scene with the dripping tap always comes to mind. But where is Bringing Up Baby? Or, for that matter, Where Eagles Dare?

SRS

Better than Casablanca? I'd go for The African Queen, no contest, hands down. The two films are both magnificent, and I'm not a true Katherine Hepburn fan, but still...
In defense of the 'art film' -- in my adolescence it was Jules et Jim, Shoot the Piano Player, Fellini and Antonioni, and I went because I loved every minute. After a diet of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, I felt these foreign films opened a new and stunning visual and emotional world.

wrinkled weasel

This is a challenge I cannot resist.

The Servant, The Third Man and Casablanca would be on my list, too.

I recently bought a box-set of Astaire movies and I'm working through them. I found "Top Hat" a bit creaky, even for a wrinkled weasel, but The Bandwagon was a revelation. Not strictly just an Astaire vehicle, but an ensemble piece, including a duet with Jack Buchanan. When you see them do "I think I'll have to change my plan" it is easy to see why Jack Buchanan was such a big star, at least in Britain.

When Astaire did Bandwagon, he was 54 years old. Another star of more mature years, Bette Davis, made the charming, triple-Oscar winning Frank Capra movie "Pocketful of Miracles".

I have mentioned this before, but I cannot recommend "Night of the Demon" enough. Based on a short story by M R James, NotD pulls all the levers that a horror story should, including the increasing and disturbing isolation the main character feels as his scepticism turns to belief and then fear.

See it one day. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but one day, and soon.

SUSAN HILL

You see ? I said everyone would chime in. Good.

WW.. I had actually forgotten Bandwagon but yes though I have a great fondness for TH. I also would have Easter Parade, just for 'We're a Couple of Swells.' Must watch Where Eagles Dare again.

Private Schultz

Oh dear, don't get me started!

Would heartily recommend a Powell & Pressburger - 'A Canterbury Tale' (wonderfully evocative wartime tale of a glue-thrower in a village near Canterbury) or 'I Know Where I'm Going' (fey love story in the Scottish islands) are my personal favourites.

If you like 'The Third Man', try 'The Fallen Idol', another Greene/Reed collaboration, with the wonderful Ralph Richardson and a remarkable performance from child actor Bobby Henery.

'Magnificent Seven' is perhaps the most exuberant western - I also love 'The Searchers' and 'Stagecoach' - two very different sides of John Wayne/John Ford partnership.

I'd second David Blackburn's 'Bringing up Baby' too.

And for a weepie 'Random Harvest' gets me every time - Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson in a James Hilton (Mr Chips, Lost Horizon) tale of amnesia between the wars.

Finally (for the moment), the film I most want to see a second time: 'Les Visiteurs du Soir' a strange medieval fable with Jules Berry turning in a fantastic performance as the Devil.

Andre

My favourites - at least ones I go back to - include Lives of Others, a German film and Beau Travail, French. Both extraordinary for sense of time and place - but above all for the concluding scene on each. Quite heart stopping. I daren't say more but do see them.

JohnAnt

'The Way to the Stars.' Redgrave superb, the wartime RAF atmos very moving.
'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg' - oh, that final touching farewell at the tank station: 'Super ou Ordinaire?'

(Take plenty of hankies to both.)

Fred Taylor

Pipped by Private Schultz with "A Canterbury Tale". Ok, raise you "North by North-West". Matchless Cary Grant. It starts going and it keeps going and going ...

SUSAN HILL

Ah, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, mais oui. Agree on Fallen Idol/Way to the Stars. Several I am now making a note of.
I cannot bear Brief Encounter by the way.

Fred Taylor

"Mephisto" with Klaus Maria Brandauer. Based on the real life actor, Gustaf Gruendgens. That moment when he stands on the balcony with the Goering character, still dressed as the devil after a performance of "Faust" and looks down on the appalled audience, is one of the great all-time scenes of modern films. Had to be made by a Hungarian, of course -- the wonderful Istvan Szabo.

SUSAN HILL

I almost put in North by North West - and what about Strangers on a Train ?

Hadrian

I have to confess that as a former teacher of English I never could abide these pretentious Art House things. I'm sure, mind you, that in a very small number of cases I am thereby the loser but the amount of drivel one'd have to thole to unearth a gem makes it not worth the bother!
I love 'Middlebrow' infinitely better.
Who could resist some of the Pinewood Studio pleasures, such as the inexpressibly delightful Lady Killers? Or Kind Hearts and Coronets? Joan Hickson as Miss Marple is in a league of her own. Carry On Screaming, anyone, plus Carry on up the Khyber?!!
And as for My Fair Lady....just wonderful!
And The Birds still scares the hell out of me!

Vivien

Yes, you've certainly stirred up something here! Of 1950s films, I always loved "Quo Vadis", seen when I was c. 14 - the moment the title came up on a huge crimson background with Quo Vadis in gold Roman letters I knew I'd love it, and Peter Ustinov as Nero held the film together. Often good films are based on a good novel: this was based on the novel by Sienkiewicz which seems old-fashioned now but it had basic drama and empathy with the characters.

Others of about that time: "Hobson's Choice"; "The Long Memory" (John Mills and scenes of the desolate Thames estuary); "Never take no for an answer" (Italian title "Peppino e Violetta", about a little boy whose donkey was ill - he went through Herculean struggles to take it to the Pope, who cured it! - scenes of Italy in the 50s). In the 1960s "The Blue Lamp" with, at the end, the camera panning over the streets of Paddington. Fellini and Giulietta Masina. "The Seventh Seal". The Russian film "Ballad of a Soldier". Yes, there was a great buzz in the air in the 1960s when we went to the Curzon cinema and the Hampstead Everyman and saw these foreign films.

Later - The Producers, The Canterbury Tales, Angeln uber Berlin, Closely Observed Trains (Czech), The Lives of Others, Billy Elliot.......

Oh well, I think I'd better go off to bed now before I think of others! The Belles of St Trinians with Alistair Sim and George Cole, Withnail and I......

Simon Mennie

Third Man definitely-the on location photography perfectly captures the atmosphere of late 1940s Vienna once the cultural and political hub of Mitteleuropa,now an occupied,seedy cloacal,bomb damaged catacomb inhabited by black marketeers.Excellent Graham Greene script;Orson Welles superb as the shadowy amoral Harry Lime.The exchange with Joseph Cotten when they finally meet on the big wheel in the Prater is a classic;"Italy the Borgias,incest and war and you get Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance;Switzerland five hundred years of peace prosperity and brotherly love and at the end you get the cuckoo clock"(I paraphrase).Great ending in the cemetery as Alda Valli walks down the long avenue after the funeral and past Joseph Cotten.

Stanley Kubrick's "Doctor Strangelove" a splendidly comic and surreal satire on the American military-industrial Cold war superpower doctrine of mutually assured destruction.Peter Sellers is certainly on form in his multiple impersonations as variously the hapless Group Captain Mandrake,a colourless US President increasingly unable to control the chaos unfolding around him and the manic,technology obsessed eponymous ex Nazi scientist now serving the US government.To my mind the best performances are those of Sterling Hayden and George C Scott;Hayden as the insane base commander General Jack Ripper having launched his wing on a nuclear attack against the USSR delivers a paranoid homily on the international Communist conspiracy through a haze of cigar smoke in a close up sequence both comic and terrifying which is the epicentre of the film.Scott is brilliant as the clownish and opportunistic General Buck Turgidson, Pentagon desk apparatschik and a
creature of the system,denouncing the Soviet premier as a "degenerate atheistic Commie"while urging full scale nuclear war from behind a palisade of Rand Corporation case studies entitled "World Tonnage in Megadeaths".

Best line-"Gentlemen you can't fight in here this is the war room"

There are very few good war films."All Quiet on the Western Front" is probably an exception.The battle scenes set a standard of realism which by the standards of the time was revolutionary and has rarely been equalled since. I would add the German 1950s film "The Bridge" and Petersen's 1984 "Das Boot"(the TV version) together with the Russian 1986 "Come and See"( the title is derived from the Book of Revelation).The film is a truly horrifying portrayal of the realities of partisan warfare in Byelorussia on the Eastern Front as seen through the eyes of a young peasant boy-the depiction of a massacre of an entire village by SS anti partisan troops and their Russian collaborators is uncompromising in its unmediated bleakness and absolute brutality and is all the more compelling as the film was made during the glasnost era.

Private Schultz mentions "Les Visiteurs du Soir"-this a particularly interesting French
work as it was made and released during the war in occupied France and is a complex allegory of the Vichy regime.Its esoteric plot and subject matter probably explains why it managed to evade the attention of the censors.

Simon Mason

Susan, I'm note sure if you knew, but Graham Greene used to be the film critic for The Spectator.

Great list BTW, but I'm sure it will come as no surprise that my top ten would look very different. But "Some Like it Hot' would make the cut.

Your number 10 on the list 'Gosford Park' probably wouldn't get made now, thanks to Hunt and Vaizey's very short sighted axing of the UK Film Council.

Sarah AB

I share Susan's preference for light, or at least genuinely enjoyable films, and Some Like It Hot is probably my own favourite too. Other favourites include Singin' in the Rain, Vertigo and (obviously much darker, but still genuinely enjoyable) Cabaret. There was a referene to Ninotchka on another blog recently and I was reminded how much I enjoyed that film. I tend to respond with suspicion to anything which looks arty/has subtitles/is much more than two hours long - but sometimes I can be swayed - by Fanny and Alexander, for example, and Belle de Jour, and some of Cocteau's films. My son (12) has much more arty tastes than me and made me watch the b and w Jeanne d'Arc with him recently - it was actually very absorbing although not precisely my kind of thing.

Oedipus Rex

Simon Mennie - interesting choice. Can I add a few points?
"Come and See" I strongly recommend to everyone - although released just as Gorbachev took power, it was made at the end of the previous regime of Soviet heavy handedness. The director, Klimov, was not at first 'approved' but eventually he prevailed. The result is however completely clear of any Soviet style propaganda and makes a simple but powerful point about the killing of children. It is available on DVD (with a post-USSR interview with Klimov) and I cannot recommend it too highly.

"Dr Strangelove" - totally agree, funny and serious which leads me onto:

"Love and Death" & "Sleeper" - Woody Allen at his early best. Hilarious, great one-liners and always with a shadow of his more serious thoughtful self. "Love and Death" is a wonderful parody of the great 19th Century Russian novel filmed with an equally respectful pastiche of Ingmar Bergman cinema, "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries" in particular.

For pure magic and drama Marcel Carne's "Les Enfants Du Paradise"

Private Schultz

Sorry, me again

How could I have forgotten the original 1950s 'I soliti ignoti' - very funny - highlight Marcello Mastroiani in an aeroplane splint climbing over a glass roof. I think it was inspired by 'Rififi'. And there was a recent remake with George Clooney.

And I watched 'Becket' again the other evening - Burton and O'Toole striking sparks off each other, with great bonus on DVD of a commentary where Mark Kermode chats to Peter O'Toole through the film.

For Hitchcock, I enjoy his earlier comedy thrillers, so 'The 39 Steps' or 'The Lady Vanishes' for me. And his atmospheric Ripper-inspired silent 'The Fog' with a brooding Ivor Novello - the way Hitch gets across Novello pacing the floor above the family's head by cutting to a glass ceiling is masterly.

Augustus

I was always fascinated by Charles Laughton's portrayal of the Victor Hugo classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame in the 1939 monochrome version. I haven't seen the 1956 colour version with Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida, but Laughton's barely verbal hunchback was masterful.

Fergus Pickering

Astaire was a marvellous singer. Listen to him on U tube singing 'The Way You Look Tonight'. Even Peggy Lee can't match the phrasing.

What - no votes for Tom Hanks in 'Big'? Marvellous film. And what about 'Terminator' and 'Silence of the Lambs' Love 'em. Oh, and 'Four Weddings and a Funeral. Seen it so many times and it holds up every time. My wife puts in a vote for 'Genevieve' which she saw for the first time about a month ago. Oh OF COURSE. The mafia films with Brando and Pacino and just about everyone else.

Alexandrovich

Susan: tell me that you just forgot Cinema Paradiso!

lescam

I have always adored musicals, the more lowbrown the better, especially Astaire and Rogers. My favourite Astaire film is "Swing Time" which I think has better songs (by Jerome Kern) than Top Hat. But my very favourite musical of all time is "Yankee Doodle Dandy" with James Cagney, closely followed by the 1936 black and white version of "Showboat" with Paul Robeson and Irene Dunne, which was infinitely better than the 1951 colour version.

Other films I loved in my childhood, were "Gone with the Wind", "The Ten Commandments", "Calamity Jane", and a little later on, "Dr Zhivago", "Singin' in the Rain", "Hello Dolly" and "Kiss me Kate". All very lowbrow and highly enjoyable. One of the few highbrown arty films I ever saw was Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries", one of the most boring evenings I ever spent in a cinema. Never again!

SUSAN HILL

I have never seen Cinema Paradiso.. clearly I should. Will pass on some of the above but EALING COMEDIES...Passport to Pimlico being my favourite. Kind Hearts and Coronets - Guinness was pure genius in everything he did but maybe this most of all ? The Titfield Thunderbolt anyone ?
Margaret Rutherford in anything. Joyce Grenfell in St Trinians - Miss Gossidge but people call me Sausage.
I can't watch anything with animals that get lost/hurt. Nothing like Silence of the Lambs - far too unpleasant.
I seem to have started something.

lescam

for "highbrown" read "highbrow".

SUSAN HILL

for St Trinian's read The Happiest Days of your LIfe ! For A Guinness read A Sim. I think I need to lie down.

Sarah AB

Fergus - I agree with you about Terminator and Big. If you like Big do look out for Chances Are which is a rather underrated rom com starring Robert Downey Junior which has just hits the right balance between charm and slight edginess.

Vivien

Me again - I promise I won't mention any more!- but had to add "Tunes of Glory", 1960, set in a Highlands regimental barracks (like a granite castle), with Alec Guiness and John Mills (also Susanna York): one of the best depictions in films of the relationship between two completely different characters, one laid-back, sociable and well-liked, the other a repressed martinet. Heart-warming ending.

Simon Mennie

Just about everything produced by Hollywood since the 1980s is off my radar;formulaic conveyor belt romcoms and action films Out of this dross I would however extract films such as "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" with John Malkovich and Glenn Close,a sumptuous and deadly rendering of the eighteenth century Laclos novel about sexual intrigue and moral corruption amongst jaded ancien regime French aristocrats .Also "Witness" with Harrison Ford,an excellent thriller which vividly portrays the invasion of a peaceful Amish community by the violence and greed of modern American society.

I have come to rather like the Carry On films;what you see is what you get;low budget,guileless,innocent,undemanding seaside postcard slapstick silliness an excellent antidote to all the pretentious overpromoted tosh which is often served up at film festivals. Where else but on a wet afternoon at Pinewood or Elstree could you be served up such deathless one liners as "Infamy,infamy they've all got it in for me"

I entirely endorse the whole Ealing canon;Ladykillers and Kind Hearts are the very best of the lot.

Back to war films again."Cruel Sea",despite its age, still the best film about the war at sea and at its heart a study of character under the stress of command in war."Went the Day Well" although made in 1942 as propaganda,cracks along apace and has some surprisingly disturbing moments and I guess partly inspired the Michael Caine film "The Eagle Has Landed" based on the Jack Higgins novel."The Train" directed by John Frankenheimer in 1964 is excellent;no special effects, shot on location in N France in grainy black and white fast paced,spectacular action sequences;Burt Lancaster as the resistance leader railway worker Labiche magnicently physical and dominant(why do contemporary Hollywood male leads look like such wimps in comparison?)Good cameo appearance by Jeanne Moreau.Paul Scofield somewhat miscast as Lancaster's German adversary.The film is gritty,realistic,unsentimental and ultimately downbeat as the German train carrying the stolen French Impressionist paintings is stopped but at a terrible price.

Finally Andrew Brownlow & Patrick Mollo's "It Happened Here" an ambitious and imaginative if at times somewhat chaotic attempt to portray
Britain under German occupation.Shot over a ten year period in the late 1950s and early 60s it creaks badly in places due to the shoestring budget but overall it is an impressive piece of work using largely non professional actors.The opening sequences are particularly convincing and often disturbing and the film squarely seeks to confront the issues of both resistance and collaboration,the latter quite controversially in its depiction of British doctors actively assisting in the murder by lethal injection of terminally ill Polish forced labourers .

It was shown on C4 some years ago in a series entitled "Lost and Found" but so far as I know is not available on DVD but definitely worth watching if you can get hold of it.

Hadrian

Alex Guiness did indeed reign supreme in the utterly charming morality tale, The Lady Killers. What a performace..as were those of all the twittering old ladies who attend Mrs Lopsided's house for afternoon drawing room tea! Simply beautiful British story!
Alistair Sims was indeed a genuis actor, I wholeheartedly agree. What was the name of the series where he appears as the Judge presiding over the most ludicrously frivilous and whimsical cases? ( One I vaguely recollect is neighbours bickering over snails being cucked over the fence so that prize cabbages are devoured!
Of War films I love The Great Escape; HMS Ulyses; and another charmer- Mrs Minver.
As for Mel Brooks- where to begin?! Young Frankenstein? High Anxiety? Blazing Saddles?
Anyone recall The Admirable Crichton?
I must also confess one of my all time faves is Emma Thompson's version of Sense and Sensibility.

Alexandrovich

You know what impresses me? This is not the Arts and Culture blog. Yet so enjoyable. Surely some lessons to be learned...no pretension I guess, for one.

Dave B

Favourite films! Super :-)

I'll offer:
The Lion in Winter: perfect script, meets perfect casting.
The Awful Truth: true love conquers all, again.
Mary Poppins: best sing-a-long ever.

Dave B

How could it forget.
'This Happy Breed': best celebration of the British in film.

SUSAN HILL

Alexandrovich.Two words Art/Culture. I shoot on sight.

SUSAN HILL

Dirk Bogarde. Magnificent film actor but did anybody find him in comedy - Doctor in the House etc - a bit embarassing ?
Carry on...not sure which to pick as they went off later but what a team..K.Williams, B Windsor before East Enders got her, the great Sid James. I will probably take Carry on up the Khyber.
War Films.. for the inadvertently campest performance of all time award, Noel Coward, In Which we Serve.
BAD FILMS WE LOVE. I have a very soft spot indeed for THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL, not only for Mariln, but for Olivier being truly awful and wearing those ghastly costumes with epaulettes, and the monocle. I adore it, it is just so bad.
Let us have a few BAD FILMS WE LOVE. That's mine.

Alexandrovich

BAD FILMS WE LOVE? Perhaps 'bad films I can't resist'. Steady now...
any George Formby film.

Liam P

Where do I begin?

A suggestion for those Classical Hollywood lovers... Douglas Sirk. He directed a lot of 50's 'womens' pictures that were dismissed at the time for simply being that are now celebrated as ahead of their time stories that often tackled taboo subjects. Ignored at the time because they were essentially B movies. Written on the Wind, All that Heaven Allows (my favourite), Imitation of Life.

Furthermore, director Todd Haynes made a film called Far From Heaven (2002) which is a wonderful post-modern re-visit of Douglas Sirk's films. You don't need to have seen an Sirk films to enjoy it but they both go hand in hand.

Liam P

I think Some Like it Hot is a classic but what always surprises and annoys me is how long it takes to get going. In my mind the Marilyn intro at the train station happens in the first 5/10 mins. It doesn't and takes some 20/30 minutes (maybe longer) for the film to get going. Still a classic but something that always makes me think 'Oh yeah, this opening is really looong!'.

I'd also highly recommend checking out some other Billy Wilder films. The Apartment and Double Indemnity in particular are brilliant but if you haven't go find and watch Sunset Blvd (1950), it's, in my opinion, one of the very finest Hollywood films. Watch it now, you will not regret it!

Sam Clements

If you're looking for some classic Hollywood escapism, you can't go wrong with a musical! These films are timeless, much like the dancing of Fred and Ginger in TOP HAT, I would recommend:

- SINGIN' IN THE RAIN
- ANCHORS AWEIGH
- AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

Also, there have been some great films from the past year which might have been missed, so below is a list of films which I hope will be remembered in the future.

-MOON (Directed by David Bowie's son, clearly talent runs in the family!)
-LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
-WHITE RIBBON
-UN PROPHET
-UP
-IN THE LOOP
-FOUR LIONS
-TOY STORY 3
-INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (Actually is spelt like that!)
-STAR TREK (2009)
-SYNECDOCHE NEW YORK
-WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
-DISTRICT 9
-DOUBLE TAKE
-FISH TANK
-THE WRESTLER
-WENDY & LUCY
-THE HURT LOCKER
-THE CLASS
-DRAG ME TO HELL
-A SERIOUS MAN

All are worth checking out on DVD or BLU-RAY.

Simon Mennie

Films I Hate (sorry to veer somewhat of SH's guideline)

"Braveheart"-utter tripe historically and on just about every other criteria;Mad Max meets Brigadoon

"Revolution" another Mel Gibson turkey;the portrayal of evil decadent plummy voiced British oppressing heroic decent liberty loving Americans could have come straight out of Dr Goebbels' dream factory at UFA

"Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Love Actually"-I am committing heresy in the eyes of many in indicting the first film in particular but I find Richard Curtis' brand of affected Britluvvie whimsicality and contrived eccentricity toe curlingly embarrassing.FWAAF at least had the virtue of a catchy theme tune;LA is just an even more dire sequel,an appalling, mawkish, sentimental porridge.

More on topic now; "Charge of the Light Brigade" Tony Richardson's 1969 self conscious and self righteous satire on the Crimean War and the Victorian class structure generally.A deeply flawed meandering and at times unintelligible even silly piece of soft focus agitprop very much of its time.Most if not all the historical characters depicted (Lord Raglan,Cardigan etc)are reduced to caricature but the film is relieved by excellent location photography (in Turkey for the Crimean war senes) and delightful over the top hammed up performances from Gielgud and Howard as well as the Oscar winning(or at least Oscar nominated) animations which punctuate the film.The script/dialogue evidence some attempt at research into Victorian speech idioms and if you can ignore the one dimensional jejeune 1960s radicalism which underlies the film it works as a piece of spectacle if nothing else.

Sarah AB

It's quite easy to think of films that I like very much but which *some* people would think were bad - Carry ons (great fun), slightly cheesy sf films like Running Man, Soylent Green or Logan's Run. But plenty of bien pensant types like those films too so I've challenged myself to come up with a couple of films which most people think are bad bad as opposed to good bad. At the risk of group ostracism I shall now confess to quite enjoying Basic Instinct 2 and Kevin and Perry go Large.

adele geras

Susan, we have just seen the most wonderful movie called THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES which is an Argentinian thriller, love story and general brilliant film which I will bet good money you will love. We'd almost despaired of finding a movie about "proper people in interesting situations" but here is one A must-see, as they say. Really wonderful...and also funny in places. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Movie last year and for once the academy got it spot on.

Vivien

Bad films: I'd nominate "Hiroshima mon amour", 1959, in which a French woman and a Japanese man fall in love, are on the screen most of the time, but say hardly anything, as far as I remember, and what they do manage to say is punctuated with long, inscrutable and very tedious pauses.

Another is "Stalker", 1979, Tardovsky, in which, again as far as I remember, a gaunt man with a moth-eaten shaven head wanders for about an hour of film time through dank grey passages, I couldn't make out why. Once, as a diversion, he slipped and his head fell into a slimy puddle. He lifted it for a few seconds, asked "Vot eez art...?" and then let it fall again without offering an opinion.

I rather like trailers as I think "Thank God I don't have to see that!

Sam Clements

*Tarkovsky

Sarah AB

Vivien - I was thinking to myself (before reading your comment) what 'great' films I secretly found a bit boring - and Tarkovsky's Zerkala (Mirror) sprang to mind.

David Bouvier

Simon Mason - you seem to have fallen for the lovie lobby. Julian Fellows made a point of saying recently that the film council had given no practical help to Gosford Park and had completely failed to deliver on the promises made regarding Victoria.

Just like the claim that Arts Council spending should be credited with generating all the VAT paid by all the West End theatres. As if.

Private Schultz

Susan - so agree with you on 'the Prince and the Showgirl'! Though other Rattigan adaptations are amongst my favourites for the right reasons (Browning Version with Michael Redgrave; Winslow Boy with Robert Donat; and, indeed, The Way to the Stars, which has already been mentioned).

And, yes, do track down 'Cinema Paradiso' - beautiful film.

On the so-bad-it's-good, I think I'd include some of the Hammer horrors of the 60s/70s. I loved them at the time, and some of the performances still stand up (including Christopher Lee as Dracula) but otherwise, looking at them now, they're often pretty dreadful.

SUSAN HILL

There is a serious difference -though I have not yet worked out what exactly it is - between bad films and bad films we love/so bad they are good. Of bad films, think of all those stupid, boring, unfunny bad films featuring actors like Jim Carry (Carey ?)
No one has mentioned NOTTING HILL. I loved it for a long time. I now do not.
Or Mrs Doubtfire, simply because of the genius who is Robin Williams.

wrinkled weasel

I don't think you can pin down what makes a bad film bad, or so bad that it is good. Casablanca is a case in point. According to Umberto Eco, it is a collection of cliches, or to paraphrase him "all the cliches coming together for a party". Not only that, it's all done in a studio and has as much to do with Morrocco as Webster's Dictionary. The characters are crudely drawn; hissing Nazis, Fat, wheezing black marketeers, campy cut-price hoodlums and saintly freedom fighters. They get through more drinks than I do in the course of an evening. One critic of the script described the Bogart part as "Two parts Hemingway, one part Scott-Fitzgerald, and a dash of Cafe Christ"

According to this website: http://casablancatrivia.com/factoids.htm

In 1982, film writer Chuck Ross retyped the screenplay to Casablanca, titled it "Everybody Comes to Rick's," and submitted it to 217 agencies dealing with film scripts. Of the 85 who read the material and responded, only 33 recognized the script; 38 rejected it; eight thought it sounded an awful lot like Casablanca; only three thought they could sell it; and one suggested turning it into a novel.

And yet, you watch it and it rips your heart out.

By the way, I tried to write to you via susanhill.com and kept getting an error message on the "contact" page

AndyinBrum

I think you'll find Blazing Sadles is the greatest western of them all

Truman Show
Moon
Serenity
Star Trek
Leon

Private Schultz

For me another case of love/hate, good/bad is the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series.

Though always hampered by Nigel Bruce's Dr Watson, the 'Hound of the Baskervilles' followed by the 'Adventures of SH' (based, I think, on a Doyle-approved Gillette stage play) were serious and fairly successful attempts to capture the stories and the period. The remaining titles were updated to the '30s, the stories mangled, the detection made a mockery of (I'm sure there's a black footprint on a white carpet in one of them that only Holmes spots!), Watson gets thicker and has little 'comedy' routines written in, and Rathbone's hairstyle goes through a bizarre Roman emperor phase.

I should loathe them, but I can still watch any one of them fondly.

Liam P

Tarkovsky......bad films? Each to their own and all that but that's just pure madness. You can't expect anything with Tarkovsky films, you have to enter them with a completely blank mind and let them wash over you. He was a complete master of his craft.

SUSAN HILL

WRINKLED WEASEL
Nobody can get to the bottom of the error message on Contact via the website. Every time the do a test it's fine. Just send direct to mail@susan-hill.com

John Edwards

It is largely a matter of personal taste. I found The Seventh Seal an utterly compelling work of genius. On the other hand to have to sit through the Third Man or Casablanca would be torture.

Workington Red

For the scenery of the Tetons and menace of Jack Palance, Shane.
Hell Drivers with Stanley Baker and a cast of superstars from Herbert Lom to Sean Connery.
The Hustler from Walter Tevis's great take on human character.
The Wages of Fear, Mon Dieu. Hang on to your seats.
Looking for Eric, is sheer back of the netlace curtains.

Hadrian

'Bad films, so bad they're good'- I confess to a total weakness for the Jaws series of films!! The special effects were- even for their own time- surely cheap and cheerful, but the one I really loved was No2 ( I think) where an underwater, marine park transparent tunnel is attacked by a giant shark ( or was it a whale?!) Lots of screaming, dashing, etc...great fun!!
And some of the old Fifties Sci-Fi movies are hilarious in their cheapness. However, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was one of the few films to give me nightmares! Is The Day After Tomorrow a 'bad film' ? If so, I still love it!!

Nansen

"Jean de Florette", and its sequel, "Manon of the Spring"... the last 10 minutes are the best I have seen anywhere.

SUSAN HILL

NANSEN. I thought of Jean de Florette etc - beautiful films. BUt something had to go so about 3 million movies did.

JohnAnt

"Graham Greene used to be the film critic for The Spectator"
Indeed yes, Simon Mason, and for 'Night and Day', and fled abroad when he was in danger of being arrested. The Lord Chief Justice had decided to prosecute him for criminal libel after he was fiound guilty in the civil courts of having libelled Shirley Temple: GG had written that her cinematic appeal had a rather paedophile aspect. or as he put it in a review of her film 'Wee Willie Winkie' -
"Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire."
(No, it doesn't sound libellous to me either, but pre-war standards were different.)

JohnAnt

Btw, I can strongly recommend Simon Heffer's late-night Radio 3 'Essay' each day this week. Last night's (Monday's) was about the cultural background and political message of 'Went the Day Well' (scripted by Graham Greene) and it was an absolutely thrilling fifteen minutes of packed succinct analysis and description.
They'll also be Listen Again-able on the BBC iplayer, and I'm definitely going to hear them all. I knew Heffer was a good broadcaster, but this is brilliant stuff.

SUSAN HILL

JohnAnt..thanks. I read about this on Sunday when Heffer did a preview and meant to post a heads-up but forgot. It was indeed excellent and the other 3 will be must-hears.

Hadrian

One of the most doom-laden and claustrophobic films must be 'On the Beach', the post nuclear holocaust vision of Nevil Shute from the late 50s. It is quite unlike his other fiction in being unrelentingly bleak, a cry of woe for poor, self destructive humanity.
Clive Owens in The Croupier puts in a brilliant performance.

Carroll Barry-Walsh

I agree with many of the choices people have made above but can I also mention:-

Now Voyager
An Affair to Remember
The Railway Children
Voyage to Italy - a marvellous Rossellini film with Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders
All about Eve
Billy Liar
Visconti's The Leopard - magnificent - and his last film "The Innocent".

Also The Go-Between and Far from the Madding Crowd.

And for big blockbusters: Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivage

Or what about Lean's Great Expectations?

Delicatessen is a delight; Out of Sight is a better George Clooney film.

Oh I could go on - but enjoy!!

SUSAN HILL

Hadrian.I couldn`t face watching OTB but I meant to mention Croupier.. terrific perf, though the film is flawed. I love watching him shuffle the cards so expertly.

canonalberic

These are films I have seen many times and could see many times more:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the Gene Wilder not the dire re-make)
All About Eve
Dune - ridiculous but irresistible
Noce di Cabiria (surely one of the most moving films ever made much better than the very great La Strada )
Two Hitchcocks: Frenzy - a very disturbing farewell portrait of 1970's London and the masters dark nature; and Lifeboat with its inspiring wartime Steinbeck script and brilliant conceit.
Finally on those interminable Tarkovsky experiences: Andrei Rublev is a truly great work of art (even if you just see the Bell sequence) which requires stamina but never leaves you afterwards.

Jolly Roger

I saw "The magnificent Seven" for the first time about 6 months ago. I enjoyed it, but I actually much preferred "The Seven Samurai" which the magnificent Seven is based on. If you havent seen the Seven Samurai yet, I would strongly recommend it.

My favorite western is "The good the bad and the ugly", with the 'dollars' movies a close second and third.

Thirladean

Irresistible challenge. So here, in no particular order, are ten more:
The Trouble with Harry (Hitchcock in comic mood, New England in the Fall and Shirley McLaine enchanting)
The Queen of Spades.
The Big Sleep.
Roman Holiday.
Sabrina.
Sous les Toits de Paris (marvellous early Rene Clair)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Jules et Jim,
Atlantic City
Meet Me in St Louis
Et Dieu Crea La Femme (without the sub-titles which got in the way of parts of Miss Bardot's body)

Hadrian

Susan- I know how you feel about On the Beach. However I think the striking thing about it is that even in such circumstances of despair Shute manages to convey a sense of the indomitable, 'British', stiff-upper-lip, where essential decency and civilised deportment and a rueful sense of our own failure succeeds in giving in effect another kind of 'finest hour'. Were this film made in the present generation I suspect it'd be brutal, nihilistic and gleefully cynical. Shute of course belonged to an earlier generation who faced the terrible depths of human depravity yet retained a definite idea of the dignity of man. So in some senses a grim film but in others strangely not!
On a lighter note, I must mention the original version of 'The Out of Towners' starring Jack Lemon who as a naive country fellow has to go to New York with is wife and gets into all sorts of scrapes. Lovely fun.
I'm having a senior moment, trying to recall the film with Denis Somebody What'sHisFace who is motoring through rural Mid Western America and gets chased by a huge truck whose driver remains menacingly faceless. The tension in that thriller is intense! Anyone got the title and actor details?

Simon Mennie

Hadrian @8:47pm

It's called "Duel" made in 1971 and stars Dennis Weaver as an innocent motorist pursued by a malevolent unseen truck driver

SUSAN HILL

I have been blogging on here for well over a year and this post has attracted more comments by far than any other of mine - and more even than several of the other bloggers. Not that I`m competitive or anything. Keep it up.

Vivien

The Australian film "Jindabyne", 2006, was outstanding, showing people's relationships without gloss, and their moral perplexities. There were moving scenes of the Australian landscape, too, as in a good descriptive novel.

Looking forward to seeing "Tamara Drewe"! - I know it won't be a classic, but it will be entertaining with a lot of speech. Some films of the last c. 15 years have such thin dialogue, and rely on huge close-ups of meaningful or cookie looks from the actors. I wish they'd SAY something as well!

Re Tarkovsky: yes, I agree, Andrei Rublev is a great film.

canonalberic

And the ones I hate:

Braveheart - an evil film
lord of the rings (vastly longer and more tedious than anything by Tarkovsky)
Star Wars - all of them bloody awful
Alexander - hilariously uncomfortable about its sexuality
Four Weddings and a Funeral - just too utterly twee
Wilde - a witless script and two hopeless central performances of eye-watering self-regard
Bright Young Things - another incompetently executed vanity project which sterilises the potential for a great adaptation of Vile Bodies.

He also absolutely ruins Gosford park......

Wily Trout

Old Hollywood - Sunset Boulevard and Rear Window I would watch if either came on the tv again - both great stories done with panache.

Nicholas

""Revolution" another Mel Gibson turkey;the portrayal of evil decadent plummy voiced British oppressing heroic decent liberty loving Americans could have come straight out of Dr Goebbels' dream factory at UFA"

Not Mel Gibson - Al Pacino.

Jolly Roger

"Braveheart - an evil film"

Well the rampant historical inaccuracies and blatant Anglophobia were extremely annoying. However at least the good guys won in the end (The English), and the traitor was justly put to death.

Simon Mennie

Nicholas @3:41pm

Quite so;for "Revolution" read "The Patriot" but the comment applies equally to both.

For what they are worth some more nominations:

"French Connection 1" 1971 directed by William Friedkin; superior Hollywood crime thriller excellent Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider with gritty location photography in New York.The film has an almost documentary fly on the wall quality to it at times.One of the first of its type to highlight the sheer unremitting and unrewarding tedium of much police surveillance work.Still one of the best of the genre.

"La Kermesse Heroique" Jacques Feyder 1935 sumptuous and witty costume drama set in a Flemish town under Spanish occupation during the Netherlands wars of the late sixteenth century.Wrily if unconsciously anticipated the realities and dilemmas of collaboration four years hence.

"Der Hauptmann von Kopenick"( The Captain of Kopenick) 1956 directed by Helmut Kaeutner.Heinz Ruhmann in the title role a late appearance when his glory days at UFA were behind him.An excellent and faithful film adaptation of Karl Zuckmayer's classic play based on a true story.Ruhmann turns in a convincing and at times moving performance as the put upon shoemaker Wilhelm Voigt who wreaks spectacular and comic revenge on a tyrannical and inflexible Prussian bureaucracy.The film (shot in Hamburg) nicely captures the popular vernacular and social atmosphere of pre 1914 Berlin.

E Hart

The Servant is excellent and some of the others entertaining but with the emphasis on 'rubbish'. Last Year in Marienburg is abomination of pretentious tedium, whereas the Seventh Seal, though, slowing moving is gripping. Might I recommend:

Five Easy Pieces
The Hairdresser's Husband
Battle of Algiers
Tin Men
Harold and Maude
The Browning Version @Schultz
Duel @Simon Mennie
The Swimmer based on the equally excellent story by John Cheever.
The Vanishing (Dutch version)
Salvatore Guiliano
Walkabout
The Shooting Party...

AngloWelshDragon

Apocalypse Now – loving Martin Sheen
Ben Hur – Charton Heston… phwoar!
Where Eagles Dare – thrilling, and Clint Eastwood looks great in Nazi uniform!
Steel Magnolias – wonderfully written and acted
The Sound of Music – normally I hate musicals but I love this
The Longest Day – superb
Fierce Creatures – Kevin Kline is hilarious
East is East – “half a cup” has become a catchphrase in our house
Blazing Saddles – “More beans Mr Taggart?”
Mississippi Burning - intense

Amanda Craig

Lovely list, Susan. I agree with those who added Terminator 1 & 2, Fanny and Alexander, Withnail & I and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but what about Master & Commander? Best, funniest most exciting film about British masculinity and derring do ever. For golden oldies The Thief of Bagdad is a perennial favourite in our house, even with cynical teenagers - as is Ten Things I Hate About Love, the joyous update of The Taming of the Shrew.

Minimes

Ooh, lovely - can't resist. In no particular order:

Alexander Nevsky
Les Enfants du Paradis
A Canterbury Tale
The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp
North by North-West
Wild Strawberries
The Ladykillers
Zazie dans le Métro
Cinema Paradiso
Das Leben der Anderen

Sarah AB

@Amanda Craig - I hope you also like Clueless - another witty update of a classic! Master and Commander is good - though I prefer the books.

@Minimes - reading your post made me think - why hasn't A Matter of Life and Death (another Powell and Pressburger) been recommended yet?

hadrian

Simone- Thanks for reminding me- Duel and Dennis Weaver- of course!
Other memorable movies,
Driving Miss Daisy
Remains of the Day
Planet of the Apes...!!
As for musicals, however could anyone fail to mention My Fair Lady?! Top rate melodies and wonderful script..in some ways superior even to Shaw's Pygmalion!!