Top 25 Favorite Films

I've been going to bed really early lately, sometimes five or six AM. And any film lover knows movies at dawn have their own rare magic, illuminating inner truths not usually seen within earlier screenings, just as two opposing mirrors might illuminate rarefied sights such as the back of one's head, the better to appraise one's hair, freeing the gaze from its familiar angles in ways the day's medicine cabinet mirror glance of prime time doth not afford. Films I've seen a thousand times are alien and strange at this black magic hour, are delivered from their familiarity and made new and wondrous. I would bring on my desert island these gathered here, though if I haven't been living on a desert island lately I never will be. So keep your VERTIGO, your CITIZEN KANE, your RULES OF THE GAME and GONE WITH THE WINDs. They make me sick. I've been sick all week, reaching the end of a decade-long mid-life crisis--my tethers coming to an end at once. So if e'er was a time to build a raft from these timbres, it's now, for these films have proven of late still lighter than air, and still potent enough to remind me why I drank in the first place and that anything that kills you makes you cool first, unless you were behaving like an idiot to begin with.


I'll never go to bed early again, not when I can re-watch THE BIG SLEEP over and over, flipping the disc (there are two versions now, for wonders never cease) and pondering the mystery of who actually killed Owen Taylor and what the hell happened in that sexy bookstore fadeout and why there's no one around today with the hetero cool of Hawks and Bogart and no girl like Bacall as their third wheel, and why in the hell that damned good looking girl I brought in the Sunday rain to the Film Forum to see the recently discovered 'pre-release cut' would throw me over for some Italian the following week. All I need to know is that Bogie and Bacall both radiate such alchemically rich magic both separately and together that time stands still and the fine print of the plot fades into the dripping shadows of time like the chuckling gasp of a post-shot in a paper cup Harry Jones. Bet that Agnes of yours wouldn't turn it down. Even knowing it would be her last. (See Anima Scythe).


Latest viewing notes, post-reshoot version: I understand now that my adult tastes were formed around this film and that it left me with no love of outdoor scenes actually filmed outdoors. I just noticed, finally, that there are no actual outdoor shoots here, that all the exteriors are on gloomy Warner Bros. sets, in and around Geiger's house and street, and Huck's Garage and the house in the back, and how Bogie prowls around them like a kid's imagination on his father's train set with the basement lights off in the dead of night; his giant face like the moon above the scene, alive with great dialogue, and stellar lighting. Bacall glows right off the screen thanks to all that dark; even CASABLANCA has sunny LA exteriors around the WB set to dampen the dream-like mood with hangovers and bazaars, but SLEEP never leaves the darkness; there was probably a war on. And all the women have jobs or are on the make, or are into drugs, gambling, decadence, smoking, drinking their lunch from a bottle, and falling onto a guy's lap while he's standing up. Hawks' greatest film, it leaves me with zero tolerance for ditzy housewives, Norman Rockwell mailmen, and apple-cheeked kids--may they all rot in hell for their code-poisoning. why couldn't there have been Hawks-Bogart adaptions of all Chandler's books, all filmed just like this? I would cut off my left foot for that. I wouldn't need it. Or sunlight.

It was starting on a local TV station one afternoon in 1981, the exact moment my mom's friend from church had connected the very first ever VCR. It was like landing on the moon. I taped the whole thing, missing only the first half of the credits, and I watched it obsessively, even though it was missing several scenes. When those scenes showed up later I was as excited as I could ever get - that is until 1997 when the Army preview cut of BIG SLEEP surfaced. By then I had read the Robin Wood book on Hawks at the library and become a dyed in-the-wool Hawksian at 14 years-old.  If I have courage in my life it's for the sense of brotherhood in this film - there's such a great rapport between Hendry and his crew that I really wants to be all I can be in the Air Force, at the North Pole, forever and ever.

When a peer group is captured correctly on film, as in Howard Hawks, or Richard Linklater, you get a feeling of the power and joy of belonging, a power and joy most adults hiding behind the evening paper at home have no recollection of. They condemn it in their children as dangerous, but without that kind of peer group power there wouldn't be a civil rights movement, a free India or America, or women voters, or even the current Wall Street occupation. And I can't help but wonder if EDGE wasn't shelved just for that reason, because of the terror producers must have felt when seeing a movie where the kids were genuinely dangerous, instead of just screwing in cars and kidnapping the school mascot and being 'edgy' in that edgeless rote misogynist PORKY'S way. (See Vandal in the Wind)

I don't recall these skulls in the movie, but they're on a BAM notice for the film and are damned cool.

The whole first half of this film is a glorious ribbing of censors, colonialism, and British prudery, only to reverse the flow by having the Henry Davidson harumpher turn over to Shanghai Lily's side after he sees her praying for Captain Harvey's safe return. The middle chunk occurs at a midway between Peking and Shanghai depot that Chinese revolutionaries have held for a prisoner swap, wherein Warner Oland barters with Shanghai Lily, incurs the vengeance of Anna May Wong, and otherwise sets himself up for trouble at a second floor railway station with more mosquito net wall veils than a dozen hospitals. One doesn't get rape-revenge sagas folded neatly within a single reel of a 1932 movie, but this is special even for Von Sternberg-Dietrich. I taped it by accident when a whole festival of JVS/MD films were on PBS in the early 80s and I was a monster-hungry high school nerd not sure quite why I liked it but I did, and became a fan all just from the one scene where the frumpy boarding house matron tries to give her card to Anna May and Marlene ("What kind of a house did you say?").


Second only to OVER THE EDGE as far as sending up the harbingers of decency and parental micro-managing, it's got great quintessential pre-code Paramount jazz music score, and the cream of the crop of character actors including Eugene Palette and Gustav von Seyffertitz and Anna May Wong, so sexy and exotic and makes such a fine pair with Dietrich in her black feathers and veil that they seem like a pair of 60s Carnaby Fashion models wandering into the 30s via a Donald Cammell time warp.

Finally, it's the ultimate rationale for why artifice and illusion are cinema's--as well as woman's--stock and trade. Without all the smoke and mirrors no one would ever hook up of their own free will. The man wants to fuck and run and it's the woman's task to devour him like a Venus flytrap luring the unwary fly. She mustn't betray her true feelings at first, mustn't tremble the leaves and tip off the prey; she must stay aloof in the same way the image mustn't include a boom mike shadow. It is accomplished.


My favorite comedy, it's like the Marxes if there were all Chicos and sociopathic killers; Mr. Camonte's secretary Angelo (Vince Barnett) getting so mad he almost shoots the phone, wondering 'bout the word 'education' - the uneasy chill of Camonte's clowning and smiles with his innocence and corruption and nothing in between...  the insert scene at the DA's office - seems like Hawks took the DA scene out of SLEEP because they put this one in."But what can we private citizens do?" The rant about "they offered their services two years ago!" The cops are dour "When I think what goes on in the minds of these lice I want to vomit!" snarling and bitter, the reporters snarky and half-crazed from hot ink fumes. The gangsters half mad from giggles, unable to stay out of hiding to bowl. Hecht's black comic Broadway witticism all over a scene at the theater seeing RAIN."This a girl Sadie... she's been a-what-a you call 'disillusioned.' Ann Dvorak's jazz baby seductive dance (even the music rocks like Satchmo), Karen Morley calmly accepting Tony's light instead of Lovo's, and on and on.


There's certain movies so much like my life I can't tell them apart. This is one movie like that, though I first saw and taped it on a TNT colorization, where it saved my life (details here); "I'm a New England spinster who's pushing 40.""Well who the hell isn't?!" Sure it's pretentious in parts but so is my life; when one is a romantic at heart one risks all for love even if or especially if it means your certain doom. And there's Sue Lyon luring you over the falls like a mirage in the mist.

Like OVER THE EDGE it is clearly on the side of the drunks and deviants, a punch in the snoot to the Tab Hunter beach movie (the fight with the beach boys and Hank). It's written by a gay man from the Southern 50s and the Ava Gardner part is meant for Ana Magnani where it would make more sense that Shannon's 'settling' to stay in paradise rather than take the long swim. And there's the old poet, ranting during the luncheon: "Love's an old remembered song a drunken fiddler plays / stumbling crazily along crooked alleyways."

My band and I loved this film in the 90s when the (colorized TNT version I'd taped) was a post-gig come-down favorite which we'd quote liberally: "strike the iron's hot, while its hot." It's a film for all kinds of romantic dysfunction, including abstinence and impotence and as one who's been both I respect that "nothing human disgusts (Deborah Kerr), Mr. Shannon... unless it's unkind... or violent." That line has become my creed, and a good way to imagine AA meetings, the 'talking cure' the way sharing intimate personal tragedy and strangeness with others helps calm us down. "I had a spook like yours once, I used to call him the blue devil" / "Endurance is something that spooks and blue devils respect, and the tricks they use to dispel their panic. Everything we do to give them the slip and so keep on going." Well, this movie is mine, this my trick, this movie my life raft that's never deflating, even sans colorization, sans band, sans Cialis, sans alcohol, sans... everything.


I had to pick one W.C. Fields movie, or Marx Brothers, so it was this. It's not perfect but I love it and can watch it incessantly. Peggy Hopkins Joyce is the pre-code equivalent of Anna Nicole Smith, and Burns and Allen do their schtick, and W.C. Fields is at his most feral, alcoholic, and assertive. I guess NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK is a favorite as well, but it's tough to put on this list because of all the lengthy Gloria Jean musical numbers, which even she doesn't seem to like doing. Bela Lugosi is the Russian buyer for the radioscope.. "Kansas City is lost, I am here!

Death is all around in TWENTIETH CENTURY. Oscar Jaffe threatens suicide (with sublime melodramatic flair) every time he starts to lose control of his actress or budget and the dialogue is choked with hilarious threats and insults, like "If he were dead and in his grave, I'd throw a rope around his neck and drag him on a Cook's tour!" But like some crazy shaman, Jaffe treads the lip between life and death in split second ham doses. Contorted like his old silent version of Mr. Hyde with hands curled in pre-strangling mode one moment, lowering them them gently at his sides in the manner of a priest to meet a backer that wants to finance his play "from a religious angle" the next. In a split second after split second, Barrymore's whole soul morphs and erupts into entire plays worth of indelible moments bashed together in long single shot takes where Hawks just uses the edges of the image as the train dimensions and lets these cats with their tails tied together have at it. It's ham-shamanistic alchemy, and the great, dark self-reflexive material brings out a full-on dose of Barrymore mania...kind of like what Robin Williams pulls off sporadically as the voice of the genie in ALADDIN or the TERMINATOR 2000 model dying in a molten pool of steel. A tale, ultimately, of a doomed impresario hurtling ever forward into the void, we wouldn't see a better locomotive-character/fearlessly self-depth-plumbing actor combo until Jon Voight's crazed escaped convict in RUNAWAY TRAIN.
Had to pick one desert island Kubrick. THE SHINING is maybe better, or has more class, but this has a sterling deep black comic magic that's in some ways far more terrifying, especially with the mad genius of Peter Sellers in full flower.

---- I suppose this is the mark for desert island discs. but if in a pinch I might even take some of these first:

11. DRACULA (1931)
dir. Todd Browning

This movie has my DNA stamped into it - it's a part of me and that's a fact. I've performed it in a one man ten-minute rooftop sideshow, screened it (in a 'Castle Films' reel) at druggy outdoor parties at half speed, been Drac for Halloween countless times, and I could give a shit that the film's so disjointed, that Whale's two FRANKENSTEIN films are so much better. This is the groundbreaker, the one everyone has seen once at least, and it used to be on all the time on UHF TV (without the girl being thrown in the lake cut out). Lugosi is the quintessential undead, the one from which all others flow. He is immortal. He's a part of me. His unworldly power is still startling, not that he's scary so much as magnetic. When he tries to control Van Helsing wiht his will you think to yourself Lugosi really does have ESP ability, you can see the shimmering auric tentacled drawing Van Helsing to him across the room. I even love the quiet, the lack of film music, making this seem like it was forgotten, that the camera just happened to be on during someone's 5 AM laudanum fever dream. Mina Harker - unearthly; David Manners - anemic - dwight Frye - hammy,

Lastly a recent uncovering (thanks to Mick LaSalle) of the existentially morbid WWI aviator films written by John Monk Saunders, I've been better able to situate the film in terms of drunken chilled moments at the flight control HQ bar or the consoling arms of Parisian meter maids. Lucy's recitation of the "Hurrah for the next who dies" toast in DRACULA connects to the same toast in EAGLE AND THE HAWK and DAWN PATROL (similar toasts and surrealist gusto in ACE OF ACES); and Helen Chandler wafts through LAST FLIGHT like the ghost of Mina Harker's soul now that Drac has her body. There may have been better movies, but this one's still never been bested. In its unearthly quiet and sheer perverse oddity it's like a British opiate addict WWI pilot's fever dream of what's going on in the mansion of his fiancee back home while he's battling the Hun. Next time you watch it just let it set in your mind that everyone involved with this film is long dead... that's true for most 1931 films but this one feels like it, it's a ghost transmission made from beyond while the actors were still alive (a formality); how's that for ghoulish existential truth? Black and white film - the ultimate vampire bite.
John Carpenter is always at his best when trying to remake RIO BRAVO, and this here is RIO BRAVO on Mars meets the old school bad guys and cops binding together to fight an alien source that he explored earlier in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, another favorite. I would never leave the planet without it. The greatest film of the 22nd century, it's genius has yet to be fully appreciated, but if PLAN NINE had a baby with THE THING, it would be GHOSTS. And Ice Cube and Natasha are a dynamite team.

A stock of top shelf eccentric character actors as the salty pirates; a real ship on real seas, Beery hobbling masterfully about like he's seldom been t'land. Poetic and darkly hilarious "this molasses is sweeter than serpent sedative!" - Great effects, sets and so forth, I personally love old Jim Hawkins and I generally hate kid actors, so there you go. When old scalawag Long John rows away at the end, there's a strange elegiac tone almost akin to the end of THE MISFITS. We're saying goodbye to charming rogues who could advise and guide wide eyed innocents in the ways of social scheming, all the things the code was worried that kids would learn. After this no Long Johns, certainly they couldn't escape at the end, to plunder happily ever after, and certainly not be around as a sage to children. Too damn bad.

I love this film for myriad reasons but one that jumps to mind is its gleeful shucking of romance (it sticks to the book and doesn’t tack on any pointless love interests) and total absence of morality. After all, the plot involves young Jim Hawkin’s going after loot stolen by pirates from murdered Spanish men and women who fell victim to the marauders of the high seas. Talk about gray areas! It aint like they’re gonna return it to the rightful owners… no sir. You root for Hawkins and his bewigged parent figures because–to quote from the scriptures of the Holy Grail, “they ‘aven’t got shit all over ‘em” – but you also root for smooth talking Silver, played with great dog-eared goofiness by Wallace Beery and his rawther repulsive looking band of brigands.

There’s a real palpable sense of bonding between Hawkins and Silver here (Beery had won an Oscar working with Cooper in THE CHAMP earlier) which takes the place of a usual dull romance as the film’s central “evolving” relationship. Basically what we see is that Silver wins out, evil as he is, because he’s good with children. He knows how to stoke the fires of Hawkin’s imagination and together they come out ahead even as everyone is dying all around them. You have to appreciate as well the sight of a young boy shooting a pirate and killing him dead with no moral hand-wringing and all the crap you’d have to go through with the ratings board and parent organizations in today’s hellishly overprotective climate. Other highlights? Lionel Barrymore as Billy Bones, telling horrible tales of warming his rum with the blood of slaughtered royalty and drunkenly bullying all the folks at the Admiral Benbow into singing “Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum.” My favorite movie to convulse to back in my drinking days. Lots of great wind effects.