1940s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[matrixschmatrix]

Swo, your film by film write up of your top fifty that you did on that other site is pretty great and I'm going to file that away with the rest of my decades project movie resources. I'm also going to try to do one myself, though since I haven't watched some of my top fifty in a long time I'm going to be blank as hell about them.

Tommasso, if I'm around long enough to do a second go round on any of these I promise I'll make an effort to seek out some of the fascinating-looking stuff I'd never heard of you and Lubitsch and HerrShreck and the other guys are always talking about. I know for my part, I was kind of lazy on this one and wound up not watching nearly as many new movies for it as I would have liked- which is probably why my list, at least, is fairly conventional.

[YnEoS]

I think as there become more and more films available per decade, the lists will end up becoming more and more conventional. Given less time, people will see some lesser known stuff, but not all of it, and the ones everyone has seen will still rise to the top. People also have more old favorites in a decade like this and less room to incorporate lesser known films.

I know this probably won't happen, especially part way through the decades project, but has anyone considered raising the amount of films on each submitted list to 75 or 100, for a final list of 150 or 200? With more room on the lists people might be more inclined to include some lesser known titles that were great, but didn't completely overshadow old favorites.

[matrixschmatrix]

I know that for my part, I could easily have filled out 100 for this list, and that would have been goddamn impossible for the last one. On the other hand, I could go ahead and just make a list of 100 for my own pleasure, because screw you guys.

[Cold Bishop]

But now, if you allow me to say so, and I surely don't want to cause any bad blood: I find the result almost shockingly conventional, quite in contrast to the 20s and 30s list. I had thought that with the new technology called the internet many more films would come into focus that were unjustly neglected

I think the technology did make the difference... but with the caveat - and one especially emblematic of internet "distribution"- that no consensus around films could be built. I only voted for 4 of the top 10, and the Kane was pretty far down on my list. Only two of my top 10 (and six films from my list, period) broke the top 40. Two of my top 10 (including my coveted number 1) didn't even make the list! (I tip my hat to the two other gentlemen who kept it from becoming an orphan).

I don't know how successful the spotlight project proved this go around. I watched at least one spotlight film from everyone, but then again, I couldn't find the time to write about most of them, so no discussion, and no discussion means convincing less people to see them. Even then, only Christ in Concrete cracked my list from the exchange (the Staudte would have, not for vote-splitting). There's also the matter of Megaupload's demise and no reasonable alternative: I don't know about you guys, but I was actually planning on uploading a small cache of unavailable films for the adventurous viewer. I even had a few uploaded when the takedown occured. Not everyone here is plugged into an elite tracker, and there is enough commercially available to dig through that they might not care to go through the effort to find them otherwise.

I'm with you on the cinema of the Occupation and beyond. I was going to write an overview of the French cinema I watched, in the manner of domino's big post in the Horror project, but I simply could never find the time. I probably still will, but now that the project is over, I'm going to use the freedom to track down some of the remaining titles in my kevyip.

[Gropius]

Or take one of my favourites, Pewas' "Der verzauberte Tag", which thankfully at least made it into the also-rans. It received 80 points, and as I was the one who listed it as #8 (i.e. 42 points), the other voter must have placed it at #12. My question is: did everybody else who saw it not share the enthusiasm (which would be okay with me), or did the majority not feel the need to seek it out? Just an example that I mention because this film is so close to my heart.

With regard to this particular example, I'm afraid that the German films I saw from this decade - which I sought out following your recommendations - made less of an impression on me than the 30s ones. While I can appreciate the significant technical merits of Der verzauberte Tag and Opfergang, I'm not really a fan of the 'fatal/fated romance' genre to which they both seem to belong. Instead, I preferred the blockbusting adventure of Münchhausen, which hangs together better, I think, than The Thief of Bagdad, its supposed model.

Generally speaking, I think the 40s is a decade too freighted with canonical titles (against a comparatively dispersed hinterland) to be seriously shaken up. For instance, since so many critics have voted Kane and The Third Man the greatest films ever made, they seem to have a hold that even iconoclasts are reluctant to challenge (e.g. I voted for both of those, albeit at the bottom of my list, and no other Reed/Welles titles, despite being open to persuasion). A new discovery has to be doubly impressive to unseat an established favourite, and, as Cold Bishop notes, it is difficult to come to a consensus on such discoveries.

[Cold Bishop]

I'm going this chance to say again that The Third Man does absolutely nothing for me. Sure, Welles presence knocks the film up a few notches, and the finale is fun (although less impressive in view of He Walked By Night and It Always Rains on Sunday), but I'd take Odd Man Out or The Man Between over it any day.

I was wavering whether or not to replace my sole Welles with either Ambersons or Shanghai. Maybe I should have, but all three (and really, all five) films are masterpieces. You just get tired of seeing Kane always hog that spotlight.

[Gregory]

Yep, if I were making a list of 75 or 100 there would have been more room for new discoveries that I liked a great deal on first viewing (in addition to giving the avant-garde a far more representative presence on my list and generally making my selection more well-rounded.). As it is, with 50, there are already easily that number that have a lot of personal significance to me and that I have longstanding admiration for. It may not be fair (if such a concept even applies here) but I find with this decade (and just as much the '50s and '60s) that it's pretty hard for films that I've just seen due to member spotlights and other discussions here to break into my top fifty for the decade. I still watch a fairly steady stream of films that are new to me, including spotlights, but tend to spend just as much time revisiting existing favorites to reappraise them and make sure they mean enough to me to rank on my list.
I didn't feel bad in the least leaving Kane, Third Man, or Red Shoes off my list. I find them all very impressive, just not significant to me in a way that'd make me feel personally attached to them. I think the lists should be highly personal and not based at all on accepted canon or critical valuation if the final list is going to be interesting.

[swo17]

Surely the war had a lot to do with this--notice the paucity of ranking foreign films during the first half of the decade.

Yes, but did the war really mean that the films made in other countries than the US, even if the number of films made was going down, were so much inferior?

No, I only meant that the number of films was down, so foreign films from early in the decade make up a smaller percentage of the available pool of films.

Or take one of my favourites, Pewas' "Der verzauberte Tag", which thankfully at least made it into the also-rans.

I did really like this film (especially the ending) and it was on my list for a little while but I ultimately had to cut it to make room for other recent discoveries I liked more.

And that still doesn't explain the 5 points for "Shoeshine"

Bear in mind that our points system fails to recognize the thousands of films that each ranking film has risen above to score any points at all. Sure, 727 vs. 5 sounds extreme, but if we had each watched 20,000 films from the decade and ranked them 1-20,000, the comparison would be more like 20,727 vs. 20,005, a more fair assessment of the general reception to both films. Not that I am in any way suggesting that we do this. To wit:

I know this probably won't happen, especially part way through the decades project, but has anyone considered raising the amount of films on each submitted list to 75 or 100, for a final list of 150 or 200? With more room on the lists people might be more inclined to include some lesser known titles that were great, but didn't completely overshadow old favorites.

I don't know, 50 seems like the sweet spot to me. That always seems to be enough room to include just about everything you need on there, but not enough where you feel compelled to start filling up spaces with canonical titles that you're not passionate about. For example, there's no foreseeable way that I could justify excluding Citizen Kane from a top 100, but limited to 50, I have to really question whether I really love it/think it's as great as many others do.

[Shrew]

I agree the list is unfortunately a bit conservative this time around, but that may have to do with a larger percentage of the 40s (particularly the big films) having been available significantly longer than the 30s. The 20s and 30s had much more of a shakeup because so many films (both American and not) became available in the interim between lists.

As for Shoeshine, I gave it its highest vote (48), but no one was really talking about it, probably because of familiarity. At the same time, I feel like it was hurt by being accessible, but not accessible enough for folks not blown away by say, Bicycle Thieves (which I don't like as much but is more famous), to bother importing it. For better or worse, other things likely sucked up the Neorealism votes. And to compare it to The Third Man is silly, as they're stylistically and tonally completely different and will therefore appeal to very different camps, and the nationality doesn't make a difference.

[the preacher]

Excellent work swo! As is often the case, the orphans and also-rans lists fascinate most.

I agree with that, they would deserve a second round.

[Tommaso]

I like the idea of extending the personal lists to include more than 50 films. This would have been extremely handy for me especially for the 20s and 30s list, where I had to leave off many films that I really cared about, but also for the 40s list, and it surely would make my provisional 50s list a little less 'mainstream' than it looks like now (in other words: I'm looking forward to recommendations which might make it look less like a 'Best of CC and MoC', which it is at the moment).

Gropius: I also voted for Kane, also somewhere in the middle range, and made Thief of Bagdad and Münchhausen my #14 and #18, respectively (I do think that the 'original' is the slightly more inventive film). As to the Pewas and the Harlan, I'm glad that you at least saw them, regardless of the effect on you personally. The best thing about this listmaking, as I always said, is the chance to get recommendations for films that one has personally never thought or even heard about. Despite my disappointment with the end result, this makes the whole effort worthwhile. But I don't share your view about canonical titles, especially as the voting is anonymous and you're not getting the whole thrust of critical attack if you don't have, say, "Casablanca" on your list. Don't believe in the critics, believe in what you like best. Often the professional critics wrote their canonical statements at a time when they didn't have a chance to have a more 'diversified' viewpoint because many films were simply not available. That doesn't mean that every 'canonical' title is overrated, but I do believe that the canon must be expanded. Which is why I'd really like to have a more extensive list next time around.

Shrew: both Shoeshine and The Third Man have roughly the same appeal to me, even though of course they are very different. I'd have placed them at around #60 or 70 on my list if the list had extended so far, thus the comparison.

now that the project is over, I'm going to use the freedom to track down some of the remaining titles in my kevyip.

Yes, indeed. For instance, just last night I watched another film which certainly would have made it onto my list had I not handed in said list a few hours earlier. It doesn't matter, because the film would have ended up as another orphan, anyway. But at least I want to mention it now: Ehe im Schatten by Kurt Maetzig (1947). The first German post-war film to deal with the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich, based on the real-life story of actor Joachim Gottschalk and his Jewish wife. Told as a melodrama, sure, but it's frighteningly intense and at the same time so very free of any moralising that it towers above any later German film dealing with the topic I can think of. A film that makes the horror personal, and for me this means it's much more gripping and devastating. Fantastic acting and fine cinematography, too. My last recommendation for this list, then...

[swo17]

I don't know how successful the spotlight project proved this go around.

Your top spotlight made my list, and I don't know if I would have seen it otherwise.

These spotlights made the top 100 (though perhaps some of them would have made it there anyway): The Chase, I Walked with a Zombie, Hangover Square, The Murderers Are Among Us, Begone Dull Care. A few others came very close as well.

[lubitsch]

I'm also very disappointed with the result. I blame myself for not always having enough energy and more often not having the time to fill out some blanks regarding Italy and France, therefore I wasn't able to write more of my summary posts. Though I doubt that they have that much influence, I therefore really can't complain.

Still I wonder about the conventionality of this list because the 40s definitively do not require more viewing than the 30s. The amount of available/important films roughly more than doubles from the pre20s to the 20s list and again more than doubles for the 30s list, but remains almost exactly the same for the 40s list. I have a fairly good overview about these decades also regarding the amount of English subtitles for non-English films and due to the war and the hostile and often necessarily conformistic political climate, both decades end up in a head to head race. In earlier decades some lesser known jewels could amass enough votes to leap, well not quite to the top, but at least crack the first 100 films. This didn't happen here.

The english language film dominance is understandable, this is a strong decade for the US cinema and the arguably strongest for the British, while Japan and Germany suffer quite a bit. But throughout all cinematographies the hidden pearls ... well remained hidden. Were Swo and me the only people who have seen Krakatit? Am I the only one who's seen Till we meet again by Borzage? That's why I liked my list filter, one could find out if films were disliked or simply unseen by the majority.

Anyway this was the last list for me I won't have the time to keep up with the 50s list, apologies for my shortcomings with this one, I simply hadn't the time. My strong suggestion is: watch the really good films if you participate, drop the solid, good stuff. It's not good enough.

Oh and BTW I voted Citizen Kane on 1st spot. Yeah it's a boring vote. But it's visually bloody inventive and it tells a modern story in a modern, exciting way while never alienating classical viewers. There's an apparently untranslatable German tern "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" which describes an animal combining traits of different species which are all useful for humans and that#s what this film is, it's a glorious shot at everything hitting almost every target.

[Tommaso]

According to dict.cc, "eierlegende Wollmichsau" translates as "jack of all trades device" Well...

But too bad you won't make it to the 50s list. If you can, try to give us some write-up of German 50s films at least. There must be something else than Peter Alexander and Rudolf Prack films. I hope....

[Gropius]

Don't believe in the critics, believe in what you like best.

Oh, I completely agree. I was tempted to exclude The Third Man, but then realised that I liked it in spite of all the excessive hype.

Were Swo and me the only people who have seen Krakatit?

One of the last things I watched, and it nearly crept on to my list, beaten out by equally neglected Teuvo Tulio and Marcel L'Herbier titles.

[swo17]

To those disappointed with the results, I would remind you that all the composite list represents is the reality of where participants' tastes, interests, and priorities currently lie. Complaining about it is a bit like complaining that half of Americans are still Republicans. There will always be some people who get more adventurous about it than others, but none of the 33 lists I received are just blindly running through the canon. It just happens that when you put that many lists together, the more familiar films tend to rise to the top. But the list can still serve as a valuable resource. If something ranked highly that you haven't seen yet, this is probably an indication that that film is worth being familiar with. If you're more adventurous, there are plenty of great recommendations in the lower reaches of the list, especially if you pay attention to the films with high max rankings (the third number shown after each film). Try not to think of this as a competition so much as an organized display of the collective opinions of everyone who participated this go-around.

[Michael Kerpan]

No point in being disappointed -- as all three lists taken together provide an excellent resource for further exploration.

[Dansu Dansu Dansu]

Hello everyone. I thought I'd come out of the shadows and introduce myself. I found out about this list project less than a week ago, so if my list was somewhat conventional, I apologize. I'm endlessly fascinated by WW2 (not that I'm unique for that), so I would have loved to have seen even one German 40s film, but unfortunately I didn't get around to it. Stray Dog and The Best Years of Our Lives were both within my top fifteen, each incredibly observant of postwar ideological changes. Read Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower and then watch Stray Dog and it's incredible how much of Dower's Pulitzer Prize-winning research is touched upon by Kurosawa, and this without the benefit of hindsight. Plus, it's very much in the spirit of Dostoevsky, one of my favorite writers, and seems all the more thrilling for its recklessness. The Best Years of Our Lives seems equally on the mark with domestic postwar adjustments, as open with criticism as praise. Brute Force, which ranked in my top twenty, takes America to task for fascist threads being absorbed by its government, as a conservative bureaucrat is guilty of forcing the appointment of Hume Cronyn's character, which, as mentioned, wildly brings out his somewhat dormant inner fascist (and I could be completely out of my mind, but I see Lancaster's crippled girlfriend as an allusion to the purity of Roosevelt's era being lost by to the prison of postwar restructuring), but this is so buried in the subtext, it doesn't seem as frank as The Best Years.

I had Welles' first two films in my top ten (7 and 10) so I can't really talk, but I have to say, I would have rather seen Late Spring take the prize. Ultimately, even though it seems as though we've all come along way in our personal film-viewing history to simply end up with Kane, I would certainly put it in a list of the top 100 films ever made, which makes its inclusion in my top ten necessary. It's not that I think those who didn't rank Kane are posturing, but for me, if I was being honest, I had to include it.

My top three were:
1. Letter from an Unknown Woman
2. Notorious
3. The Lady Eve

These are easily three of my favorite films of all time, so I'm not sure time would have changed this, but it's certainly exciting to think it may have. Anyway, thanks for all of your comments and for sharing your knowledge. I'm eager to plunge into that list of also-rans and orphans for next time, but I've already started preparing for the next one. I'm looking forward to reading your recommendations for the 50s.

[colinr0380]

I agree with Mr Kerpan. I do not know how other people structure their lists but I know that I try and highlight different titles from those that I used my fifty spots for on the last iteration (hence why Thieves' Highway dropped lower for me this time! I do not suddenly 'hate' the film; I am just highlighting some other films I saw since the last poll) - some I keep on there but I like to think of my list as an example of films which affected me the most over the time since we last tackled the 40s list. I do not really think too much about having to create or work against a canon so much as decide which films most affected me during this period, for better or worse. To take Kenneth Anger as an example I did not vote for Fireworks or Puce Moment (and I really like Puce Moment) but because for me the 50s films are the ones that I am most excited about, so I focused on other areas. I guess that this means that I would also support a 75 or 100 submission list, since I think that way many more films would be eligible, but it would be a huge job for the kind person who tallies up all of the lists to do that!

However the most exciting thing about all of these list projects are the discussions that they inspire and the huge number of films that both the discussion and the final list exposes me to. The great benefit of the wonderful posts by Tommaso and lubitsch is that they expose a much wider world of cinema beyond the canonical, and that exposure is much appreciated even if the films will likely not appear in the 'Final 100' - I hope that I can help to do the same in some small way in the horror project by talking about films which might never trouble anyones list even of best horror films, but which still have a part to play in the cinematic landscape.

[Cold Bishop]

Listmaking is rather simple (although at some point, rather arbitrary and useless): You got a dozen films you really love, the personal masterpieces that are going to be topping your list. You got a long list of Great Cinema that you'll have the cherrypick, often randomly, down to a working list. Then you got a small group of "sleepers", or I guess lubitsch would call them the "solid, good stuff", that you feel a great fondness for, despite the lack of perfection.

The task of list-making is simply ordering the first category; culling down that second category to something workable (in the process, maybe discovering some of these are personal masterpieces, and other maybe aren't hot stuff after all) using all sorts of self-imposed strategies and algorithms; and hopefully sprinkling a few of those "sleepers" at the end (although The Monster and the Girl just missed my list). There's no real science or accuracy to it, which is why something like Reign of Terror can miss my list, but if you were to casually tell me "Reign of Terror is one of the 50 best films of the decade", I wouldn't disagree.

Yeah, past lists do make a difference. I didn't vote for nearly enough film noir as I could have, for example. And if you see that something like The Suspect belly-flopped this go around, you may not save a spot for it the next time around.

[domino harvey]

Swo, think you could use your Excel skills to give us like the tally ordered by the number of lists the film appeared on (or like the top twenty of that?)

[swo17]

01. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) 27
03. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948) 22
02. Late Spring (Yasujirô Ozu, 1949) 21
04. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) 21
06. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947) 21
09. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946) 19
10. Day of Wrath (Carl Dreyer, 1943) 19
05. Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944/6) 18
07. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) 18
22. Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) 18
08. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) 17
14. The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) 17
15. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) 17
11. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) 16
12. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) 16
13. The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1944) 15
18. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) 15
19. Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) 15
31. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) 15
17. Ladri di biciclette (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) 14
28. Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) 14
38. White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) 14

Also, if rank were determined by number of votes, these guys would have made the top 100:
The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) 7
Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949) 7
Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945) 6
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949) 6
Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946) 6
Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1947) 6
Key Largo (John Huston, 1948) 6
Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) 6
Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948) 6

[colinr0380]

There's no real science or accuracy to it, which is why something like Reign of Terror can miss my list, but if you were to casually tell me "Reign of Terror is one of the 50 best films of the decade", I wouldn't disagree.

Yeah, past lists do make a difference. I didn't vote for nearly enough film noir as I could have, for example. And if you see that something like The Suspect belly-flopped this go around, you may not save a spot for it the next time around.

Or vice versa? For example I might assume that if lots of people have been talking about Reign of Terror being one of the best films of the decade in the discussion thread that maybe I might not need to vote for it myself, since it appears to have strong support to 'chart'. But then if I vote for The Suspect and it does not get any votes, then it might strengthen my conviction to champion it again on the next iteration. Although in my case it would also depend on my remembering my promise to myself to champion a film when we next get around to looking at the decade again in five years time!

[swo17]

I expected more votes for Reign of Terror given all the discussion, but now that I think about it, maybe that was mostly just me bringing it up over and over again.

[Gregory]

Welcome to the forum, Dansu Dansu Dansu. It looks to me like you have exquisite taste.