80 - TOKYO STORY (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
The spare wonder of Ozu’s masterpiece is that his characters and plot are as
plain and honest as old shoes. The film is a portrait of middle-class
siblings who put on their Sunday best when their elderly bumpkin parents
travel to meet them in Tokyo. The excitement of the genial old couple is
salted by a gradual and unspeakable awareness that their children regard
them as an expensive, time-consuming inconvenience. The humble grace with
which the elderly parents accept the drift between themselves and their
impatient children would make stones weep. The original release was totally
unmatched by anything happening in Western cinema, and made Hollywood look
thoroughly superficial. Ozu would rather die than use a studio sleight of
hand. His camera barely moves from the sitting position adopted by his
elderly stars. The tension is exquisite. The result is profoundly moving.
This is rare gold. James Christopher
79 - DELIVERANCE (John Boorman, 1972)
The original hillbilly thriller, and the scariest of them all. Boorman’s sour
and violent classic loomed over the early 1970s like a Darwinian nightmare
about the condescending rich and the feral poor. Four Atlanta businessmen
(including two of the biggest names in Hollywood, John Voight and Burt
Reynolds) are on a canoe trip in Georgia when they find themselves stalked
by remorseless inbred woodsmen. A romantic alpha-male camping trip turns
into a squalid fight to stay alive. The bleak message of the film — that
there’s absolutely nothing civilised about survival — shook audiences to the
core. It still does. James Christopher
78 - THE LADY EVE (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) has been studying snakes in the Amazon for two
years, and hasn’t seen a woman for the duration. He was always going to fall
hard for the first resourceful young woman to cross his path — literally in
this case. Cruise ship con-artist Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) trips him up and
reels him in. He’s rich and naive, the perfect guy as far as she’s
concerned; she’s not a reptile or a pygmy which makes her pretty much ideal
for him. But when Charles gets wise to his lady friend’s dubious line of
work, he breaks off their relationship. Sturges’s film now kicks the comedy
up a notch as Jean reinvents herself as a British aristocrat, the eponymous
Lady Eve. Fonda and Stanwyck have a sexual chemistry that all but melts the
screen. Wendy Ide
77 - THE APU TRILOGY (Satyajit Ray, 1956-1959)
Former ad man Ray here turns heads and preconceptions away from the idea that
Indian cinema is synonymous with all-singing, all-dancing, multicoloured
camp. Instead, this tri-part celebration of lived reality is defined by a
quasi-documentary style, light, observational camera work and convincing
non-professional acting. Pather Panchali focuses on the hardships of
Apu (Subir Bannerjee, one of the three actors to play the protagonist
through the series), growing up in an impoverished rural idyll. In
Aparajito, his father dies, he trains to become a priest, but eventually
abandons the vocation for a place at Calcutta University. While Apu Sansar
details our hero’s impulsive marriage, his wife’s death in childbirth and
his attempts to reconcile with his estranged son. It’s epic stuff, but on a
quiet, intimate scale. Kevin Maher
76 - BLAZING SADDLES (Mel Brooks, 1974)
The first and the best of the “spoof” movies (Airplane!
would follow five years later), Brooks’s comedy satire took a genre that was
sacrosanct to American cinema and culture – the Western – and simply
eviscerated it. A deliciously wild-eyed Gene Wilder was perfect as the
alcoholic gunslinger, The Waco Kid, who joins forces with black sheriff
Cleavon Little (a stinging barb at the inherent racism of the genre) to
fight the expansionist plans of corrupt businessman Hedley Lamarr (Harvey
Korman). Mostly, however, it’s just an excuse for a roll-call of anarchic
gags, including the most famous flatulence scene in cinema history. Kevin
Maher
75 - THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Sergio Leone, 1966)
Ponderously slow, but never less than gripping, the third of Leone’s spaghetti
westerns with Clint Eastwood is rightly the most celebrated. The Spanish
army supplied the hundreds of extras needed, and agreed to build the bridge
that is destroyed by explosives, on condition that a Spanish army captain
got to press the button. He blew up the bridge when the cameras weren’t
turning, so his army colleagues rebuilt it, and they blew it up again. The
$200,000 in gold that our unlikely alliance is hunting would be worth around
$8,960,000 at today’s prices. Nigel Kendall
74 - ROSEMARY'S BABY (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Inspired by Ira Levin’s novel, Polanski returned to the themes of urban
alienation and the descent into madness explored in his earlier Repulsion,
but this time with a genuinely horrific twist. Mia Farrow took the role
against the wishes of her then husband Frank Sinatra, who threatened her
with divorce if she disobeyed. In a curious echo of the film, in which
Rosemary’s husband endangers his mortal soul for an acting career, she took
the part and lost Frank. Nigel Kendall
73 - GREAT EXPECTATIONS (David Lean, 1946)
David Lean’s finest two hours, and still the best big-screen version of a
Dickens novel yet made. The director’s master stroke was to open it like a
ghost story and film it like a ripping yarn. Guy Green’s magnificently
broody photography was an Oscar-winning ingredient. So too the gothic sets.
There is so much to admire: the crisp pace, the crackling atmosphere, and
John Mills as the arrogant hero whose expectations are built on delusions.
But it is Martita Hunt’s matchless Miss Haversham that most of us will take
to the grave. Wendy Ide
72 - DAYS OF HEAVEN (Terrence Malick, 1978)
Malick’s follow-up to his extraordinary Badlands is one of the
great art films of the 1970s. A young Richard Gere stars as Bill, a
hot-tempered labourer who is forced to flee the industrial blight of Chicago
with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his sister Linda (Linda Manz). They
seek sanctuary in the rural heartlands, and find it on a farm owned by the
ailing Sam Shepard. Days of Heaven is celebrated for the eerie
half-light of the cinematography – Malick insisted that the film was shot at
the “magic hour”, first thing in the morning and late at night. Wendy
Ide
71 - THIS IS SPINAL TAP (Rob Reiner, 1984)
Starting life as a stunt, this faux documentary about a British heavy metal
band on a disastrous tour of the United States is cinema’s most legendary
spoof. Shot with deadpan candour, the film charts the squabbles, the gaffes,
and the cock-ups as Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St Hubbins
(Michael McKean) and Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls) threaten to implode after
17 years on the road. It’s a terrific fly-on-the-wall comedy with Reiner
himself playing the cheesy documentary-maker Marty DiBergi. Some scenes will
forever be cherished: the band totally lost back stage before a concert; the
drummer getting trapped in a stage pod; Derek Smalls setting off an airport
metal detector because of a large foil-wrapped gherkin in his underpants;
and Stonehenge. James Christopher
