1949's Best Movies: 70 Years Later

1959's Best Movies: 60 Years Later
1969's Best Movies: 50 Years Later
1979's Best Movies: 40 Years Later
1989's Best Movies: 30 Years Later
1999's Best Movies: 20 Years Later

This must be the easiest one of these there is. Even though I like several of these. But come on!

Definitely not the easiest for me, aside from immediately scratching The Third Man off the list.

Also, would love to see which aggregated lists are responsible for fucking Samson and Delilah ranking higher than The Heiress.

Late Spring, no question.

i mean yeah late spring is better but i voted stray dog out of fondness

I think I love A Letter to Three Wives more than All About Eve! All those leading ladies doing perfect stuff!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Late_Spring_Japanese_Poster.jpg

Ozu is just far too sedate and genteel for me tbh

Kind Hearts v The Third Man

God, Late Spring is 70 years old.

White Heat

In descending order:

The Third Man
The Heiress
The Reckless Moment
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
White Heat
Kind Hearts & Coronets
Late Spring
A Letter to Three Wives

I saw White Heat again a couple Fridays ago -- what a cracker.

aside from immediately scratching The Third Man off the list.

^still evil

I also watched The Fountainhead again -- it's a scream, and sexy as hell.

The Fountainhead is a great anomaly. Never not voting Ozu.

it's a scream, and sexy as hell.

how tall is your building?

is this building sexy or is it just tall

if Gary Cooper were a skyscraper I'd jump off his roof.

never did it for me, except maybe in the silent days when he wore lots of makeup

still evil

Everyone gets their allotment of insanely irrational dislikes.

Nearly all of you hate The Searchers, iirc.

they prefer Jodie Foster to Natalie Wood

never did it for me, except maybe in the silent days when he wore lots of makeup

Strange how fug Cooper became just as sound was coming in.

I say White Heat, but I love that human firecracker Cagney.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ba/6c/f8/ba6cf8eb0a556345b1f525d8d24f210b.jpg

Stray Dog and The Reckless Moment are my biggest blindspots here. The Heiress and A Letter to Three Wives probably as well, but Wyler and Mankiewicz have yet to enter my own personal auteur canon (though I like several films by each of them).

Is The Third Man the obvious front runner here, or are we more of an Ozu crowd?

It's not m favorite Ozu; he made stronger variants.

My

Late Spring will run away with this tho I don't adore it
Third Man is good... nonstop dutch angles get sort of annoying
Yellow Ribbon is gorgeous but pales next to Fort Apache

Conversely, Late Spring actually IS probably my favorite Ozu variant.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon seemed like an odd inclusion to me as well (I agree that Fort Apache is better).

I like The Third Man plenty, but from this list, White Heat and Kind Hearts and Coronets are just such deliriously entertaining movies that I found it hard to pick between them.

nonstop dutch angles get sort of annoying

More or less annoying than that interminable zither theme?

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is pretty fab imho

Adam's Rib is a ludicrous omission

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Silence de la Mer too (been on Criterion awhile)

haha I love the zither! xp

cmon j.lu and flappy, T3M is a stone classic. I've watched it more than i've needed to, it's addictive.

God only knows why I'm hanging onto my Criterion BR of it, with the prices it's fetching on the aftermarket.

a situation like that does tempt amateurs

Let it go, DLH, he's only another scribbler with too much drink in him

I'm not saying the total movie is bad; just the way that theme keeps coming back distracts me.

like themes do!

Close to a dead heat between White Heat and The Third Man, and I think Late Spring is the Ozu film I really love (more than Tokyo Story), although I get the titles confused. White Heat, I guess.

all of the Ozu films with Setsuko Hara were pretty great I thought (Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story, Late Autumn, The End of Summer). hard to pick a favorite, maybe Late Spring

went with The Third Man, though i was tempted by White Heat and Kind Hearts. those three films all really stick the landing, too.

The Third Man gets a lot of deserved props for the intrigue but it's also an extremely funny film, the entire mini-subplot with Holly getting roped into giving a lecture on literature has a great buildup and a great payoff.

I love how I just watched _The Third Man_ in full for the first time always breaks down into quoting marathons.

The Third Man gets a lot of deserved props for the intrigue but it's also an extremely funny film, the entire mini-subplot with Holly getting roped into giving a lecture on literature has a great buildup and a great payoff.

― omar little, W

"The stream of...?"

piss

Enough about Welles' personal life...

Welles' wells run deep

Smells sweet, doesn't it ?

also no other film came close to embodying Graham Greene's sensibility, tho there were some other good ones

Our Man in Havana is pretty close, methinks

I rewatched OMiH recently and it's very entertaining, but there's something a little off. Played for laughs a little more than intended, maybe.

I've never read Graham Greene, but how does Lang's Ministry of Fear measure up?

I suspect The End of the Affair, while good, is it's own unique thing.

Greene is a fun read, but he's Maugham with religious pretensions. Brighton Rock's good.

I tend to forget Greene's novels even tho i get the urge to read one every couple of years. He's mostly pretty po-faced is how i think of him.

I remember the Lang movie being more straightforward than I gen associate with the GG I've read. From the war years, Went the Day Well? is stranger and more violent.

Yes, Brighton Rock, also The Fallen Idol and the Caine-Fraser Quiet American.

Never realised Went the Day Well? was a Greene story. Cavalcanti had surrealist affiliations iirc so not the obvious director to match Greene's vibe

of the Greene novels I've read, Travels With My Aunt is the one that feels most unlike the others. haven't seen the film

Voting Third man, which I love, but I gotta admit I've never been a fan of the zither, took me more than a few viewings to get over it. Its so goofy and incongruous, it seems like its being piped in from a romantic comedy being filmed next door.

you guys know the theme was a huge hit in the US, right?

wiki:

Following its release in the US in 1950, "The Third Man Theme" spent 11 weeks at number one on Billboard's US Best Sellers in Stores chart, from April 29 to July 8. Its success led to a trend in releasing film theme music as singles. A guitar version by Guy Lombardo also sold strongly. Four other versions charted in the US during 1950. According to Faber and Faber, the different versions of the theme have collectively sold an estimated forty million copies.

You can see how an Elvis had to happen.

how does Lang's Ministry of Fear measure up?

The movie is excellent (haven't read the book).

I do like the movie but it’s sort of compromised by the peppy lite wartime ending imo (don’t know if that’s in GG’s text). And I have a tough time with Ray Milland...

I like The Third Man a lot but I’m not gaga about it, probably due to revisit it

Yeah there’s seemingly a version of the third man theme on every Salvation Army dollar bin record. It’s is fine as a tune or w/e, just feels like it’s from a different movie is all. I’ve made my peace with it over the years

It was a big deal. Has anyone mentioned the radio show yet?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Harry_Lime?wprov=sfti1

Think I must have heard this version of the theme song before I saw the movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XfZizxzHrY

Yadda Yadda late spring

Yeah, this is Late Spring, pretty easily.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Do this too: 1939's Best Movies: 80 Years Later

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

that's what happens when i assume it's safe to throw yellow ribbon a vote

kind hearts and coronets is so boring btw, why isn't guinness also the murderer

Late Spring is the one about parents and adult children where Chishu Ryu goes "mmmmmm." right?

the multiple-adult-children film is Tokyo Story. in this film there is only one adult child.

I love the storyline that, as the widower Shukichi he agrees to marry Mrs. Miwa to make his daughter Noriko realize she has to let go, as much as she loves him and is comfortable staying at home, and as much as he wants her to stay. In the end so devoted to him that she is willing to marry to make him happy

*she is so devoted...

10/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8njihi1CbI

the final moments when she actually does marry and he realizes he is alone forever is kind of heartbreaking