1924's Best Movies: 100 Years Later

In keeping with previous polls, I've gone with the contenders in the top 2,000 films (actually bumped up to 2,500 to bring the list of nominees to at least 10 total), but they now offer the entire starting spreadsheet. Here are the titles that carry through through the top 5,000 films ever.

2518	2471	Sylvester	Pick, Lupu	1924	Germany	66
2903	2856	Saga of Gosta Berling, The	Stiller, Mauritz	1924	Sweden	183
3278	3267	Michael	Dreyer, Carl Theodor	1924	Germany	86
3634	3513	Au secours!	Gance, Abel	1924	France	18
4214	4587	Thief of Bagdad, The	Walsh, Raoul	1924	USA	155
4599	4456	Inhumaine, L'	L'Herbier, Marcel	1924	France	135

Sherlock Jr. 100 years old yesterday.

Really tempted to go with Ballet Mechanique here

Pretty sure I will die without ever having seen Greed.

https://archive.org/details/greed-1924_202111

I watched this in 1999 on TCM! Ah, I miss cable sometimes.

So many choices for this year, went with the Last Laugh

(xpost) Thanks! Will watch that for sure (over many nights I will confidently predict). I take it that a four-hour version is about the best that you can do.

Tough to pick between The Last Laugh and Sherlock, Jr., but I went with the latter because what it has to say about cinema is done so brilliantly and unpretentiously.

i have seen the keatons and the last laugh. not my favorites of either director.

I've only seen 3 and it's hard to choose, but I think Murnau just over Leger and Keaton. I had the benefit of seeing the Last Laugh on a big screen the first time I saw it, it's amazing to look at.

What are Fritz Lang's Wagner movies like?

It's a delight to watch Sherlock, Jr. blow away my students.

Even the shortest version of Greed is p great tbh

Will look at watching Greed and Sherlock Jr in the next week

Sherlock Jr. is such a joy, and a century of film theory demonstrated in that last scene.

Sherlock Jr. is one of the few Keatons I haven’t seen. Must correct that immediately!

I love Ballet Mecanique so voted for it, but I'm not entirely sure I've seen any of the others.

I will never vote against Buster Keaton. He was the greatest.

Sherlock Jr is an astounding Don Quixote-esque achievement. Great selection of films, though - Chaney is wonderful in He Who Gets Slapped. Still hoping to catch Greed on the big screen!

I will never vote against Buster Keaton

OK fine I will ;)

I saw Greed, Sherlock Jr. and the two shorts more than 30 years ago, and never since, though this did persuade me to finally see The Last Laugh. I'll vote for Greed since I think Keaton is taking care of himself.

voted for Greed

just finished rereading McTeague for my book club. we haven't met to discuss it yet, but I wonder what they will think

Just finishing Greed now
Judging by the amount of scenes using still pictures the MGM cut can't have made too much sense?

From what I remember, it's pretty coherent - if you didn't know better, you wouldn't have guessed it had seven hours sliced out of it.

There's an excellent book called Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film by the late James Card, who was the founding curator of the George Eastman House. It has a brutal takedown of Stroheim whose work he does like (I think he calls Foolish Wives a masterpiece and his greatest film) but he argues that Stroheim went a long way to inflate his own reputation as an uncompromising artist partly to make up for his own shortcomings as a filmmaker. He argues that Greed never needed to be that long and likely ran past nine hours because Stroheim insisted on shooting Norris's richly detailed novel word-for-word without knowing how to condense anything. He even argues that the film betrays a lack of vision on Stroheim's part as so much of it feels like a straight visual translation of what's described in McTeague, a literary masterpiece in its own right. He then puts Greed in context of Stroheim's other productions, arguing that Stroheim was known for excessive methods that wouldn't produce any results that could be discernible on-screen (like on Merry-Go-Round where he insisted on the great expense of purchasing hand-embroidered silk underwear for all the extras to wear even though no one would ever seen them, claiming just feeling them when they're worn would somehow allow the extras to inhabit their background roles better).

I think Stroheim is a great director, love his work, and would welcome a Holy Grail discovery of the original cut of Greed, but I can't say Card is all that wrong either.

Great response thank you

Reminds me of the fans who ooh and ahh at Kubrick filming by candlelight.

You're welcome nxd. Re: Barry Lyndon, to be fair, what Kubrick did there was visibly awesome. It's not 100% perfect - you can see signs of why shooting in so little light is problematic as it's right on the cusp of having serious focus issues and possibly too much grain showing - but it's a gorgeous documentary-like effect. There's really only a handful of candlelight scenes, but the whole film is lit wonderfully.

I am at peace with my oohing and ahhing over Barry Lyndon's visuals

I raise my eyebrow at the (male, always) fans who praise Kubrick exclusively on those terms. For a certain kind of fan, a director is great because he (male, always) shows his work.

Well yeah, there's Kubrick and then there's Villeneuve

That's common with any director with that kind of visual flair, whether it's Kubrick, Scorsese, Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson - they draw a lot of fans who are just into those superficial pleasures. Life on the Record just did a podcast on the 50th anniversary of I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (FWIW, one of my absolute favorites, certainly my favorite album of that year), and she makes a brief comment that she's averse to long guitar solos, associating it with some phallic impulse among men. I can see someone making a similar comment on long camera moves, specifically long Steadicam shots that snake through long hallways and corridors, etc, not just for the physical aspects of that work but as some kind of one-upmanship meant to floor the audience.

They may be true of how some people view Kubrick's work, but I don't think that's actually what he's doing. I think Christopher Frayling called Kubrick "relentlessly logical" (IIRC as part of his explanation as to why Kubrick drove Ken Adams to a nervous breakdown - should be on the Criterion extras for Barry Lyndon) and that feels like a pretty perfect description of Kubrick's methods - he doesn't do anything unless he's got a solid rationale behind it. At least to me, everything he does stylistically is an integral part of his worldview in any given film.

Barry Lyndon can be a beautiful film, but it's also very unsettling. I always felt like the tragedy behind the climax and ending is how someone finds it in himself to remain merciful only to find that the world is anything but. A lot of the twists and turns of Barry's fortunes throughout the film seem rooted in his warmth and decency and whether they're ultimately to his advantage or whether they make him that much more vulnerable to being knocked down. My favorite moment is when he knowingly drops his guard and puts everything on the line at the beginning of a dangerous mission, leaving himself completely at the mercy of fate or really one fellow human being. (A lot like the climax in many ways.) I get knocked out by the film's beauty, either as an epic painting come to life or as something akin to time travel where you see a long-past era as if it was happening now, but a lot of that beauty is tied to how straitjacketed this world seems to be, from the clothing, makeup and ornate decor to the social mores and customs that seem kind of cruel and dehumanizing. That's in so much of the picture and it can look suffocating. That feels very fitting given Barry's path in life and how he's at heart a beautiful human being who's navigating a pretty treacherous world that has made its cruelty acceptable, a part of how people are expected to live and thrive.

*That may be true

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Think I voted Léger or Sjöström just to shake things up a bit, though this is clearest case where voting Keaton would be a total no-brainer

It's a delight to watch Sherlock, Jr. blow away my students.

I'm not going to vote since I've only seen the two Keatons but Sherlock Jr. did blow my mind when I saw it for the first time last year. I was not at all expecting anything like this in a movie from the 1920s.

Going through the Brussels 12 and just finished The Last Laugh... wow

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