Notes and Musings on the Best 100 Films List

I've been giving some thought to the Best 100 American Films list that I put on this blog and I'd thought some of those thoughts (and second thoughts) with you.

I said that when I put together this list I deliberately did not refer back to the list I put together in response to the AFI's original Best 100 list from a decade ago. But afterwards I pulled it up and gave it a look, and was intrigued by some of the differences. And the similarities.

Roughly 75% of the content of both lists is identical. The changes are mainly on the margins.

Only five of the top 50 films on my new list are not on the old list.

Those five films are (the number indicates their order in the new list):

24) The Kid Brother
26) Ace in the Hole
34) Trouble in Paradise
44) All the President's Men
48) Crimes and Misdemeanors

You'll notice in the first three of them that I was most likely influenced by the fact that they were previously hard-to-find films that have been released on DVD relatively recently (Ace in the Hole comes out on DVD next month from the Criterion Collection but has been on TCM recently).

The latter two films (All The President's Men and Crimes and Misdemeanors) are examples of films that have gotten better with the passing of time. Pakula's film seems better now than it did when it came out -- or at least it seems that way to me. And I think we're starting to realize that Woody Allen is America's greatest living filmmaker, who has made more great films over a longer period of time than any other active director. The trouble with Woody Allen was not what to put on but what to leave off -- I could have put another three or four Allen films on the list and felt completely justified. Will I feel that way in a decade? I guess we'll find out in 2017.

Here are the films that were on my original list but which did not make the cut the second time around (listed in chronological order):

Broken Blossoms
The Kid
42nd Street
Bombshell
Modern Times
Easy Living
History is Made at Night
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Detour
It's a Wonderful Life
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Fort Apache
Gun Crazy
Rebel Without a Cause
Psycho
The Manchurian Candidate
The Graduate
The Producers
Cabaret
Diner
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
Rumble Fish
Stranger Than Paradise
Blood Simple
Hannah and Her Sisters
JFK

They're all good films, but there are only two of them that I think probably should have been placed on the new list (Modern Times and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington).

Here are the films in the bottom 50 of my new list that were not on the old list (number indicates their position on the new list):

51) The Circus
53) Gunga Din
55) Out of the Past
58) The Big Sleep
59) American Graffiti
63) Fury
65) I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
69) The Philadelphia Story
75) The French Connection
82) Husbands and Wives
83) East of Eden
84) Footlight Parade
85) The Day The Earth Stood Still
90) The Thing from Another World
91) Ben-Hur (1925)
92) The Awful Truth
94) Hail the Conquering Hero
95) Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
96) Frankenstein
97) Queen Christina
99) They All Laughed
100) The Women

And, much to my chagrin, I find a film that was not on either my old list or my new list, but which really deserves to be on both of them. Its exclusion was and is a major mistake on my part.

That film is All Quiet on the Western Front.

Tom Moran

Addendum, 6/27: For those of you who would like the list broken down by decade, I decided to see how they would break down. 16% of the list is silent (two from the teens, 13 from the 20s and 1 from the 30s).

Here's how the films break down by decade:

1910s: 2
1920s: 13
1930s: 25
1940s: 20
1950s: 17
1960s: 1
1970s: 16
1980s: 3
1990s: 3
2000s: 0

I knew that the majority of the films would come from the 1930s and 1940s (the golden age of American filmmaking) but I was a little surprised that the 50s and the 70s came in almost tied. The 60s came up with only one entry, the 1980s and 90s with only three a piece, and this decade has had no great films as yet.