Tom Moran's Best 100 American Films List: The Also-Rans
As sort of an appendix to my Best 100 Films list, I thought it might be interesting to show you the films that didn't quite make the cut. Out of all the films I considered, these were the 51 that did not make it to the list of 100.
I'll print them in alphabetical order:
America America
Apocalypse Now
Babes in Arms
Back to the Future
Badlands
The Band Wagon
Bataan
The Black Cat
Blade Runner
Cabaret
Cat People (1942)
David Copperfield (1935)
Deconstructing Harry
Dr. Strangelove
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
The Freshman (1925)
The Graduate
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Ziegfeld
Gun Crazy
Hannah and Her Sisters
How Green Was My Valley
Imitation of Life (1959)
It's a Wonderful Life
The Kennel Murder Case
The Kid
King Kong
Laura
A Letter to Three Wives
The Life of Emile Zola
Little Caesar
The Little Foxes
Manhattan
M*A*S*H
Mildred Pierce
Mister Roberts
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Modern Times
My Darling Clementine
Network
North by Northwest
Only Angels Have Wings
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
The Scarlet Empress
Star Wars
The Terminator
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Truman Show
Wuthering Heights
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Not bad for a list of also-rans, I must say...
Tom Moran
posted by Tom Moran @ 11:13 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
This is an obviously biased comment, but I don't see how "Modern Times" could drop off a 100-best list. I could be conflating it with a 100-favourite list. I asked my immediate family to choose between Gregory La Cava's "My Man Godfrey" and Norm McLeod's "Duck Soup" and they ruled in favour of "Duck Soup." Then I asked "The Gold Rush" or "Modern Times" and "The Gold Rush" won out, even my child voted for it.
Honestly, with the growth of the prison profit industry, layoffs, monotonous jobs, and the housing bubble (look at where the Gamine and Charlie end up with their waterfront property, and know that Bay-area CA realtors put a $550K list price on that nowadays), "Modern Times" seems more relevant and timely than many of the 100-best entries...
Well, I did write this in my follow-up to my new list, when I discussed the films that I left off the new list from the old one:
"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)."
Nonetheless, I did prefer to put The Circus on the list rather than Modern Times, since the earlier film is a genuine silent film and the latter film is something of a hybrid -- a sound film pretending to be a silent one. But then I'm probably wrong.
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