Filmstruck is a great company for anyone interested in watching films from cinema’s past. The site has nearly everything, including great films from other countries: think Netflix for Turner Classic Movies. In this post I’m gonna give you a host of recommendations based on all the stuff that I’ve seen on the site. We’ll break this into 3 brackets: CONSIDER, SKIP, and MUST SEE.
For this post, these are the films that should you get the chance to see them, you MUST SEE them. No ifs, ands, or buts.
MUST SEE
All the President’s Men
Rating:
The Watergate Scandal is one of the darkest times for American politics, with distrust in the President’s office forever changed thanks to the Nixon Administration. All the President’s Men is about Woodward and Bernstein, two journalists at the Washington Post who helped break the scandal wide open.
Does it hold up?: Considering the Mueller investigation is happening right now, yeah, absolutely. All the President’s Men is smartly directed by Alan Pakula as a political thriller. What does that mean? The journalists are in actual fear for their lives because of how they are calling out the powerful. Bernstein’s source, Deep Throat, meets in secret in the darkest garage on the planet, completely covered by the shadows. And he’s a GOOD guy. The movie teaches us to follow the money (still 100% true today), and turns investigative journalists into the newspaper version of gunslingers.
Network
Rating:
A news anchor (played by a great Peter Finch) goes crazy on air and threatens to kill himself….to mass ratings for the news network he works for. This gets the TV executives talking, and ideas sparking.
Does it hold up?: Better than any film in recent memory, and it came out over 40 years ago! The concept of TV executives exploiting personal drama for a ratings boost? Reality TV exists doesn’t it? How about forcing a host to censor themself because it affects the narrative they choose to present? I’m pretty sure that’s Fox News’s model. The movie gets more prescient each day something crazy happens on TV and is exploited for ratings.
Malcolm X
Rating:
Spike Lee can certainly rub people the wrong way (read: conservatives). However, there’s no denying the power of the films he creates. Malcolm X is Lee’s biopic about the Civil Rights Activist.
Does it hold up?: Oh my yes. Malcolm X will leave you fixated on the screen for many reasons. It is a tour de force from Denzel Washington, giving us all of his talents, including magnetic walking megaphone Denzel and and quiet powerful Denzel. The period clothing pops, and Harlem comes alive only in a way Spike Lee can pull off. Most importantly, Lee paints Malcolm as a perfect biopic subject: a flawed man that grows and learns from his mistakes, but rises to power and irks the wrong people. The movie is 3 hr 22 min long, and I believed I only looked at my phone once, because I was transfixed at the life of Malcom X and Spike Lee’s depiction of it.
Sunset Boulevard
Rating:
Billy Wilder is one of middle Hollywood’s great satirists, though for me, most of his satire is lost to the time he was making films. Sunset Boulevard, however, could be remade at any time. It tells the tale of a struggling writer who happens upon the house of a once famous silent movie star named Norma Desmond, one of the most iconic characters in movie history.
Does it hold up?: I had seen a fair number of films designed to skewer Hollywood and the moviemaking process, some solid, some garbage. However, Sunset Boulevard is the best example that will probably ever exist. Through narration from a screenwriter, we see how deluded excessive fame can be on someone who simply isn’t famous anymore. Norma Desmond lives in a decaying large house (nice imagery, Billy) that contains reminders for Norma of how amazing she is. When the screenwriter tries to open her eyes to how the world has forgotten her, Norma twists the story into an excuse to attempt a comeback, with Hollywood execs not telling her no, but clearly thinking she’s loopy, feeding her delusion. This all culminates in one of the most haunting endings to a movie outside of a Hitchcock film I have seen, where Norma’s delusion is so deep that you’re horrified and saddened at the same time. Kudos to Gloria Swanson, for creating an all timer of a character in Norma Desmond.
Bonnie and Clyde
Rating:
Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) are folk heroes in the US, robbing banks during the Great Depression.
Does it hold up?: It’s a period piece anyways, but it’s still very exciting and interesting. The duo’s exploits make them famous to the media, and this fame makes the gang aim for bigger and better scores. Gene Hackman became a common name because of this film, and Estelle Parsons (unworthy, in my opinion) won Best Supporting Actress. Until I saw this, I didn’t understand Warren Beatty’s appeal, but he’s quite terrific as Clyde here, slick but more vulnerable than you think, and Dunaway proves again why I’ve loved her in everything she’s done: sexy and dangerous.
The Films of Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa is a Japanese Filmmaker, directing films from the 1940s until 1990s. These films hold up better than most of the films I have seen in any genre or era of filmmaking, full stop. Holding up is one thing: however, Kurosawa tapped into some movie magic and delivers a series of stories that contain a multitude of power and scope that only the greats like Spielberg can achieve.
Let’s start with Ikiru (). The movie starts off with one of the great intro’s to its main character (in this case, it’s Takashi Shimura, a Kurosawa favorite: you’ll hear his name again…) ever: showing us how the Japanese local government spins people in bureaucratic circles until they stop caring, bringing us to the hero: a middle management bureaucrat who has done NOTHING with his life except “work” and save money. Like Groundhog Day, after a horrible medical diagnosis, the hero starts living it up: trying to throw money around, or spend it on younger companions so he can see something meaningful come of his life. Before the frivality threatens to bog Ikiru down, Kurosawa pivots the movie halfway, and post death, we see other bureaucrats wax poetically about our hero, and how he got through the red tape to create a playground for kids, though the hero’s companions lack conviction to do what the hero did. I describe it like Citizen Kane meets The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It’s long, but complex and rewarding.
But the great stuff of Kurosawa’s amazing career is on the battlefield or among samurai. The Hidden Fortress () is a fun romp of a film, taking what could be a dark situation and making it pretty funny. Essentially, two peasants get mistaken for being a part of a defeated Japanese clan. After they evade capture, they stumble upon a princess and her protector (the protector is played by Toshiro Mifune, another Kurosawa fav, who’s name you’ll also hear again later). The group then meets another clan and makes allies with them on the down low, so they can cross into safe territory. Hidden Fortress has everything you want in an adventure flick: there’s swordplay, horseback heroics, clever planning, and humorous back and forths between the brave and the scared, trying to get the scared to rise to the occasion. You might be wondering, well, if it’s so fun, why hasn’t The Hidden Fortress been used in a US movie adaptation. Well in fact, it has: two of the biggest grossing movies of all time have used the story or characters. Two hapless characters meet a princess? Sound familiar Star Wars fans? George Lucas himself says his R2D2/C3P0 inspirations were the two peasants in The Hidden Fortress, and the plot of Phantom Menace (minus Lucas’s terrible racial stereotyping and script) is VERY similar to the plot of Kurosawa’s adventure, 40 years after the Japanese inspiration.
Those first two films are great, but Kurosawa’s Top 2 films are so well known and beloved, they’re almost unimpeachable. They also both happen to star Tohsiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. Rashomon () is nothing short of a perfect showcase of something we all take for granted, and why eyewitness testimony should never be considered in a court of law. Rashomon recounts the story of a couple in the woods that come into conflict with a bandit who rapes the wife and murders the husband. However, through various storytellers, we get multiple versions of the same story, completely unclear as to what really happened. Was seduction involved? How much agency did the wife have? Was there duplicity? It’s not clear by the end, and may never be, highlighting how subjective truth can be when you resort to a person’s memory. This movie is so powerful that the term Rashomon effect is used when conflicting eyewitness testimonies happen in legal and historical proceedings, knowingly referencing this Kurosawa masterpiece.
But my favorite film from Kurosawa is the Seven Samurai (), a perfect adventure story, so perfect that The Magnificent Seven ripped it off. The plot is a perfect action plot: a medieval town is overrun by bandits who demand taxation to be left alone, so the town hires 7 ronin (masterless samurai) to defend the town from the 40ish bandits. This is a long film, but a worthwhile one. The first hour and a half we get intros for each of the seven samurai, as well as a few of the townspeople. This is the first film I can think of where we have a “getting the band together” montage. The 2nd half covers the raid on the town. The raid is beautiful to watch, unfolding like a chess match and a ballet at the same time, with aerial shots of townspeople running in packs to attack a bandit. In addition we get arcs for most of the characters, making them heroic and complex at the same time. Epic storytelling rarely is better than what Kurosawa and his two muses, Mifune and Shimura, accomplish with Seven Samurai.