Another great year of cinema. 3 great epic films in the top 4, including the best film from one of the great directors of the 50s: Akira Kurosawa. Also, we’ve got sci-fi! 2 top 10 entries for the usually maligned genre, including one of the best sci-fi scripts ever conceived.
What a flex from Alfred Hitchcock! He remade his OWN movie in 1934, got a bigger budget, bigger stars like Jimmy Stewart, and location shoots in Morocco to tell the same great premise of a story about a couple tourists who witness a murder of a friend they made on vacation who divulges information to the tourists that sends them to other foreign locales in a plot against time.
William Shakespeare….in SPACE!!! Young Leslie Nielsen arrives on a mostly deserted planet, investigating what happened to a previous ship investigating the planet, only finding Walter Pidgeon’s Dr. Morbius as one of the survivors of that voyage. From there, if you’ve read The Tempest, you’ll know the plot, but be amazed and amused at the inventive, crazy characters and sets concocted by Fred Wilcox, and maybe notice a technique George Lucas, um, borrowed for Star Wars…
The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical adaptation is as big as Deborah Kerr’s hoop skirts. She plays Anna, a modern 1860s woman, teaching the wives and children in Siam, under the King (Yul Brynner, who won an Oscar for this movie). From there the two dance, fight, and love a little as they grow together and help make Siam stronger and better for the next generation.
John Ford and John Wayne team up again for one of the Great American Westerns. Wayne plays the messy, complex Ethan Edwards, a loner former Confederate soldier returning to family 3 years after the war ended. When a Comanche tribe kidnaps one of his nieces, Ethan riled up with prejudice and rage, goes to find her and probably do vile awful things. Wayne’s strange motivations give the movie momentum, which Ford ratchets up with great tension like when a group of Native American surround a battalion on horseback slowly.
This movie made Stanley Kubrick the directing hot commodity and led to his amazing career. Here he makes a film noir about a racetrack heist, but he does so in a new way. The heist planner is different, the femme fatale is different, and the wrinkles in the plan are different. All this thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s desire for perfection, leading to a movie that works with clockwork precision and culminates with a simple, brilliant ending.
The middle film of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, this one is about the inherent paradox of growing up and parents, where Samaran Ghosal wants an education to move to the big city, but his mother Karuna Bannerjee wishes the opposite future for her son, creating an irreconcilable difference that families live with as their kids journey from children to adults. Ray’s direction makes you feel the exhilaration of Ghosal’s chance to discover something new, and the heartbreaking anguish of Bannerjee’s now purposeless existence. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful, in a way that only greats like Satyajit Ray can pull off.
Cecil B. DeMille gave Biblical Epics their proper size. Here he takes on Moses’s story, unleashing Charlton Heston’s booming voice to great effect. The effects hold up reasonably well, and despite the movie’s self indulgence, the spectacle gives the movie a larger than life power that has made it an Easter viewing tradition in the US for years.
Robert Bresson was a POW in WWII, and drew inspiration from the story of Andre Devigny, a man who escaped a giant fortress of a Nazi prison. This movie is tense and uses sounds to signal to Francois Leterrier signs of hope and determination to break out of his hellhole. The last 20 minutes is tense as hell as we see if Leterrier can find a way to pull off the impossible.
Aliens from outer space create copies of your body, and replace you, killing you in the process the minute you fall asleep. The script for this movie is amazingly flexible: at the time is was about McCarthyism, but it could be applied to PTSD (like the 1978 version) or drug abuse, basically, anytime a person looks the same but is acting totally different. On top of the thematic potency, this movie is scary as well, with scenes that will send shivers down your spine.
A piece of filmmaking that will be remembered forever. Akria Kurosawa’s masterpiece, about 7 paid for hire samurais defending a town from marauders, is 3 and half hours of amazing storytelling by a master at the peak of his powers. Kurosawa spends the first half of the movie teaching us about the town and the samurai, and the 2nd half engaging in an amazing series of battle sequences as the marauders invade the town.
