SMC Founder.Programmer Craig Hammill's Top 35 Films Conversation! 35 to 29...
Dear Secret Movie Clubbers, while we hunker down, Secret Movie Club thought we'd start a conversation! Across the next week, we'll post this Programmer's personal top #35 movies. A Top #10 can be limiting. A Top #35 can be revealing! We encourage you to post, chime in, share. Let's get the movie conversation going! Here we go…
#35 Los Tres Huastecos (1948, dir Ishmael Rodriguez, Mexico)
Mexican cinema had an amazing run of movies in the 40's-50's they call the "Siglo del Oro" (Golden Age). Two of its greatest artists collaborated constantly: Superstar/Singer Pedro Infante & Director/Producer/Writer Ishmael Rodriguez. They made movies in every genre (although there were usually songs). Infante could do it all and there's really no analogue to his talent in any other world cinema. Rodriguez is a director who deserves to be as well known as Spielberg. All his movies are wildly entertaining and inventive. In this movie, Infante plays 3 roles(!!!), brothers separated at birth who become individually a gambler, a priest, and a soldier. Of course fate intervenes so that they'll meet and band together to fight. . .This movie also has one of my all time favorite scenes where the Gambler returns to his forest hideaway and his wild 9 year old daughter Tucita who scolds him for being afraid of tarantulas when she's not
#34 VIRIDIANA (1961, dir by Luis Buñuel)
This was a tough one because I almost equally love Buñuel's next movie THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL as much. But in the end, VIRIDIANA is a kind of cinematic miracle. Fascist Spanish dictator Franco invited famously anti-authoritarian Buñuel back to Spain to make a movie (why I don't know). Buñuel proposed a movie about a pious woman trying to be a modern day Saint. The censors saw nothing wrong with the script. From there, Buñuel made one of the most bitingly brilliant, erotic, satirical movies on human hypocrisy, misguided religious impulses, and unbounded human nature/sexuality ever made. Sufficed to say, he was never invited back to make another movie. This is how you shake things up
#33 ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958, dir by Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
This is the last movie in a loose trilogy directed by Wajda (along with A GENERATION and KANAL) about the Polish resistance during and after WWII. Incredible cinematography, moviemaking, acting, cinema. It all takes place on one very tense night. We see the nerve wracking moves of a series of Poles, especially freedom fighter Maciek, as they try to escape detection by the authorities as the political reality of post war Poland dawns on everyone. One of those movies that shows you that cinema, humanism, politics, and history can mix. This is as close to a first hand cinema document as you can get. And it's told with blistering white-hot cinematic style.
#32 PORTRAIT OF JASON (1967, dir by Shirley Clarke, USA)
We just screened this a few weeks ago! One of those movies that illuminates what cinema is. In 1967, daring moviemaker Shirley Clarke filmed gay black street hustler Jason Holliday for 12 hours talking about his life in her Chelsea apartment. She then cut the footage down to 105 minutes using very inventive in camera and editing techniques. One person. One location. Telling stories. It produced one of the most incisive documents about the minority experience in 20th century America ever made. Ingmar Bergman himself said this was the most fascinating movie he'd ever seen. It shows you what you need (a fascinating character) and what you don't need (almost everything else) to make an incredible movie. Always an inspiration.
#31 THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939, dir by Victor Fleming, USA)
Some of you might be saying, "Of course. Obvious pick" And you're probably right. But as I get older, the brilliance of this movie hits me more and more. THE WIZARD OF OZ has a structure that really serves as the storytelling/filmmaking template for how you handle fantastic/supernatural/transcendent journeys. One can see the DNA of this movie (sometimes explicitly acknowledged) in the works of James Cameron, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg among others. Rumi, the mystic Sufi poet, once said "a revealer of mystery and that which is revealed are the same." This is Rumi as cinema. The Rosetta Stone for movies of the fantastic.
#30 SALVATORE GIULIANO (1962, dir by Francesco Rosi, Italy)
This is a very mysterious movie whose tremendous power is in just how unorthodox & creative an approach the filmmakers take with their subject. Giuliano was a "Robin Hood" like Sicilian Bandit who antagonized law enforcement and was beloved by the people in post WWII Sicily. Yet he only appears briefly in the entire movie. His story and the story of a nation's political upheaval are really told as a series of vignettes of all the people Giuliano AFFECTED. Each scene is told in a different style with a different approach/POV. And there are several scenes which you immediately realize affected Coppola, Scorsese, and Spielberg. One of the most inspiring movies I've ever seen for how radically inventive you can be when you approach a subject. This movie is also tremendously gripping, cinematic, and involving. MUST SEE CINEMA!
#29 THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955, dir by Charles Laughton, USA)
One of the strangest most tonally fascinating movies ever made. Robert Mitchum (in one of the great all-time movie performances) plays a psychotic criminal who poses as a charismatic preacher, murders trusting women, and steals money. But when he chases the two children of his most recent target across a nocturnal south the movie suddenly becomes a fairy tale and then a kind of biblical allegory. Shot by Stanley Cortez with some of the most striking visuals in any movie ever. This was the only movie actor Charles Laughton ever directed. But what a movie. Lillian Gish appears late to kick some a@@ as a kind of "Mother Goose" to orphan children. The Coen Brothers and many others have paid visual homage to this movie. One of the most striking, spiritual, strange, beautiful movies I've ever seen.
Written by Craig Hammill. Founder and Programmer of Secret Movie Club.