Daily Archives: September 19, 2021

My Ten Favorite American Films and Capsule Reviews of Two of Them (for BBC.com)

Capsule reviews of two of my favorite American films, both commissioned by BBC.com, who previously asked me to name my ten favorite American films. (For some reason, my computer can’t handle their own web site and link, which is why I’m posting this material here.) I responded to their first request with these choices:

 

1. GREED (Stroheim, 1924)

2. SUNRISE (Murnau, 1927)

3. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (Welles, 1942)

4. CITY LIGHTS (Chaplin, 1931)

5. LOVE ME TONIGHT (Mamoulian, 1932)

6. THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (Wyler, 1946)

7. STARS IN MY CROWN (Tourneur, 1950)

8. LOVE STREAMS (Cassavetes, 1984)

9. A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001)

10. WHEN IT RAINS (Burnett, 1995)

 

Greedweddingbanquet

 

Greed

Other truncated masterpieces (most notably Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons) tend to be appreciated in spite of their flaws, but Erich von Stroheim’s Greed maintains its strength and intensity and even much of its density in its surviving form. The characters are rich and complex and the mise en scène fully serves both the power of the performances and the richness of the world depicted. The overall fidelity to Frank Norris’s McTeague is matched by a highly personal and inventive dedication to its meanings and resonance, and the overall vision of what money does to disfigure and destroy human personality is unequaled. Read more

Best Seller

From the Chicago Reader (September 25, 1987). — J.R.

Image result for Best Seller 1987

While it may not add up to anything very profound, this paranoid thriller is put together with so much craft and economy that a significant part of its pleasure is seeing how tightly and cleanly every sequence is hammered into place. Brian Dennehy is Dennis Meechum, an incorruptible police detective who doubles as a successful crime writer; James Woods is Cleve, a hit man who doubles as a corporate executive, and who wants Meechum to write a nonfiction best seller exposing his ruthless and respectable former boss — a philanthropist tycoon who has stealthily slaughtered his way to the top. Dennehy’s square and skeptical cop is an adroit reading of a dull part, but he makes a wonderful straight man for Woods’s fascinatingly creepy yet sensitive killer — modeled in part on Robert Walker’s Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train, with a comparable homoerotic tension between the two men. Tautly and cleverly scripted by Larry Cohen, crisply shot by Fred Murphy, and directed by John Flynn without a loose screw in sight, this is first-class action story telling, stripped to its essentials: no shot is held any longer than is needed to make its narrative point, and the streamlining makes for a bumpless ride. Read more