Forget the popcorn: these 10 movies comes with a sense of heritage

National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1998 by Raymond A. Schroth

From the beginning, Hollywood and television were born antagonists. Who will go out to the movies when you can see movies at home?

Aesthetically, TV reduced the sweeping drama of the large screen to the dimensions of the box. TV formatting clips off the sides and the tap dancer's feet and, with Cinemascope, shows the dancer and leaves the chorus to your imagination,

TV shrunk the communal experience of watching a movie in a theater with hundreds of other live human beings into a solitary act -- the isolated, often lonely guy parked in front of a glimmering tube, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Finally, it shattered the sustained illusion of entering the lives of other people by interrupting the experience every 10 minutes with commercials.

But now, commercially and culturally, Hollywood and TV have melded into one another. The marriage was most remarkable in the June three-hour 100th anniversary American Film Institute self-celebration, in which they presented the results of their balloting for the "100 best American films of all time." Fifteen hundred prominent Americans were invited to vote on a list of 400 films nominated on the basis of historical significance, critical acclaim and popularity, including video rentals.

Speaking for an outraged film studies intellectual community, Robert C. Allen, professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, wrote that the marketing of Hollywood films, as exemplified in the AFI and CBS joint production of this program, proves that "Hollywood cinema is dead." Theatrical distribution accounts for only 23 percent of American movie studios' revenue. Fifty-five percent is from video sales, and the rest is from licensed merchandise like toys and other expensive junk.

Anything notable about the list? As Russell Baker says, any list that leaves out Ronald Coleman and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in "The Prisoner of Zenda" (1937) can't be taken seriously. Although there are several that deal with moral issues -- "The Third Man" (57), "All Quiet on the Western Front" (54), "To Kill A Mockingbird" (34) -- there was not one film with a religious theme.

But it wasn't meant to be an evening about great art or truly great movies. It was about watching TV and renting videos and admiring CBS. The main sponsors were the video outlets Blockbuster and Target. The Blockbuster ads featured kids who liked movies but clearly knew nothing about their history. The ad's implied solution? Rent videos.

Maybe, but I'd rather rent a 35 mm projector and give them a short course with 10 films, some from the 100, some of which will make them think hard, all of which will give a strong sense of the heritage they should understand but would never explore if left on their own. Here are the films I would select:

10. "Sweethearts" (1938, W.S. Van Dyke, director). 20-year old who hasn't heard Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald sing is musically and emotionally deprived. This also has a witty script by Dorothy Parker, Oscar-winning color photography, and Ray Bolger and Frank Morgan. Afterward go back and see "Naughty Marietta" (1933) where Nelson and Jeanette sing "Ah Sweet Mystery of Life," and "Rose Marie," with "When I'm calling yoooooooooooou."

9. "Four Feathers" (1939, Zoltan Korda, director). The best specimen of the British empire movies -- "Drums," "Lives of the Bengal Lancers" and "Gunga Din" -- which we aren't allowed to enjoy any more because they don't show imperialism as bad. In "Four Feathers," a young British officer, to prove he's not a coward, disguises himself and pursues Kitchener's army into the Sudan to return white feathers (the symbol of cowardice) to his comrades and save their lives at the same time. Ralph Richardson, a blinded veteran, sacrifices his one chance for happiness. Young or old, people reluctant to commit themselves to anything beyond Saturday night's date need this.

8. "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962, David Lean, director, with screenplay by Robert Bolt, #5 on AFI list). I own the video but can't bring myself to watch it on a small screen. On a visit to Syria and Jordan a few years ago, I traced T.E. Lawrence's first steps through the desert east of Aqaba and have seldom been so overwhelmed by a spectacular landscape. Lean's cameras and Maurice Jarre's sweeping musical score capture that landscape for the screen. Above all, it's cinema that makes us love history, want to read about the Middle East and how places like Jordan, Syria and Iraq, as weft as Israel, came to be what they are today.

7. "The Third Man" (1949, Carol Reed, director, #57 on AFI). In Graham Greene's script, Lime, portrayed Orson Welles, personifies the evil -- the greed and cynicism -- that threatens to corrupt the Western world in the wake of World War II. In the famous Vienna Ferris wheel scene, Lime is Satan and Joseph Cotton is an American writer of Westerns who must decide between the principle of loyalty to a false friend and his moral obligation to a larger community.

6. "Henry V" (1945, Laurence Olivier, director). Ruthless one moment, tender the next, the "warlike Harry" goes to war with France without sufficient reason. The night before the battle of Agincourt, he visits his troops in disguise and hears a young soldier say at the campfire: "But if the cause is not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the Latter Day and cry all, we died in such a place.'" Henry answers logically, but not well. The next day, however, he rouses his troops with the most themselves accursed they were not here/ And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks/That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's Day." And as Laurence Olivier leaps upon his horse and waves his sword, we want to leap up into the screen and go, too.