Century club: March is Oscar month, a good time to reflect on real achievement in cinema

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2002 | by Rex Roberts

Film buffs delight in making lists. The British Film Institute has its 360 classics of world cinema -- (one could watch a screen gem every day of the year), while the American Film Institute has its Top 100 and TV Guide its 50 greatest flicks. Never to be outdone, the New York Times publishes its Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, while Filmsite.org offers compilations by magazines, film societies, critics and ordinary fans.

It's reasonable, then, that Roger Ebert should put forth his own appreciation of the classics, The Great Movies (Broadway Books, $27.50,539 pp), and do so in March, just in time for the Oscars. Ebert may be the most recognized movie critic in America -- the fat guy to the late Gene Siskel's skinny one in the famous "thumbs up, thumbs down" TV program -- but he's earned his bona fides, winning a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, authoring a dozen books and teaching at various universities. He's been writing for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967 and continues to opine on television with Richard Roeper, who replaced Siskel after his death in 1999.

In fact, The Great Movies began as a project for the Sun-Times, a series of articles revisiting classic films inspired by Ebert's concern that younger film-goers are overlooking noted directors such as Jean-Luc Godard. Godard, for those who don't remember, is the personification of French New Wave who defined sixties' cinema, when Ebert was coming of age. "And now the name Godard inspires a blank face," laments Ebert, sounding a bit jaded and a little dated. "Art films are out. Self-conscious films are out. Films that test the edges of the cinema are out. Now it is all about the mass audience."

Hollywood pandering to the masses isn't a new development, and there are plenty of edgy, arty films being made by Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover), Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen and, this year, Amelie, nominated for best foreign film), to name a few directors. Ebert lists several films made in the nineties -- Silence of the Lambs, Schindler's List, The Shawshank Redemption -- but they're conventional, "all about the mass audience," compared to David Lynch's disturbing fantasias or even the mannered realism of David Mamet.

If Ebert's taste in contemporary film is debatable -- he also thinks Nashville, Network and Pulp Fiction are great movies -- his comments on the undisputed canon of 20th-century cinema are agreeable. He mixes history and gossip into his discussions of silent masterpieces such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Buster Keaton's The General, Charlie Chaplin's City Lights and G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, starring the remarkable but largely forgotten Louise Brooks. Musing on James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, Ebert addresses the advantages of horror movies: "The genre has encouraged actors to crank it up with bizarre mannerisms and elaborate posturings," he writes, noting that directors tend to experiment as well. Recent advances in technology are another thing entirely: "There is more sheer shock in a clawed hand unexpectedly emerging from the shadows than in all the effects of Armageddon (1998), because Armageddon looks realistic, and horror films taunt us that reality is an illusion."

While he includes Star Wars in Great Movies, Ebert exhibits a fondness for predigital Hollywood. The Wizard of Oz, filmed in 1939, employed state-of-the-art color cameras, but the costumes, sets and special effects owed more to ingenious theatricality than innovative technology. Buddy Ebsen had to drop his role as the Tin Man because of an allergic reaction to the silver makeup, for example, and Margaret Hamilton was burned badly when the Wicked Witch went up in smoke. "You don't even have to look closely to see where the set ends and the backdrop begins," writes Ebert. "Modern special effects show exactly how imaginary scenes might look, effects then showed how we thought about them."

Oz has become so much a part of American culture it's hard to think of it as just a motion picture. "It somehow seems real and important in a way most movies don't," writes Ebert, adding that few working on the production felt they were creating a timeless classic. The actors were relaxed and loose, "as if the roles were a lark," and four directors contributed to the picture, including Victor Fleming, who left to work on Gone With the Wind. Fleming, by the way, would collapse from nervous exhaustion while making GWTW, an "astonishing" piece of filmcraft which also survived a menage of four directors.

Ebert describes his compendium as a "tour of the landmarks of the first century of cinema," and so it is. His appreciations of Citizen Kane, Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia, of films by Howard Hawks, John Ford and Billy Wilder, of Kurosawa, Fellini and Hitchcock, are concise, entertaining and occasionally poignant. There are notable absences, however, including the movie King Kong, the director Eric Rohmer (whose Clair's Knee is a small masterpiece on the nature of desire) and the satiric genre known as mocumentary (This Is Spinal Tap). Ebert makes room for Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue, a series of 10 hour-length films produced for Polish television, but not for Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective or the BBC's brilliant Brideshead Revisited. He may be right to list the Beatles' Hard Day's Night for it's sheer joy and originality, but what about Blade Runner, or Mr. Roberts, or To Kill a Mockingbird? Why the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup) but not W.C. Fields (with Mae West in My Little Chickadee)?