The New York Times' Stanley Fish, of all people, has released his list of 10 all-time best American films. Showing remarkable restraint in not selecting a 13-minute documentary from 1924 on labor unease or "Killer of Sheep", he has instead opted to present a deliberately middle-brow list. Let's start by giving Fish a little bit of a break. We expect something idiosyncratic- something we wouldn't find in Bosley Crowther's heart of hearts. We expect that Fish will have done some judicious paring- this being the difference between a list and an inventory. We expect our tastes to be represented and suspect that we might become resentful if they are not but we are not entirely partisan. We don't expect "The Daily Worker" to gush about "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" the way we do when our more....urban friends are not supposed to be nearby. We expect that Fish has seen a large number of American films- we don't require him to have seen everything- the ability to rank films obviously would require less expertise than might be needed to... let's say... decide the ten most important developments in aeronautics.
However as we look at the list we have to wonder if Fish believes that it should require something greater than the ability to recall his own reactions.
There are so many endemic problems with establishing a hierarchy within such a vast archive of amorphous and dissimilar objects. Was "Steamboat Willie" more meaningful, more moving or more cinematic than "Long Day's Journey Into Night"? We've all tacitly (let's leave Kant out of this) agreed that there can be no objective value in art- so given the task of deciding which creative work exceeds the effects of all others- given the duty to select ten exceptional works from the entire history of this particular creative form- why does it seem that Fish abrogates all responsibility?
So Fish, we want a unique response....BUT we have expectations. "Citizen Kane" has been at the top of most such lists for decades. We expect it, or something very like it- a harbinger of modernism, the uncompromising vision of the true cinematic auteur. Fish's list is headed by "The Best Years of Our Lives", a mawkish WWII epic. This star-packed film, (if we count Dana Andrews) bested the sublime "It's a Wonderful Life" and Hitchcock's dark "Notorious" for Best Picture at the 1947 Academy Awards. Its reunion scene between Myrna Loy and Frederick March is about the only widely anthologized moment, but the film is often remembered for plucking the actor Harold Russell from obscurity, reminding us why we had obscurity in the first place. Russell, an actual double-amputee throws the film's particularly theatrical verisimilitude into disarray with his unconvincing performance as a double-amputee. Tellingly, this marks the first time a film with Teresa Wright was ruined by someone else. (Wright is the ubiquitous 40's ingenue whose excessive schoolgirlishness makes every Shirley Temple film look like "Krapp's Last Tape".) There are so many levels of required deception that one must engage to endure "The Best Years..." that watching it inexorably becomes about self-deceit.
You must ask whether Fish being moved by what could be most charitably be regarded as an unintegrated vision means that he isolates the power to manipulate viewers' emotions as the only valid effect produced by motion pictures. Well, what if emotional manipulation exists to achieve higher ends? Is it even possible to arouse the intellect without first registering upon the emotions?
What, after all, should be the aim of film? I suppose it varies from piece to piece, from artist to artist. It gets mighty complicated when you begin to dissect a particularly effective narrative and discover that it is not the result of a single design. How can we evaluate "The Third Man" when the idea came from Korda, the script from Greene, the direction Reed, the music Karas, and the speech on the ferris wheel Welles?
"The Third Man" is emotionally effective though Graham Greene considered it primarily an action film padded with dialogue. It also is a brilliant study in morality, an analysis of love, a dissection of literary celebrity, a history lesson, a detective thriller and a celebration of, and indictment of allegiance. Let's say that the result is a consistent, controlled amalgam of writing, performance, and technical skills producing a coherent narrative (within whatever logical boundaries it decides to make apparent to us). What is its value as a singular work of art? The complexity and variety of one's responses should have some sort of numerical value shouldn't it?
Not so fast! What about "Norbit"? Who can enumerate the countless levels and types of revulsion? "The Third Man" is a British film (mostly) but if the lachrymal melodramas on Fish's list, like 'Shane" eventually invite more exegesis by their ambiguities, does that give them an edge over films that have more readable emotional landscapes? Is that what he is getting at? Could someone ask him?
What else is on the list? Though Fish relies mostly on things from his tender youth, (even singling out the melodramatic moments in such lighter musical fare as "Meet Me in Saint Louis" to justify that inclusion) he has also included the Ramis/ Murray film "Groundhog Day", a light comedy based on a sort of stoner's existential concept which I won't go into. Let's just say it has more holes than Bonnie, Clyde and their goth kid Seth. Its appearance here as the sole comedy (to the exclusion of great screwball comedies "Bringing Up Baby", "The Awful Truth", "My Favorite Wife", and "His Girl Friday" or anything by Capra, Wilder Lubitsch and Sturges or even Fields, Chaplin and Allen) suggests that he expects us to regard all such lists as ephemeral, and his admiration easily given when the subject doesn't really matter much. This can only reinforce the suspicion that Fish does not respect film but enjoys it when it does what he permits it to do.
Part of the point of these lists is to put an ugly girl in with the pretty ones to teach us a lesson about surface beauty. Top Ten lists thrive on citing the inevident, it is the stock in trade of all music, art and film critics to find an obscure moment far worthier than a heralded moment. Doing so naturally implies a depth of knowledge and experience. If a critic's greater exposure has given him a larger sample from which to choose, how can the viewer of one or two films a year deny that there might be more charm in the collateral plot, the oblique emotion or the muddied dialogue? And if critics pretend to have no pre-conceptions, if they accept all finished products as contenders, they necessarily imagine that approving the well-regarded means they have not looked hard enough.
Most critics mix their lists like home-made salad dressing: 50% oil (the well-regarded) 40% vinegar (the obscure) and 10% spice (the things even their friends can't disguise their contempt for). Groundhog Day" is rocky road ice-cream in the recipe. It is not by any definition, not even by Fish's, one of the ten greatest works in American cinema. Wasn't Andie MacDowell still being dubbed by English speaking actresses then?
I do not mean to suggest that competent critics pander to their readers by offering them what they expect nor do I suggest following the above recipe (I buy Wish-bone). I also would never dream of suggesting that a body of critical response should dictate all future critical response. I've never made it through any "Godfather" nor to my knowledge any entire Scorcese film. I would never suggest to find a film superior to Citizen Kane is to dismantle the values of our forefathers. I'll be the first to argue that "Citizen Kane" has almost outlived its usefulness as the film equivalent of Ulysses or Demoiselles D'Avignon (and if pressed even that Picasso has almost outlived his usefulness as Picasso- but just leave Joyce be for now). Even though Welles' methods and manners have become familiar: the Rube Goldberg concatenation of lines, the switchback propulsion, the tonal and aural depth which define its visceral and quasi-intellectual thrills, the film still produces those thrills. It does so with a surprising economy, unlike the turgid epics of recent years. As it ages though, those pleasures are increasingly undercut by the inept performances which have become harder to ignore: the cast often bent and tremulous, clad in age-make-up so poor that it reminds one of an elementary school "Death of a Salesman"- their earnest radio drama line-readings. The film must also suffer as a paradigm of the disjointed nature of truth when its own artifice is so false- and must pall as a model of the destruction of hagiography when later study shows that -whereas Welles selected a perfectly loathsome target in Hearst, Hearst was a monster for reasons entirely ignored in the story of Kane (and the attacks on the widely admired Marion Davies were gratuitously mean-spirited.)
These are opinions that have evolved as the art-form has evolved. The art-form can never evolve enough to make "Groundhog Day" great.
"Sunset Boulevard" and "Double Indemnity" are on the list. These are both films I admire. I can just imagine what these dark, cynical but worldly romances speak to in Fish. Surely there is no more menacing affection on film than that between Stanwyck and MacMurray, but no one gets out of either of these love stories alive or sane. Possibly that's their appeal. At least they brook no chance of sequels though I'd like to think that someone pitched Max and Norma's return in "Sunset Boulevard Day Care". "Triple Indemnity" with Edward G. Robinson? ("See... I took out a policy that pays triple if these two kill each other after killing the original policy holder. I'm putting it all in Flubber"). What of the other great dark romances? Scripts from which at least one person emerges or in which both survive but in less than idyllic bliss? "Casablanca", "The Big Sleep", "The Maltese Falcon"? Even for the love of Jesus "The Philadelphia Story"?
Fish responds best to complex relationships and their complicated geometries, with his citing of "Red River", of "Raging Bull" and never more so than with his selection of "Vertigo", an easily detestable film featuring a woman named Kim Novak who appears to be constantly winded from failing to scintillate while hunching. Fish revels in the complicated "he manipulates me through her so I manipulate her" plot and singles out Novak for praise as he did Russell, the dead-eyed leaden middles that drag these long slogs down. If he likes complicated relationships why doesn't he consider "Chinatown", (was Faye Dunaway her own mother? What was that? Parthenogenesis? ) or the delightfully monstrous "The Little Foxes"?
That Fish gives us a list of movies we already know as opposed to things he wishes us to search out seems to cast aspersions upon more deliberately erudite Top Ten Film lists- lists that might rely heavily on films whose hypothetical later discussion could possibly inform areas of neglected plight: the plights of black Appalachian sommeliers or Hurricane ZsaZsa orphans (they have to use Z at some point). I'm all for giving a leg-up to the ladderless masses, but I suspect, today on the intersections of despair and degradation, you are more likely to have gaggles of ragged production assistants than orphans chase you down the street for change.
I've long believed that the more 'subversive' the publication that employs the critic the more recondite the list. It's not a perfect formula but I'm working on it. A critic in some ways is always assembling a simulacrum of himself- as automatically as he might name his 5 senses. After all, how can any man live his life without imagining the world is just himself, disassembled? The entireity contains the top ten facets of the list-maker's personality. This allows the list-maker to illuminate the aspects of his personality that are so nuanced that no one else has ever seen them. He does this by selecting films that illustrate such nuances in a manner which he presumes is invisible to nearly everyone. The small signs of heroism or despair strike some inner resonance, and the less evident they are the more acknowledging them gives hope that one's own quiet gestures can make a difference.
Fish stresses the piquant buried within the mundane. This is certainly understandable. But how uninteresting must the bulk of the thing be to make those interesting moments worthwhile? If I have been numb for 110 minutes only to find, in two fabulous minutes Mickey Rooney popping out of Victor Buono's stomach and running around the spaceship, I am not likely to forget the earlier pain I endured. But maybe that's me. I am such an ideal candidate for brainwashing, I usually consider the first 20 minutes of every film I see the greatest thing I've ever seen. "Oh my god! I love this! 'The Dukes of Hazzard' is the best mov...." and then minute 21 hits. Maybe it's my metabolism. Pauline Kael must have been built like a Galapagos turtle.
I suppose what is most provoking is how Fish discards the evolutional narrative of film by ignoring its touchstones, ignores the scope of film by wallowing within the major studio projects, and ignores the social utility of film by ranking excellence by his own responsiveness- and does this without admitting that he is doing it.
I suppose it could have been worse. Thank god they screwed Manny Farber's lid tight.
