There was no surprise about the two films which topped the American Film Institute poll to select the 100 best American films of the 20th century. The magnificent Citizen Kane from 1941, made by a 25-year-old Orson Welles, takes first place, as it generally does whenever movie critics are asked to name the all-time greats.
Second place goes to Casablanca from 1942, the movie most mentioned when audiences are invited to select their favourites. It's when one starts to work through the others on the top 100 that one begins to trip over many bones of contention.
The American Film Institute invited 1,500 movie lovers - critics, actors, film-makers, and fans such as President Clinton - to vote in the poll, the results of which were announced this week in a three-hour CBS television special as part of a promotion which involves all 100 films being packaged for re-release on video.
The list was restricted to American films or films made mostly with American financing. Consequently, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is on the list, surprisingly high at No 5, by virtue of its Hollywood money. Interestingly, half of the top 20 films were directed by men born outside the United States, although many of them lived and worked there for most of their lives.
The period covered by the poll spanned films made between 1912 and 1996, and the result suggests 1939 was the vintage year, producing five films on the list, more than any other year, Gone With the Wind (fourth); The Wizard of Oz (sixth); Mr Smith Goes to Washington (29th); Stagecoach (63rd), and Wuthering Heights (73rd).
There are four films from 1951 - The African Queen (17th); A Streetcar Named De- sire (45th), An American in Paris (68th), and A Place in the Sun (92nd) - and four from 1969: Midnight Cowboy (36th); Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (50th); The Wild Bunch (80th) and Easy Rider (88th).
The top director on the list is Steven Spielberg, with five movies: Schindler's List (ninth); ET (25th); Jaws (48th); Raiders of The Lost Ark (60th), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (64th). The only 1990s production to make the top 60, the worthy but heavily over-praised Schindler's List, is further overrated by its lofty perch on this list. I, for one, would not have even included it in an all-time top 100 of American movies.
However, the first film I would drop from the AFI list would have to be the ghastly, Oscar-laden Forrest Gump (71st), closely followed by the soporific Doctor Zhivago (39th), the cringe-inducing Amadeus (53rd), the forgettable Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (50th), the dreadfully twee The Sound of Music (65th), the wholly formulaic Rocky (78th) and the long-dated Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (99th).
I would seriously question the top 20 placings of Gone With the Wind (fourth), The Bridge on the River Kwai (13th), Star Wars (15th) and The African Queen (19th), and relegate all four well down the list, or off it. I would assume that The Jazz Singer (90th) is there solely for its place in cinema history, as the first talkie. And I would reverse the positions of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (third) and its far superior sequel, The God- father, Part II (32nd), the only sequel to make the list.
On the other hand, I would upgrade such great movies as It's a Wonderful Life (11th), Raging Bull (24th), Bonnie and Clyde (27th), A Clockwork Orange (46th), Taxi Driver (47th), and especially three masterpieces shamefully placed far down the list, Vertigo (61st), The Wild Bunch (80th) and The Searchers (96th).
SO MUCH for what made the Top 100. Where this poll really begins to lose credibility is when one begins to note its many glaring omissions. For example, comedy is badly under-represented. There is just one Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, all the way down at 85th. Howard Hawks's scintillating Bringing Up Baby is even further down the pack, at 97th, and there is no trace whatsoever of Hawks's equally scintillating His Girl Friday, arguably the finest comedy ever to come out of American cinema. And there is nothing at all from Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy. (Chaplin figures in the nether regions with The Gold Rush 74th, City Lights 76th and Modern Times 81st).
Nor is there a single film on the list from such important directors as Busby Berkeley, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, Douglas Sirk, Anthony Mann, John Cassavetes, Raoul Walsh, Robert Aldrich and Don Siegel. And the exclusion of Robert Altman's Nashville, one of the most acute and fascinating American films ever about America, is outrageous.
While Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese each have three movies in the top 100, they surely should be joined on the list by Kubrick's extraordinary Barry Lyndon and Scorsese's dynamic Mean Streets. Terrence Malick's marvellous two films, Badlands and especially Days of Heaven, are disgracefully ignored by the poll, as are John Boorman's Point Blank and Deliverance, and every Fred Astaire musical, even The Band Wagon.
And where is Laura? Mildred Pierce? The Night of the Hunter? Rio Bravo? The Last Picture Show? Cabaret? Dog Day Afternoon? All the President's Men? Paris, Texas? Blue Velvet? Hannah and Her Sisters? Thelma & Louise? Seven?
Chacun a son gout.
