Sometimes its hard to second guess the rulings of the Academy. One such time came in 1991 when the foreign language film Oscar went to Italy’s entry that year, Mediterraneo.

This film, which had really flown under the radar up until its win, was a sweet natured little fable about a group of Italian soldiers, weary of the battles of World War II, who are stranded on a small Greek island and, instead of staunchly holding the line, make friends with the island inhabitants and all find peace.

It’s as sweet as it sounds and director Gabriele Salvatores, a decade into an ongoing career helped enormously by this film’s win, urged the crowd to live in peace in his acceptance speech. That’s so nice except for the fact that his was not even close to being the best film in the category.

That year’s nominee’s also included an interesting curio, Sweden’s The Ox, a rare directorial effort by the great cinematographer Sven Nykist (and filled with a cast list cribbed from the films of his usual boss, Ingmar Bergman). However, the most memorable entry was the one submitted by Hong Kong (now part of China and no longer eligible to submit individually).

This was film maker Zang Yimou’s pictorially and dramatically striking period film Raise the Red Lantern. The story initially looks to be set  during a long ago epoch in China but is actually set in the earlier part of the 20th Century, albeit in a wealthy household which looks to be insulating itself from the outside world by invoking the glow of the past.

Within this lavish household are the several wives and concubines of the home’s wealthy master. When he decides to bestow his favors on one of the women for the night a ceremonial red lantern is placed outside of the door of the woman’s apartment.

The women are hardly friendly towards one another in the best of times but the arrival of an educated young woman who can hold her own with the most competitive takes the rivalry to another level.

Though it sounds like a personal drama it is full of views of the decadence of times gone past and how those times affected the present. Especially pleasing are the film’s vibrant colors (China for many years housed the last plant processing the classic three strip Technicolor process) and the stunning sets and costumes.

Truly Raise the Red Lantern was a film with which to reckon. However, the Academy has very rarely been receptive to the idea of Asian films actually winning their award. Most of the few which had won have gone to Japan, even though Asian cinema has been widely held to have truly come into its own in recent decades. That such a fine lost is bad enough, but to lose to so lightweight an entry….

9. Belle Epoque (Farewell, My Concubine, The Scent of Green Papaya, The Wedding Banquet) – 1993

The more things change…. Two years after Mediterraneo beat out Raise the Red Lantern, another good natured but hardly earth-shaking European film beat out not one but, this time, THREE worthy Asian entries!

The winner in the foreign film category that year was Belle Epoque from Spanish film maker Fernando Trueba. It tells the story of a gentle young man running from the fighting in the days building up to the Spanish Civil War. He befriends and is befriended by a friendly old man and is taken to the man’s lovely country home, filled with four beautiful daughters, all of whom have love on their minds, as the young man has marriage on his.

Actually, the story even sounds somewhat like that of Mediterraneo, so perhaps the voters had some strange soft spot for this kind of thing. It must be noted that Trueba is quite acclaimed and has won many awards in Europe and this film is very pleasing. However, the Asian films were rather more interesting and pointed.

One film in the group which catches the eye is the entry from Taiwan, The Wedding Banquet, a tender comedy about a gay young man marrying for reasons which have very little to do with love (save love of family).

This was an early success for Ang Lee, who would go on to win the Oscar twice (to date) and helm a later winner in this category (2000’s big crossover hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The Wedding Banquet is unmistakably a Lee film, albeit in nascent form, but better still was yet to come from him. 

The Scent of Green Papaya from film maker Tran Anh Hung was, to date, the first and only nominee from Vietnam and tells the story of a young servant girl navigating her way through Vietnamese society and finding her place.

Best of all, though was another entry from Hong Kong, this time courtesy of noted film maker Chen Kaige, Farewell My Concubine, a triangular love story set against the turmoil of China’s recent history and a most epic piece of film making (with a fine performance by Kaige’s famed star actress Gong Li). 

Farewell was one of the most acclaimed films of its year, a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, and still seen and commented on to this day. Sadly, it would not become one of only five Asian films to win in this category to date.  This time the loss was to a more worthy film but injustice was still done.

10. The Secret in Their Eyes (A Prophet, The White Ribbon) – 2009

In 2009 the Academy once more set a high bar…for snubbing worthy nominees. The winner in the foreign film category that year had been a huge hit in its native Argentina and in Spanish speaking countries in South America and Europe and had received its share of praise and awards.

The Secret in their Eyes is a rather edgy mystery thriller about a now middle aged law clerk and the female judge he was secretly in love with (which she secretly returned) and their examination of a twenty-five year old unsolved rape-murder case which starts to yield some big surprises. The film is a good one but better ones were in the mix.

If the Academy wanted to  honor an unnerving  mystery thriller then the better choice would have been the German entry, The White Ribbon, a disturbingly elliptical thriller with a historical setting which subtly commented on how the undercurrents of that time and even in the small towns, such as the one pictured in the story, impacted later German history.

Also, quite importantly, it was the product of Austrian born film maker Michael Haneke, one of the current bright lights of international cinema. (He has certainly had a more noted career than Secret’s film maker, Juan Jose Campanella, who had a good career in Latin countries but wasn’t ever that well known outside of those countries.) Happily Haneke has since been honored (for 2012’s big all around hit Amour) and he surely isn’t finished yet.

However, as good as The White Ribbon was, there was an even more deserving nominee, the entry from France, A Prophet, a fine effort from Jacques Audiard. The film is ostensibly a prison drama concentrating on a petty criminal rising to the top of prison society largely by using his Algerian roots to ingratiate himself into the Muslim and ethic subcultures of the prison world.

Though a crime story it also makes a larger statement about the make-up of French society.  Being set in the modern era, it was even more edgy than The White Ribbon and a very telling effort. As  so many choices of the Academy, it wasn’t a case of a bad film being honored, just not the best one.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in 1928, its primary goal was to add a bit of prestige and luster to the motion picture business….the Hollywood movie business.

While it is, of course, certain that those creating the organization knew that there was a world of film making outside of Hollywood (especially since so very many of the members and others in Hollywood originally came from some of those places), the Academy wasn’t too concerned about what went on outside of their strictly boundaried little world. 

While a film from somewhere other than Hollywood could conceivably be nominated or win one of the Academy’s annual prizes, it was highly doubtful that it would happen.

When the French classic A Nous la Liberte was nominated for its set design in 1932, it came as a big shock, as did Charles Laughton’s best actor win for the 1933 British Film The Private Lives of Henry VIII (though the fact that Laughton had been working in Hollywood for two years by that time did take the curse off a bit).

As far as the top prize, best picture, goes only French director Jean Renior’s timeless classic Le Grande Illusion (1938) rated even a nomination (it was an off year in Hollywood and the French film towered over everything and still lost).

After World War II the Academy, thanks to the increased awareness of other countries fostered by the conflict, started giving out honorary awards to foreign language films considered worthy (with Italy’s Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves, France’s Forbidden Games, and Japan’s Rashomon and Gate of Hell being among the recipients). This lasted from 1947 to 1955 and there was no competition for this award, which was given out solely at the Academy’s choosing.

Starting in 1956, best foreign language film became a real award category. This category has always generated much controversy since a myriad of rules govern it and voting for this award is only allowed if Academy members meet certain strict guidelines (though there are other categories, such as short subjects, which have similar rules).

One important thing to remember in looking over the list of what the Academy did and didn’t award or even nominate: the films selected for the category were submitted by the country of origin.

For example, Spain engendered much controversy when it refused to submit film maker Pedro Almodovar’s much acclaimed 2002 film Talk to Her, reasoning that, after his win in 1999 with All About My Mother, Almodovar had been lauded enough (and there are and were past histories of film makers winning multiple times in this category).

The end result was that that Spain’s official entry, Afternoons in the Sun, was not among the nominated but the Academy used its prerogative to nominate Talk to Her in other categories, non-specific to foreign language films, and Almodovar ended up winning for his screenplay. (Though, to date, Spain has never submitted another Almodovar film for consideration as best foreign language film.)

In considering the following list, be mindful that it concerns only the films winning or nominated for the award. It would be nice (and quite accepted) to say that Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (both 1957) or Francosis Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) or Jules and Jim (1960), for example, should be among the award winners but, in these cases, Sweden and France didn’t agree at the time. Here then is a list of some interesting winners and some interesting conflicts within this Oscar category.

1. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (The Umbrellas of Cherborg, The Woman  in the Dunes) – 1964

It’s a pity that the Academy didn’t get its act together in regards to foreign films much sooner than it did for more than one reason. If there had been earlier recognition of work from places outside of Hollywood, then such artists as Rene Clair, G.W. Pabst, and Jean Renior might now be listed among those honored by the Academy (or, knowing the Academy, maybe not….).

One artist who wasn’t able to compete in his prime years was Italy’s Vittorio De Sica, who had a long career both before and behind the camera  but who will forever be remembered as one of the principal movers of the famed Neo-Realist movement in Italian cinema.

Though he was given honorary awards for his finest works, Shoeshine in 1947 and the unforgettable Bicycle Thieves in 1949, the Academy seemed to feel some strange sort of guilt towards him (as will be explained even more fully later in this article).

In 1957 he received one of the least deserving acting nominations ever for his supporting turn in the big Hollywood dud A Farewell to Arms. Then came 1964 and his award for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

First, let it be stated that this is not at all a bad film. Its a very pleasant three part omnibus of comedic love stories, all starring Italy’s leading stars (and favorite cinematic romantic couple) Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren (and though Mastroianni worked with many great European film makers, De Sica was truly Loren’s special director).

Though one might detect some of the film maker’s Neo-Realist roots in the lower and working class backgrounds of the stories (especially the third, which casts Loren as a friendly prostitute), this could not be farther from the films which made De Sica’s reputation. In fact, its really rather fluffy, which perhaps accounts for the fact that, for a foreign release, it was surprisingly popular at the box office. OK, it has a good pedigree and was a hit. Sadly, it was not the best.

Among the other films nominated that year was another romantic film was was also a big hit and has weathered the years even better. Many, to this day, count French film maker Jacques Demy’s somewhat tragic but colorful and lovely film operetta The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to be among the screen great romances.

Demy was truly a special film maker in that he could make ultra-romantic, dream-like, and almost fairy-tale (and in some cases, no almost) plausible within his cinematic realm for the course of a few hours and imprint them deeply in the memories of audiences who could give themselves over to his vision. (In Umbrellas case, he was greatly helped by a very young Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castlenuovo and the late and great composer Michel Legrand, who received three nominations for his work.)

Umbrellas was also nominated in three other categories, including one for Demy’s screenplay. There was also another romance, of sorts, among the nominees and no sentiment was involved in that one.

Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Woman in the Dunes (taken from noted Japanese writer Kobo Abe’s acclaimed novel) is still  a most highly regarded film (and Teshigahara also received an individual nomination for his work).

It might well be that the two distinguished films left the field open for a dark horse (and the other nominees, Raven’s End, an early work from Sweden’ Bo Widerberg , and Sallah Shabati, a now forgotten film which was the first to be nominated from Israel, didn’t have much spark). The Academy has done worse than honoring a world class film maker, but it could have done better.

2. A Man and a Woman (The Battle of Algiers, The Loves of a Blonde) – 1966

Perhaps romance is the universal language for two years after Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow won, history truly repeated itself in this category.

Any lover of romantic films with a knowledge of world cinema surely knows A Man and Woman. This was the supreme effort of the well-remembered French film maker Claude Lelouch.

Its story was simple enough to write on the back of a napkin: a lovely young widow (Anouk Aimee, nominated for best actress for a good performance in one of Hollywood’s worst years for actresses) meets a handsome young widower (that icon of French cinema Jean-Louis Trintignant) at the boarding school their children attend. She can’t forget her late and beloved stuntman husband but the man is a famed race car driver!

Can she commit? Well, it must be stated that it took some real work by some excellent people to get this plot and characters taken seriously (though the greatest of all was composer Francis Lai and his memorable theme music, causing him to be imported to Hollywood four years later to Oscar winning effect for Love Story, a film which shows just how much really good work went into making this one watchable).

This was also a favorite in the film community since Lelouch had to scratch up the money for it any way he could (which is why the film keeps switching from monochrome to color) and the actors worked for a potential cut of the profits. That story is actually more compelling than the one on the screen.

A Man and a Woman’s win might not seem all that bad except that there were other, more deserving, films up against it. That year Eastern Europe was alive with cinematic (and political) potential which would be sadly snuffed out shortly thereafter.

There were nominees from Poland (Pharaoh), the country which was then Yugoslavia (Three) and, best of all, the then-country of Czechoslovakia with The Loves of a Blonde, the breakthrough film of perhaps that country’s great film maker, Milos Forman (who would later come to Hollywood and climb to the Oscar winning summit).

However, even these nominees and the winner stand in the shadow of the fifth nominee an official entry of Italy, famed political film maker Gillo Pontecorvo’s much lauded semi-documentary The Battle of Algiers.  A film of influential style and substance, Battle is studied, watched, and written about to this day. If the Academy had wanted to make a choice for the ages, here it was.

However, politics of all sorts seem to govern foreign made films. A few years later French film maker Marcel Ophuls’ pantheon level The Sorrow and the Pity lost to the dinky pseudo-doc The Helstrom Chronicle and this decision ranks right up there with it in the annals of Academy mistakes. Sometimes how the Academy  chooses can be put down to matter of taste. In this case, one is left searching for a reason.

3. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Dodes ‘ka-den, The Emmigrants, Tchaikovsky) – 1971

This particular entry may be entitled De Sica make-up award part deux. In all honesty, calling the award given to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis anything but a justified matter of taste is much dicier than taking issue with the one given to Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

Taken from a well respected Italian novel, the film tells the story of a very wealthy family of Italian Jews in the late 1930s. The forbidding winds of danger and doom are blowing all around them thanks to Italy’s political union with Germany but the group decides that they will be the ultimate ostriches and live quite happily behind the gated walls of their palatial home with its luxurious gardens with tragic results.

The film is memorable and well made but bears virtually no trace of the gritty style for which De Sica was famous (the story ends just as the ugly part is really about to begin). One might not take issue at all with it, as stated, except that some even more memorable films got short changed.

Putting aside the now forgotten Israeli film The Policeman, the list included the excellent Russian bio-pic Tchaikovsky (which looked much better than British director Ken Russell’s outrageous take on the composer’s life, The Music Lovers, released the same year), a fine entry from no less than Japan’s great film maker Akira Kurosawa, Dodes ‘ka-den, and the one film to break out of the foreign language Academy ghetto, Swedish film maker Jan Troell’s now-classic The Emigrants. 

Any of them would have been a worthy winner and a win for Kurosawa, who was going through a truly tough period which hadn’t been relieved by the domestic reception for Dodes ‘ka-den, a tale of life among the poverty stricken of a large city, would have been a great boost. In fact, he was (infamously) nearly driven to suicide by the episode (and the film is far more highly regarded now).

However, The Emigrants is not only a superb film (from a classic Scandanavian novel dealing with 19th century rurals heading for a hoped for new life in the US) but a real triumph for Troell, who directed , wrote and photographed (!) the film.

The next year the story’s always planned second half (not sequel), The New Land, was again nominated in this category (losing, more justifiably, to Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). Perhaps if the voters could have seen the two halves together they might have realized what a towering achievement this work was in the end. As it was, Oscar has done worse but  missed out on the real prize.

The use of ultimates can be a dangerous thing. Calling anything or anyone something that generally ends in the suffix est, or some variation thereof, is almost like a call to arms. There will inevitably be someone(s) else who will assert that the item or person under the magnifying glass of being the best, the worst, the mightiest, etc. is not deserving at all and that the honor (or whatever) should, in fact, go to another person, place, or thing. When these absolutes are applied to the arts, which really shouldn’t be judged that way, then it can all become dicey indeed.

In line with all of this, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has bestowed its award on the worthy (or not) for the better part of a century. No organization should know better the pitfalls of naming absolutes, since that’s what awards do by their very definition. Keeping that in mind, it is no surprise at all that every year, without fail, there are some (often many somes) who proclaim that the Academy doesn’t know what it’s doing or is doing it for the wrong reasons and the best was not rewarded at all.

All of this leads to the point of this article. While the idea of simply naming a group of works or people as outstanding and simply saying that good jobs were done and leaving it at that is admirable, human beings thrive on the excitement of competition and the ideas of winning and losing.

The National Board of Review, the oldest US organization awarding good work in film, tried just naming a list of deserving works and workers in film in 1943 (as did TV’s Emmy awards in 1966 and which the distinguished George Foster Peabody awards, TV’s highest honors always has) and had to go back to competition the next year due to lack of interest. However, as stated people often get mad if something/one they consider deserving doesn’t win.

Sometimes, such as the case of 1952’s Best Picture winner, The Greatest Show on Earth (a winner due far more to blacklist era politics than anything else), there is no logic or excuse in terms of quality.

However, there are a number of films with the term “Oscar winning Best Picture” attached to them that, if not the best, are really pretty decent films, and might well be thought of as such if that onus wasn’t on them. This article wishes to focus on those films. The thesis here isn’t that they deserved their awards, just that they deserve a break.

1. Cavalcade

Perhaps the Academy’s greatest flaw throughout the years is the fact that the members often vote with an eye towards posterity, thinking often about how choices will look to future generations, thus causing those members to play it safe and go for safe-sounding prestige efforts which will surely reflect glory back upon the choosers.

Going for Art with a capital A sounds good but that can be so dicey since art can so easily be confused with pretention and, also, those trying for art for art’s sake (as MGM’s motto supposedly exhorted) can so often create something with no pulse at all. That was all brought into play with the choice of the 1932/33 season (the last year the Academy used a theatrical season calendar).

That period of time brought some fine, lively films. The horror/special effects classic King Kong and the eternally fun, low-ish down musical 42nd Street still live on vibrantly in popular culture (though only the latter was even nominated).

If one prefers a higher brow, Little Women, a case study in how to adapt a genteel literary classic and still have it come out interestingly was a nominee, though, sadly, Queen Christina and Dinner at Eight, two other efforts which could be labeled “prestige” didn’t get noticed at all (the timing of the calendar might have caused that) and those films still look wonderful. Then there is the winner…. Cavalcade.

Due to the fact that Twentieth Century Fox very, very rarely released the films made before two companies merged to create the studio as it’s known to this day (the companies being Fox Films and Twentieth Century Pictures) in more recent times until just lately, and, also, due to so many of those early films being lost in a fire in the late 1930s, Cavalcade was unseen for years.

The film was an adaptation of a rare dramatic play by British playwright Noel Coward, one of the great theatrical wits of his century. The play traced the (mis)fortunes of an upper class London family during the hectic early years of the 20th Century, after leaving the peace of the preceding century, and having every big cataclysm of the day hit them (even the sinking of the Titanic).

It was a big hit in London but, significantly, never made it to North America, let alone Broadway, since the work was considered too Anglo-centric to be of interest elsewhere. (However, a decade later Coward and then-young director David Lean reused the idea, this time focusing on a working class family, for the fine and popular 1944 film This Happy Breed, which got no Academy notice.) Well, early Hollywood had a weakness for the stage and US citizens have always had a yen to pair with “the homeland” (i.e. the UK) so a pre-20th Fox films bought the rights and made the film.

This film is surely not to everyone’s tastes. It is quite tasteful in a Victorian era kind of way. Though the husband and wife (Clive Brook, somewhat known to US film goers, and Diana Wynyard, new to both film and the US) are kind to their inferiors (anyone lower class, which is virtually everyone outside of the palace) their behavior unintentionally smacks of condescension.

Also, the way this film enshrines them and their kind might give some a turn (though there is the fact of Downton Abbey in the modern day…). However, it must be noted that the acting is quite good, if of another period (Wynyard was an acting nominee).

The costumes and set design also reflect a lavish sense of both the time in British history the plot concerns and, also, a moment in Hollywood history which won’t come again. There are also, surprisingly, some witty Coward songs in the film, including the classic “Twentieth Century Blues”.

The topper is the expert direction of Oscar winning Frank Lloyd, often a top-notch director of naval dramas, and here giving the story his all. For all this, there are those who will never like this film with the quaint charm of a lovely antique (which it itself is) but, though not close to deserving, it still is worthwhile.

2. How Green was My Valley

Addressing the elephant in the room: CITIZEN KANE IS THE BEST FILM OF 1941. OK, now that that’s out of the way, the winner of the best picture award for 1941 may be discussed.

There is little point in beating the drum for Orson Welles’ great film, often selected Best Film of All Time. Many a book has related how Hollywood resented brash newcomer Welles, how he angered the mighty publisher William Randolph Hurst, and how Hurst’s influence and the fact that Kane, for all its brilliance, is not the most likeable or sympathetic film, all of which doomed it at the box office and killed its chance at winning many or very big awards (it made off with best original screenplay only, a smarmy injoke).

1941, almost as rich a year as 1939, also saw the renowned John Huston (Welles spiritual brother) making his directorial debut with his superlative mystery classic The Maltese Falcon (actually the third version of the novel).

However, the mystery genre was never favored by the Academy so Falcon’s nomination was an honor in itself. Also director William Dieterle’s fantasy folk classic, The Devil and Daniel Webster, unnominated, was a fine piece of filmmaking but a notorious box office bomb (go figure).

All that being said, the winner, the Wales-set period memory piece from the iconic director John Ford, How Green Was My Valley, is actually one of the best films to ever win the award. Ford stands second to none as a filmmaker and Welles himself ran Ford’s western classic Stagecoach many times preparing for Kane.

The previous year had seen two of his films, both now classics, The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home (and Welles had chosen cinematographer Gregg Toland to lens Kane based on his work in these films), nominated but they lost to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (not a favored work in his cannon) though Ford himself won for Grapes.

Valley saw Ford working at that same high level. He had worked at Fox Films, then its successor, Twentieth Century Fox for decades by even that time and he had created a crack group of collaborators in front of and behind the camera (which was lensed by the excellent Arthur C. Miller). No studio in Hollywood could create the right physical look for period films better than the artisans at Fox and they outdid themselves in creating the early 1900s Welsh mining town.

In front of the camera were many Ford regulars such as Barry Fitzgerald, Anna Lee, Arthur Shields, Rhys Williams, Sara Allgood (nominated) and Oscar winning Donald Crisp, with the cast being led by Ford’s favorite leading lady Maureen O’Hara (quite radiant), MGM loan-out Walter Pidgeon (easily his best performance), and young Roddy McDowell in the performance which set him on the fine career he pursued the rest of his life.

Past all of that, Ford skillfully held together a film which, by design, didn’t have a strong central plot but worked as a group of highly emotional segments, all directed to maximum impact (though with that sentimentality Ford couldn’t live without but did so well). If this film had beaten out the risible Mrs.

Miniver for the next year’s Oscar it would have looked like a triumphant choice. As it is, this fine picture gets repeatedly clobbered by the weight of having beaten out one of the great pictures of all time.

3. Going My Way

Elephant number two: DOUBLE INDEMNITY WAS THE BEST FILM OF 1944 AND THE GREATEST OF FILM NOIRS. OK, now that is also out of the way. Yes, DI is an immortal film and one of the supreme Billy Wilder’s best works. Also, the classic suspense melodrama, Gaslight (unofficially remade so many times) is also a film to remember. There was also Otto Preminger’s memorable and unnominated film noir classic Laura. Then there is the actual winner, Leo McCarey’s Going My Way.

Quite often modern viewers overlook context when judging the past. 1944 was near the end of World War II (though no one knew that at the time). The war had been long and grueling and, quite often, people tend to get rather sanctimonious in times of great stress. Surely the citizens of 1944 could attest to that fact. For all their many virtues, DI, Gaslight, and Laura are very dark films which are vastly entertaining to modern viewers but didn’t and don’t provide a lot of uplift.  By contrast, the winner was nothing but uplift.

Going My Way is a pleasantly sentimental comedy-light drama concerning a progressive minded youngish priest (best actor winner Bing Crosby), who has been sent to take over a failing and troubled inner-city Parrish from the somewhat crotchety, very set in his ways old Irish priest (supporting actor winner Barry Fitzgerald) who has run it for decades.

Needless to say, the warm and easy-going younger man gets the church on track, tames the neighborhood juvenile delinquents (by getting them to sing with him!), solves a few love problems and makes a nice peace with the old priest.

OK, this is cinematic comfort food but, if this sort of film needed to be made, it couldn’t have been made better than Going My Way. A large part of this credit goes to best director winner McCarey. This was his second win in this category, after taking the prize in 1938 for his comedy classic The Awful Truth (still loved to this day) in a year that also saw the release of his dramatic masterpiece Make Way For Tomorrow.

That was the essence of McCarey: he could be funny and dramatic with equal skill because he knew what he was doing and seemed to love people. It would have been so easy to have made the old priest a stock villain to be defeated, but McCarey makes him someone to be understood and the young priest great at understanding. He had perfect players in Crosby, self-admittedly not a great actor but a soothing and relaxed screen presence, and the (somewhat ham) flavorful Fitzgerald, who is a comic delight (and reportedly the actors were nothing like their screen personas off camera).

The pay-off is the finale when the old priest is surprised at his retirement party with the tiny, ancient mother from Ireland he hasn’t been able to see in decades. The director frames the moment so perfectly and simply that resistance is futile. And McCarey could do it over and over. That’s a gift.

4. Hamlet

Hamlet, the greatest play of the greatest playwright in the English language, William Shakespeare, as filmed by Laurence Olivier, then thought of as arguably the greatest actor in the world: how could the Academy resist prestige catnip like that? As it turns out, they couldn’t. Never mind that John Huston turned in what very well may be not only his best film but one of the great ones ever, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (though he himself did win best director).

Also the superlative British film making team The Archers hit an all-around high with the ballet themed drama The Red Shoes (a triumph of skill and technique over a trite storyline). Also the great European director Max Ophuls offered Letter From an Unknown Woman, a film to stand with his continental masterpieces, not that it got the time of day from the Academy.

Now, as to the winner, past the films it beat out, critics have always carped about its mere two and half hour running length, eliminating a good deal of the play. However, most Shakespearean plays are edited for time (and when Kenneth Branaugh did film the whole thing decades later it came off as more like a stunt than anything else). The more perceptive critics have noted that the editing is quite skillful and very little of great import was cut.

Also, this was the only one of the four Olivier-Shakespeare films to be shot in black and white (Olivier later claimed to have been having a feud with Technicolor). However, this is one of the darkest of dramas, one that has many similarities to what is now known as film noir. In fact, Hamlet looks very much like a film noir and the cinematography (by Desmond Dickinson) achieves such enormous depth of field that the film almost looks to be three dimensional at times.

Along with that criticism, many over the years have noted that the camera wanders over the empty rooms several times but this makes sense for a story where all major characters will lie dead by the end, so the settings take on greater significance, especially as the camera surveys these now tragic locations at the end. Then there is, surprisingly, the comments on the acting.

Though few had negative comments about Olivier’s performance (though, at 41, he was awfully old to be a student prince) nor for an 18-year-old Jean Simmons coming fully into her own with a fine showing as Ophelia, but there were others to consider.

It will be admitted that Basil Sidney, Eileen Herlie (Hamlet’s mother Gertrude at 28 to a 41-year-old son!) and Felix Aylmer as Polonius, might have been more powerful but the supporting cast is still filled out with man familiar and expert faces (including future horror icons Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, though not together). No, Hamlet may not, in the end, be all that, but it is far from negligible.

5. Gigi

Gigi, the last big hit of MGM’s famed Arthur Freed musical unit, is quite often damned with praise. It always seems to get comments such as “good-for what it is”, “nice, if you like that kind of thing”, or “a nice product of its time and place”. All of that sounds, and is, very limiting. Depending on taste, virtually any film that can fit into a genre could have such comments applied to it.

Musicals seem to have a harder time with this sort of things than most genres since they appeal to a very niche audience. That same year the comedy Auntie Mame, a big hit, was major competition, though comedy is still a niche, too (the musical version of that property was still a decade away).

Though Auntie does have her partisans (many in the gay community), a large number of film fans/students would now prefer the nominated, harder edged I Want to Live! (about capital punishment with an Oscar winning Susan Hayward) and The Defiant Ones (a then-much acclaimed crime based racial drama) and even more, many more, prefer the now classic Sweet Smell of Success (a big all around flop then, despite Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis at their peaks and some fine filmmaking) and Welles Touch of Evil (thrown away by Universal and then available in an almost incoherent studio cut).

OK, these are much harder edged times than the late 1950s and something such as Gigi is perceived to be has a much harder time of it now than it surely did back in that day. However, Gigi is far from a negligible film. In fact, modern cineastes love many of the pictures from the Freed Unit. If the Freed musicals which won best picture had been, say, Singin’ in the Rain (which was not a Vincente Minnelli film) and Meet Me in St. Louis or The Band Wagon (both of which most assuredly were) then there would be little to no dissension.

Well, Gigi, sumptuously set in the fin-de-siècle Paris of the early 20th Century, may seem a bit rarefied put next to those somewhat more homespun (could any famed MGM musical of the time be homespun?) films but it has a lively pulse of its own. The story, taken from a short novel by the great French writer Colette, is actually rather naughty for the day (and even now if one considers the age Gigi is actually supposed to be at the time the story takes place).

Gigi is the latest daughter of a long line of courtesans, women brought up and trained to give sophisticated pleasure to very upper class gentlemen for get monetary reward (yes, upper class prostitutes). Gigi, however, is very natural and unruly and actually captures the heart of the young man chosen for her and makes him go the respectable route (after many fine songs from the renowned Broadway team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe).

The cast is flawless with the players being Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Hermione Gingold, Eva Gabor and Leslie Caron in the title role giving a performance which almost typecast her out of a career (even more remarkable in light of the fact that she was almost a decade older than the character is as indicated in the script and she still gets by with to the extent that no one ever really questioned the fact!).

In point of fact, everything in this film, the sets, the costumes, the lush cinematography, the orchestrations, Minnelli’s ultra-smooth direction, everything, show the Freed Unit operating in full gear. Perhaps Gigi also suffers, though, from being linked to another (far less defendable and not on this list) Oscar winning best picture: 1964’s George Cukor-directed My Fair Lady.

MGM had concocted Gigi when Lerner and Lowe refused to sell their enormous and then still running stage hit (and wouldn’t for another half a decade). The joke is that MGM ended up with the better film and one that deserves a little more respect.

Film history is full of films which stick in the memory, good or bad, but is also (perhaps even more so) full of films which seem to be remembered and live on, if that is the right term, as what may be referred to as “text book classics”. This term simply means that while these films are often mentioned in books concerning film art or history, they don’t get seen or, especially, talked about by viewers/students all that often.

Why would this happen to work good enough to be cited in scholarly works or historical surveys? A number of reasons could apply. It’s not unheard of for films to be taken out of wide circulation (or out of circulation at all) for legal reasons or because the owners of the films don’t consider them and their like to have enough commercial value to keep in rotation.

Perhaps, also, a change of styles might make the films and their achievements look decidedly old-fashioned and run of the mill (in large part, in many cases, due to the fact that said films had their innovations were so incorporated into the filmmaking fabric that the originals now look like trite retreads).

Also, some films were made by talents who had dazzling moments but then had careers which failed to live up to those moments or which didn’t stand the test of time well. Sadly, with so very many films throughout the medium’s history, some just got left in the dust after a while.

The following films were either popular or well regarded or both in their own times or at some time thereafter but now seem to be a bit lost on modern audiences and viewers. They all had influence in the film world in one way or another and there well may be a book or two (or three or four) which mentions them but current viewers and/or audiences rarely seem to bring them up. Hopefully, this list may shed a bit of light on them.

1. October (Ten Days That Shook the World, 1927)

In his excellent scholarly history of cinema, A History of Narrative Film, author David Cook makes a great case for each of the renowned film makers of the early days of the Soviet Union (from the late 19-teens through the 1930s) having been allowed only one clear shot at creating uncompromised works of film art. There was one slight exception and many thought, and think, of him as the greatest of them all: Sergei Eisenstein.

The master of cinematic montage, however, was actually only a bit luckier than his compatriots. In 1925 he produced both his debut feature, Strike, and his eternal masterpiece, The Battleship Potemkin, both largely without government interference. This is understandable since both pretty much towed the party line (which Eisentstein believed in to a large extent).

However, the trade off for that golden year was to be a remaining lifetime (both creative and physical, since the film maker didn’t live to be very old) filled with compromised and unfulfilled projects. Most of those, such as the 1938 sound film Alexander Nevsky, and the two Ivan the Terrible films (1944 and, way posthumously, 1958), and even the uncompleted Que Via Mexico! (shown in an incomplete edit in 1978), have attracted their fair share of attention down through the ages. However, one film which seems to be in danger of being left behind is the film which came just after Eisenstein’s double header: October.

Just as Battleship Potemkin was created as part of a massive celebration of the aborted Russian 1905 revolution, so October (somewhat based on US reporter John Reed’s famous account Ten Days That Shook the Earth) was created to celebrate the famed October revolution of 1918 which swept the Bolsheviks to power.

As with his early films, though the film maker was somewhat concerned with the messages which extolled the principals of the revolution, he was even more concerned with his penchant for choosing striking and telling images and with his dynamic theories of editing (montage, which was influential way outside his homeland, though it was supposedly cut off from the rest of the world culturally at that time).

To this end, Eisenstein succeeded in creating a work of stunning images and brilliantly edited set pieces (such as the siege on the bridge) but the main plotline and various episodes ended up truncated. Why? Sadly, the real-life political world whose origins the films was celebrating intruded. The film sought to glorify the heroes of the revolution and one of those, and a prominent figure in October, was Leon Trotsky.

Though his swift downfall was surely no surprise to those in power circles, it caught most everyone else off guard, Eisenstein being no exception. The censors demanded all traces of Trotsky be removed from the film (and everywhere else, effectively erasing him as a person long, long before the assassin they sent to his hiding place in Mexico ended the man himself). This automatically caused a full quarter of the film to be removed and several sequences to be reshaped.

In earlier times, critics and historians were able to accept the good in the film without dwelling on the misfortunes it endured. However, in later times, when only a director’s cut is truly acceptable, October began to be considered “damaged goods”. While the full vision of any film maker is preferred, is it wise to throw the baby out with the bathwater in such cases as this? If one chooses to do so, then much fine work, even in an imperfect film, will be lost.

2. The Crowd (1928)

King Vidor was one of the real greats of the first half century of Hollywood film making and created one of the best films and biggest hits on the silent screen era in 1925’s moving war film The Big Parade. Sadly, after a few more hits, he made what has to be considered his masterpiece, only to have the studio brass (at M.G.M., his home base) dislike his work and the public (largely due to studio underhandedness) give that work the cold shoulder. That film was The Crowd, one of the most personal and sincere works ever to be made in Tinseltown (and it itself has no tinsel).

The Crowd follows the life of a nice, but unexceptional young man (unknown James Murray, who would come to a tragic end due to his brush with fame, among other things) with a loving but unexceptional wife (Eleanor Bordman, then actually Vidor’s wife) both trying to make their way in the anonymous crush of a big city (New York City, to be exact) and finding a few happy days and a lot of really bad ones along the way, finally accepting that they are just part of “the crowd”. It was such an honest film (and Vidor filled it with every truthful touch which would fit into the picture) but an upper it surely wasn’t.

This last part was the big point of the film: life doesn’t always (or often) play fair, hard work doesn’t always get the worker anywhere, bad things can happen to decent people, and how we make out in life, either with a lot or a little, depends on how life is met and accepted. Studio chief Louis B. Mayer, who had something of a fairy-tale like rise to the top, frequently extolled the greatness of the US (his adopted homeland) and how anyone could be anything they wished to be with enough hard work.

Time, let alone realism in any era, has shown how much more knowing and sophisticated was Vidor’s vision, which was much more on the nose, but it didn’t help. At the time of the film’s release the capper was that it actually won one of the two production awards, namely “Most Artistic Production”, given out in the Motion Picture Academy’s first year in lieu of a Best Picture.

Sadly, Mayer argued the then small body governing the Academy into awarding, not his own studio’s film, but the Fox Film release of the great F.W. Murnau’s different but equally great masterpiece Sunrise (a film that does still get talked about). Vidor was also nominated and also lost and there went the film’s chance to get into the books in that manner.

Shortly afterward, the sound era started in ernest and most silent films were thrown into vaults (or worse) until a much later time when there was renewed interest in them. The Crowd is, thus, a real text-book classic but it deserves better. Though Vidor himself had to compromise and make his fair share of false, sentimental, and/or sensationalistic films, this film still serves as an inspiration to those who have come after and wish to use film to tell important truths about human beings and how they live.

3. A Nous La Liberte (1931)

Just as people of a certain age in history would have found it difficult to conceive of another time when such qualities as charm, lightness of touch, sweet natured humor and mischievous invention would be looked at in a skewed way, so its hard for many of the modern era to understand a world wherein those very qualities were revered.

This very fact may well explain why the wonderful films of France’s Rene Clair, seen at their best in the late silent and early talkie eras, are now consigned largely to film history tomes. The odd thing is the Clair’s period of greatness, coming at one of the worst economic times in world history when the continent of Europe was still recovering from what was then the biggest war in history, was still able to accommodate so many warm, funny, charming and very human qualities.

Though he had hit with the lovely silent The Italian Straw Hat (1928) and the early sound film Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), and would also hit in 1931 with the souffle light charmer Le Million, A Nous La Liberte would prove for many years (always?) to be his calling card film.

The story finds two hapless ner-do-wells incarcerated in what looks, in all honesty, to be one entertaining prison. One escapes early on and thus they end up parting ways, one to freedom and other back to prison. After the imprisoned one is finally released and enjoying the natural life, he discovers that his old co-hort is now the wealthy owner of a phonograph factory (and even that carries an old-fashioned charm to it).

The factory owner, now not nearly so friendly, allows his old cell-mate to take a job on the assembly line in order to keep him quiet but the former jailbird soon finds out that he’s just exchanged one prison for another. After much lovely humor and a number of nice songs, a non-realistically happy ending in achieved.

This film might just be the polar opposite of The Crowd but this only shows that the world of the cinema is so multi-faceted that it can hold both types of films and have them both turn out to be treasures in their own different ways. The main characters in The Crowd end the film by setting their many troubles aside and going to a movie theater to laugh for a little while.

The film that they are seeing might well be one much like A Nous La Liberte. It takes a gift to make fine entertainment of any kind but one of the hardest types to do well is escapist works with the needed dose of reality turned on its head in order to make it funny. Clair had an absolute genius for that sort of thing.

This film throws in penal problems, labor difficulties, social prejudice, the feeling that modern man has been reduced to a cypher, and other such things and, yet, its still so joyous. And now so dated. Clair has largely been considered out of fashion since the time of World War II (he fled France and returned after the war was over). OK, the world isn’t as obstensibly innocent as it once was. However, is it so awful in this wised-up time to long for a little comparatively unknowing lack of guile? Clair’s films may be antiques but antiques are quite often quaint, charming, and of great value…as are this film maker’s works.

4. Man of Aran (1934)

Pretty much any history or text book relating to film history will hail US independent (and how) film maker Robert Flaherty as the father of the documentary form. While it is true that motion picture cameras had been documenting reality ever since their existence began, it was Flaherty who turn the random snippets of recorded life into something with dramatic unity, pull and power.

However, by the standards of later documentarians, he made his films generally a little TOO dramatic, namely by helping reality along a bit by staging many aspects of his films. This is anathema to modern film makers of that ilk but Flaherty was trying, and, despite his very limited output, succeeding, in establishing the form as a viable commercial entity, which allowed its continued existence.

Man of Aran, incredibly his first film of the sound era, is really a stand-in for all of Flaherty’s works. Though his initial effort, 1922’s Nanook of the North, is famed just by virtue of being the first documentary hit, none of his work generates a lot of discussion now due to, in the view of many, being so compromised by their very nature.

Even in its own day, 1926’s Moana was considered lesser due to being a mostly pictorial view of the natives of the South Seas and for being “made to order” by Paramount Pictures. The film maker then tried to go commercial with both 1928’s White Shadows in the South Seas (completed by W.S. Van Dyke) and 1931’s stunning Tabu, which was to be his collaboration with German great F.W. Murnau (who directed most of his last masterpiece before his untimely death).

After having stuck out trying to work Hollywood’s mainstream way (not that it stopped him from trying again with also unhappy results) he struck upon the idea of creating a film dealing with the existence of the natives of the Aran Islands, a most inhospitable groups of rocks off the coast of Ireland in the turbulent Irish Sea.

These islands were so barren that no plant life could naturally grow there (potatoes had to be grown in seaweed!). Pretty much everyone was a fisherman, the wife of a fisherman, or the child of a fisherman as they lived in this chain of islands and the sea was the hub of their existence. However, and this drew Flaherty as much as anything, the place had a majestic raw and powerful beauty, never more so than when the overwhelmingly surrounding sea was all stirred up.

The film maker set out to, and succeeded, in capturing that sublime wonder on film (and no one seeing this film will ever forget the seascapes). He framed this in the context of the life of an average family of Aran. Well, the people playing the family were from Aran but they were absolutely no relation to one another and the scenarios they played out were scripted. Still, it actually plays well. Perhaps if it had been correctly billed as a “semi-documentary” the curse might have been lifted. In any event, this is a true work of art and, whatever its shortcomings to modern eyes, it deserves respect.

5. Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Those around in the 1970’s, when film history scholarship first started to become serious, might well remember that, in that era when the Women’s Liberation movement was at its height, there was a lot of feminist film study. Though much of it was centered on how women were presented through the male gaze on film, there was a lot of interest in the work of the very few women of earlier Hollywood (and other places) who managed to direct their own films. No film maker drew more attention than a somewhat obscure and previously nearly forgotten figure named Dorothy Arzner.

Arzner had intended to become a doctor (another mostly male profession at the time) when she drifted into work in the motion picture industry, then in its childhood, and eventually ended up becoming a top editor in the early days of Paramount Pictures.

Paramount was one of the very few film companies which encouraged interesting, individualistic directors and it didn’t seem odd for a woman to helm a film (there had been a number of female directors in the earliest days of film). She remained there from the late silent era through the early days of sound before branching out to such studios as MGM, Columbia, and RKO, making films with, among others, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford,Clara Bow, and Rosalind Russell. (1936’s Craig’s Wife put Russell on the Hollywood map and might well be Arzner’s best film but it isn’t embraced since it adapts one of the most misogynistic majors plays of 20th Century Broadway drama.)

The film which at one time had the attention of feminist historians and authors is Dance, Girl, Dance, which was, ironically, one of the film maker’s last. Made at RKO on a modest budget, it was taken from a story by then-prominent author Vicki Baum (best remembered for the novel and play Grand Hotel) and delt with relationships and aspirations of the main members of an all female dance troup. The stars were a lovely but staid Maureen O’Hara as the dancer serious about her craft and oblivious to popular taste and her opposite number, played by a sarcastically vibrant Lucille Ball, who brazenly sells out at every turn while looking for a rich sugar daddy.

Arzner also had the male director of the troup turned into a rather “gentlemanly” aged lady (not unlike Arnzer herself) played by the great character actress/drama teacher Maria Ouspenskaya. (There was also a token male love interest/bone for the two women to fight about played by Louis Hayward, but that was a very wan aspect of the film.) The big climax, and a scene modern day feminist loved, was an ahead-of-its-time moment wherein O’Hara’s character sharply tells off a rowdy male burlesque audience, which once excited a lot of comment. Why, then, is this film now untalked about?

In his long-time annual guide to movies on TV (and now his classic movie guide) Leonard Maltin, not an unkind reviewer, notes this film’s better points but then makes a statement that could stand for Arzner’s career as a whole: “unfortunately, its not as good as one would like”. Truth to be told, Arzner’s films often had interesting themes and she got some worthwhile performances from, mostly, her leading ladies (not all, though, since a number of them ended up roundly despising her).

However, her record with the actors was rather uneven and, surprising for someone who started as an editor, her films often drag and have a patchy sense of pacing. Like the old joke about the talking dog, the miracle was that Dorothy Arzner managed to have a decent career as a film director in that place and time. Maybe wanting her to be one of the greats is asking a bit too much.

One of the things which drives to  craziness those who don’t subscribe to the auteur theory, the one which states that the director must be the “author” and prime mover of the film, is the fact that the practitioners of the theory, by implication if not implicitly, insist that any film by a film maker considered an auteur must inherently be great, or at least a work of art demanding consideration. While it does, barring unusual circumstances, take a great film maker to make a great film, it really doesn’t follow that any and every film of a great film maker must be great, or even good.

However, that doesn’t mean that, also, that even a great film maker’s films can’t fall somewhere in-between and be good films, if not GREAT ones. In the last analysis, even a less well known or thoughtful of film of a masterful, professional and skilled film maker can be a better viewing experience than many films coming from lesser lights. While the films on the list below may not be the first to come to mind when their makers are discussed, all are worthy and good ways to spend a few hours at the very least.

1. Spies (1928) – Fritz Lang

Film and theater historian Ethan Mordden once wrote that big ones can kill. A big project, hit or flop, does cast a long shadow and whatever follows may not always have the metaphorical sunlight to grown and develop properly. One might make a good case for noted German director Fritz Lang’s career mostly suffering from a prolonged post-big one shadow.

Most of those who know anything at all about film know of the mammoth 1927 science fiction classic Metropolis, one of the few silent films still widely famous today. This film was not just a pioneering effort but a film made on a lavish scale very rarely seen before or since. Actually, way too lavish, since, as it turned out, it was too expensive for it literally to be possible for the film to make back its production costs.

Thanks to this, the great German studio UFA, of which Lang had been one of the great talents, put the director on the persona no grata list and he never worked there again. This left him to work at smaller studio on somewhat scaled down films. Many of these films harkened back to earlier Lang successes.

One of Lang’s first hits was the hero and (mostly) villain melodrama Dr. Mabuse in 1922. This elaborate production anticipated the many super-hero-villain films to come, such as the James Bond films. Being down on their luck a bit, Lang and his screenwriter and then wife, Thea Von Harbou, concocted a very similar story and even got their Dr.  Mabuse, actor Rudolph Klein-Rogge, to play the new film’s master fiend, a supposedly respectable banker intent on ruling Europe, if not the world. (Klein-Rogge had been married to Von Harbou until she left him for Lang, yet they all continued to work together for years, which must have made the sets of their pictures quite interesting.)

The plot of the film involves a secret treaty which the villain wishes to steal in order to manipulate world events. Thankfully, a spy organization working on the side of the angels is on to his organization (even if they don’t at first know who is behind the plot and certainly don’t know of his many disguises). They have put their best man, Agent 326 (Willy Fritsch) on the case. This is good since the banker has put his best female agent, Sonya (Gerda Maurus), on the job.

Plotwise, as with most of Von Harbou’s scripts, this is all simply preposterous. However, her pulpy imagination, combined with the work of a variety of excellent artists and artisans on the crew, stimulated Lang’s creative juices to a large degree. If the story is silly (and it is) then the execution and imagery more than compensate. (Though, except for Lupu Pick, playing a tragic Japanese diplomat, the acting, as usual with Lang, isn’t notable.)

This was, in its own way , a quite influential film. Anyone knowing Alfred Hitchcock’s British work can see one thing after another which he recycled from this film (though he claimed to have been barely conscious of Lang’s work) and can also be found in such later films as Ridley Scott’s neo-sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982). Will Spies ever replace Metropolis with viewers and historians? Not a chance, but it is a memorable film in its own right.

2. City Girl (1930) – F.W. Murnau

Another German film artist, F.W. Murnau came to Hollywood at what turned out to be the tail end of the silent era, something he, as a non-English speaker, couldn’t traverse. In fact, all of his films after leaving Germany in 1927, came out so late in the silent day that they all had soundtracks consisting of the film’s scores and sound effects.

His Hollywood masterpiece was 1928’s Sunrise (well, just plain masterpiece period, really) and it was a big one: imposing to critics and discerning viewers, too few of which paid to see it, making it a big box office flop. As with Lang, Murnau was in an uncomfortable position with the people in the front offices.

Murnau still had two pictures to go on his three picture contact with Fox and, to their credit, the studio, which could have found a legal way out of the contract, still valued the prestige of having Murnau working at their studio and honored the deal for the remaining pictures.

The next one up after Sunrise was the now long lost 4 Devils, a circus based drama starring his Sunrise leading lady Janet Gaynor. The present day world may well never know the true value of this picture but things apparently went smoothly enough to proceed with picture number three, the focus of this piece, City Girl.

Murnau was fascinated with rural, basic life in the US and how it compared, or was quite similar, to the lives of those who lived in other parts of the world. The picture he conceived in his head was to have been called Our Daily Bread (and had no connection to King Vidor’s famous independent 1934 film bearing that title).

The thrust of his plot was to have been on the time honored traditions which governed the lives of those tilling the land and the interaction of these people to the wife of a native son, a woman born and raised in the city. The idea was to show both the wonder and terror of nature from the young woman’s point of view and, also, how she would bring some small but lovely new ideas to the farm folk she encounters.

Well, to say that the production of this one was bumpy is a great understatement. Just as with Sunrise, Murnau caused the budget to go sky high by insisting that the main set (a working farm), be built to realistic scale and be fully functional and that it be built in an authentic location far from the studio (the wilds of Oregon in this case). This took some doing but done it was.

However, the studio couldn’t accommodate his next request: the services of Miss Gaynor for yet another film as her popularity had skyrocketed and she was greatly in demand. Instead he was given Mary Duncan, a non-star getting plums due to a personal relationship with someone in the front office and, as leading man, Miss Gaynor’s frequent co-star Charles Ferrell, a very handsome young actor whose talent was largely limited to his looks.

Thankfully there was a good supporting cast chose including Ernest Torrance, Edith Yorke and child actress Dawn Parrish, who would find a measure of stardom as an adult actress under the name Anne Shirley. It was also determined that Murnau would shoot a completely silent version but, also, that a part-sound version would be made with others shooting the sound footage, since Murnau had no interest in sound.

This might have still worked well enough except that a violent upheaval involving ownership of the studio took place during production and, when the smoke cleared, the new management was not favorable to Murnau. He left the studio and, largely, the country and went to the south seas to film one of the very last silent films (and a great one it was), 1931’s Tabu.

As for the film now labeled City Girl, the part-talkie version was the one widely released to tepid reviews and business. Thankfully, the silent version, which is more Murnau’s film than not, is the one which survives and is in circulation today.

Though the later reels do feel a bit ordinary and compromised, the first half of the film is right up there with Murnau’s best work, featuring ingenious cross-editing, telling symbolism, and lovely imagery. Is this, as a whole, up there with Sunrise or 1924’s The Last Laugh? No, not really, but that doesn’t mean that it should be forgotten or overlooked.

3. La Dames du Bois du Boulogne (1945) – Robert Bresson

Virtually anyone who is interested in the art of cinema at least has a nodding acquaintance with the work of France’s Robert Bresson. His stark, unelaborated, deliberately minimalistic moral explorations into the lives of characters facing moral and/or philosophical issues are quite famous among critics, historians and anyone who might lay claim to being a film student or a discerning film viewer.

His work is well known for his use of non-professional actors who were forbidden to inject any emotion at all into their lines and for his simple (but elegant) camera set-ups. However, his work was not always made in this vein. When he began his film career, in time when classically formal French film making was in full flower, he tried to play the game in the manner of those making film around him and, though he was good at it, he found that he just couldn’t continue on in that manner.

Bresson had made his debut during the occupation period with the religious drama Les Anges du Peche in 1943 but didn’t really reach public notice until the release of his second film La Dames du Bois du Boulogne. This film was taken from a novel well known in France, a dark comedy-drama of grand scale game-playing and manipulation among the privileged classes of France, akin to the classic French novel Les Liasions Dangerereuses.

The dialog for this film was co-supplied by no less than France’s greatest artistic jack-of-all-trades Jean Cocteau, who was taking this young artist under his wing must has he would another French great, Jean-Pierre Melville, a few years later. The rub in this is that in both cases, though he seems to have meant well, Cocteau ended up causing both young men to make a film such as he would have made (which were great in a florid, baroque sort of way) instead of the kind of films either would have made left to their own devices.

The story here concerns an angry, hurt society woman (Cocteau fave Maria Casares) who devises a cruel plot in which her ex-lover (Paul Bernard) will be tricked into marriage with a prostitute. The young woman (Élina Labourdette) is actually a morally sound person who has fallen on hard times and is doing whatever she must to support not just herself but her financially strapped mother. The hateful plan goes on without a hitch but brings unexpected consequences.

This plot sounds good in a fancy dress melodrama sort of way and, honestly, the film plays well as that. However, anyone looking at this to find seeds of Bresson’s later groundbreaking sort of work will be appalled. OK, this film isn’t that but it is well made for what it is and what it is was what it was meant to be. The later day response to this film is one which requires a sort of realignment of thinking.

It doesn’t help that Bresson immediately thereafter changed to the style he employed for the rest of his working life and scorned his first two films for being more “commercial” than he liked. However, one should keep in mind that, in the end, it is show business and not show art. The cinematic world is richer for a visionary like Bresson and his fine work but there’s a place in it for films such as this as well.

4. Othello (1951) – Orson Welles

Orson Welles often made the mordant joke that he started at the top and worked his way down. Like all good jokes, it contains a kernel or two of truth. He came to Hollywood in a blaze of publicity with a contract such as no one had ever had before (and very few since) to make 1941’s immortal Citizen Kane at quality R.K.O studios. After 1947’s MacBeth, made at the M.G.M. of poverty row, Republic, he was metaphorically ridden out of town on a rail (the Columbia made The Lady From Shanghai, released the next year, had been shot earlier but had been kicking around editing rooms and vaults for awhile).

Hollywood was closed to him and he didn’t want to go back to his old stomping grounds, New York City, and the theater and radio which had spawned him. So, he took off for Europe, where he expected to be better understood as an artist and better able to find backers for films which he could make his way, without interference.  Well, he did find a good number of individuals who celebrated his artistry but as for the second part….

Though he did find some backers along the way, usually of the morally dubious and shady kind whose money had a habit of drying up at the worst times, he generally had to rely on his somewhat healthy status as an actor to supply funding for his films. This never more true than in the case of his first independent European production, Othello.

Welles had been involved with the works of William Shakespeare literally since childhood (when he wrote a book on the Bard, explaining his work to other, less gifted, children!) and had done innovative productions of the great playwright’s work for several years. He also recognized that Shakespeare’s works were the finest material available in the public domain.

Welles, too, had a good eye for locations and planned to dispense with sets and shoot his films on authentic locations. So far so good, but things such as actor’s salaries, financial compensation for those working behind the camera, fees for shooting on locations, and such incidentals as costumes did cost something. He found this out the hard way as the roughly three week shooting schedule of the film, stretched out over several countries, three changes of cast and numerous cinematic artisans, and three years. In the end, though, what might well have logically been considered a mess in the making turned out to be pretty magical.

Admittedly, this hour and half version of the tragedy of the jealous, manipulated Moor of Venice pares away much of the original play (see 1965’s Othello with Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith, a finely acted but cinematically dead film, to see the whole work).

However, it might well be argued that this film, stunningly shot in black and white on exceptionally well chosen locations (picked from all over Europe and northern Africa), conveys the story in a vibrantly vital and cinematic fashion which a mere rendering of words (admittedly, among the most glorious words in the English language) could match.

The tone is set with the magnificent opening, departing at once from the Bard, opening without dialog at the story’s end with the funeral procession for the dead and a glimpse of the punishment awaiting the culprit (hoisted in a cage into the air with POV shots showing that he is being made to observe the effects of what he has caused).

In an age which valued by-the-book film making from major studios and production companies, this true indie, shot for pennies, but with ingenuity making up for one disadvantage after another, was doomed in its own time (though it did win top honors at Cannes). Today it looks exciting with it troubled history just an interesting sideline (even more so in the recently rediscovered and preferred European cut).

5. Le Plaisir (1952) – Max Ophuls

Austrian born French film maker Max Ophuls, famed for his endless tracking shots, stunningly beautiful mise-en-scene, and tenderly sad and knowing view of the world, had great talent and awful luck. He was a hit early in his career in 1930s Europe but had to flee to the U.S. as the Nazi shadow fell over that continent.

He landed in Hollywood where he unwittingly waltzed into the professional arms of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, causing him to waste a few valuable years, only getting back to work as the war period ended and making four films which were indifferently received (three of which, one in particular, look like masterpieces today). He then went back to Europe and, in the abbreviated time he had left to live, made four films, three hits and all of them, particularly the last, a notorious flop in its own time, considered among his very best work in retrospect.

The flop cum seminal film was his finale, the now renowned Lola Montes (1955). What might be actually his ultimate masterpiece was the exquisite 1953 film The Earrings of Madame de… 1950’s funny, sharply knowing, yet very humane La Ronde was the most popular of all in its own day. That leaves number four, now the least known of the pack, but not one deserving of that ignominy.

Le Plaisir (a.k.a. The House of Pleasure) is an example of something which was long popular in Europe but which has never made in inroad with U.S. audiences: it is an omnibus film. Unlike very many of its ilk, it does not have short segments created by a variety of film making teams but, rather, all are the work of the same film maker and his crew with only the actors of each segment changing from story to story. Stories one and three (especially) are highly dramatic with story two being a rare comedy work from Ophuls.

Story one involves what appears to be a dandyish young man wearing a mask dancing wildly in fin de siecle  ballrooms until his collapse reveals a sad secret concerning his supposedly frivolous behavior. Story two has a brothel closing down on a crucial Saturday night when the madame journeys with her employees to a far away town for her niece’s first communion, only to cause a furor among her clientele. Story three concerns the love affair between a painter and his model, casual for him, profound for her. His ignoring her desperation causes a calamity which precipitates a great change in the situation.

These stories, much like the linked, ever changing episodes of La Ronde, are really short vignettes but Ophuls and his collaborators invest these episodes with warmth, wisdom, and humanity which renders them memorable.

Many of the best French actors were all too happy with work with Ophuls when he returned to Europe and the excellent cast here includes Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux, Claude Dauphin, Simone Simon, Pierre Brasseur, Daniel Gelin and many others. Though the film may look like a basket of trifles, they are trifles finely made (with all of Ophuls’ trademark camera movements) and a joy from start to finish.

It’s a bit hard to believe that. in a world with so many bad films, a good film can be overlooked or forgotten, especially if it was created by first rate artists, but it does happen.

Sometimes film makers go out of fashion and even their best works can be swept aside. Sometimes a film maker is perceived as making a certain type of film and anything that’s an outlier to the auteurist theory crowd can be put to the side for the sake of continuity. Quite often, a film maker is loved by the select few and, no matter how good a film is made, it won’t get known widely.

Sometimes autumnal works of even great film makers, perhaps lacking the spark or energy of earlier works but gaining in depth of maturity, are pushed aside for those of newer and more immediate artists. Conversely, good early works by those yet to achieve greater fame are forgotten.

Something such as this happened to every one of the films listed below. Hopefully, the reader will be moved to find or revisit some of these works.

1. Gone to Earth (a.k.a The Wild Heart 1950/52)

To many lovers of classic film, the colorful, always unique pictures made by the British film making team “The Archers” (director/writer Michael Powell and writer/producer Emeric Pressburger) are simply indispensable. However, at least one of their individualist films has managed to fall through the cracks.

This film was made not long after their magnum opus, 1948’s The Red Shoes, and was taken from a novel greatly admired in the U.K., with all of the team’s usual top notch collaborators. Yet, it was barely seen outside of the U.K., and, even then, in a horribly butchered version disdained by almost everyone. How did this happen? Well…

By the late 1940’s, the famed Hollywood producer David O. Selznick’s fortunes had toppled precipitously from his back to back best picture Oscar wins Gone With The Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940). In the ensuing decade he had discovered a young lady who became his big female star both professionally and personally.

The lady was Jennifer Jones and her mentor had done a great job of guiding her from unknown to Oscar winning stardom (1943’s The Song of Bernadette) but after the dubious but financially successful Duel in the Sun (1946), it looked like neither could do anything right, with even well made films such as 1948’s Portrait of Jennie drowning in red ink.

Selznick then had the not illogical idea of taking his-by-then wife to Europe and having some of that continent’s best film makers work with her, giving her an international cache. Sad to say, Selznick, an infamous meddler and second-guesser in his professional life, couldn’t or wouldn’t change his ways while in Europe.

Through an arrangement with The Archer’s then-current producer, J. Arthur Rank, he made a deal for the team to create a film version of author Mary Webb’s well-known and respected novel Gone to Earth, a mystical tale of a gypsish young women with the improbable name of Hazel Woodrus who finds no end of trouble in late 19th century England due to both her uncanny ways with nature (her best friend is her tamed pet fox) and the conflict which results when magical signs direct her to choose a very wan young minister over a lusty, attractive, but none-too-ethical local squire, who isn’t the type to give up. 

The novel, like any good one, has its own style and one, in this case, hard to capture. Powell never thought that they quite did but modern viewers tend to disagree due to the usual sumptuous visuals and well modulated dramatic scenes and good acting which often graces Archer’s films (and, needless to say, Miss Jones was Hazel, stage actor Cyril Cusak as the minister, the wonderfully handsome and talented Archer’s favorite David Farrar, a man who deliberately side-stepped stardom, as the squire, with future Oscar winner Hugh Griffith as Hazel’s father).

The full version ran just under two hours and was and is very much like both an Archer’s film and a Selznick film. However, Selznick just hated it. He took his rights as the U.S owner (Rank released the original cut in the U.K.) and tinkered with it for two years at a not inconsiderable cost (which he, by then, could ill afford), chopping out nearly AN HOUR of footage and having the distinguished Rouben Mamoulian direct almost an half hour of retakes without credit.

The abominable results were released as The Wild Heart to very little fanfare (Selznick International hardly existed by then and was in no shape to widely release anything). Sadly, until recent years, viewers outside of the U.K. only had this mess by which to judge the film. Happily, a new day has dawned and this unusual and intriguing film can, and should be, seen in its intended version.

2. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

MGM studios must have been in either a self-reflective mood or Hollywood happy in 1951 since the studio gave the green light to not one but two major projects dealing with behind-the-scenes-stories of Hollywood film making. One of them was Singin’ in the Rain, is now often regarded as the best cinematic musical of all time. The other was directed by Vincente Minnelli, quite often regarded as the finest of MGM’s musical directors (thus, one of the best period).

However, this film, as, ironically, the majority of Minnelli’s films, wasn’t a musical. It’s often forgotten that the director was also a fine maker of intense dramas (also with an artistic flair) and that the subsequent film, The Bad and the Beautiful (changed from the original title Tribute to a Bad Man, per request of its female lead) is one of his best ever.

Whenever films about films are made there’s always a roman a clef quality or, at least, speculation about them (it seems too tempting for industry insiders not to insert stories which happened to them or which they knew about). Even Singin’ used, in a mild way, some stories of early sound Hollywood. However, TBAB is perhaps the mother lode for such films. Every character and plotline has its roots in some Tinsel Town person or event.

The story involves one Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas at his very best), a second generation film producer who has run aground when his enviable string of hits has run dry. Through an old “frenemy”  film exec (Walter Pidgeon), who has set up a phone meeting in Hollywood while the now disgraced producer is in exile in France, the man frantically pitches a new product to three old acquaintances.

One is a leading director (Barry Sullivan), who started out with the producer and helped him achieve his early successes, only to be shafted when their big break arrived. The next is a big (and “beautiful”) female film star (Lana Turner), the daughter of a once great theater/stage actor and greater roué who had drunk himself to death and left her to follow the same path…until the producer picked her up out of the gutter and made her a star….only to betray her with another woman.

The third is a distinguished writer (Dick Powell), whom the producer lured to Hollywood and then, in order to get the writer to concentrate, palmed his obnoxious wife (Oscar winning Gloria Grahame) onto a wild Latin matinee idol (Gilbert Roland)…only to have her die in a plane crash with him (the author did, however, end up writing a Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the whole thing).

All of this sounds so trashy and, well, by some measures it is. In Charles Schnee’s Oscar winning scriptz are bits and pieces of stories about David O. Selznick (again), F. Scott Fitzgerald, producer Val Lewton, John and Diana Barrymore (with a big change of ending), and many others. However, the script has a genuine sense of humor (for example, a big preview scene ends with a young lady gleefully writing “it stinks!” on her card, only to reveal in the next scene that she wrote the only negative comment).

Also, Minnelli had a way with actors (many were surprised at Turner’s performance, for instance) and a way with design (he started as a designer in the theater). Even though the film is monochrome (photographed by the great Robert Surtees), it has a most sumptuous look and feel.

Beyond all that, the film’s collaborators give a real sense, past all the melodramatic stories torn from Tinseltown history, of the excitement and chaos of creativity and collaboration. In light of that the film’s ending makes sense in a place where the thrill of achievement can outdo all but the worst of emotional conflicts.

3. Pickup on South Street (1953)

Film maker Samuel Fuller was a character if ever there was one. Short, pugnacious, feisty, and never lacking in opinion and bravado (though warmly so), Fuller had fought in World War II and served an apprenticeship as a newspaper reporter, allowing him to segue into screenwriting and then into directing.  He concentrated on war films and thrillers, sometimes with socio-political undertones.

These were not films which the highbrow critics and viewers and certainly not The Academy took too seriously or to their hearts. However, one performer in one of his films did break the Oscar (nomination) barrier in what now looks like one of his best films.

One big political idea Fuller expressed was that he hated communist (it was the Red Scare era, after all). During one of his rare (and short) times at a major studio (Twentieth Century Fox in this case) he came up with a novel idea. The story sees a petty pickpocket, a career criminal, stealing the handbag of a prostitute  on a N.Y.C. subway car.

The FBI agents following her become frantic to track the man down since the woman was the unwitting courier of some vital microfilm an old “business partner” had asked her to deliver in the now-stolen bag.

The hunt involves a colorful little old lady who obstensibly sells ties on the street but, more profitably, sells info to the cops in order to pay for her eventual funeral. The thief ends up being hunted by both sides wanting the film back and gets involved with the none-too-bright young woman, who ends up in a desperate situation of her own, as does the lady stoolie. A lot of (old movie style) violence commences.

This is the stuff of B movies, surely. However, Fuller was a film maker without pretense and he could find the art in the artless with his muscular, take no prisoners style married to an oddly literary quality. This film is a supreme example of his work, due in no small part to the solid, if not spectacular, production values a big studio back in the studio era can afford (even allowing for the film’s ending, which is only obstensibly happy but quite subversive when contemplated).

A large part of this is the cast. Fuller wasn’t always able to cast top actors but he was surprisingly good with the ones he got. In the case of this film, he had Richard Widmark, one of the few stars who always thought like a character actor, as a perfect lead, with Fox’s by-far most substantial starlet Jean Peters giving her best performance, and the likes of Richard Kiley, Mervyn Vye and Milburn Stone in support.

However, the whole show is stolen by the incredible Thelma Ritter, who earned the only major Academy Award nomination ever given to a Fuller film (and she deserved this and a number of the other five Oscars she lost in her career). If there is a sensitive moment in Fuller’s oeuvre, it would be in the death scene of her lowly, yet naturally dignified, character. Perhaps the spark of human warmth she adds is why this may well be Fuller’s masterpiece.

4. French Can-Can (1955)

After a decade and a half away due to World War II, France’s Jean Renior finally returned to film making in his native land with this lovely period film.  Once again employing his frequent star, the French acting icon Jean Gabin, Renoir decided to tell a very French story in a comfortable and familiar style.

The plot revolves around a real person, Henri Danglard (Gabin), the owner of a none-too-successful night spot in late 19th century Paris. Taking a thoughtful walk through the colorful, earthy Montmarte section of Paris, he spots a lovely young washerwomen (Francoise Arnoul) dancing “The Can-Can”, a popular dance of long ago. He gets the idea of using the woman to bring the dance back into fashion in a lavish new establishment he plans to open (the Moulin Rouge, of course).

While the story is cozy, the style is impeccable. Many of Renoir’s old collaborators, such as Gabin, return to his fold as though no time had passed. A worthy new addition, and one which really makes the film more than any other, is the cinematographer, Michel Kelber. He, along with set designer Max Douy and costume designer Rosine Delamare, help to give the film the lovely period look, much like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, which imbues the film with so of its much nostalgic power, especially thanks the warm and heavily saturated colors.

Sadly, the critics who would shortly become the creators/directors of the New Wave looked on films such as this (and their makers) as relics of a formal period of cinema which was anathema to them. Later on Renoir was seen as one of the great film making masters, a man actually ahead of his time, and many of his films were placed in the pantheon. This one belongs with them.

5. The Pawnbroker (1965)

Starting as a juvenile actor on the Yiddish stage at a very young age, director Sidney Lumet, who came from a theatrical family, was a New Yorker through and through and stuck to his guns making his films there always.

The Pawnbroker was taken from an acclaimed novel by Edward Lewis Wallant and concerns the title character, Sol Nazerman, who owns a pawn broking shop in Harlem (which actually launders money for the mafia) and who has survived losing his family and academic career in the Holocaust, during which he and they were interred in a concentration camp.

Living with his sister, who choses to ignore the past, and her family outside of New York City, he goes through his days as a virtual zombie, afraid to feel anything but haunted by his memories of  the horrors of the camps. Sadly, situations swirling around him will demand a response and his deep removal from the present will lead to catastrophic results.

Incredibly, no US film had ever before this one been made which even touched on the Holocaust. In fact, many in the US at the time had only a vague knowledge of this earthshaking event (which was, of course, folded into the even bigger World War II).

Hollywood would wait several more years to ever address the matter. In light of all of that, the fact of this film’s existence is remarkable enough, much less the fact that it is so uncompromising in its refusal to put a happy face on any of its issues (and few who have seen it can forget its disturbing and emotionally overwhelming finale).

Lumet is to thank for this and for filming in real N.Y.C. locales, which add much gritty verisimilitude to the proceedings. One major factor, though is the cast. This cast includes such excellent and often underutilized players of the day as Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters and Jaime Sanchez (and also, as it happens, the debut of no less than Morgan Freeman!).

However, the main attraction is the actor playing the title character, Rod Steiger. This is truly the actor’s finest hour. This picture is a real downer by its very definition and not an item that would ever be popular with the feel-good crowd. That its makers recognized that fact and went for broke, making the film with the artistic integrity for which its subject is demanding, is a great credit to all concerned.

Many years ago in the introduction to her book of capsule reviews, 5001 Nights at the Movies, the noted film critic Pauline Kael rendered one of her (numerous) opinionated opinions by stating that anyone seeing a film on television, whether it be a live broadcast or via video, was committing a cultural crime with themselves being the victim.

OK, in a perfect world she would be quite right. Films are, or were, certainly, made to be seen on big screens with a lot of people reacting at once for a communal, epic experience.

If one settles for new, mostly commercial films, it’s still easy to have that (though the movie theaters of the present day aren’t designed on an epic scale), but, if one is interested in vintage, international, or documentary films, the pickings may be slim indeed, and then only if one lives in the right place (large cities, especially ones with an academic bent, are best). More and more (and this was true even in Kael’s day, though an insular and culturally elite New Yorker might not have known it) video is what keeps a lot of cinema history alive.

Actually, video/streaming has done a bit more than just kept films and their history alive. There have been more restorations and/or refurbishments of notable films in the decades since home video/streaming has been in existence than ever before. Why, one might ask? Well there is a cultural, artistic interest (though, admittedly, a niche one, commercially speaking), and that feeds the real reason, which is financial.

With the advent of video and streaming platforms, older films now have newer ways to again make money. One thing which became more and more apparent when the video revolution began to take wing, especially when higher quality visual and audio formats from laser disc through blu-ray and HD broadcasts came into being, is  that older films simply couldn’t be presented in the worn-out, battered prints which were too often the norm when they were shown on television or repertory theaters, the chief venues for such films before the advent of video.

Added into this mix was a new interest in film history, often involving the stories of talented, often ahead of their time, film makers who saw many, if not most, of their films butchered and/or thrown away by short sighted studio hierarchy and/or also ignored by a public which didn’t “get them” at the time.

Well, everybody loves a comeback story and vintage film fans/students love to see old wrongs righted and too ahead of the curve films be recognized (which also helps this group to feel that they have been smart enough to embrace these fine works and make them their own, fostering a sense of involvement). Whatever the attitude or circumstances it took, the bottom line is that this is all to the good in helping to preserve and champion good, too often overlooked, work.

Admittedly, not all older films and film makers are equal. Some people’s work and some films are just maintained for nostalgia/cultural reference reasons. Others, however, maintain a vibrancy and artistic pulse which speaks to newer generations.

This article seeks to celebrate these artists and their films, which have happily been given a second chance through the channels of new mediums. Sad to say, all of this comes mostly too late to help, well, mostly deceased film makers (who mostly didn’t even live to see the restorations/refurbishments of their works). However, posterity gets to see and judge and, hopefully, enjoy, these works in their best conditions ever. There is some justice in the world.

1. Orson Welles

One is tempted to reference Welles frequent and much quoted comment (and bitter joke) about starting at the top and working the way down. This can’t be since there many more good film makers to come but there is a great case for Welles being not only one of the finest of the lot but also for being one who may well have benefitted the most from the video era.

Anyone who knows the quite colorful and rather checkered history of Welles career knows that most of his films were released in versions not to their creator’s liking. Sadly, many of them were also barely released to the point where they could build an audience in their own times. Too many think of Welles as the man who made 1941’s monumental Citizen Kane and then….? Thankfully, the video era is correcting that.

While the possibility of finding the legendary lost footage of 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons looks to be nil, the distinguished Criterion Collection created a stunning, extras-laden version during the laser era and, at the time of this article’s writing, have announced that the film will be given similar DVD/blu-ray treatment.

Even better, MCA/Universal allowed a mighty group of heavy hitters, notably the great sound designer Walter Murch, critic/historian Jonathan Rosenbaum, and producer Rick Smidlin, to be allowed to re-edit and rejigger 1958’s Touch of Evil to something like Welles original conception (and get it to a way bigger audience than Universal gave it a chance to reach). The results were stupendous.

This prompted Criterion, which had already released a similarly revamped version of 1951’s Othello (and has since discovered Welles preferred European version of that film), to create similarly ambitious projects for 1956’s problematic Mr. Arkadin (now the best it can be) and 1966’s Chimes at Midnight, a masterpiece blighted by budgetary difficulties. Now, in Criterion’s new version, those technical problems have been solved and the film looks and, more importantly, sounds as Welles wished.

However, the capper comes by way of the streaming giant Netflix, which has managed to break the nearly five decade old obstacles blocking the completion and release of Welles’ final work, The Other Side of the Wind, which is opening to incredible reviews at the time of this writing. They also commissioned a companion documentary whose title is taken from another Welles saying/prophecy: They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Once more, right on the money.

2. Hershell Gordon Lewis

From the sublime straight to the ridiculous. Unless the powers that be at Criterion lose their minds and/or have another Valley of the Dolls moment where something completely lacking in artistry becomes a sort of art form of its own, the works of Hershell Gordon Lewis will not  be in the fold (though, oddly enough, the works of his biggest fan, trash-maestro John Waters, are more than welcome).

Some reading this, especially those who dote on the kind of quality cinema represented by most of the other film makers on this list, may not be familiar with Lewis and his work (which provides a clue as to why video has enriched his reputation).

Despite being a highly educated man (one with several lofty degrees and who taught on the university level!), Lewis is infamous for making the lowest and basest of grind-house films created during the pre-slasher film, pre-ratings code era.

In a time which largely still pitched films to the family trade, such mini-epics of sexuality and, especially, violence as Blood Feast (1963), Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), and Color Me Blood Red (1965), along with such sexploitation fare as Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963) and How to Make a Doll (1967), along with such outliers as The Magic Land of Mother Goose (!), also in 1967, weren’t going to be admitted to be noticed (in public, anyway) by “nice” people.

Though he made a brief comeback, at an advanced age in 2009, mostly thanks to the new fans home video had brought him, he only actually spent one decade (from the early 1960s to the early 1970s) making films. However, he accumulated nearly 40 films to his credit during that time, and did virtually everything on those films, except act (and that included writing the theme song and singing it on the soundtrack of Two Thousand Maniacs, an extremely twisted rip-off of the classic stage musical Brigadoon).

By all account, he was also a dynamic whiz at promotion and had to be, for his films weren’t going to be shown in the same theaters displaying Lawrence of Arabia, Mary Poppins or Oliver! His was what might be termed “subterranean cinema”, way out of the mainstream.

Video has not brought notable restorations or distinguished critical editions to Lewis but it has done things that it does so well: it has preserved his work (which might by now literally have disappeared into the ether for it was once quite hard to see any of his neglected films) and presented it to a new, much wider, audience. Does such fare deserve it? Well, why not in an age of so many choices?

3. Josef Von Sternberg

Von Sternberg had an odd career, so it’s not surprising that his is a unique entry on this list. He had come into his own in the late silent era with such memorable films as Underworld (1927), The Last Command and the superlative The Docks of New York (both 1928).

To many, though, he has been best remembered for his seven film cycle with his great discovery, the now legendary actress/singer Marlene Dietrich. They made films over a most turbulent half decade and ended their time with two big box office bombs (1934’s The Scarlet Empress and 1935’s The Devil is a Woman, which had major trouble from Spain’s then fascist government). Those failures damaged her career and, even more sadly, virtually ended his.

After a very limited contract with then-lowly Columbia Pictures, he only made films very sporadically (and his volatile temperament certainly didn’t help). Sadly, though there were a number of critical appreciations over the years (and he did live to see some critical restoration of his reputation before his death in 1969) he was often treated like “damaged goods”. Also, von Sternberg’s work had a few peculiar handicaps which had prevented his films from being better known. One was availability.

His best works were done for Paramount Pictures, which sold the vast majority of its pre-1948 talkie library to MCA/Universal in 1958, and which also expressed very little interest in its silent output for years (and, in fact, had many of its silent films destroyed for storage purposes). It was if the fates had conspired to put his films in the hands of the two companies existing in Hollywood most indifferent to their vintage catalogs.

In fairness to MCA, they did try to release the Dietrich films on VHS, laser, and in sort of cut-down DVD versions (the kind of packages which cram many films into a few discs with no extras). This leads to the second and more serious problem in seeing Sternberg’s  work. He has always been cited as one of the masters of light and shadow in black and white film (and was a cinematographer in his own right).

In fact, he often claimed that his films only had stories in order to have a peg on which to display his chiaroscuro tableaux (and to enable him to express his sophisticated, ironic, and very nihilistic attitude). Unless Von Sternberg’s works are seen under the most optimal conditions, they don’t really work. VHS was not the medium for them and they were all big commercial disappointments in that medium. The films never made a dent, really, in the more suitable laser market but started to catch on  in the more advanced Blu-ray era.

In 2018, Criterion released a much acclaimed multi-disc set of the Dietrich Hollywood films, proclaimed as the first presentation to do them justice. This left out the Berlin-shot film which started their collaboration, 1930’s The Blue Angel, long thought to be their true masterpiece, but, thankfully, that art-house classic has never suffered from a shortage of good video additions. However, the element of von Sternberg works which has really benefitted from the presence on home video of his surviving silent works are his silent films.

For too many years his silent work was dismissed as a warm up to his Dietrich years but the video presentations of, especially, The Last Command and The Docks of New York (which was swept aside during the rush to sound), show that the silent era might well have been his greatest period (and both are now starting to be considered to be among the very best of that time).

Though some also want to claim greatness for such peculiar later efforts as 1941’s The Shanghai Gesture and his swan song, 1953’s The Saga of Anathan (the big-budget Jet Pilot bears a 1957 date but was actually kept in the editing room for seven years by producer Howard Hughes!) , the silent and Dietrich films are the treasures and the beautiful video versions of these long neglected films may have revealed the true artist.

4. John Cassavetes

Several of the elements present in the stories of the artists already discussed are certainly present in the story of John Cassavetes as a film maker. Cassavetes was first known to the film industry as an actor of the method school and showed a lot of promise, if not as a leading man/star, then as a suave villain (as witnessed by his most famous acting roles, his Oscar nominated turn as a sex criminal turned commando in 1966’s The Dirty Dozen and the duplicitous husband who commits the ultimate betrayal in 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby).

However, almost from the time that he started as an actor in films, he was trying to become a total film maker, writing, directing, producing..and only acting when necessary. He also wanted to by-pass all the slick tropes of Hollywood film making and create a gritty and realistic, almost documentary, style (very often improvised in long rehearsal sessions, not on camera, as many still believe). The studios weren’t having any of it (and his few attempts to try to be mainstream didn’t please him on anyone else).

He always had to finance his own productions starting with 1961’s Shadows and his big breakthrough, 1968’s Faces, largely shot in his own home. Theaters still showing mostly the glossy products of the Hollywood system weren’t about to touch these films and they were rough for even the art house circuit. He did have something of a commercial breakthrough with 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, but even that wasn’t seen by vast multitudes.

Such later films as Opening Night (1977) and the truly unfortunate The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, both edits) were virtually abandoned upon release. Though Cassavetes reputation remained high among cineaste, his films were actually little seen after whatever original releases they may individually have had. This problem was compounded by his death in 1989 at the too young age of 60.

Thankfully, his legacy was put in the hands of his family, principally his wife, star actress and incredible muse, Gena Rowlands. She did her homework and, as she said to an interviewer, partnered with Criterion, a company she described as having “a reputation”‘.

Though his later, thankfully uncompromised, attempts to work with a major studio (1970’s much maligned Husbands, 1980’s box office success Gloria), save for his last, overlooked, film 1984’s Love Streams weren’t included, all of his magical indie films of his prime period were and all given excellent, instructive extras. Happily, even the non-included films have found homes on video and streaming. Keeping in mind the director’s iconoclastic reputation, who can say that he would be happy to have his films life on via video/TV but better that way, to influence future generations, than not at all.

5. F.W. Murnau

It’s a true shame that the idea of film preservation took hold so many decades after a great many films could have been saved were lost. There may be no greater historical film tragedy than that of F.W. Murnau, perhaps the greatest film maker of Germany’s staggering platinum silent era and, after he came to Hollywood for the brief remainder of his life, one of the greats there as well.

Murnau’s life was cut short at 42 by an auto accident just as sound was coming in (and the last few films he made were released so late in the silent era that they contained musical soundtracks and sound effects).

Of his 21 films, only nine survive. Barring a miracle, no one now living will be seeing his Jekyll/Hyde film Der Januskopf (1920) or his much desired Hollywood production 4 Devils (1928) but, happily, the nine which do survive are major productions and have been presented to modern viewers in fine video versions. 

Thanks to the fine work of British and US companies, such as Kino, landmarks such as the unforgettable The Last Laugh (1924) and Faust (1926), not to mention Murnau’s most famous film, his Dracula, 1922’s Nosferatu (ironically, once ordered destroyed by legal injunction!) are now widely available in the best restored prints in which they have been shown in decades.

Even better, Twentieth Century Fox, not a company which has plumed its vaults back past a certain point, rendered a superb version of the director’s famed but too little seen masterpiece, Sunrise (1927), along with the excellent City Girl (1930), a film swept aside by the coming of sound (and which was compromised by the studio but is still quite worthy). This led to the exhumation of his last great film, the poetic South Seas semi-documentary Tabu (1931). To quote a Spencer Tracy line, there’s not much there but what is there is choice.

In the jewelry world its Tiffany. In the auto world its Rolls Royce. In old Hollywood it was MGM. There is always a gold standard bearer of some kind in virtually every field one might mention. In the world of home video, at least in the countries in which this company markets its line, that standard bearer is The Criterion Collection.

Criterion has had a long and distinguished, if rather circuitous history in the home video field. It was started by the much admired art house company Janus Films in partnership with the educational company The Voyager Press back in 1984. No, they were not releasing DVDs, and certainly not Blu-Rays back at that time.

Also, except for the tiniest handful of releases (three films to which they had reclaimed the rights, to be exact) they never released anything on the once popular, now quite inferior and extinct medium of VHS. Instead they released their product on the then emerging laserdisc format.

Laserdiscs might well be called the working prototype of DVD. Unlike VHS, they had sharp images and sound and could accommodate such things as chapter stops, additional material related to the main subject of the release, and, particularly after digital soundtracks came into being, the addition of alternate sound tracks commenting on the featured subject.

The even happier news was that the company intelligently filled these additional spaces with marvelous, instructive and entertaining material which greatly enhanced the main feature. Also, those main features weren’t put out in just any condition: the very best pre-print  materials were sought for transfer and Criterion’s top technicians made sure that the transfers were flawless.

As the company’s reputation grew, they sought and often got input from the films’ directors and/or cinematographers with many world authorities on film also contributing. The bottom line is that if a film is chosen to be included in The Criterion Collection, then it will surely never have a better presentation and just the matter of it being selected is a great honor in and of itself since Criterion only tends to chose very superior films (and to readers of this, yes, some few selections aren’t that superior but artistic things are always in the eye of the beholder and some films get chosen for reasons past their intrinsic artistic value).

For all the great films which are, or have been, included in The Collection, there are many others which have not. While the films of the Janus Collection do form the core of Criterion (mostly foreign and art house classics), sub-licenseing from other companies have added many great films from other sources to the roster. However, for whatever reasons, legal, proprietary, physical, whatever, some remain out of reach.

Sometimes a company (one might well look at Paramount and the case of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic Chinatown) wants to hold on to a film exclusively. Sadly, though, for many, if a film doesn’t have a Criterion version then whatever video version it does have, even a good one, seems lacking. (Even the classic videos of Warner Home Video got this attitude, though in the past few years Criterion has been re-releasing some of these films in versions which port over the extras virtually in toto and have virtually the same fine transfers!).

Listed below are some memorable films which are not in The Collection. Surely the reader will have their own wish list of Criterion should-bes (and films which once were in The Collection but which no longer are, aren’t included) . However, for now, these are a start:

1. Greed (1924)

Actor-director-writer Erich von Stroheim is a colossus of film history, certainly early film history. With his matchless (truly matchless) dedication to physical and psychological honesty (he NEVER met a kink he didn’t like) and his expert attention to even the most minute detail, there was no one quite like him in his own time and sadly few like him since.

Film was his canvas and, if he had been left to paint it as he wished, he might well be considered the of greatest of them all. Sadly,  very few of the nine films he directed (all but one silent) exist in the form he intended. While some restoration was done to 1922’s Foolish Wives and 1929’s truly ill-fated Queen Kelly, the finest, yet most damaged, of his films was Greed.

Greed was taken, literally page by page, from the noted early 20th Century naturalistic author Frank Norris’ superb novel McTeague. This work tells the grim story of the title character, an unruly, unlicensed dentist plying his trade in late 19th Century San Francisco. His frenemy Marcus palms off his unwanted cousin/fiancee Trina on McTeague, only to have the woman come into a small fortune by winning a lottery just as the pair marry. A ruffled Marcus then turns McTeague into the authorities, ending his dental practice and leaving him unable to find work.

As this is happening, Trina, with her own money for the first time in her life, becomes an obsessive miser, refusing to use any of her money to help her husband or alleviate the situation. Clearly, all involved are on a collision course and it will end tragically (to say the least).

The basic story contained realistic, if not downright sordid, elements not usually tackled in Hollywood films. Added to this was Stroheim’s unusual ideas of casting (he detested “stars” and, indeed, the two times he was forced to work with stars were catastrophic to his career). He chose unknown Gibson Gowland  for McTeague (his only other notable film with Stroheim’s 1919 Blind Husbands), study but not stellar supporting actor Jean Hersholt for Marcus and, most daringly of all, low comic actress Zasu Pitts as Trina.

The three times she worked with Stroheim were the only three dramatic roles she played in her extremely long career and he, and he alone, saw the great tragidenne lurking beneath her comic mask. However the huge element which makes Greed great is the breathtakingly painstaking amount of realistic (and, often, perverse) detail Stroheim injects into the project. If there is a phony moment in this film, a detective would be required to find it.

The killer in all of this, for the studio front office if not the public, is that, in its original form, the film ran nine hours! Stroheim suggested that it be divided into two parts which would play in theaters on successive  weeks, as was being done in Europe around that time with films such as Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse films (1921) and Die Niebelungen films (1924).

However, Hollywood wasn’t that progressive and the film was cut, first by Stroheim himself to four hours (his bare minimum)and, without him to two and quarter. Supposedly, the cut footage was destroyed, though phantom reports still surface saying that it survived.  In 1999 there was a “restoration” using stills (and a copious amount were taken of the cut footage) that was a nice try and gives an approximation of what might have been with this film.

Sadly, the current owners, Warner Home Video, an excellent company in general for catalog releases, has a somewhat blind eye for silents. Though many silents, Greed in its new version included, have had a presence in the streaming world, few have been given a DVD release. Greed was given a VHS and laserdisc release many years ago when the rights belonged to MGM/UA but, as was the custom of the times and formats, those now obscure versions were rather bare-bones (and came before the revised version was created).

Greed is a milestone film and deserves a great video edition (such as other Stroheim works have been given by other companies). While silent films aren’t a major Criterion focus, they aren’t at all an unknown quantity to the company, either. Greed deserves the Criterion treatment.

2. The Thin Man (1934)

Speaking of Warner Home Video…back in the DVD heyday, that company achieved its highest sale figures for a vintage catalog release with a wonderful box set dedicated to those lovely, chic romantic comedies masquerading as murder mysteries, The Thin Man series.

The original film in the series was taken from a then-current best-selling novel by literary mystery maven Dashiell Hammet  (and little did anyone know that it would be his last ever, though he lived on for many, rather mysterious, years thereafter). Though the author did not work directly on that film, he did contribute to the next two (more or less the last writing he ever did).

Every so often in film history (or just history, period) happy accidents take place and The Thin Man was one of them. Though the novel was selling briskly (there actually were no best seller lists at the time so who can say if it was one), mysteries, and comedies for that matter, weren’t taken all that seriously by the cinematic powers-that-were. A moderate budget (by MGM’s lavish standards, at any rate) was set aside for the project.

The directorial chores were given to studio director W.S. Van Dyke, know as “One Take Woody” due to his rat-ta-tat-tat shooting style.  The leading man chosen was William Powell, a star since the silent days but a low burner sort of star mostly.  His leading lady would be Myrna Loy, around also since the silent days, and then know mostly for playing, of all things, Oriental women, mostly vamps (impressive for a WASP from Montana). 

The pair was chosen mostly due to their fine mutual chemistry in the then-recent hit Manhattan Melodrama (1934), a serious crime drama featuring Miss Loy torn romantically between D.A Powell and his childhood pal-turned-gangster Clark Gable (an actor Miss Loy would work with almost as many times as she would with Mr. Powell). None of these ingredients promised  anything more than a decent, soon forgotten programmer, especially seeing how it would be made on a schedule of only eleven days! Well, how wrong was that impression!

Van Dyke’s loose, energetic style, not always right for “prestige” pictures (the boring kind) was just the right thing for this jaunty tale of a high-living, hard drinking society couple (she an heiress, he a former police detective happily admitting to living off her money) solving a murder mystery set in high society circles during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

Powell was about to set off on his finest period as one of the cinema’s great comic actors and Miss Loy never had a play a degrading Oriental role again (and today she looks like one of film’s great comic actresses, something she made look too easy to get much credit for at the time). Their characters, Nick and Nora Charles,have become synonymous with wit, sophistication, elegance and…well, a lot of fun.

It didn’t hurt that they also were “parents” to Asta (played by Skippy), a Cairn terrier who is the best canine to appear in a feature film. (Yes, that includes the ever-maudlin Lassie. By the way, Skippy also has a crucial role in one of Criterion’s best 2018 releases,1937’s The Awful Truth).

At the height of the DVD era, Warners was actually doing Criterion level work with many of their catalog releases.  Sadly, as that era passed, many of those releases went permanently out of print. Now The Thin Man and three of subsequent five sequels are only available on a much cut-down two disc version largely sans extras.

Thankfully, the company now has an agreement with Criterion and some of its previous editions are being reborn on the Criterion label looking very much as they did a few years ago on the Warner label (and 2018’s re-release of 1945’s film noir classic Mildred Pierce is a fine example). To date the films selected have been of a very serious nature. How about it, Criterion?  Something a bit less serious?

3. Johnny Guitar (1954)

The old saying is that a prophet has no honor in his homeland. Well, some films prove that to be true enough but also can show that the prophet can have honor even in his homeland provided a vast amount of time has passed, preferably if said prophet has died in the meantime. There can be no finer example of that than US director Nicholas Ray.

Though he worked in the Hollywood system for about a decade and half (though it seems longer, given the number of films present day critics and fans find notable)and had a big hit (with the younger audiences, anyway) with 1955’s Rebel Without A Cause, he was never truly Hollywood.

To say that the fit was uncomfortable would be a great understatement. Had the indie film movement existed in his own time, Ray would surely have been the king but, as it was, he had to struggle to make his films his own way. That struggle was never greater than evidenced by the making of his great cult oddity Johnny Guitar.

Joan Crawford, a truly incandessent but, by then, fading star was trying to take her career in her own hands in the early 1950s and found an unusual western novel centering on the battle between two exceedingly strong willed women over land that is soon to be valuable with the coming of the railroad. The saloon owning Vienna is a considered a “foreigner” with the locals stirred up againist her by the witchlike Emma.

Crawford, playing Vienna, bought the rights to the novel and sold them  to Republic Pictures, a poverty row studio trying desperately to break into the bigger time (they had just had their all-time biggest hit with John Ford’s The Quiet Man in 1952 but timing wasn’t on their side overall).

The provision was that she came with the deal. She did not, however, get approval over much else and got a rebel director, who would end up in exile, a leading man (Sterling Hayden) who would join him in exile after being blacklisted, a screenwriter (Phillip Yordan), who would help the blacklisted, and a scene-stealing Oscar winning powerhouse of a supporting actress (Mercedes MacCambridge) Crawford would jealously try to have put on her own personal blacklist. It was not a happy group.

Added to this is the fact that Ray seemed to chose this film in which to try out all sorts of odd and new ideas. This was his first color film (and he would prove to be a master of color eventually) and it was done in the harsh, rather second-rate Trucolor system used by Republic. However, he does create an interesting color scheme for the films. Then there are the sets. Apparently, this patch of the old west was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright (Vienna’s saloon/casino is literally built into the side of a mountain).

Then there are all sorts of undercurrents built into the bizarre story. Emma seems to be a stand-in for Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his ilk, wanting to drive out any who don’t fit the pattern of the “norm”. She and Vienna perversely take on the roles usually given to male characters (yes, they end up shooting it out).

The male characters in the film are all oddly passive (and Hayden was the least likely actor In the world to portray that quality).  In fact, if ever a film was the cinematic equivalent of a Rorschach test, this is it. It was all too much for the domestic market (though singer/songwriter Peggy Lee’s fine theme song was a big hit).

Happily it was and remains a favorite of European audiences and disciples of Ray. Jean Luc Goddard had his much beleaguered runaway lovers in the 1965 classic Pierrot le Fou stop to catch the film in a revival house!

Though the film has achieved a healthy cult following in the US over the years, a really great video version has been elusive. Republic went of business not too long after the release of the film.

The rights, along with most of the other Republic films were bought by early television packagers National Telefilm Associates (NTA), who changed their name to Republic Pictures Home Video when the VHS era started. They subsequently sold out to TV producer Aaron Spelling, who quickly sold the library to its current owner, Paramount Pictures (that library also contains some of the finest indie films made in the US from the 1940s to the early 197os).

All of this upheaval has, thankfully left the doors open to interested third parties sublicensing the films (Paramount literally has almost no interest in putting out catalog titles). In the laser era, several titles from this collection made it into the Criterion realm (and one wishes for the return of 1948’s Letter From an Unknown Woman!).

Those didn’t make into the DVD collection up to this point, though evidence on the streaming channel Filmstruck suggests that could be changing. Criterion has shown a penchant for Ray’s work (1951’s In a Lonely Place, 1956’s Bigger Than Life). Maybe Johnny Guitar’s day will come soon.

4. Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Luciano Visconti is one of the greatest of Italian film directors  (and just plain film makers period).  An aristocrat by birth, an artist by temperament, and a socialist by choice (and gay by nature), Visconti, who began his film career as assistant to the great French film maker Jean Renior, started  his career in the informal Neo-realist tradition and ended up embracing a very formal style related to the theater and opera mediums in which he also worked and excelled.

The remarkable thing is that he created memorable films every step of the way. From his debut in 1943, Ossessione, to his finale, 1977’s The Innocent, he was a memorable film maker and Criterion has noted this, placing 1954’s Senso, 1957’s Le Notte Bianchi, and 1963’s stunning The Leopard in The Collection. Though Visconti wasn’t unduly prolific, there are still several of his films which could profitably be placed alongside these pictures. One of the front runners would be Rocco and His Brothers.

Running an epic three hours (in its full director’s cut, for there are lesser ones around), and taken from  a section of a novel by Italian writer Giovanni Testori, Rocco tells the story of the title characters, peasant siblings who moved from southern Italy to northern and industrial Milan with their mother, following the death of their patriarch, in search of a better life.

Sad to say, while some will end up better than others, the family that was will largely dissolve in the big city. The oldest brother will marry and turn away from the family. Three of the others will engage, at least for a time, in the boxing game. Two of them will love the same woman, a beautiful but troubled prostitute. Due to this, one will come to a tragic end. Two will decide to return to their roots in the south.

The cast is one of Visconti’s finest. Yes, the so-handsome-he’s-pretty Alain Delon is more image than acting in the title role (and Visconti was always a sucker for a handsome face, sad to say), but the cast also includes Renato Salvatori, Katina Paxinou, a young Claudia Cardinale (she and Delon would return to star to better effect in The Leopard), and, especially, Annie Giradot as the ill fated prostitute.

The cinematography of Giuseppe Rotunno, the music of the sublime Nino Rota, and the matchless direction by Visconti, not to mention his own novel-like screenplay, helped Rocco to emerge as one of the great films of the day (and later). Lately, its been restored to a wonderful condition and given a fine DVD treatment (not by Criterion). However, shouldn’t it one day come to its true home, The Criterion Collection?

5. The Yellow Submarine (1968)

Usually, rock music and film mix uneasily. Not counting documentary/concert films, made for admittedly specialized tastes, its hard for film to capture the live immediate spark of a good rock concert/event. 

Somehow, trying to put singer/musicans in a dramatic context either seems to drain their powers or makes them look awkward (save for 1965’s memorable documentary Don’t Look Back, the renowned Bob Dylan’s film career could be a working example of this). The Beatles, those spritely turned profound game changers in the music world, also turned out to be exceptions to the rule cinematically, if in a limited fashion.

Many think of the Beatles film career as consisting of four films, five if one counts the TV special/short The Magical Mystery Tour (1967). First and foremost is 1964’s  A Hard Day’s Night from director Richard Lester, one of the great musical films ever and a long time entry in The Collection. Then, the next year brought Help! (again directed by Lester), a silly James Bond-esque spoof with a greater score than even its renowned predecessor. 

Last and least was 1970’s Let It Be, a TV documentary special turned into a feature due to contractual obligation issues (an Oscar winning score but the film catches the breaking up group making their last great album amidst a whole lot of bad vibes). Now that’s three, so where is four? Well, there really aren’t four but very many viewers take the subject of this entry as the fourth. Even though the film exists due to The Beatles (who only contributed a live action cameo at the end in addition to their songs)and, mainly, their revolutionary Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, its greatness really has little to do with the group.

United Artists, the company which released The Beatles’ films, was sold on the idea of using the group’s music as the springboard for a fanciful animated feature done in the wild, loose popular style of the late 1960s. Animation, in feature films at least, up until that time usually meant the Disney way, round, cuddly, cutesy and sentimental. The overall look of this one was, to use a contemporary term, psychedelic, a veritable riot of color.

The film also inventively used such art movement modes as op, pop, and surrealism, among others, The script was also quite inventive, packing in all sorts of irreverent humor. The story, and loose it was, had Sgt. Pepper making the journey in the title vehicle to Liverpool from Pepperland, a magical kingdom existing far under the sea, but one which has been conquered by the music hating Blue Meanies, halting the lovely musical existence of the Pepperland natives.

Why did they suddenly attack? Who can say? Why did Sgt Pepper go in search of  The Beatles to help? Well, ’cause they made the album. At any rate, the plot and song are the springboard for many great musical sequences (the enchanting “When I’m 64” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, which single-handedly convinced squares that rock music was full of invites to drug it up.)

The film was a hit with the public and a legend in the animation field. Until Disney reasserted itself with its modern hits starting in the 1980s, The Yellow Submarine lead the way in the animated feature film field. Just think of what Criterion could do with this film’s glorious color images and stunning soundtrack….

Those who are adherent to the French based auteur theory would have the film watching world know that every film of a film maker adjudged to be “great” is, inherently, great itself. Now, in practical terms, while it pretty much requires a great film maker to create a great film, it doesn’t really follow that every film a film maker brings into the world will be great.

There is an old adage the only a mediocre person is at his/her best at all times. By the same token, though a film may indeed be recognizable as a certain director’s work by its style and motifs germane to the film maker, there may well be times that the elements just don’t come together properly.

Added to this would be the times a film maker has really come up to the plate, only to have the public stay away or, if the film was a hit at one time, somehow the film may be forgotten with the passage of time. This list concentrates on the later type of film.

Why do the films get overlooked or become overlooked? Maybe they aren’t what the public expected. Maybe the culture changes and leaves them unfairly behind. Maybe unseen factors such as poor distribution or legal entaglements keep the film out of sight. However, the good news is that, in these cyber times, films aren’t largely locked away and kept out of sight for decades on end, as was once the case (and the cases with more than one film on this list). These films may or may not return to a large public consciousness (if they ever had one) but the individual viewer may well seek, find, and enjoy.

1. A Woman of Paris (1923)

For almost as long as there has been film history, there have been endless plaudits for the comic genius of Charles “Charlie” Chaplin. Chaplin, as most surely know, was one of the first and, even now, greatest of screen clowns. Additionally, he also directed, produced, wrote and, after the coming of sound, even helped compose the scores of his much acclaimed films. Thankfully, he did not seem all that susceptible to the urge that clowns always seem to get to “play Hamlet”.

Though his 1948 black comedy masterpiece Monsieur Verdoux had its serious moments, he didn’t go dramatic until his penultimate starring appearance in 1952’s Limelight (a mixed film with wonderful performances). Perhaps he got it out of his system for several years due to the fate of his initial stab at drama, albeit one without a starring role for himself (he does have a quick cameo as a train porter, though).

A Woman of Paris stars is longtime protégée Edna Purviance in this rather sophisticated (for its day) drama of irony and fate. The title character is first seen as the mistreated step-daughter of a monstrous man in a little French village. After one bad encounter too many, the young woman and her aspiring artist boyfriend (Carl Miller) plan to run away to Paris together. However, fate prevents him from meeting her at the railway station at the appointed time and she leaves for Paris alone.

A year later, the young man gets to Paris and searches for her. Unfortunately, she learned the ways of the world rather quickly and is living a luxurious existence….as the kept woman of a wealthy man (Adolph Menjou). Though she hides the truth from the young man as long as possible, all concerned are on a somewhat tragic collision course.

By today’s standards the story is bit contrived and melodramatic and this starring role shows why Chaplin was never able to make Purviance, who was pretty and not without talent, into a major star, despite co-starring with him in a number of films. However, his touch as a director is very sure and the situations play out in a far less purple manner than might be expected. The one player to go on to a major career is Menjou, and his performance here gives a good indication why.

However this film didn’t help him or anyone else. At the time, if the public saw Chaplin’s name on the marquee then they wanted him starring in the film and they wanted him to be funny. Chaplin simply moved on and had a big triumph with 1925’s The Gold Rush (though, sadly, this was the end for Purviance, career-wise). Chaplin put the film in the vault and it wasn’t seen again until the 1970s. It may not be up there with The Gold Rush or 1931’s City Lights but this is a major and important work from a great cinematic artist and deserves respect and recognition.

2. Le Notti Bianche (1957)

Looking at this film purely on paper, it should be one of the great ones ever. This is a modern dress adaptation of a work by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky by one of Italy’s finest film maker ever, Luchino Visconti. It stars one of Italy’s all time greatest actors, Marcello Mastroianni, along with famed German actress Maria Schell and French acting icon Jean Marias.

Behind the camera, Visconti had three of the Italian film industry’s finest talents, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, who co-wrote the script with him, and the famed cinematographer Giuseppe Rontunno, with music by the immortal composer Nino Rota among other collaborators. On paper, it looked like a can’t miss proposition and up on the screen….well, it didn’t miss, looking and playing wonderfully well. However, for some reason, it isn’t as well remembered as some of the other films in the cannons of its makers.

To be fair, the film maker and many of his collaborators made some of cinema’s greatest masterpieces with a capital M. This one may be a masterpiece with a small m but that’s better than many, many films can achieve.

Up until this point Visconti had been a film maker in the Neo-realist tradition, filling his films with liberal, socially progressive themes. This intimate and delicate tragic-romance was a transitional work in his cinema in that he began to embrace the more formal, operatic, naturally aristocratic side of his nature (he was a titled nobleman but chose to largely reject the trappings of that lifestyle).

The story involves a young man (Mastroianni) encountering a sad young woman (Schell) who cries while standing on an ancient, ornate bridge every evening in a picturesque old Italian town. It seems that a year earlier she had promised her love to a young man boarding in her grandmother’s home.

The young boarder had left, promising to return when he had enough money for he and the girl to wed. She is trying to be faithful but has had no word for a year and may well be living a life of delusion and false hope. The young man in the present is falling in love with her but must break the hold of the past, rightly or wrongly, on the woman for himself to have any chance with her.

The acting (especially Mastroianni) is fine, as is direction, script, you-name-it. Few ever say bad things about this film. However, for whatever reasons, this one just gets tucked away in people’s mind, rather than being put in a living film lexicon. That is unfair, but that’s life. However, one hopes that future viewers will give this more of chance.

3. Bay of Angels (1963)

France’s Jacques Demy was a rather dreamy fellow, at least in displaying his ideas onscreen. The cinematic world will always remember him for wonderfully colorful tragic romance set completely to music, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and its 1967 follow-up The Young Girls of Rochefort, the stylized romance of his debut Lola (1961), and the literal (and wildly color-filled) adult fairy tale, Donkey Skin (1971). Considering the love for all of this surprisingly honest whimsy, it might not be that much of a surprise that one of his best, and earliest, films, a picture rather out of key with those others, is a bit forgotten today.

The story of Bay of Angels is hardly a fairy tale: a handsome, but rather reticent, young bank clerk named Jean (Claude Mann) accompanies his friend Caron (Paul Guers) on a trip to the casinos of Monte Carlo. It turns out that Caron is a compulsive gambler and, soon enough, so is Jean. One of the key elements pushing Jean into the world of perpetual gambling is the presence of Jackie (Jeanne Moreau).

Jackie is also compulsive but so much more. Neither young nor conventionally beautiful, she exudes a world weary sophistication and, also, a sort of fatalistic wisdom bought by hard experience. Somehow her haggard and worn look, coupled with her innate style, makes her all the more ravishing. Soon enough the young man is coupled with her and finds yet another addiction.

This film has so many of the things that distinguish early Demy: beautiful widescreen black and white cinematography, a stunning sense of place, and a magnificent actress at the center of a simple tale compellingly told. The fine actresses who worked for Demy include Anouk Amiee, Catherine Deneuve (both several times), and Francoise Dorleac but none was ever as great as Moreau. She and Deneuve seemed to be in a contest in the 1960s and 70s to see which one could appear in films by the largest number of great film makers.

Deneuve scored Demy, Truffaut, and Bunuel but Moreau matched all of them and added Welles, Kazan, and Malle, among others. She was among the greatest of film actresses and perhaps the finest French film actress of her period. This film contains one of her finest performances. Pauline Kael greatly praised her performance (comparing it to Bette Davis’ work in 1937’s Marked Woman as having the most vibrant presence in film history). Without her, this would still have been a good, well-made film. With her, it’s a masterpiece.

4. The Milky Way (1969)

Anyone who knows the work of the great Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel (or film history in general) knows that he got into a lot, A LOT, of trouble with 1930’s L’Age D’Or (banned from making films for life by the Catholic church, though he actually didn’t work for only two decades).

That film had a pretty good number of sacrilegious elements (especially for such a short film) which had upset both the church and the Spanish government. One might think that being burned so badly due to working with religiously based materials (handled with no reverence or tract) would have dissuaded Bunuel from going down such a path again. One thinking along such lines would obviously have no knowledge of the great, and greatly impudent and iron willed, film maker.

After his return to mainstream European film making, he created the long short subject Simon of the Desert (1965, 40 minutes, and actually shot in Mexico). This story of a saintly prophet and miracle worker on a pillar in the desert and how his every good deed nightmarishly metamorphosizes into one (very funny) mess after another showed that the maker of the scandalous L’Age was still very much in existence. In 1969 he was ready, after some big successes, to bring this subject back to European soil.

The eventual film, The Milky Way, shares much with L’Age D’Or. Both are very loosely structured black comedies which tackle (as do most of Bunuel’s films) a variety of topics concerning the status quo, here namely the church. The various episodes in The Milky Way are hung on the loose structure of two devout modern day Frenchmen (Laurent Terzieff and Paul Frankeur) setting out on foot for Santiago de Compostela, in order to visit the supposed remains of Saint James. Along the way they have many encounters and are not bound by time, space, or any barrier to a mystic dimension.

Just as in L’Age, Jesus and the Marquis de Sade show up, along with a wild variety of others, leading up to, inevitably, the Devil. Though each episode has a close historical basis, they are twisted cunningly by Bunuel into a surreal comedy.

Even in 1969, religious humor didn’t always go over well. However, though the film did stir debate concerning heresy, times had changed enough between the two pictures for no one to end up banned or blacklisted after its release. Actually, Bunuel’s wild musings just show a sharp and questioning mind genuinely concerned with the concepts of Christianity and how they are practiced in the world of organized religion. Now what is so bad about that (don’t answer)?

5. Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)

John Cassavetes is truly and rightly considered one of the founding fathers of the US indie film movement and an influential innovative film maker regardless of country. The really admirable thing about this is that he easily could have had a major career as a leading man or star (he mostly acted to finance his films as it happened). He also might have bent mightily and compromised with the major film companies with whom he could have worked as film maker in order to have had an easier and more commercial career (though the few times he tried to work within the system early in that career pleased no one, least of all himself).

However, after his big breakthrough with 1968’s Faces and the arrival of the New Hollywood era, he tried again to see if he could work in the system without compromise. Columbia gave him carte blanche, resulting in 1970’s Husbands, which struck many as quite self-indulgent (it marked one of Cassavetes few appearances in one of his own films, along with real life friends Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, all of whom seemed to be living it up, though the film was quite serious and somber).

It didn’t strike box office gold, so he tried one more time, this time at Universal and, of all things, with a comedy-drama with a pretty happy ending (probably the total number of laughs in other Cassavetes films equals three and none go for happy endings).

Minnie and Moskowitz centers around the title characters, a sophisticated but none too happy upper middle class woman Minnie (Cassavetes’ favorite muse, wife and excellent actress Gena Rowlands) and hippyish and decidedly lower class parking lot attendant Moskowitz (Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel).

Moskowitz comes to Minnie’s aid during a potentially tense and hazardous moment in his parking lot and a relationship starts to develop. Film history is full of pictures wherein the heroine, trapped in high society living with unfeeling effete men, meets the dashing down to earth man who tears away the phony social masks and “fulfills” the woman, giving her a more “natural” life.

In outline this sounds like that sort of film but the film maker and players turn the types to flesh and blood. Moskowitz is far from dashing and not that young and just as full of quirks and issues as Minnie. Minnie may come from another strata of society, but she is no ice goddess, instead a confused woman looking for some personal answers and possessing a history that doesn’t come off looking terribly good. The pair realizes that any long term relationship between them will entail a lot of work and willingness to bend in order to blend two wildly different worlds.

The miracle is that, though this is one of the film maker’s lightest films, it’s still full of the kind of intense and revelatory moments that mark Cassavetes’ films. His actors (including his mother Katherine and mother-in-law, Lady Rowlands), as ever, give until it hurts in the service of their mutual film.

Though the ending is happy, it’s happy in an honest, imperfect, worked-for sort of way. Sadly, the film maker’s usual fans considered this film a bit of a sell-out and didn’t exactly turn out. That’s too bad but it did help to pay for Cassavetes’ next indie, 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence (again with wife and mom, both giving fine performances), a career high for all involved. That was nice, but it’s a shame that this rather sweet little prelude had to get lost in the shuffle.

Anyone new to the classic mystery reading field could be forgiven for thinking that Dashiell Hammet, author of The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man, probably had a gigantic selection of mystery novels in his bibliography and that those were just the top three. Actually they were the top three of just five full length novels.

By the same token, it would be reasonable to think that the great multi-faceted genius Leonardo da Vinci had a gallery full of great paintings based on his still quite famous The Last Supper and Mona Lisa. Actually the paintings number around a dozen.

Much the same situation exists for the famed Dutch painter Vermeer. And ask anyone who enjoyed John Kennedy Toole’s excellent comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces how they enjoyed his others (actually that would be just one other that he wrote when very young and didn’t intend to ever be published).

The point of all of this is that sometimes artists who are finely talented, or who happened to create a fine work of art, ended up leaving frustratingly little work behind them….sometimes just one good shot is all that they got off.

In show business the wise always want to leave ’em begging for more but, in some cases, those leaving the stage left ’em begging for way, way more. The thrust of this list concentrates on those in the business of directing (and often writing) films who left the film lovers of the world with simply too little of their work.

Why does this happen? As will be illustrated by the entries on this list, a paucity of work can be attributed to a variety of causes. Some of these can be major calamities such as illness and/or death. Some film makers just have bad luck personally or professionally. Some managed to create at least a handful of memorable films and others just one. Some had a number of causes converge to rob them of bountiful careers. Whatever the cause of their abbreviated careers might be, these people gave the cinematic wonderful dreams and images but stopped presenting them way too soon.

1. Krzysztof Kieslowski

Many of the film makers on this list might surprise the reader since the films that they did make were so memorable that one doesn’t often stop to realize how few they were. Such a case could be made for Poland’s Krystof Kieslowski.

Kieslowski could be forgiven if his output wasn’t memorable. He worked in a harshly restrictive place during a less than congenial era, a time and place which was oppressive to artists of all stripes. He himself suffered bad health and died of a heart condition (which might have been successfully treated had he agreed to treatment outside of his beloved, but medically backward, homeland). He was only 54 years old.

Added to all of this was the fact that he was a documentarian for the first half of his career. This left about a decade and half for him to create his feature (fictional) film work and that amounted to a baker’s dozen (and this does not count his monumental TV project The Dekalog from 1988, though two of his features were expanded episodes from that series). In the face of all that, he was still memorable indeed.

Sad to say, he was truly hitting his stride when death overtook him. His last four films, The Double Life of Veronique (1991), and the films of the Three Colors trilogy (Blue, 1993, and White and Red, both 1994) were acclaimed as his biggest and best (with Red winning him Oscar nominations). Those should have been the start of a long phase of memorable film making but it wasn’t to be.

However, his earlier and less celebrated film such as Camera Buff (1979) and Blind Chance (1987) have been exhumed by fans/students wantinlg more and they have been found quite worthy. Kieslowski will remain one of the cinema’s great humanist with his keen understanding of the human heart and mind and his supreme empathy for the plight of average people in difficult circumstances. The world as a whole, not just the cinematic one, misses such a rare talent.

2. Alexander MacKendrick

The world at large, much less the cinematic one, can be full of odd stories but even by that measure the tale of Alexander “Sandy” MacKendrick is a strange one. MacKendrick’s story is not, strictly speaking, tragic (in fact, he might have considered that he achieved a happy ending by his own standards) but it is a sad entry for discriminating film fans and a most contradictory one.

To start at the beginning, MacKendrick was and is thought of as the most British (actually Scottish) of film makers. Though his roots were planted in Scotland and he did indeed end up largely being raised there, in fact he was born in Boston Massachusettes, USA to immigrant parents who met with tragedy, causing their son to be sent back to grandparents in the old country.

Oddly enough, that fracturing would mirror their son’s eventual professional life. After a hard and lonely childhood, MacKendrick was trained and found work as an advertising illustrator and copy writer (experience he found invaluable). In the course of that job he began directing early commercials (for theaters) and, during World War II, segued into making propaganda films for Britain’s Ministry of Information. These films were his stepping stone into features with the UK’s most wonderfully quaint, quirky, genteel and amusingly heartfelt studio, Ealing (if films could be hand crafted, Ealings all would have been).

He hit the ground running with the droll comedy classic Whiskey Galore! in 1949 and made four more films for the studio (including other comedic treasures The Man in the White Suit from 1951 and Ealing last great bow, 1955’s The Ladykillers, in addition to the profoundly moving juvenile deafness drama Mandy in 1952). He worked slowly but oh so well with sharply good natured wit and a smart grasp of human nature being his trademarks. Too bad Ealing sold out to the BBC shortly after The Ladykillers and he was left at liberty thereafter.

This sent him to his birth land to try his luck with Hollywood. He would make but three films there (and one more memorable one back in the UK, 1963’s Sammy Going South) and the last, 1967’s Don’t Make Waves, was no jewel, but he would create his masterpiece upon arrival. This would be 1957’s unforgettable The Sweet Smell of Success. This still potent film about the bitter underbelly of Broadway was one of the great films in Hollywood history….and a truly big flop at the box office. After 1965’s good but indifferently received A High Wind in Jamaica and Waves, he was presented with an offer he found irresistible.

A then new institution, The California Institute of the Arts, asked him to be its dean. He accepted and spent the rest of his professional life there (though he decided to step down as dean after a few years and became a legendary film theory professor). He may not have made films but his roster of students is like an all star list of film directors, writers and historians.

He almost made a return to film the acclaimed play Rhinoceros but it wasn’t to be (and considering the version that did get made in 1971, a special tragedy). However, a series of his lectures may be found on YouTube and they are just magic. He may well have made the right decision. However he lived to the age of 81 and one can’t help but think that its tragic the he couldn’t have found time for film and teaching.

3. Gillo Pontecorvo

On the whole there haven’t been many overtly political film makers in commercial cinema. Anyone wanting to know just why might have done worse than to question Italy’s Gillo Pontecorvo.

At first glance, Pontecorvo could strike one as an ill fit for this list. He lived to the ripe age of 86 and a cursory look at his filmography gives the impression of being rather voluminous. However, very many of those credits were for documentaries and some for scores he also composed. Also, though he will be eternally remembered by film students, scholars, and discerning film watchers everywhere for the unforgettable 1966 semi-documentary The Battle of Algiers (still used as a training film for would be terrorist), his feature films numbered only five.

In addition to Battle, he also directed the fine earlier film from 1957 The Wide Blue Road (which attracted the politically simpatico French star Yves Montand as its star), a story dealing with the plight of fishermen living on a barren patch of Italy’s coast.

There was also 1960’s Kapo, an excellent concentration camp drama and Queimada (1969), also known as Burn! in it truncated North American version. That stringent tale of a revolt in a colonial island nation of the West Indies snagged no less than Marlon Brando as its star and remained one of his few films the star took seriously. After that film, the only other feature film in Pontecorvo’s cannon was the semi-documentary political thriller Operación Ogro in 1979.

Though Kapo and Battle won Oscar nominations (the latter for Pontecorvo himself) only Battle was any kind of hit. Perhaps he might have made more films but Pontecorvo famously stated that he must be in love with the subject in order to make the film. This is quite admirable but very limiting. However, it can’t be denied that his small filmography is full of gems.

4. Jean Vigo

While other entries on this deal those who would not compromise in one way or another in order to have fuller careers, French film maker Jean Vigo’s story reads like some romantic fiction.

He was the son of notorious anarchists and spent much of his childhood on the run with his family. When they decided that it was best to separate from him and sent him to a boarding school for education and a chance in life, he had to assume the name history now knows him by. He was at the start of both a promising career and personal life as a young husband and father. Then the at-that-time incurable tuberculosis felled him at age 29, just as his only feature was opening. Would any writer of fiction dare to make this up?

The real punchline is that his work shows that he might well have been one of the great individualistic film makers. This work consist of two documentary shorts, À propos de Nice (1930) and Taris (1931), the mini-feature Zero For Conduct (1933) and the feature L’Atalante (1934).

Though the first two are excellent in their own right, the latter two are the lynchpins of Vigo’s reputation. LAtalante is a magical film concerning the new marriage of young barge owner, his inexperienced bride and the kind and wise older man who helps both. It has poetically realistic shots and beautifully expressionistic ones perfectly meshed to tell a delicate and heartrending story.

However, Zero For Conduct, a dadist telling of the mini-revolution an oppressive boy’s school suffers when it pushes the students too far, is perhaps even more influential, certainly during the youth revolt of the late 1960s (and Lindsay Anderson’s memorable 1969 film IF… is its direct descendent).

Could Vigo have kept going along this remarkable course or would he have been destined to shoot out all of his good ideas first and decline thereafter? Sadly, the world will never know.

5. Andrei Tarkovsky

Russesian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky, surely one of the great cerebral directors in film history, is also a prime example of what being a true, truthful and insightful artist can get one when tied to a regime philosophically opposed to all of those things and more.

The former Soviet Union was never known as a bastion of free thought and human rights (actually, it was considered just the opposite of all that). The nation had blighted the careers of many great artists with the much acclaimed, historically important film maker Sergei Eisenstein being the forerunning martyr before Tarkovsky in the film world. Both men would lead somewhat truncated lives (Tarkovsky only lived to be 54), would have multiple interests and talents (both wrote seminal books on film theory) and both refused to back down to oppressive authorities, resulting in banned and butchered films and sometimes banned careers.

Tarkovsky made only seven features (and his student thesis film, 1961 prize winning short film, The Steamroller and the Violin is also treasured). They range from autobiographical films (Ivan’s Childhood, 1961, 1975’s Mirror and 1983’s Nostalghia)biographies (the much lauded Andrei Rublev, made in 1966 but not released until years later and not restored to his cut until years thereafter), science fiction (the cult favorites Solaris, 1972 and 1979’s Stalker) and allegorical drama (1986’s The Sacrifice).

All of them were slow, deliberately paced, carefully crafted and rich in ideas. Though he wrote other screenplays between these films, its no surprise that they took years upon years to conceive and create his works. Its doubtful that any film maker wrestling with so much in every film could ever have been prolific but a few more gems would have been nice.

6. Carl Theodor Dryer

Unlike Tarkovsky, Denmark’s Carl Theodor Dryer didn’t face intense political pressure (except for some during the Nazi occupation era). However, a lack of commercial success leading to a lack of investors, coupled with an intense individuality, can produce the same results.

Dryer was the product of an extremely unhappy childhood (an illegitimate birth and adoption by a couple who might have done better without the child rearing experience). Surely this colored his eventual films, formal, austere efforts which explored the interior thoughts of various characters and their relationships and the place faith does and doesn’t have in people’s lives.

His feature films number 14 though many of those were made in the early days of his career (and cinema history), although several of them are as much Dryer films as any other (notably The Parson’s Widow from 1920, Leaves From Satan’s Book, 1921, and 1925’s Master of the House). However, as he hit his stride with 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the greatest films and a complete box office flop, funding became hard to find.

In the next three decades he averaged one film per decade! These include the well remembered supernatural story Vampyr from 1932, the powerful Day of Wrath from 1943, the intellectually thrilling Ordet from 1955, and his finale, the controversial, little loved, yet still interesting Gertrud from 1964. (There was also a mysterious 1945 film entitled Two People, made while fleeing the Nazis in Sweden, disowned, and permanently withdrawn.)

Much like Tarkovsky, Dryer’s work shows the effort of years of highly intelligent planning, thought and talent. It was simply not in the cards for him to have made one or more films every single year (or was it?). However, he should have been able to create more than one roughly every ten years!