My ten favorite films

We took some good friends of ours out to dinner to celebrate a birthday the other night. Over champagne one of our friends asked us to name our ten favorite films. Not the ten films we'd consider the best or the most significant, but the films that we find most pleasurable—the ones that we find ourselves watching happily for the fifth or tenth or thirtieth time, the ones that we never miss when they're shown on TV. I didn't come up with a very adequate answer at the restaurant (thanks, no doubt, to the champagne), but now I've managed to give the question a bit more thought.

The "pleasure" criterion means that greatness is neither sufficient nor even necessary for a film to make the cut. Among the filmmakers who didn't make my list are Almodóvar, Bergman, Buñuel, Chaplin (and Keaton and Lloyd), Cocteau, De Sica, Fellini, Godard, Kieslowski, Kurosawa, the Marx Brothers, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Renoir, Rossellini, Scorsese, Truffaut, Welles, or Wilder. The only claim I'm making for the movies that did make the list is that I've formed an intense and continuing personal connection with them.

Entire genres are missing, too: there are no silent films, horror films, or action films. Meanwhile, three-quarters of the list could easily have been Hitchcock movies, or films noir. So I decided that for some entries, one film would have to represent many others. Of course on another day I might decide that my favorite noir is The Maltese Falcon or Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. As a consequence this list should be thought of as a continual work in progress.

So here are some of my favorite films, in the order in which they occurred to me:

	1. Vertigo. No surprise to anyone who knows me (or who has read the first installment of this blog), Vertigo not only occupies the top spot for itself; it stands in for many of Hitchcock's other films as well: Rear Window, North by Northwest, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, Blackmail, The 39 Steps, Young & Innocent, Sabotage, Strangers on a Train, Psycho, The Birds, Dial M for Murder...
	2. Singin' In The Rain. In my view the most purely enjoyable Hollywood musical save one, and which just beats out An American in Paris, the Astaire/Rogers films, On The Town, West Side Story, and Gold Diggers of 1933. Which is a bit of a surprise, because Singin' in the Rain's music (by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown) is far weaker than the scores for the other films, supplied by the likes of Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, Kern, and Bernstein. But the story by Betty Comden and Adolph Green about Hollywood's rocky transition from silents to sound is just brilliant, and provides the perfect period context for Freed and Brown's songs.
	3. The Wizard of Oz. The best Hollywood musical that isn't Singin' In The Rain, and one of the most frightening films ever made (at least, so claims my 6-year-old self). The flying monkeys still give me nightmares. (Incidentally, I'd seen the film perhaps ten times on black and white TV before I saw it in a theater and discovered that the Oz scenes were in Technicolor—and yet even in black and white it was so wonderful and terrifying to my youthful imagination I'm not sure I could have borne it in color.) Those veteran vaudevillians Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr deliver their schtick as though for the first time. And when 16-year-old Judy Garland steps forward to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" I hold my breath, even though I've heard it countless times before.
	4. The Big Sleep. Bogart and Bacall in a film whose plot is nearly incoherent—but who cares? Their chemistry carries the film (as it does To Have and Have Not, also directed by Howard Hawks). This title has to represent many other films noir: The Maltese Falcon, Lady from Shanghai, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Sunset Blvd, The Big Heat, Gilda, Laura, The Big Clock, Gun Crazy, Detour, Narrow Margin, and on and on. If you're a fan, I highly recommend Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference edited by Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward and James Ursini, and Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, by Eddie Muller.
	5. Casablanca. Perhaps it's an obvious choice, but the crackling, endlessly quotable script, Bogart in his archetypal role, a cast filled with European refugees played by actual European refugees, and Ingrid Bergman's luminous beauty make it impossible for me to leave it off my list.
	6. La Jetée. I'm cheating a bit here because this isn't a feature-length film. But it's haunting and unforgettable, and should be experienced in a theater if at all possible. In this film composed of stills the moment when the man's sleeping lover opens her eyes is one of the most moving in cinema.
	7. Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick's renowned chilliness as a director gives this movie a deadpan tone that makes it both hilarious and horrifying. Peter Sellars is so brilliant in multiple roles that the first time I saw it I thought he was three separate actors, and George C. Scott's gum-chewing, explosively exasperated General Buck Turgidson is Sellars' perfect foil.
	8. It's a Wonderful Life. Not nearly as saccharine as you probably think it is, this is actually a very dark story about how George Bailey's dreams of escape from his constricted small-town existence are continually thwarted. Plus, if George hadn't existed Donna Reed would have become—a librarian! What could be more horrible? I have a fantasy that one day I'm going to re-edit this movie, cut God out of it entirely, and reveal it as the true noir masterpiece it is.
	9. The Philadelphia Story. The Hollywood studio system functioning at its highest level, with a cast of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Katherine Hepburn. This film stands in for many other great pre-WWII comedies (most of which, come to think of it, also star Cary Grant): His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, It Happened One Night, My Favorite Wife, My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday...
	10. Kal Ho Naa Ho. An atypical Bollywood film set among young Desis in New York, KHNH makes this list on the appeal of its stars (Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan, and Preity Zinta), the cleverness of its script, and the way its musical numbers are integrated into the story. Once again a single film represents many others: Modern-day Bollywood classics such as Devdas, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Veer-Zaara, Paheli, Diwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Kandukondain Kandukondain, the original Umrao Jaan, Khal Nayak--most of which, come to think of it, also star Shah Rukh Khan.

Honorable mentions to Some Like It Hot (Marilyn Monroe at her most comically luscious), Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête (the utterly magical images of the Beast's castle), and Ugetsu Monogatari, which were on earlier versions of this list but somehow didn't make the final 10.

While the movies on the list are pretty evenly distributed from the 1930s through the 1960s, there are none from the 1970s (sorry, Godfather), 1980s (sorry, Wings of Desire and Dekalog), or 1990s (sorry, Groundhog Day), and only one from the 2000s (sorry, Amélie). And with the exceptions of La Jetée and Kal Ho Naa Ho, I had seen all of the films on the list by the time I was 25. Are movies getting worse, or am I getting less susceptible?

All comments, flames, and alternative lists welcome.