In honor of Turner Classic Movies’ 30th anniversary, I’ve prepared a list of favorites, most of which are repeated often on the channel. This is not my all-time top 30. For one, I opted against duplicating filmmakers, mostly to prevent the list from being half-filled with movies directed by Lubitsch, Wilder, Hawks, and Hitchcock. In the spirit of the classic period, I also eliminated newer films, although some top picks from more recent decades are now shown semi-regularly on the network (Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey, for example, along with occasional airings of foreign favorites by Wong Kar-Wai and Pedro Almodovar). I arbitrarily chose 1965 as the cut-off date, as cherished movies as objectively old as Blow-Up and The Graduate that fall just after my dividing line seem modern and even contemporary feeling when compared to the early sixties Wilder/Diamond triumphs, mid-Kurosawa, and French New Wave highlights (my Nouvelle Vague selection, Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, released on my borderline year, is suitably revolutionary for the cinematic movement but quietly classic in style and tone). I didn’t shy away from obscurities entirely (the comparatively conventional Fear is the least celebrated of Rossellini’s films with Ingrid Bergman), but I eliminated pictures I hadn’t seen represented on TCM: Luis Bunuel’s Mexican period, for example, which would have been represented by the unheralded Cela S’Appelle Aurore or Subida al Cielo. Bunuel is definitely my favorite filmmaker not on the list; Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie would have easily qualified except for its comparative recency. And while the network focuses on American movies, it ventures into world cinema enough that I included everything from iconic masterpieces like Grande Illusion and Wild Strawberries to lesser-known triumphs like Becker’s Touchez pas an Grisbi and Rossellini’s Fear. I did, however, bounce Melville’s tremendous Bob le Flambeur, in part due to its similarities from the Becker from a few years earlier but primarily to make room for the equally deserving and more TCM-appropriate All About Eve. For those not familiar with pictures from these eras, almost every movie on the list is pretty accessible: Steamboat Bill is kinetic enough to draw in people otherwise resistant to silents, and the artsiest film on the list (with the possible exception of Wild Strawberries) is Morocco, which compensates with magnetically iconic performances by megastars Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper. Best as I can tell, no individual actor appears in more than three of these picks, with a tie at the top between personal favorite Ingrid Bergman (Notorious, Casablanca, Fear) and ubiquitous sideman Ward Bond (Maltese Falcon, The Searchers, Johnny Guitar). Of the gigantic tie for third, the most impressive/unusual two-film appearances are probably Marcel Dalio, with one in English (Casablanca: “your winnings, sir”) and one in French (Grande Illusion), and Buster Keaton, silent star in Steamboat Bill and one-word cameo in Sunset Boulevard.
- I Know Where I’m Going (Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger) 1945
- Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock) 1946
- The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles) 1942
- The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch) 1940
- Casablanca (Michael Curtiz) 1942
- Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder) 1950
- Fear (Roberto Rossellini) 1954
- Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman) 1957
- I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini) 1953
- Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir) 1937
- The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa) 1961
- Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur) 1947
- The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges) 1941
- Red River (Howard Hawks) 1948
- Laura (Otto Preminger) 1944
- The Maltese Falcon (John Huston) 1941
- Touchez pas au Grisbi (Jacques Becker) 1954
- The Third Man (Carol Reed) 1949
- The Searchers (John Ford) 1956
- Seven Men from Now (Budd Boetticher) 1956
- Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Buster Keaton) 1928
- Morocco (Josef von Sternberg) 1930
- The Earrings of Madame de… (Max Ophuls), 1953
- Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk) 1959
- Le Bonheur (Agnes Varda) 1965
- Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray) 1954
- The Big Heat (Fritz Lang) 1953
- All About Eve (Joseph Mankiewicz) 1950
- The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann) 1953
- Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller) 1953
The omissions of works by favorite actors Sidney Poitier (always better than his films) and Jack Lemmon (really close call for Some Like It Hot) led me to prepare a top 30 performance list as well. For consistency, I kept the same general rules (one slot per actor—all apologies to Claude Rains and Setsuko Hara; 1965 deadline—all apologies to the casts of Network and Gosford Park). My favorite classic actors not included start with Humphrey Bogart (very close for In a Lonely Place), followed by William Holden (Sunset Boulevard’s a far better film, but he gets more to do in Stalag 17) and Barbara Stanwyck (at her best, I believe, in the 1941 comedies Ball of Fire and Lady Eve). Of the selected actors, there were close calls for their best performances in a few cases. Montgomery Clift, for example, is equally amazing in A Place in the Sun, complementing his own brilliance by drawing out a career expanding performance from Elizabeth Taylor just as he did for John Wayne in Red River. Ultimately, I went with Red River because I prefer it as a movie. The most unusual choices were the Kurosawa actors: Shimura for Bad Sleep Well over Ikiru and Mifune for his comparatively unheralded Kurosawa debut. I love Shimura in Ikiru as well, but his corrupt middle manager in BSW is as perfect an example of that type as we’ve seen in cinema (yet he still makes it unique). Mifune improved his craft mightily over the years (I’ll cite Yojimbo along with High and Low as wildly different yet monumentally impressive examples), but his raw, viscerally powerful burst on the screen in his first Kurosawa collaboration makes James Dean look timid. Kurosawa is also the only filmmaker to direct three of these 30 performances, although Hitchcock (in a crowded runner-up tie with two) could have had another if I’d gone with Claude Rains’s equally amazing portrayal in Notorious, which for me takes a slight back seat to Casablanca primarily for the magnificent humor Rains displays in the latter.
- Ingrid Bergman, Voyage in Italy
- Charles Boyer, The Earrings of Madame de…
- Felix Bressart, The Shop Around the Corner
- Radha, The River
- Cary Grant, His Girl Friday
- Juanita Moore, Imitation of Life
- Gloria Swanson, Sunset Boulevard
- Claude Rains, Casablanca
- George Sanders, All About Eve
- Sidney Poitier, The Defiant Ones
- Setsuko Hara, No Regrets for Our Youth
- Eva Marie Saint, On the Waterfront
- Anna May Wong, Shanghai Express
- Thelma Ritter, Rear Window
- Peter Lorre, The Maltese Falcon
- Bette Davis, All About Eve
- Toshiro Mifune, Drunken Angel
- James Stewart, The Naked Spur
- Montgomery Clift, Red River
- Lee Marvin, Seven Men from Now
- Greta Garbo, Ninochtka
- Joseph Cotten, Shadow of a Doubt
- Eve Arden, Mildred Pierce
- Jean Gabin, La Bete Humaine
- Jack Lemmon, The Apartment
- Marlene Dietrich, Morocco
- Takashi Shimura, The Bad Sleep Well
- Susan Kohner, Imitation of Life
- Gloria Grahame, The Big Heat
- William Demarest, The Lady Eve