By Herbert Goldstone
Now that the nominees for this year’s Academy Awards have been announced, this is the right time to reveal to what I’m sure is a breathlessly awaiting world the list of the 10 best movies I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of movies in my time.
You’ll agree with most of my choices, I think. Please excuse me if I omitted some of your favorites.
Picking one movie — out of the 1,000 or so I’ve seen — as best of all is not easy, but I’ll try. I think it would be “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the anti-war masterpiece that stunned audiences in 1930. It’s been revived a few times and I now have it on video.
There’s never been an anti-war film to match the one they made out of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel about 11 young German schoolboys persuaded by their teacher to enlist when World War I starts, and are killed one by one.
“All Quiet on the Western Front” has a great ending. The last survivor of the school friends, Paul Baumer, played by young Lew Ayres, is killed by a French sharpshooter when the war is almost over as he reaches for a butterfly that lands near the German trench.
Without any of today’s technical advances — color, wide screen, stereo sound and the rest — “All Quiet on the Western Front,” in simple black and white, has battle scenes that have never been equaled, heart-stopping scenes of bayonet charges, French soldiers mowed down by German machine guns, murderous artillery barrages, hand-to-hand slaughter to capture a few yards of trench recaptured a short time later by the enemy.
There are some poignant scenes of the German soldiers meeting French girls and a sequence with Baumer, home on leave, telling students in his old school that war isn’t the glory his teacher promised but a life of horror.
You can’t have a list of all-time great films without “Gone With the Wind” near the top. Moviegoers have been enthralled by Scarlett O’Hara’s life and loves before, during and after the Civil War since the movie they made of Margaret Mitchel’s best selling novel came out in 1939.
Beautiful British actress Vivian Leigh got the role after a long search, and won an Oscar for it. And who else but Clark Gable could be Rhett Butler?
If you saw “The Manchurian Candidate,” you’ll agree it’s a marvelous story of intrigue in the Korean War.
Laurence Harvey is captured by Chinese, brainwashed into becoming an unconscious assassin by agents led by his own mother (played by Angela Lansbury) seeking to grab this country. With the help of an American Army intelligence agent, Frank Sinatra, the human “weapon” is turned against the conspirators. It’s a fascinating plot.
Don’t worry, kids. I haven’t forgotten the fairy tale marvel, “The Wizard of Oz.” Children and grownups alike are still enchanted following Dorothy (Judy Garland) from a farmhouse in Kansas to Munchkinland, to the Emerald City, and home again.
I wasn’t a ballet fan until I saw the next film on my list, “The Red Shoes.” The British masterpiece is the human version of the fantasy about a magical pair of red ballet shoes that won’t let the girl who wears them ever stop dancing until they dance her to death.
The pretty star of the film, Moira Shearer, can dance for me any time she’d like.
“Casablanca” is on my list, of course. The story of wartime intrigue in French Morocco early in World War II when the Germans captured the African colony has one of moviedom’s great romances between an American renegade, Humphrey Bogart, who runs a night club, and Ingrid Bergman, an old flame from their Paris days,
“The Grapes of Wrath,” which stars Henry Fonda, is the film made of John Steinbeck’s great novel about families driven from their Kansas dust bowl farms in the 1930’s trekking cross country to find new homes in California.
One of my favorites, and a favorite of the critics as well, is “Sweet Smell of Success,” the story of a ruthless newspaper gossip columnist, patterned after Walter Winchell, who uses his power to control politicians and show business stars and gets a smarmy publicity agent to break up a love affair between his sister and a young musician.
Burt Lancaster as the columnist and Tony Curtis as the press agent both turned in top performances.
If there’s a funnier movie than “Some Like it Hot,” I haven’t seen it. It’s about two members of an out-of-luck band, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, who unintentionally are eyewitnesses to a gangland massacre in a garage and pose as members of an all-girl orchestra, complete with women’s dress, makeup and hair styles, to escape the gang.
It’s hard to choose between two great productions of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” about the young English king who invades and conquers France and marries the French princess — one version starring Laurence Olivier, the second starring Kenneth Brannah.
My advice? Rent both videos and enjoy both.
Okay, that’s 10 films.
Now please allow me to add a ringer, a film most people probably never heard of but which I taped when it was on TV and love it. It’s “The Browning Version,” the story of an English school master who’s forced to retire because of poor health.
It has a fine performance by Michael Wilding, who is scorned by most of his pupils, but is befriended by one of them who gives him an unexpected present, a version of a classic Greek play translated by the British classic poet, Robert Browning.
So there they are, my favorite 10 plus one. I’ve awarded them all my personal Oscar.
