FILM COLUMN: THE OLD BROAD'S 10 CLASSIC BEST

From 'The Quiet Man' to 'Philadelphia Story' - Some of the Top Movies Ever Made

By: Clare Elfman

January 9, 2011

We all have personal reasons for choosing our “best”--those films that strike a chord in the heart. They say something to us that delights, or intrigues, or—as it is with this “old broad”—suggests possibilities, a look through doors we always thought closed. I was born in 1925, just at the cusp of the Great Depression, to a majorly dysfunctional home. So that in 1932, when  I saw Tarzan the Ape Man, I was aware for the first time that there was such a thing as a loving home, warm and happy, yes even on a platform in a tree high above the jungle. Tarzan really loved Jane--you saw it in his eyes and heard it in his romantic dialogue: “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” It was me and you, as hopefully romantic as Humphrey Bogart looking at Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

And it was much more than that. When Tarzan needed to travel, he had only to step out and grab a vine, swing through the forest, reach out and there was always another vine waiting. Do you know what a message of hope that was for a confused kid who had never seen hope related to life? In my home, if Tarzan had reached for the second vine, it would not be there--he would have fallen to the ground and been eaten by tigers.

So although there were, through the years, plenty of good and entertaining films, my choices were the ones that I could see over and over and over again, always for a particular reason. There was something…maybe a concept, maybe a scene that reinforced a major idea that appealed to my sense of right and wrong, maybe an unforgettable character, maybe a new insight. I only knew that when the first scene appeared onscreen, my heart knew that an old good friend had arrived, and I settled down to the visit.

For example, a particular scene in The Usual Suspects.  I just love the scene at the end where Kevin Spacey, the crippled, cowardly Verbal Kint, begins to walk away from the police who never suspect him of being the horrendous Keyser Soze, and slowly he straightens his crippled leg, relaxes his crooked arm, and stops to light a cigarette with a gold lighter. He’s fooled them all: his friends, the police, and me!  Damned good story telling.  I sometimes just fast-forward to enjoy that scene again.

In the confused world of my childhood, before I was old enough to go to the movies, I had radio, my Saturday programs, and most of all, my “decoder ring.” I don’t remember which program it was--perhaps The Shadow or Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy--but one of them sent “secret messages,” and I could decode them with my ring and make sense of confusion. Through this lifetime, there has been a lot of confusion and, in part, the favorite movies have touched the “decoder ring” of my erratic heart and made sense of this...yes satisfying but still bewildering life.

Here are my choices and why I chose them:

1. Philadelphia Story (1940)  For language and wit in days when wit was still prized…I don’t mean humor which in today’s (funny) films is more like a wet fish slapped across the face. A spoiled rich girl (Katharine Hepburn), totally intolerant of any human weakness, is about to marry a second husband. Her ex, Cary Grant at his handsome best, turns up at the wedding.  Society reporter Jimmy Stewart falls for her, they drink too much wine, have a midnight swim (and possibly a fling); the new husband thinks the worst--these were times when any premarital intimacy was considered a worst. The dialogue is fast and clever, joy to the ears of an old English teacher. I’ve seen (and listened to) that dialogue fifty times minimum since 1940.  If I get it on Netflix streamed to my TV set, I’ll watch it 51.

2. Great Expectations (1946) For an old-fashioned sense of loyalty and a one-of-a-kind character in Miss Havisham, a loopy old lady who lives in cobwebs and tattered lace since the wedding day when she was deserted by her fiance and stopped the clocks. A poor boy walking the marshes on a cold, foggy day to visit his mother’s isolated gravesite comes across a convict who frightens him into bringing food and files for his chains. This the boy does in kind spirit. The boy is also hired by an eccentric old lady to play with her adopted daughter. Later, when the boy is told he has great expectations, he’s sent to London to be made into a gentleman. He assumes it’s the old lady who means him to marry the now beautiful ward.  But he finds that his benefactor is the convict. And his sense of loyalty makes him risk his life to save him. Wonderful scene when Miss Havisham and her tattered and dusty bridal gown move too close to the fire…and…(FYI: Oscar Wilde’s two sisters died in just this way). If you know the great actors of that period:  John Mills as a young man, Jean Simmons as a girl, and Alec Guinness so young, you may not recognize him. Master script beautifully delivered.

3. Rebecca (1946) One of Alfred Hitchcock’s best, and the dream of every shy young girl of those days (maybe today) to be chosen by a rich and handsome lover. Our young innocent is travelling as companion to an overbearing society lady in Monte Carlo when she meets rich and handsome Laurence Olivier.  Beyond her wildest schoolgirl dreams, she falls in love and he actually asks her to marry him. He takes her home to his enormous mansion, Manderlay, which is under the care of one of films’ best villains, the scary Mrs. Danvers, who convinces her that the first Mrs. DeWinter, Rebecca, was the love of this guy’s life, she can never compete, that he married her on a whim, and brings her to the edge of despair and close to suicide.  The window is open to the rocks below and the wild sea. Jump, says Mrs. Danvers. What have you to live for? And bang, fireworks, a ship down on the rocks! Divers go down to find the boat in which Rebecca drowned, with Rebecca’s body in it. The husband was the one who put it there. (Good old Hitchcock.) My great scene in this film is the moment when the unhappy, vulnerable wife learns that the man she loves really loves her. Oh my beating heart.  Thriller beginning to end.

4. On the Waterfront (1954) One of Marlon Brando’s great films. This rather than Streetcar Named Desire for its depiction of great courage and a moral victory.  A washed-out ex-boxer, whose big brother has made him throw a fight, gets involved with the murder of a boy. Boy’s sister, a convent school girl, comes home searching for answers. For the first time, he meets someone decent and, for the first time, begins to question his life and wants to change but is confronted by forces that threaten him. Two scenes were important to me. The one in which he meets this girl--a sexual scene in the bar without overt sex--but as he leans near to her, this innocent convent girl, you can feel the heat of passion.  And of course the final scene when he physically confronts the rotten guys, who almost beat the life out of him, but with the incredible strength of a man fighting for good, he rises and… You must have seen this scene, and if not, shame on you. Rent it.  Famous lines, of course, from the failed boxer to his crooked brother: “Charley, you shoulda' looked out for me…” Powerful and inspiring.

5.The Little Foxes (1941) For powerful family conflict…a rapacious mother, Bette Davis, in one of her most powerful roles, stands by, pills in hand, cold-eyed, unmoving as her husband dies of a heart attack. For that scene alone, the film is a classic must.  The little foxes and their sharp teeth eat the tender grapes of the human vine. A period piece, post-Civil War. Cruel brothers and a weak-brained son try to cheat their way into money at the detriment of the ethical brother-in-law. Just watch their sister standing by, eyes frozen in conflict, the devil wins and she lets him die. It’s tragic in the Greek sense.  Evil gets its just rewards.

6. Night of the Iguana (1964) A not defrocked but locked-out priest (Richard Burton) makes a life escorting religious tours to Mexico, and he comes to the end of the line when a teen tease makes a move toward him and the straight-laced tour leader gets him fired. Major symbol: an iguana tied by a rope to a railing. It and he are at the end of their rope. But the character most appealing to me is Deborah Kerr, a spinster travelling with her ancient grandfather, paying their way by her sketches of tourists.  Burton has a breakdown; the spinster and the sexy owner of this run-down Mexican resort tie him up in a hammock. He and the spinster talk about his sexual misadventures, and he asks her, sarcastically, if she’s ever had a sexual experience. Her answer?  Won’t tell you. Watch it.  To me, it was an important expression of tolerance of sexual differences; and the death of the grandfather is a must-see scene.

7. Now, Voyager (1942) I’ve written about this one before--not that it’s a classic in league with Waterfront or Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but I was in high school and wept all the way though this tear-inducing tale of deathless, unrequited love--she the dreary spinster now renewed into a handsome woman; he an architect with a lousy wife and an unhappy child. They fall into major love, but he, because of his responsibility, can’t ditch the lousy wife, so she will never marry but take care of his kid--two selfless lovers--and he demonstrates his passion by lighting two cigarettes and placing once between her lips. Don’t tell me soap opera. I’m crying my 16-year-old tears already.

8.. The African Queen (1951) To me, Humphrey Bogart’s best film. A mismatched couple: a reprobate, unwashed drunk of a riverboat captain and a most proper, very religious spinster go down an African river in search of a German boat on a lake which they plan to blow up. Bogart has done rough-edged detectives, anti-heroes who, at the end, turn really heroic, but in this one, he is absolutely believable as the captain whose rough edges do not bruise this highly proper missionary’s sister who gradually sees the goodness under the roughness and, at the end, when they're about to be hanged…but no more spoilers. It’s inconceivable that you’ve never seen it, but if you are one of those, quick, get to your computer and order it.

9. Midnight Cowboy (1969) Dustin Hoffman has done so many interesting roles: the idiot-savant brother of Tom Cruise in Rain Man, the clueless kid in The Graduate, the spy’s brother in Marathon Man... Among the best is Ratso, the dying street hustler in Midnight Cowboy. Totally innocent Joe Buck (Jon Voight) comes in from the west to the big city and almost drowns until this hustler, this Ratso finds him, first steals from him, and ultimately teaches him to become a male hooker.  What’s beautiful about this film is that the tall, handsome Voight and the short, twisted, deformed Ratso form a bonded friendship. Voight is the loving and loyal friend who cares for Ratso and shields him from humiliation, even after death. Very few films show lovingkindness and a true sense of brotherhood like Midnight Cowboy.

10. The Quiet Man (1952) One of John Wayne’s true best. A boxer who has accidently killed a man in the ring runs away to his ancestral home in Ireland and falls in love with the beautiful sister of an implacable, tough headed misery of a brother. If you want to study classics, the brother is one classic actor who has a history: Victor McLaglen, a character familiar at his period. Their fight over the hills and dells and into and out of bars is one of a kind.  Fighter and Irish wife have fallen out over her desire to get her dowry out of the miser of a brother, and the dowry recovery scene…you’d better see that one.

Other films I have loved, also my “bests”: Fanny and Alexander's texture and color and scary fantasy and sense of the joy of life…unmatched. Hobson’s Choice--best husbands are not born but made. The 39 Steps: the original please--not the TV remake which hurt my heart--for good clean and good-spirited mystery.

Movies have been a joy and my friends and teachers for almost eighty years. And now, with Roku and a comfy king-sized bed and a good dinner on a tray…what a nice way to spend old age. But on the other hand, who’s old? I still have places to go, things to see, and new movies (not too edgy, not too much violence) to watch. I had advised one of my daughters-in-law that, when I got old and senile, she should send me out on an ice flow. Freezing, I understand, is a painless way to go. Not at all, she said. When you get senile and have forgotten everyone, I’ll sit you down in front of the TV and you can watch all your best films (which you will have forgotten) and see them as if for the first time. Not a bad way to go.