Heart ruled by head
Patrick Boyle
A CENTURY OF FILMS — PERSONAL BEST by Derek Malcolm L B. Tauris, £9.99, pp. 184 Film critics and enthusiasts of the cinema love making lists: the Ten Best Films of the Year, the Best of the Decade, the Best of All Time. As a game, we all indulge in it, but when you're asked to compile a list for publication, spontaneity and honesty go out of the window and self-consciousness takes over. Clearly your list will say more about you than the merits of the films you choose, so you must consider the image you want to give yourself. Well-read and intellectual? Lovably unpretentious and middlebrow? Youthful and hip? Or a mixture of all three? If you want to be taken as a serious authority on the cinema, you will have to include several silent films and a number of unknown ones from third-world countries to demonstrate the range of your film experience. The middlebrow selection will be the same as Barry Norman's and include old favourites like Casablanca, Some Like It Hot and The Third Man. But to show you're in touch with modern youth, you must go for the special effects and choose at least two films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Derek Malcolm has brought out a very self-conscious list. As you would expect from a 30-year critic of the Guardian, his choice tends towards the highbrow with some concessions to middlebrows (Brief Encounter, for instance and yes, The Third Man is there) but nothing but contempt for modern Hollywood and youth culture. In fact, he selects only two American films of the last 20 years — Blue Velvet and, more surprisingly, Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose. He has clearly been greatly influenced by film fashions of the Sixties. In those days, we were caught up in the `auteuf school of film criticism, we admired the French New Wave and Italian directors like Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni and Olmi: Japanese cinema, particularly Kurosawa, was highly regarded and Les Enfants du Paradis seemed to he playing forever at the Academy in Oxford Street.
The book's title implies that we are going to learn about Derek Malcolm's favourite films, but it soon becomes apparent that that's not what we get. A dozen or so of the
chosen 100 are probably cherished favourites, but the majority seem to have been selected to give balance and variety to the whole and to demonstrate Malcolm's range of cinema experience. For instance, he has quite unnecessarily decided to limit his choice to one film per director. Thus his adherence to the 'auteur' principle ensures that we have one Hawks, one Hitchcock, one Ray, one Mann etc as well as Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, so beloved of Cahiers du Cinema. This self-imposed discipline, however, does have the advantage of allowing him to leave out Citizen Kane in favour of Touch of Evil, and La Regle du Jeu, preferring Boudu Saved from Drowning — an ingenious way of omitting two films that have been in every other critic's Top Ten for the last 40 years.
Malcolm also admits to trying to find room for the works of talented foreign directors whose films have been little seen in Britain 'to give readers an idea of what cinema can do'. This has resulted in the inclusion of little known films from Cuba, Taiwan, the Philippines and Senegal, as well as more celebrated ones from Eastern Europe and Japan. (Mysteriously, though, there is nothing from Ingmar Bergman, in spite of his being frequently mentioned in descriptions of other people's films. Since Bergman is one of the ten greatest filmmakers of last century, I can only assume this was an oversight.)
He tends to favour films that are either directly or indirectly political in content, regardless of political bias. Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation have a place, as well as Spirit of the Beehive and W. R Mysteries of the Organism. For some reason, he is particularly impressed by those that have had censorship trouble or upset the Establishment. Freaks, Last Tango in Paris and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp arc chosen largely for that reason, and Viridiana is selected from Bunuel's work because it caused 'the maximum annoyance to people one is glad to see offended'.
Sometimes his reason for including a particular film is unconvincing. For instance, as an example of the Hollywood musical, he chooses Band Wagon in preference to, say, Singing in the Rain or Seven Brides or On the Town on the grounds that 1) it starred Fred Astaire, 2) it was produced by Arthur Freed and 3) it was directed by Vincente Minelli, a director popular among devotees of the `auteue theory, whose work would otherwise have been unrepresented in the book. If, as I suspect, Malcolm is not particularly fond of musicals, why does he feel it necessary to include one at all?
Occasionally, within his exposition of a chosen movie, Malcolm describes a person al meeting or interview with its director with phrases such as 'Once, after I had dinner with Satyajit Ray at his Calcutta home...' or "It's dangerous," the great Polish director, Andrzej Wajda once said to me...,' leaving you with the sneaking suspicion that a film made by a director of his acquaintance has had a better chance of being on the list than those of outsiders.
After each of Malcolm's chosen 100 titles, he writes two pages of text explaining, sometimes rather defensively, why he made that particular choice. In most cases, he tells us something about the director's other work, gives a résumé of the plot and adds historical or anecdotal information about the making of the film. With few exceptions, the review is a clinical assessment with no real passion. Each seems to have been analysed on to the list, rather than crying out to be given a place. You feel he admires films rather than enjoys them. When praising those I too would put on my list — Paths of Glory, Apocalypse Now, The Battle of Algiers, Double Indemnity, for instance, and, yes, I admit to The Third Man — he seems unable to communicate what made them, for me anyway, so exciting or moving or memorable. Even among his selection of anarchic comedies, Oh Mr Porter, A Night at the Opera and Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert, you feel he is counting the jokes rather than having a good time.
In only one of his reviews does he hint at how much better this book might have been. Citing Rio Bravo as his favourite Hawks film, he says:
If I had my way. there would be half a dozen westerns tucked away inside my 100 favourite movies, since it's my contention that almost everything the American cinema has to say has been said within this genre. And if I allowed my heart to rule my head, there would be half a dozen Howard Hawks movies in there too.
This is by far the most revealing and potentially interesting paragraph in the whole 180 pages. Why, for goodness' sake, didn't he let his heart rule his head? What was stopping him?
Although I cannot see Malcolm's book making many converts, it is not without interest to us list-makers. Within it are some truly eccentric choices. Witchfinder General? Good, but surely not one of the hundred best of all time! And who would choose Monsieur Verdowc as Chaplin's finest or Fat City (fine though it is) as Houston's masterpiece? And surely we all agree that Paul Morissey's Trash was just that. But his bravest and most surprising choice is Behind the Green Door, an example of an out-and-out hardcore porn movie, almost as famous in New York in the early Seventies as Deep Throat, It is, as Malcolm says, imaginative, artistic and erotic and includes a famous scene in which male sperm is launched from a penis in slow motion. I would never have dared include that on my list.
Previous page
