During the late 1910s, Erich von Stroheim was known to film audiences as “The Man You Love to Hate,” thanks to a string of performances as Germanic villain stereotypes in films like The Hun Within (1918). By 1919, though, von Stroheim (who had worked briefly for D.W. Griffith) had started to write and direct the films in which he appeared. His first film, Blind Husbands, demonstrated the skillful editing and careful attention to detail that von Stroheim had learned from Griffith. It also revealed von Stroheim as a relentless perfectionist who stubbornly insisted on bringing his unique artistic vision to the screen. Along with his unsparing themes of sexual and physical degradation, this uncompromising attitude made von Stroheim the man studio executives loved to hate—and nobody hated von Stroheim more than Irving Thalberg. As a production assistant at Universal, Thalberg had fired von Stroheim from Merry-Go-Round (1922). But Thalberg’s master stroke was still to come. In 1924, when the Goldwyn Company merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions to form MGM, Thalberg became von Stroheim’s boss just as von Stroheim was putting the finishing touches on his fifth film, a nine-hour epic that he had carefully whittled down to a five-hour, two-part masterpiece. Thalberg took the film away from von Stroheim and handed it to editors who had read neither the script nor the novel it was based on. The release version, at just over two hours, is all that remains of von Stroheim’s vision—a series of glimpses of what might have been the greatest film ever made.

“Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end
it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and ugliness.”
- André Bazin, describing von Stroheim’s approach to directing

There are no heroes in Greed. No paragons of virtue, no incorruptible icons of goodness, and certainly none of the gun-toting superhumans that plague Hollywood films today. There are only people, tragically real characters who let their own flawed natures strip away their humanity. Based on Frank Norris’s bleakly naturalistic novel, the film depicts the various effects of the titular deadly sin on three people—a simple man, his wife, and her cousin/ex-boyfriend—after one of them wins a lottery.

John “Mac” McTeague (Gibson Gowland), the closest thing to a hero in the film, is a giant of a man with the curly blond hair of a boy, a man-child capable of extremes of both tenderness and violence. When he finds a wounded bird lying on the tracks at the mine where he works, he gently takes it in his massive hand and kisses it. A moment later, after another man slaps the bird from McTeague’s hand, he lifts the man overhead and heaves him down the steep side of the track. Urged by his father to succeed in life, McTeague learns the practice of dentistry from a traveling dentist and sets up shop in San Francisco, where he befriends veterinarian Marcus Schouler. One day, Marcus brings his sweetheart and cousin, Trina Sieppe (Zasu Pitts), into Mac’s office for some dental work, and Mac is immediately smitten. (The scene in which Mac struggles against his urge to kiss her while she’s unconscious, then gives in to it, foreshadows the lack of self-mastery all three characters will display). After Marcus gallantly steps aside so Mac can woo Trina, the pair are married. The wedding is one of the film’s most famous and memorable scenes. In a high-angle deep focus shot, we see a funeral procession through the window of the house where Mac and Trina are exchanging vows—a powerful image that manages to be funny and foreboding at the same time.

Things begin to go sour after Trina wins five thousand dollars in a lottery. Instead of guaranteeing her happiness with her husband, the sudden windfall makes her so miserly that she steals money from Mac’s jacket while he’s sleeping, and buys three-day-old meat from the butcher. Meanwhile, Marcus becomes envious of Mac—not for marrying Trina, but for cashing in because of her. After a drunken altercation between them in a bar, Marcus leaves town to seek his fortune elsewhere—but not before betraying his onetime friend. A short while later, Mac’s dental practice is shut down by lawyers because he lacks the necessary licence. Jobless and shiftless, Mac turns to booze while his wife grows increasingly obsessed with her still-untapped fortune. Their problems swiftly escalate to madness and murder, leading to a final confrontation between Mac and Marcus in the glaring sun of Death Valley—a confrontation that can have no winner.

Despite cuts that cripple the film narratively and thematically (including the loss of two parallel narratives involving other couples whose experiences bookend the central disintegration of Mac and Trina’s marriage), Greed retains images that hint at the scope and intensity of Erich von Stroheim’s original conception. In keeping with his realist principles, the director shot the film on location in an era when studio filming was the norm. Thanks to the brilliant cinematography of Ben F. Reynolds and William H. Daniels, the locations take on an expressionistic life of their own, from the off-kilter streets of San Francisco to a Death Valley as white as sun-bleached bone. (Jean Herscholt, the actor who plays Marcus, sports a noticeable suntan in the Death Valley sequence; he was reportedly hospitalized after days of shooting in the summer heat.) Other expressionistic touches, like a shot of distended arms grasping at riches, are strange but memorable remnants of lengthy subjective dream-sequences that never survived the studio hack job. But there are some images—Mac pausing on his way downstairs while Trina glares at him from the upper landing; Trina sleeping on bedsheets strewn with her gold, Mac kissing and releasing the bird he has kept in a cage throughout the film; and the final, devastating long shot of Mac and Marcus in the desert—that emerge from the ruin of von Stroheim’s painstaking effort with their emotional force fully intact. Like fragments of a half-forgotten dream, they leave us wanting to remember what the whole dream was like, and sad that we never will.

Von Stroheim’s subsequent films continued to be cut, reshot, and hampered by studio interference. He was fired by producer Gloria Swanson halfway through Queen Kelly (1928), and never completed his last film, Walking Down Broadway (it was retooled and retitled by others to become 1933’s Hello, Sister!). Not surprisingly, he stopped directing films and concentrated once again on acting. Until his death in 1957, he appeared in a large number of films, mainly in Europe. Jean Renoir, who claimed von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives was the reason he became a filmmaker, cast him as Captain von Rauffenstein in La Grande Illusion (1937). His final Hollywood appearance, as director-turned-chauffeur Max in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), was ironically his most famous role. His example stands as a pointed reminder that the uneasy alliance between art and commerce has always typified Hollywood.

Few directors in the history of film have had so much influence based on so little output as the French pioneer Jean Vigo. Born in 1905 to militant anarchist parents, Vigo lost his father early in life and spent much of his youth in hospitals and boarding schools. After attending the Sorbonne, he began work in the growing film industry and eventually bought a camera of his own. This led to his first two projects, the short films À propos de Nice (1930) and Taris, champion de natation (1931). In both films, Vigo imprinted an innovative and original style on ordinary subject matter. In 1933, he wrote and directed Zéro de Conduite, a scathing semi-memoir about a revolt at a French boarding school. The film was banned in France, and Vigo was accused of being “anti-French.” A year later, he completed his first feature-length film, but the Gaumont studio recut it without his advice or consent. Jean Vigo died just two weeks later, at the age of 29.

Of L’Atalante, Pauline Kael said that “in some ways it’s more pleasurable in the memory than while you’re seeing it.” She’s right, but that’s as it should be. The film is like an old love affair—you have to experience all the mood swings before you’re allowed to have the fond reminiscences. It’s a strange, surreal romance set in the unlikeliest of places, but full of all the humor, jealousy, erotic tension, and passion of any great love affair.

The film begins as newlyweds Jean (Jean Dasté) and Juliette (the luminous Dita Parlo), fresh from their wedding, stride purposefully down to his river barge, L’Atalante. There they bid adieu to her small village and Juliette is introduced to the barger’s life. The amorous couple are happy in each other’s company as they cruise the Seine, but the ingenuous Juliette desperately wants to see the sights of Paris. Jean makes promises, but his obligations as captain leave little time for shore leave.

During a short visit to the city, Juliette is charmed by a street peddler (Gilles Margaritis), arousing Jean’s jealous nature. (The scene is a hilarious counterplay between the roguish fellow’s acrobatic, antic come-ons to Juliette and Jean’s frowning disapproval.) Her growing affection for old Père Jules (Michel Simone), the barge’s salty, cat-loving first mate, only makes things worse. When she sneaks out for a night on the town, Jean sets sail without her.

Their separation gives Vigo a chance to put together a brilliant montage that alternates between the two lovers. While Juliette tries to find work and shies away from strange men, Jean spends hours looking out at the river and brooding. At night, as they lie dreaming in different beds, they reach out to caress and kiss each other, their need as urgent as any waking desire. Vigo gives their love an almost mythical intensity, a seemingly predestined inevitability; when Père Jules finally finds Juliette in Le Havre and reunites her with Jean, it feels less like coincidence than fate. Isn’t that the best way to remember an old love affair?

Ironically, Jean Vigo’s “anti-French” work was a source of technical and artistic inspiration for several of the New Wave directors whose films would come to define the French cinema. In 1990, L’Atalante was restored to Vigo’s original conception, reaffirming his critical reputation and considerable influence.

By the late 60’s, Peter Bogdanovich was already well on the way to becoming a first-rate film scholar. He had long been obsessed with movies, and he was publishing criticism and essays in major magazines. One of his biggest influences was the work of French critics and directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, the leading proponents of what came to be called the auteur theory. It wasn’t long before he was taking a stab at being an auteur himself; in 1968, he produced, wrote, directed, edited, and acted in a movie called Targets. Three years later, with his big-budget debut, he would emerge as one of the leading lights of Hollywood’s own New Wave, but the film remains the masterpiece he has never topped.

Based on post-Western specialist Larry McMurtry’s novel, The Last Picture Show is an elegiac look at the inextricably connected nature of relationships in small-town America. Set in the all-too-brief interval between WWII and the Korean War, the film chronicles the lives and loves of the residents of the tiny, windblown town of Anarene, Texas (a very close relative of McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, which served as the filming location.) Bled nearly dry of her youth by the better prospects in nearly Wichita Falls and by army recruitment, Anarene is slowly becoming the sort of one-horse, church-and-gas-station burg people go through to get somewhere else. It’s a place where Hank Williams on the radio is as inescapable as the constant dusty wind. The teenagers too young to leave amuse themselves by taking in John Wayne movies at the town’s only theater, or grabbing a burger and Coke at the diner. Both establishments are owned by an old man nicknamed Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), who acts as a wise mentor to the kids who frequent his businesses. Two such young people are Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges), best friends for as long as either can remember. Duane is going steady with beautiful Jacy Farrow (a gloriously young Cybill Shepherd in her first film appearance), a fact that Sonny, who is less boisterous and cocky than his buddy, can only accept with envy. A favor for his football coach leads Sonny into an affair with the coach’s lonely wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman), while the callow Jacy’s realization of her potent effect on men puts her on the same path as her loose mother (Ellen Burstyn). For each emotional crisis suffered by the younger generation, the older one has a piece of sage advice ready at hand, but when Sam the Lion dies, it signals the end of an era for all of them.

If The Last Picture Show is a coming-of-age film, then the term applies as much to America as it does to the characters. With the tumultuous Sixties to give them perspective, Bogdanovich and McMurtry are eulogizing the lost innocence of more than just Sonny, Duane, and Jacy. Places like Anarene can keep it down for a while, but change will always come, sweeping aside old values and mores like grit off a boardwalk. Like poor, simple Billy at the end of the movie, the pastoral tranquility of small-town life itself is a victim of progress.

The Last Picture Show is, above all, a masterpiece of storytelling. Shot in wonderfully rich black and white by the great cinematographer Robert Surtees, the film purposely evokes the period it describes. Like so many classics, it has the authentic feel of autobiography; in this case, McMurtry’s fond familiarity with his beloved town and the sort of people who live there. Even relatively minor characters such as the knowing waitress Genevieve (Eileen Brennan) are fleshed out with concise scenes that speak volumes. As bleak and forlorn as Anarene is, it almost feels like home. Like Sonny and Duane in the theater when the last picture show is over, you won’t want to leave.

The Last Picture Show was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. It won for Best Supporting Actor (Ben Johnson) and Best Supporting Actress (Cloris Leachman). It is still considered to be Peter Bogdanovich’s finest work to date. In 1990, he directed Texasville, an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s sequel.

Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s obsession with life’s unfathomable questions began at an early age. The son of a strict pastor, Bergman developed the love/hate relationship with God that would eventually define his life and career. Combining his crisis of faith with his towering talent as a writer and director, he has forged a body of work as profound as it is prolific. His films are distinguished by an astonishing beauty that coexists with intense and unflinching emotional honesty. In 1957, Bergman took a passage from the Book of Revelation and a story about a particularly high-stakes chess game and turned them into one of the most unforgettable films of all time.

The Seventh Seal is the film Dostoevsky might have penned if he’d been a screenwriter. In its allegorical depiction of man’s search for truth and meaning, its questioning of God’s existence, and its stark portrayal of death, Ingmar Bergman’s early masterpiece may be the most deeply challenging film ever made.

Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is a knight who has returned home from the Crusades, only to find that Death (Bengt Ekerot) has come for him. Unsatisfied at having wasted his life in the service of his holy mission, Block challenges Death to a chess game in hopes of gaining time—and perhaps knowledge of God’s ultimate purpose. Accompanied by his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand, providing the existential realist foil to von Sydow’s idealistic innocence), Block finds his homeland plague-ravaged and fear-stricken. In the wake of the Black Death, his countrymen have fallen prey to cowardice and superstition; sects of self-flagellating, cross-dragging fanatics march shrieking through the streets, and young women are burned at the stake for witchcraft. En route to his castle and wife, Block meets a couple of actors travelling with their infant son, while Jöns finds companions in a female “housekeeper” and a loutish blacksmith whose wife has run off with the actors’ colleague. Throughout their journey, Block and Death continue the game, with the fate of the whole group hanging in the balance.

As if the chess symbolism weren’t enough, cinematographer Gunnar Fischer provides Bergman with plenty of other potent black-and-white images: dark forests, foreboding thunderclouds, and especially the implacable white-faced visage of Death (Ekerot’s black-robed figure remains the screen’s most indelible Grim Reaper). Some of them—notably scenes involving a young witch and a parched plague victim—sear themselves into the mind and leave feelings of unease that linger long after Erik Nordgren’s ominous score has faded.

Indeed, Bergman’s medieval tableaus look more like Hell than the work of a benevolent and compassionate God. In essence, he asks the question every child wonders when introduced to the concept of the Almighty: How can God let bad things happen when He’s supposed to love us? What makes The Seventh Seal so provocative is that Bergman refuses to allow the standard shoulder-shrugging, leave-it-to-Jesus answer. Like Block, he can’t just let the issue go, even as he recognizes the inevitability of his own death. Yet by the film’s perfect, ambiguous ending, Block finds a kind of redemption and acceptance, and Bergman comes as close in his own quest for truth as any filmmaker has ever done.

Although The Seventh Seal is Bergman’s best-known film, he has directed almost fifty features, establishing himself among the world’s great filmmakers. His influence can be found in everything from Woody Allen movies to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. He has earned five Oscar nominations as screenwriter and three as director, and three of his films have won for Best Foreign Language Film. Although his last feature directorial effort was Fanny and Alexander (1982), he continues to write for both film and television, and to direct for the Swedish theatre. His most recent screenplay, Faithless, was directed in 2000 by his longtime collaborator and companion Liv Ullmann.

Fresh from his success with such films as M.A.S.H. and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, director Robert Altman was one of a number of remarkably talented directors gaining attention in the early ’70s. In 1975, he unveiled the film that would become his undisputed masterpiece. With its huge ensemble cast of twenty-four actors, natural-sounding overlapped dialogue, intricately interwoven plot threads, and brief but pointed cameos, it was a potent allegorical collage that came to define Altman’s unique style.

Nashville is about a bunch of people who come together in the titular city over the Bicentennial long weekend for a concert and political rally. Some are famous country stars; others want to be. Some reflect the deep-seated conservatism of the South; others dress and act with a free-spirited looseness more characteristic of the hippie counterculture. One is a clueless, pretentious BBC documentarist trying to capture America with her intrusive microphone and tape recorder. Together, they’re a microcosm of a nation at a cultural and political crossroads—a nation of desperate, lonely masses still mourning the promise that died with the Kennedys, in the midst of sexual and racial revolution, and facing a future of empty slogans and mindless celebrity worship (both of which are satirized to great effect in the film’s opening-credits sequence).

Many of the country-singer characters are thinly disguised versions of real-life stars, from Loretta Lynn-like Barbara Jean (played by actual singer Ronee Blakely) to folk-rock trio Tom, Bill, and Mary. This gives the film an added layer of roman a clef realism, punctuated by a couple of cameos from Eliott Gould and Julie Christie, among others. With such a multitude of accurately drawn characters, Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury bring so many aspects of mid-70’s American life under their cynical scrutiny that the film demands multiple viewings.

What better place than Opryland, the mecca of down-home family-values music, to weave such a richly symbolic tapestry? The city of Nashville itself, with its odd mixture of ancient Greece and the barnyard, of rhinestone-cowboy allure and redneck showbiz tawdriness, is no less important a character than any of the two dozen others whose fates suddenly and shockingly converge at the Parthenon in the film’s unforgettable climax. When Henry Gibson’s traditionalist singer Haven Hamilton, his face a blank slate of disbelief, says “This isn’t Dallas. It’s Nashville,” it’s at once heartbreaking and hilarious. What happens next, though, is the perfect ending to a film that has only grown more trenchant and prophetic in hindsight.

Many of the cast wrote and performed their own songs in the film; Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” won the Oscar for Best Song. Nashville received nominations in three other categories (including two Best Supporting Actress nominations for Lily Tomlin and Ronee Blakely), but lost both Best Picture and Director to Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Robert Altman’s subsequent career has been hot and cold, with misfires like Popeye (1980) and Ready To Wear (1994) balanced by films such as The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). Though none have equalled Nashville’s narrative brilliance or thematic significance, the adjective “Altman-esque” has become critical shorthand for films with multi-threaded plots and numerous major characters.

The early career of Orson Welles was prodigious in every sense of the word. By his twentieth birthday, he was acting on stage and in radio productions like The Shadow. In 1937, he founded the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman; a year later, the company broadcast an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as a Halloween prank. The broadcast caused a sensation when thousands of listeners were convinced that a Martian invasion was actually underway. Welles was subsequently lured to Hollywood after RKO Radio Pictures promised him creative control over his first feature. In 1941, at the age of 25, he produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in what is widely considered to be the greatest film ever made.

“For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul?”
(Matthew 16:26)

Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ spellbinding dark fable of one man’s rise and fall, begins with one of the most famous sequences in movie history, proceeds through a consummately assured and brilliantly realized nonlinear narrative, and concludes with an unforgettable gut-punch of a twist ending. Six decades later, the echoes of its innovative storytelling and cinematography are still being seen.

The film opens as the camera approaches an opulent but foreboding palace. Inside, an old man lies alone in a darkened bedroom. He utters one last word—”Rosebud”—before dying. A snow globe falls from his hand to the floor, shattering the idyllic winter scene within. So ends the life of Charles Foster Kane, newspaper tycoon and American icon. Hoping to spice up an obituary newsreel with the meaning of Kane’s last word, a journalist interviews the great man’s second wife and several of his associates, who reveal much about Kane but nothing about the mysterious Rosebud. The reporter leaves Kane’s mansion empty-handed, but Rosebud is finally revealed as the film ends.

Welles’ genius as both actor and director elevates Charles Foster Kane to a tragic figure of Shakespearean proportions, a man whose relentless pursuit of power, influence, and material objects corrupts his youthful idealism and leads to his downfall. Adopted at an early age by a callous banker, Kane has learned how to be greedy and manipulative, but not how to love or be loved. The vast emptiness of his palatial mansion is a physical manifestation of the ego that further alienates him from the world. He collects countless art treasures, but hoards them in his castle without even looking at them. As the film’s ironic title makes clear, he’s the personification of America’s most deeply held values—capitalism and imperialism. (Luckily for Welles, Joseph McCarthy was just a circuit judge when Citizen Kane was released.)

Much has been made of the fictional Kane’s close resemblance to real-life newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, but Orson Welles’ own preoccupations come through as well. Kane’s seemingly predestined fate and lonely-at-the-top isolation reflect the director’s fascination with the Bard’s favorite themes; in the same way, likening Kane to Kublai Khan is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium-dream ode to the double-edged nature of greatness, a theme Welles must surely have appreciated.

Aside from its boldness and depth of characterization, the film is remarkable for the groundbreaking methods used to reveal all the facets of Kane’s personality. The combination of Welles’ vision and the inventive expressionism of Gregg Toland’s cinematography results in deep-focus compositions that are like moving chiaroscuro masterpieces. Often—as in the final part of the celebrated “kitchen table” montage depicting the disintegration of Kane’s first marriage—it is only the postures of the actors and their position in the frame that tell the story. Equally impressive are the overlapping dialogue and extended flashbacks (seen through the eyes of different characters at different times) that shine light on Kane’s psyche from different angles, not to mention the revelation that ties everything together to end the film. The influence of these landmark techniques cannot be overstated, as generations of filmmakers have used them ever since.

Citizen Kane was greeted with critical acclaim but commercial indifference during its initial run. Less indifferent was William Randolph Hearst, who tried to undermine the film in his newspapers. Although it lost money for RKO Radio Pictures, it was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won for Best Original Screenplay. The following year, Orson Welles directed a similarly unsuccessful adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, causing his Hollywood fortunes to decline. Relocating to Europe in the late ’40s, he continued to act, direct, and develop numerous film projects, many of which never came to fruition. His late career featured various film and television roles, and his distinctive voice became a fixture in documentaries and commercials until his death in 1985. The reputation that was tarnished in his prime has been restored as his work has been rediscovered by critics, film scholars, and fans. He was honored with Lifetime Achievement awards by the American Film Institute (1975), Los Angeles Film Critics Association (1978), and Directors Guild of America (1984). In 1998, the AFI named Citizen Kane the greatest American film of all time.