The joy of making lists - of the ten greatest cities to live in, the fifty finest films, the hundred best novels, the thousand works of art to see before you die - continues unabated. It’s best savoured, however, without the competitive element that almost invariably creeps into the final choices. If you are listing the finest films, why does one film - traditionally Citizen Kane, though more recently this seems to have been displaced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo - have to be superior to all the others? It’s just like calling Beethoven the best composer, or Van Gogh the greatest artist, and it gets you nowhere except for showing how narrow your mind is.
Just recently, and purely for personal entertainment value, I have been sharing a spot of list-making with my eldest daughter’s father-in-law. We’ve concentrated on films because we are both film buffs, and films are something we all like to think we know about. But we have avoided placing any film at the head of the list, other than alphabetically. To start with we thought big, compiling rather rambling lists of a hundred films, which extended with ease to 150. We tended to use words such as “favourite” rather than “finest,” though even favourite, of course, carries implications of quality.
Nevertheless a favourite film can be a bad film which you happen to love - one of my own favourite bad films being Beat the Devil, John Huston’s gloriously self-indulgent 1954 comedy featuring Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Jennifer Jones, Edward Underdown, Ivor Barnard and others. It’s certainly not a great film. Why, then, do I adore almost every moment of it and have been able to quote for more than half a century some of the niceties of Truman Capote’s dialogue?
The answer is that the film has stuck ineradicably in my memory and when I recently came upon a DVD of it, I bought it instantly and - because for me it has not faded - have been revelling in it all over again. So perhaps a list of remembered films, or perhaps what EM Forster might have called good bad films, saying why they are memorable, could be more revealing than one more list of the finest.
Whittling down and sub-dividng a list can be another way of beating it into shape. At the risk of being defeated by our lists of 150 films, Hamish - Susie’s father-in-law - and I have been toying with lists of as few as ten, divided into comedies, thrillers, dramas, westerns worth seeing. The overlaps, where they occur, have interested us, though the divergences are perhaps no less arresting .
At any rate, the comedies common to both our lists include M. Hulot’s Holiday, The Ladykillers, Whisky Galore, Sons of the Desert, The Cat and the Canary, Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and A Night at the Opera, in no particular order and most of them now (like ourselves) pretty old. Next will come thrillers, though we have yet to decide what films would count as eligible. Watch this space.
27 June 2014
Nothing beats Cinema Paradiso for me.
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