Five Films I (Still) Watch Every Year
Everyone has their own list of films that influence them or that they learned from. I don’t know how many films you can watch over and over and see something new or spot something you never noticed before.
This is my list of five films I watch every year because I learn something new every time.
These films are rich in content and reflect a style in their acting, art direction, cinematography, costuming and sound.
Fritz Lang’s M is one of the creepiest films of all time. I show it in class every year. Peter Lorre is perfectly cast as the child murderer, which was quite a daring choice at the time. We know Peter Lorre from later films, he sounds funny and looks odd but at the time he was one of Germany’s leading comedic actors. He always said this film ruined his career because he was so believable.
This was the first film Lang did with sound and he uses it amazingly. The killer whistles “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg and it’s the only piece of music in the film. (Think about The Jazz Singer released a few years earlier, music plays a much bigger part in the film.) Lang keeps M very spare as far as sound.
Lang was influenced by German Expresionism and he uses it to great effect in his lighting with lots of shadows. His shots are composed with an eye towards architecture, design, and geometric angles. Look at the montage when the police are looking for clues in the park area and see how the park itself has hard lines separating the bushes from the sidewalks. His police use a crime lab to go through clues, pre-dating all of those CSI shows by sixty or seventy years.
The film seems slow today but if you take your time watching it and see what’s going on within the frame it’s a great watch. It seems that EVERYONE SMOKES in the film. It feels like there is a cloud of smoke over everything.
In my mind Lang was way ahead of his time.
Touch Of Evil – Yes, we have to look beyond Charlton Heston playing a Mexican detective, but without Heston, Welles doesn’t get hired to direct. The scenes with the hoodlums doing drugs at the motel is also forgettable. But...
We all know the famous opening shot that goes on forever and sets up the movie. Since this film was made in 1960 and shot in 35mm I still marvel at how they were able to do that opening considering both the weight and the bulk of the equipment.
Another scene that is just as amazing to me is when they find the dynamite in the apartment. That scene is also a long single take and the camera is incredibly active going from room to room and back again tracking the action. I have been told that grips were literally moving set walls so that the camera could move uninterrupted.
The lighting is very moody. Orson Welles is always lit from below to give him a more hideous feel. He was a big man, but in this film he padded himself to look even fatter and he’s constantly sweating. Marlene Dietrich is wonderful, she looks so tired and world weary. Study all of the actors and see how they’re dressed, how they act and look at the sets.
When Walter Murch and Rick Schmidlin restored the film based on a fifty-eight-page memo from Orson Welles they re-did the sound to more closely match Welles original intentions. I have seen both versions. To me, the original version was amazing, and the restored version is even more amazing.
Even a low budget quickie in Orson Welles hands is phenomenal.
Amadeus is one of those films where people say, “I don’t like that kind of music but I really loved that film.”
I love Tom Hulce’s performance as Mozart. It was unexpected to me and that’s what I like about it. To me the performance shows Mozart as someone who is ahead of his time, or perhaps not in sync with the time that he lived.
I find the editing and sound seamless. Pre-lapped sound leads us in to the next scene quite often. The post crew worked on this film for a long time and it shows. They would edit and mix a scene then take it into a theater, screen it, take notes, tear it a part and work to make it better.
A lot of time and care was put into this film and it shows. Watch it a couple times and you’ll see what I mean.
John Cassavetes film, A Woman Under The Influence,is an acting tour-de-force. Watching Gena Rowlands trying to maintain her sanity and Peter Falk trying to keep the family together is a train wreck that you can’t look away from. At the end of the film you’re exhausted.
There are many times you wish that Cassavetes would cut away during a scene but he doesn’t and that’s the point. He makes watching this film difficult and when I show it to students they either love or hate it. Some think it’s too long but they always understand why it’s long. It makes them uncomfortable and that’s the point.
Cassavetes says that “the camera serves the actor” and in this film it certainly does. No pretty angles or beautiful lighting, just hand held grittiness that feels right.
Then there is Sergio Leone’s, Once Upon A Time in the West. I love it for its grittiness. I think it’s beautifully shot and when Leone wants a close-up you get a close up.
Anytime you have Henry Fonda as the bad guy (he is amazing) and Jason Robards and Charles Bronson as the less bad guys you’re in for a treat.
The sound and the visuals work so well together in this film. I love the sound effects and the musical score is right on the money. Leone is an original and his vision was never truer than in this film. There is so much to see, from camera angles to lighting to art direction and editing and sound. I always get so much out of this film.
So there you have it. Five films I watch every year. And yes, someone borrowed my copy of A Woman Under The Influence and I need to get it back.
I believe that studying these films has made me a better filmmaker.
What films do you watch every year?
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