Who doesn't love a list?
I devour the BFI Best Films of All Time list whenever they deem it necessary to revise and (invariably) disagree with most of the findings, but I still get a kick out of browsing. Same with Rolling Stone's inane Best 100 Albums (how does Sgt. Pepper drop from #1 to #24 in the latest incarnation?); the anger I feel subsides when I see they've put a couple of Aerosmith albums on the list! We all disagree with that number one but we keep right on scrolling through each choice.
This project, which has been percolating for quite a while, originated from the constant back and forth "good natured bickering" between John Scoleri and myself. John invariably loves everything and I hate it all (for more of the discourse, I advise one and all to pick up a copy of bare•bones print magazine and read our debates about streaming and movie theaters to get a taste). I began to think it would be fun to compose a Favorite (as opposed to Best) 100 and compare our selections. Making it even more tantalizing, I managed to talk the third head of Ghidorah, Jack Seabrook, into participating. This could be interesting, since John's never seen a movie the two Georges (Romero and Lucas) didn't have a hand in, and Jack usually favors the flicks that have words at the bottom of the screen (dis-moi que j'ai tort, Jack!). I, on the other hand, can't wait to educate these two gentlemen as to what constitutes good cinema.
Every Thursday, we'll count down our picks, two at a time. We're hoping this will generate discourse outside of our trio. Let us know just how crazy we are. This is going to be fun!—Peter
The Sting
(1973)
Starring: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw
Directed by: George Roy Hill
Henry Gondorff: Glad to meet you, kid. You're a real horse's ass.
Johnny Hooker: Luther said I could learn something from you. I already know how to drink.
In the 1970s, Newman and Redford were mega-stars, super novas that seemingly could not pick the wrong project, and that streak continued with The Sting. The boys had famously teamed up four years before for the smash Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, also directed by Hill. The Sting has a measured, slow pace that probably wouldn’t sit well with today’s filmgoers, but the time invested certainly pays off. We are privy to every step in the planning of the “Big Con.”
The entire cast, especially Newman as the veteran con, Henry, and Shaw as the mark, are unbeatable (the card game between the two is a brilliant seesaw between tension and comedy). Redford plays innocent and wide-eyed Johnny Hooker, cocky yet willing to learn. The pair’s best scene in the movie would have to be their initial meeting, where Hooker has reason to doubt the prowess of the drunk who sits in the bathtub before him. There are a couple of clever twists in the climax, both predictable if you pick up the clues, and the final shot leaves you wanting more time with these two con men. It’s a cliche, but they really don’t make them like this anymore. Alas, the pair would never work together again.
I caught up with this one late, I think in a viewing on HBO in the late 1970s. This would not have been the type of film I’d have run to the theater to catch. Well, not unless the titular event was delivered by a giant wasp.—Peter
Remarks from the Gallery
Jack: I saw this in the theater when it first came out and loved it. I've watched it several times since then. It's much higher on my list!
John: While it doesn't show up on my list, it's one I am fond of as well. I wouldn't mind catching it on the big screen; perhaps the Alamo Drafthouse will hook me up! I recall wanting everyone in my peer group to adopt the brushing my finger across our nose to be a secret sign, but I can't imagine any of them understood the reference.
Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford
Directed by: George Lucas
I saw Star Wars on its opening weekend in 1977 and immediately loved it. Prior to that, I had been hooked on Logan's Run, which came out the year before, but after seeing Star Wars, I forgot all about the earlier flick.
I had all the merch — the paperback (which I tried to read before the movie came out but couldn't get through), the original poster thumbtacked to my bedroom wall, the Super 8 version (3 minutes long?), the double issue of Cinefantastique, the soundtrack album — all of it.
Watching it again today, it doesn't quite hold the same magic. After a very slow start, it picks up, but there are still long stretches that are just people shooting ray guns at each other. You could go out for popcorn and miss nothing. Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing make the film work for me, and Harrison Ford is still great in it, but Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are so young. C3P0 and R2D2 reminded me of the Go Go Gophers!
I was struck by the constant music! The movie wouldn't work without it. The special effects, which were so amazing 49 years ago, seem dated now, but that's to be expected. I wasn't at all impressed with the direction or the pacing. Still, how could this not make the top 100?—Jack
Remarks from the Gallery
Peter: I remember waiting in line the day after it opened. Saturday morning about 11 at the Century in San Jose. I had seen the teaser promo book at one of the local bookstores and picked up the tie-in a month or so before the film opened. I was primed and I wasn't disappointed. That is, at the time, I wasn't. Now, fifty years later, it's still a good flick, but not my go-to Star Wars chapter. It's hard to put into words just how huge Star Wars was when it opened. I saw it three times in the first few months and waited in line every time (once, at a San Francisco theater, we waited all day). As good as it was, I always thought Close Encounters (which opened five months later) was infinitely better. Apples and oranges, though.
John: Once again, Jack picks a film I've never—waitaminute—I am familiar with this one. Perhaps I'll find more time to speak about it in the months ahead, given it's one of a handful of films I've seen at least 100 times in the last 50 years. I will say this—I didn't see it coming. I never saw a trailer for it (had the trailer above played with King Kong in December 1976, it definitely would have made an impression on 6-year-old me, even sans the John Williams score). Nope, my introduction came in early June when my best friend Mark showed me the photo section of the novelization (you know the one, the gold cover with John Berkey's art) and told me how great the movie was. From that point on, I couldn't see it soon enough. Our first trip out to the Century 22 on Winchester Blvd. was a bust, with lines snaking through the parking lot and nary a single place to park, so the family threw in the towel and went home. My mom took us back out a few hours later (I assume at my pleading), and we were able to get in, forever changing the life and trajectory of this particular moviegoer.
Starring: Robert DeNiro, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgard
Director: John Frankenheimer
Spence: You ever kill anybody?
Sam: I hurt somebody's feelings once.
John Frankenheimer made a lot of great movies, but this one is my favorite. I love DeNiro and Jean Reno's relationship, and Sean Bean is perfectly used based on audience expectations for his character. The film has a number of fantastic set pieces, not to mention an epic car chase to give Billy Friedkin a run for his money!—John
Remarks from the Gallery
Peter: Copycat.
Jack: The first movie to show up on two lists! What will be the first to be on all three lists? Hint: it won't be Ronin.
Starring: Les Tremayne, Don Sullivan, Jeanne Carmen
Directed by: Irvin Berwick
"I think we've found our killer"
The above snippet of dialogue is delivered by doctor/chemist Les Tremayne in a very sober tone after the titular rapscallion exits a meat locker holding the head of an unfortunate local. It also perfectly encapsulates why I love this dopey, high-energy, mini masterpiece. There's no rhyme or reason to anything that goes on in the 78 minutes it'll take for you to breeze through this rip-off of Creature from the Black Lagoon, but that only adds to the enjoyment. Where did this monster come from? Who cares? Why did Sturges the light-keeper feed this thing for so many years and did its yen for human blood begin only when its human buddy couldn't provide the usual ration of "meat scraps?" And why would this old man keep its existence a secret, especially when dealing with a daughter whose lust is reaching its peak? You got me. Again, I'll only throw up my hands and answer, "Because it makes for a more enjoyable thriller."
My first exposure to The Monster of Piedras Blancas, like a lot of the creature features I took in while a youngster, was a pic in the pages of Famous Monsters, that well-known still of the monster holding the severed head in his hands as if practicing his "Alas Yorick..." monologue. A severed head and lots of blood was something new to me; I just had to see what this thing was all about. It took a few years, but the flick finally showed up on one of the local Saturday afternoon double features and I caught it at my grandmother's house. I was probably about nine or ten and that meat locker scene did not disappoint. Luckily, my Nana wasn't in the room at the time or the TV likely would have gone dark and I would not have gloried in the thrilling climax set atop the lighthouse.
Again, only ten, but Jeanne Carmen made me wonder new things about life. Do girls really take all their clothes off at the beach? She was so cool I assumed she had a Partridge Family lunchbox just like me. Imagine the great conversations we could have over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.—Peter
Remarks from the Gallery
Jack: Your writeup makes me want to check this out. I've heard of it but never seen it.
John: I have Peter to thank for introducing me to this classic creature feature, which somehow eluded me in the televised Creature Features and Chiller Diller circles. While not the caliber of the resident of the Black Lagoon, our namesake offers up a better than average (i.e., Corman-budget) monster suit. I've been a fan ever since Pete sat me down to watch his VHS copy and have even stopped on the road to the (sadly inaccessible) Piedras Blancas lighthouse for a photo op while on a road trip to Southern California in my late teens.
Starring: Roger Moore, Barbara Bach
Directed by: Lewis Gilbert
When two ballistic missile submarines disappear, James Bond teams up with a beautiful Russian secret agent to get to the bottom of things. What 007 doesn't know is that the agent, code name XXX, has vowed revenge on the man who killed her lover--and that man is Bond!
I saw The Spy Who Loved Me in a packed house at Blue Star Cinema in Watchung, NJ, when I was 14, and it was a thrill. I still remember the audience bursting into applause at the end of the thrilling pre-credit sequence, as Bond skis off an impossibly high cliff and falls and falls and falls for what seems like forever until his parachute opens--and the parachute has a big British flag on it!
Rewatching it today, the movie holds up, even if I can see its inherent silliness. Barbara Bach still looks gorgeous, though her acting isn't quite as good as I remembered. The sets are fantastic, especially the scenes filmed by the Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx. This was the first appearance of Richard Kiel as Jaws, and he's great. Even Caroline Munro shows up—arguably even more attractive than Barbara Bach—before she's blown to bits in a helicopter.
The film as a whole is like a Best of Bond mashup. There's a character who looks like Oddjob. The Big Bad is a knockoff of Blofeld. Roger Moore spends the movie smirking and making corny quips; I think he actually had to act for about thirty seconds toward the end. But it all works. And the theme song, "Nobody Does It Better," has to be considered one of the best Bond themes. It gets stuck in my head and I can't get it out.
Finally, watching the movie today makes me think how of its time it was. The 1976 Olympics had been a huge hit the year before, with women's gymnastics taking over the culture, so of course the credit sequence has naked women in silhouette doing gymnastic routines with giant gun barrels instead of horses. And Richard Kiel's Jaws obviously follows the Spielberg smash. At the end of The Spy Who Loved Me, this Jaws actually falls into a shark tank and does away with a killer shark with his metallic teeth! Like I said, this movie is just plain fun. It's my favorite Roger Moore Bond movie.—Jack
Remarks from the Gallery
Peter: Even though I saw this at least five times in the Summer of '77 (at the Almaden Twin), I can't stand any of the Moore Bonds now that I'm grown up and know better. He has an inherent "safeness" to him. He's also too up his own arse throughout most of his appearances. I always got the impression that Moore couldn't be Bond because Bond needs to get his hands dirty now and then and Moore is always spic 'n' span. I'll agree that Carly Simon's tune is an all-timer (though my personal top Bond theme would have to be Wings's "Live and Let Die"). For me, there's a giant void between Connery's last (official) Bond, Diamonds are Forever, and Craig's first one. All the installments in between, to me, are unrewatchable.
John: My first exposure to James Bond was For Your Eyes Only, which might explain why I was never a Bond fan in my youth (and didn't really become one until Daniel Craig took on the mantle). That said—Caroline Munro! So The Spy Who Loved Me was one of the few Bond films I deliberately sought out. Of course the poor dubbing of Caroline's dialogue, and the fact that her appearance is ultimately just a glorified cameo role, ultimately didn't win me over to the franchise. But God bless still photographer Bob Penn for exposing seemingly more rolls of film on Caroline than any other Bond girl before or after! I treasure the dozens of photos in my collection from shoots that originated with this film!
Starring: Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart
Director: Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow
"December 1965. Is that all it has been since I inherited the world? Only three years. Seems like 100 million."
The first official adaptation of my favorite novel of all time, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. And while it fumbles some key aspects of the story (in particular, making the main character a classic sci-fi trope scientist, instead of the everyman of the novel, and the film being shot in Italy, which does not resemble the Southern California locales of the novel), it remains the most faithful feature adaptation of the novel to date (and likely the only one we'll ever get, Spanish student film Soy Leyenda notwithstanding, given that Warner Brothers controls the rights and seems dead set of any future adaptations being based on their own version: The Omega Man—More on that later).
A very entertaining movie about the dead (in this case, as with the novel, vampires) coming back to life in search of blood, and one man's pursuit to stay alive in this new world order. Price is often called out as being miscast, but I think the only real strike against him is audience familiarity. I think he does a decent job with the material he was given. And while Matheson's original screenplay adaptation of his novel has been published, it leads me to wonder if this version (credited to his pseudonym Logan Swanson and William F. Leicester) is actually based on a subsequent draft he did, which hews to the book more than his original screenplay did, particularly the ending. Or perhaps we have Leicester to thank for that (along with renaming the protagonist from Robert Neville to Robert Morgan)?
I'd personally love to know a lot more details about the US/Italian co-production. English language texts tend to give Salkow a lot of credit, but the Italian release (L'Ultimo uomo della Terra), which does not credit Salkow, has a few scenes not included in the US cut; while the US cut only features a few things not present in that version (the most interesting being an insert shot of a sign outside the Community Church during the opening noting THE END HAS COME).
It's worth pointing out a couple of things in the film's trailer—the creatures are referenced as 'the living dead' and also 'zombies'—eight years before George A. Romero's 'ghouls' would begin their official takeover of the moniker from that Haitian/Voodoo variety. — John
Remarks from the Gallery
Peter: I probably saw this on Creature Features (or on Bob Wilkins's Sacramento equivalent) before you even saw Night of the Living Dead, John. I prefer Chuck Heston's The Omega Man to this, mostly due to Vinnie's scenery-chewing, but I'm going to give LMOE another look soon. Will Smith's version, with its impossibly large-jawed zombies, is a big smelly turd.
Jack: I know I saw this long ago. Any movie starring Vincent Price is A-OK in my book!
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