49 Films the AFI Forgot

The American Film Institute continues its "100 Years, 10,000 Lists" listmaking mania by updating its Top 100 American (And A Few British) Films Of All Time. The blogosphere has been abuzz with smart rejoinders and alternate lists, so I figured I'd jump on that train and come up with my own list of films omitted from both their top 100 list and their 400-film ballot—but in prose form! (I'm putting the film titles in bold italics to aid in skimming.) The AFI list is pretty "safe," and most of these are "safe" too—nothing too terribly challenging—but they're films that deserve the kind of recognition that the AFI films get.

The AFI generally stiffed the silents, but unfortunately they've included many of the ones I've seen, so I'm as bad as they are in this case. Let me throw in The Unknown (1927), the last of the great silents, so I can feel a little bit superior about the silent era before moving on to films I know more about.

For the pre-Code era, my favorite period in film history, you have to start with Rouben Mamoulian's dynamic, roving camera in Applause (1929), which proved that the talkies didn't have to be clunky (although it took a while for the lesson to catch on). Ernst Lubitsch's elegant and hilarious Trouble in Paradise (1932) was arguably his career high point, although he crops up again on my list. Josef von Sternberg's best film, the decadent Shanghai Express (1932), would make a great double-feature with Frank Capra's gorgeous and heartbreaking The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933); miles away from Capracorn, he almost out-Sternbergs von Sternberg. The manly art of killing is the subject of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), as well as the almost completely unknown film The Eagle and the Hawk (1933), which starred Fredric March as another guy who loses his marbles over killing (in a less other-oriented way than Leslie Banks does in the previous film). And a year before Hays and company drove a stake through the heart of one of the most dynamic half-decades in film history, Busby Berkeley's unheralded (by the AFI, at least) Footlight Parade (1933) (yeah, I know he didn't direct it, but it's his film anyway) was the best of his magic 1933 trifecta (the others being Dames and 42nd Street).

But the 1930s kept chugging along, despite the Code. There was the inspired baroque lunacy of Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which exceeded its predecessor in every way, as well as two of Charles Laughton's best performances in Les Miserables (1935) and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). The AFI probably didn't include Dorothy Arzner's masterpiece of double meaning, Craig's Wife (1936), because it's so hard to see anywhere (and because she's a woman), but what's the excuse for leaving off Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the film Leo McCarey called the best of his career (he's wrong, but not by much)? Oh, right: it's hard to see anywhere, a problem the AFI is doing little to remedy.

Raoul Walsh's best film, The Strawberry Blonde (1941), is missing, likely because it's not "representative" of his work. But the lunatic exchanges between Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in The Talk of the Town (1942) are certainly representative of their work, as representative as the sublime Heaven Can Wait (1943) is of Lubitsch's work. (I like The Shop Around the Corner, but not enough to complain that it was left off the ballot—I'll leave that to other bloggers.) It's a crime that Cat People was left off the final 100, but the bigger crime is that Val Lewton's masterpiece, The Seventh Victim (1943), didn't even make the ballot.

Noir and boxing are two staples of the 1940s that the AFI really missed the boat on. In the black trunks, we have the brilliant Scarlet Street (1945), the hyper-gritty Detour (1945), and one of the best screen adaptations of all time in The Killers (1946); in the equally dark trunks, we have a masterpiece of the soon-to-be-blacklisted in Body and Soul (1947), along with a film that serves as a bridge between the two worlds, the noir boxing dirge The Set-Up (1949).

Don't get me wrong: Rebel Without a Cause is a great film, but it's not the beginning and end of Nicholas Ray. He also coaxed out Humphrey Bogart's best performance in In a Lonely Place (1950) and queered the western in Johnny Guitar (1954). But the biggest omission in the AFI ballot and final list is Samuel Fuller. What they're telling us is that Samuel Fuller did not make any of the top 400 American films of all time. Not The Steel Helmet (1951), not Park Row (1952), and not Pickup on South Street (1953), just to name a few. Good job, AFI.

Nobody's heard of Phil Karlson, and nobody's heard of his best films, the prescient newspaper satire-noir Scandal Sheet (1952) or the downright terrifying The Phenix City Story (1955). Nobody's heard of Richard Fleischer's taut thriller The Narrow Margin (1952), which could teach Hitchcock a thing or two about filming on trains. One might think that part of the AFI's mission is to remedy these slights, but then one might be wrong.

How could they forget the best live-action cartoon ever made, Frank Tashlin's delirious The Girl Can't Help It (1955); the best Southern Gothic cannibalism psychoanalysis melodrama, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) (Monty got a raw deal); the best film about a hitman who just might be dead already, John Boorman's frenetic Point Blank (1967); the best film shot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969); and the best young-lovers-on-a-tear film, Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973)?

Let's not forget that they got the wrong Star Wars movie; The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is the highlight of the series. Speaking of sci-fi (look at that smooth segue), they missed John Carpenter's superior The Thing (1982).

Woody Allen seldom balanced humor and pathos as well as he did in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), a balancing act that plays out in radically different ways in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything (1989) and Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger (1990). (Ok, fine. Sometimes I'm really stretching to connect films.) Two sometimes-phenomenal writer-directors with unmistakeable styles were left off the lists, so I'll insert David Mamet's House of Games (1987) and John Sayles's Lone Star (1996). The AFI generally stiffed African Americans and women, so no wonder Kasi Lemmons's miraculous debut Eve's Bayou (1997) wasn't there—she has two strikes against her. And where are the Coen brothers? Lots of people complained loudly when Fargo got dropped off the top 100 list, but it isn't even their best film. That would be either Blood Simple (1984), The Big Lebowski (1998), or O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).

Finally, I can't think of anything to connect Paul Thomas Anderson's operatic Magnolia (1999), Cameron Crowe's masterpiece Almost Famous (2000), and Terry Zwigoff's quirky Ghost World (2001), except that in each film people start spontaneously singing. Except in Ghost World.

OK folks, what am I missing? What brilliant films did I join the AFI in snubbing?