54-Beauty and the Beast - Director:Jean Cocteau . Cast:Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon and Michel Auclair.

"Jean Cocteau's first full-length movie (he wrote and directed it) is perhaps the most sensuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales. As a child escapes from everyday family life to the magic of a storybook, so, in the film, Beauty's farm, with its Vermeer simplicity, fades in intensity as we are caught up in the Gustave Doré extravagance of the Beast's enchanted landscape. In Christian Bérard's makeup, Jean Marais is a magnificent Beast; Beauty's self-sacrifice to him holds no more horror than a satisfying romantic fantasy should have. The transformation of the Beast into Prince Charming is ambiguous-what we have gained cannot quite take the place of what we have lost. (When shown the film, Greta Garbo is reported to have said at the end, "Give me back my Beast.") The delicate Josette Day is, quite properly, Beauty."
-Pauline Kael-

http://criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=6&eid=271&section=essay

53-The Awful Truth - Director: Leo McCarey. Cast: Cary Grant,Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy.


"Our director, Leo McCarey, would arrive each morning with notes written on some kind of brown wrapping paper. That was our script. He'd instruct, 'Okay, Ralph you come over here, and I'll run the dog through here,' and so on. I tried like hell to get out of it the first day.Cary even offered to do another picture for no pay if Harry would let him out of it. Irene Dunne cried, begged and pleaded to get out of it. We almost shot the whole picture that way. We learned our lines day by day, and shot the picture in just six weeks."
-Ralph Bellamy-(who in the end got an Oscar nomination for his performance-Leo McCarey won best director 1937)


"if one is not willing to yield to Irine Dunne's temperament,her talents,her reactions,following their detail almost to the loss of one's own identity,one will not know,and will not care,what the film is about."
-Stanley Cavell-

"She always knew how to put man in her place,but at the same time leave him room to maneuver out of it"
-Richard Schickel-


"...in two very different movies with Cary Grant--The Awful Truth and Penny Serenade--she seems smarter or more knowing than Grant,yet graceful enough to watch him catch up,without letting him feel it.And Grant was testing company(he,too,revered her timing)."
-David Thomson-


Actress - Sigourney Weaver - Top 5 favorite female performances:
Irene Dunne in “My Favorite Wife” (1940)
Ingrid Bergman in “Notorious” (1946)
Margaret Rutherford in “Murder At The Gallop” (1963)
Diane Keaton in “Looking For Mr. Goodbar” (1977)
Greta Garbo in “Ninotchka” (1939)


"...he was the best and most important actor in the history of the Cinema."
-David Thomson-(about Cary Grant)

52- Bicycle Thiefs - Director: Vittorio De Sica. Cast: Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Elena Altieri and Vittorio Antonucci.


“I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief.”
-Vittorio De Sica-


The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) ,1995:


1-Citizen Kane -Welles
2-Battleship Potemkin -Eisenstein
3-The Cabinet of Dr Caligari - Wiene
4-Nanook of the North- Flaherty
5-Man with a Movie Camera - Vertov
6-The Rules of the Game-Renoir
7-Intolerance -Griffith
8- Bicycle Thiefs -De Sica
9-Breathless-Godard
10-Andrei Rublev -Tarkovsky

51-Citizen Kane - Director:Orson Welles - Cast:Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead and Ruth Warrick.


"Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation."
-Orson Welles-


"Every film made since 1940 that matters has drawn something from either Citizen Kane or The Rules of the Game"
-Francois Truffaut-


"Village Voice", U.S.A, 2000.
1-Citizen Kane -Welles
2-The Rules of the Game-Renoir
3-Vertigo-Hitchcock
4-The Searchers -Ford
5-Man with a Movie Camera -Vertov
6-Sunrise -Murnau
7-L'Atalante -Vigo
8-The Passion of Joan of Arc -Dreyer
9-Au Hasard Balthazar -Bresson
10-Rashomon -Kurosawa

50-Ugetsu Monogatari - Director:Kenji Mizoguchi - Cast: Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyô, Kinuyo Tanaka, Eitarô Ozawa and Ikio Sawamura.

"a degree of purity that our western cinema has known only rarely."
-Jaques Rivette-


"Quite simply one of the greatest of filmmakers”
-Jean-Luc Godard-


"The long shot is a remarkable instrument—Mizoguchi developed it to perfection. I suppose I must have hit on the idea long before I saw his films; but his technique struck me all of a heap. It was from him I pinched a long shot which I regard as among the most successful I've ever made; and that's in Persona, when Bibi lets the piece of broken glass lie where it is. But at the same time the long shot demands tremendous density and a high degree of awareness. It must never be used at random."
-Ingmar Bergman-

49-Sunrise -Director: F.W. Murnau - Cast: Janet Gaynor,George O'Brien and Margaret Livingstone.

"I suppose I must have a particular weakness for silent films from the second half of the twenties, before the cinema was taken over by sound. At that time, the cinema was in the process of creating its own language. There was Murnau and The Last Laugh, with Jannings, a film told solely in images with a fantastic suppleness; then his Faust, and finally his masterpiece, Sunrise. Three astonishing works that tell us that Murnau, at the same time as Stroheim in Hollywood, was well on the way to creating a magnificently original and distinct language. I have many favourites among the German films of this period."
-Ingmar Bergman-


"He was only 43 when he died,and in 'Sunrise' he had already married a German narrative fatalism to the Naturalism of actors like Janet Gaynor,George O'Brien, and Margaret Livingstone,who is poignant the vamp.Above all,he had found a crucial American subject,the ordinary person's dream of something more than fate has allowed,and the dread that goes with the dream.For 'Sunrise' is a key step toward film noir as well as the woman's picture.It is the city and the country,jazz futures and the old frontier.Murnau might have done more for American film than Lang or Lubitsch."
-David Thomson-(The New Biographical dictionary of Film)

48-Dodsworth -Director:William Wyler. Cast:Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Paul Lukas and Mary Astor.


“It's eighty percent script and twenty percent you get great actors. There's nothing else to it.”
-William Wyler-


"The greatest director this city ever had..."
-Bette Davis-

47- Day of Wrath - Director:Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Cast:Thorkild Roose,Lisbeth Movin ,Sigrid Neiiendam,Preben Lerdorff Rye and Anna Svierkier.


“Dreyer seems to prey on our subconscious, our unformulated fears; the mood is evocative, dreamy, spectral. Psychological surprise, dread, and obsession are the substance of the film; death hovers over everyone.

Carl Dreyer's art begins to unfold just at the point where most directors give up"
-Pauline Kael-



--"Editorial Jaguar", Spain, 2001
1-Citizen Kane -Welles
2-The Leopard -Visconti
3-Ordet -Dreyer
4-Vertigo -Hitchcock
5-The Searchers -Ford
6-The Godfather 1&2 -Coppola
7-Sunrise -Murnau
8-Gertrud -Dreyer
9-The Man who Shot Liberty Valance -Ford
10-2001: A Space Odyssey-Kubrick

46- La Notte- Director:Michelangelo Antonioni. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti.

"The final sequence of Antonioni's La Notte is perhaps the only episode in the whole history of cinema in which a love scene became a necessity and took on the semblance of a spiritual act. It's a unique sequence in which physical closeness has great significance. The characters have exhausted their feelings for each other but are still very close to each other. As a friend of mine said once, more than five years with my husband is like incest. These characters have no exit from their closeness. We see them desperately trying to save each other, as if they were dying."
- Andrei Tarkovsky -



"Before we made the film together( Beyond the Clouds-after Antonioni's stroke)I spoke to Jeanne Moreau who had worked with him many times. I told her about the project and asked if she thought I should do it, or if she thought there would be any problems.
"Do it of course, you have to do it," she said immediately. "You should keep in mind," she said, "that when I did La Notte with Antonioni, he never spoke a word to me—from the first to the last day of shooting. He never, ever said anything to me, and this is one of the movies I am most proud of. So I don't think that the fact that he cannot speak should be any handicap for him." And she was right, he proved that his limited ability to speak was, for him, as a filmmaker, the least of his problems."
-Wim Wenders-

45-Battleship Potemkin. Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein -Cast:Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov, ... ...

"You know,I make a picture,and then I forget about it.I don't have a print,I don't have a cassete.I have a script at the office,in case I would like to look.Which is the best picture I have ever seen?My answer always is Battleship Potemkin,by Eisenstein."
-Billy Wilder-

Trivia: Also Charles Chaplin favorite movie ever.

"Kinovedcheskie", Russia, 1995
1-Citizen Kane
2-Battleship potemkin
3-Intolerance
4-8 1/2
5-Breathless
6-The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
7-The Rules of the Game
8-L'Atalante
9-The Passion of Joan of Arc
10-Ivan the Terrible