78- Ninotchka - Director:Ernst Lubitsch - Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire, Bela Lugosi ,Felix Bressart,Alexander Granach and Gregory Gaye.

"Lubitsch ruled at Paramount in the late 1920s and 1930s (he was head of the studio for a year), embracing the advent of sound with a series of musicals that often starred Jeannette Macdonald. "Trouble in Paradise" is generally considered his best film, but there are advocates for his version of Noel Coward's "Design for Living" (1933), with Gary Cooper, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins; "Ninotchka" (1939), with Garbo, a definitive adult; "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940), with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as bickering co-workers who don't realize they're romantic penpals; and "To Be or Not to Be" (1942), with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in a comedy aimed squarely at Hitler."

-Roger Ebert-

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Time Magazine 100 films with 'Ninotchka' and 'Shop Around the Corner'

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/the_complete_list.html

(#34)http://cinemawelove.blogspot.com/2006/05/34-trouble-in-paradise-director-ernst.html

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"In that Golden Age of Hollywood that everybody's always talking about there were only two directors whose names meant anything to the public and critics: Cecil B. DeMille and Ernst Lubitsch."

-Claudette Colbert-

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"I loved Lubitsch, mainly for his tremendous desire to make something funny with class . . . It was strange -- he really should have been a Frenchman."

-Edgar G. Ulmer-

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"He was an imaginative, perceptive, mischievous and an altogether brilliant director."

- Melvyn Douglas-

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"Intelligent and beautiful, mysterious and intense -- that was Garbo. She's nearing the end of her career here, with only one more movie left. She's wonderful to watch -- 'Garbo is the extreme definition of stardom in the cinema.'

-David Thomson-

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Q:Did you have movie idols when you were child?

Robert De Niro: I always think about Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift,James Dean. Greta Garbo was a marvellous actress.The most interesting actress I have ever seen.

Q:Many actors say: I want to be De Niro. And you? Would you like to be someone else?

Robert De Niro:No, I can say nobody... I think Greta Garbo was fantastic.

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"She must think, that I’m trying to imitate her, but Garbo is unique. Garbo never gives Interviews and I wish I could do that too."

-Marlene Dietrich-

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" If it could be said that Hollywood had a Queen, that Queen was Greta Garbo!"

-Orson Welles-

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" To know Garbo, you must know the North... She will be always a nordic with what means of ponderation and of introversion. Greta Garbo was the foundress of an religious order called "Cinema".

-Federico Fellini-

Greta Garbo and Ernst Lubitsch on the set of Ninotchka

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"He was the only great director out there. Ninotchka was the only time I had a great director in Hollywood."
-Greta Garbo-

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"We were just writers at MGM-(and) I was on the stage one day,and Garbo was playing a love scene.So she went up to somebody,an assistant,and she came out and started rehearsing the scene,but in between,they put up a blackboard right in front of me.She had eyes in the back of her head.She saw me there.""Throw that man out!"".So they threw me out.And then I met her later at a party at Salka Viertel's,the grandma of the German circuit.She was here in the twenties.I met her there,and now knew Garbo a little.Then one day years later I saw her running,exercising,up Rodeo Drive.Rodeo then had a track in the middle where you could run.So she was running up Rodeo and she was very sweaty,and I stopped her and said,"Hi,how are you?I'm Billy Wilder". And she said,"Yes,I know you"."Would you like to have a Martini,something to drink?.I live right around the corner ,Beverly Drive". She said,"Yes,I would like to". I lived right around the corner so I took her home.

It was in the afternoon,and she collapsed in the chair and I said,"I will tell my wife,she is upstairs,to come fix us a drink."And I said,"Aud,come on down,guess who we have here."She says,"Who,Otto Preminger?"--somebody like that.And I said,"No,Greta Garbo".And she said,"OH,go on,go fuck yourself !". And I said,"No,honestly."So she came down and I introduced her,and Aud fixes a martini,really strong,big,and Garbo had that thing in one gulp,and then another one and then another one.They drink them like beer,those Swedish---... martinis.And then we started to talk about pictures and she said,"I would like to make a picture about a clown." I said,"Oh,that's fine"."I always am a clown,and I am wearing a mask,and I will not take the mask off. I will only be in the picture as a clown".She never made a picture again.She made one more picture after "Ninotchka" and that was it.So she wanted to play the clown,and not show her face.A clown who grins all the time.I said,"That might be difficult'.

-Billy Wilder-(co-writer of Ninotchka)

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"We were previewing "Ninotchka",and Lubitsch took the writers along too,in Long Beach.And they are outside in the lobby there,a stack of cards,with the audience invited to put down their thoughts.So the picture starts playing,and it plays well.Now Lubitsch takes the cards,a heap of the cards,doesn't let anybody else touch them.We get into the bid MGM limousine.We turn the light up.Now,so,he takes the preview cards and starts reading."Very good"..."brilliant"...Twenty cards.But when he comes up to the twenty-first card,he starts laughing as hard as I ever saw him laugh,and we say,"What is it?" He keeps the cards to himself;he does not let anybody even look.Then,finally he comes down a little and starts reading.And what he read was--I have the card--"Funniest picture I ever saw.So funny that I peed in my girlfriend's hand".

-Billy Wilder-(Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe)

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"I feel it is weird that Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch and I are even mentioned in connection to "Ninotchka".It was so much Ernst Lubitsch's own baby.He was a director in a creative frenzy at the time,and everything he did was to me wonderful and funny and stimulating"

-Charles Brackett-(co-writer of Ninotchka)

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"She was funny.And I knew she could be funny on screen.Even in some serious things she showed humor.You didn't notice how she always had such a light touch?Most of them are heavy.Heavy!But she was light,light always,and for comedy,nothing matters more"

-Ernst Lubitsch-

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"I would go to her with a suggestion,saying,'This is how I see the scene.Now you go away and think it over'.And she would go in the corner,all by herself,and brood."

--Ernst Lubitsch-

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"He wasn't just a gagman,he was the best creator of toppers.You would come up with a funny bit to end a scene,and he would create a better one.I think he thought up a bit where the picture of Lenin smile back at Garbo.I can't be to sure.He would look up our stuff and go,'Ho ho,very good',and scratch out the next line.What he did was purify,and that was made him a great writer."

-Billy Wilder-

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"Having worked with many women starts,I have found that one of the difficulties with them in their slavish devotion to the mirror.Some of them take a terrible long time to powder and make up between scenes.They are much concerned about their looks that they exhaust their vitality.In the eight weeks during which I worked with Greta Garbo she never looked into the mirror once unless I told her to do so"

-Ernst Lubitsch-

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"She was so excited.When people started to laugh ,it was the most amazing thing ! She looked around like she'd heard thunder claps!"

-Ernst Lubitsch-

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"The face,that face,what was it about that face?You could read into it all the secrets of a woman's soul.You could read Eve,Cleopatra,Mata-Hari.She became all women on screen.Not on the soundstage--the miracle happened on that film emulsion."

-Billy Wilder-

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"We still say Garbo's Ninotchka is one of the sprightliest comedies of the year,a gay and impertinent and malicious show which never pull the punch lines (no matter how far below the belt they may land)and finds the screen's austere First Lady of Drama playing deadpan comedy with the assurance of a Buster Keaton."

-The New York Times-

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"In appearance she is really hermaphroditic, almost as flat as a boy, very thin, the eyes and voice extraordinarily pure and beautiful but she has the cold quality of a mermaid or something... She scares me to death."
-Tennessee Williams-

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"Greta Garbo is the Sarah Bernhardt of Film and shy as an antelope."

-Laurence Olivier-

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"Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyse this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera."

-Bette Davis-

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WVruh95IWqw

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y173/frejoty/Signatur-21-1-1.jpg?t=1191592415

77-Stalker - Director:Andrei Tarkovsky - Cast: Aleksandr Kajdanovsky, Alisa Frejndlikh, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko and Natasha Abramova.

"People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolizes, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing"

"the hero [Stalker] goes through moments of despair when his faith is shaken; but every time he comes to a renewed sense of his vocation to serve people who have lost their hopes and illusions"

"In more general terms, it is the theme of human dignity; of what that dignity is, and of how a man suffers if he has no self-respect."-“In Stalker I make some sort of complete statement: namely that human love alone is – miraculously – proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world.”

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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"My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle.Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream."

-Ingmar Bergman-

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"The idea of a film always comes to me in a very ordinary, boring, manner, bit by bit, by rather banal phases. To recount it would only be a waste of time. There is really nothing fascinating, nothing poetic, about it. Ah, if only one could represent that moment like a sort of sudden illumination! In an interview Ingmar Bergman, if I remember correctly, told how the idea, or rather the image, of one of his films came to him suddenly, while observing a ray of light on the floor of a dark room. I don't know, evidently it happens. It has never happened to me. Naturally it occurs that certain images emerge suddenly, but then they change, perhaps inadvertently, as in a dream, and often they transform, vexingly, inexorably, into something unrecognizable and new. "

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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"In general, I'm very afraid of these things and I always try to avoid them. And I don't like when someone then reminds me that in this or that case I did not act with complete independence. But now, recently, quotation is also starting to become interesting to me. Mirror, for example, has a scene, a shot, which could very well have been filmed by Bergman. I reflected on the opportuneness of filming the scene that way. Then I decided that it wasn't important. Oh yes, I thought, it will be a sort of homage that I make to him. It is the scene in which Terekhova sells her earrings and Larissa, the doctor's wife, tries them on and looks into the camera, as in a mirror. Terekhova's face, looking in the mirror, and behind her, Larissa's face, who moves, approaches the camera and tries on the earrings, gazing at her own image reflected in the shadows: I don't know why, it seemed to me that it was a scene that was very similar to something Bergman might film."

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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"Perhaps even more than in 'Mirror', in 'Stalker' I had to make use of emotions, even memories, that are very personal. In Mirror there is the physical resemblance of the actors to real people, of the settings to real places. In Stalker there are more moments that evoke in me a sort of strange sense of nostalgia. Let's take the writer. It seems to me that the actor, Solonytsin, followed my indications very scrupulously: so that at times I recognize my own characteristics, my way of speaking, in a certain way of behaving, in a certain intonation of voice: even though the writer is a character who, in general, I don't like very much."

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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"When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure - THE SERPENT'S EGG, THE TOUCH, FACE TO FACE and so on.Fellini, Kurosawa and Bunuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness. Melies was always there without having to think about it. He was a magician by profession. "

-Ingmar Bergman-

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"A director is not entitled to please anyone. He hasn’t the right to restrict himself in the process of his work for the sake of success, and if he does he will invariably pay the price; his plan and purpose, and their realization will no longer have the same meaning for him. ... It takes little enough to appreciate art: a sensitive, subtle suggestible soul, open to beauty and good, capable of aesthetic experience..."

- Andrei Tarkovsky -

76-Diary of a Country Priest - Director:Robert Bresson - Cast: Claude Laydu,Jean Riveyre,Marie-Monique Arkell,André Guibert,Antoine Balpêtré,Nicole Ladmiral,Nicole Maurey and Martine Lemaire.

"The most moving moments of the film are those in which the text and image are saying the same thing, each however in its own way... It is here at the edge that the event reveals its true significance. It is because the film is entirely structured on this relationship that, towards the end, the image takes on such emotional power. It would be in vain to look for its devastating beauty simply in what is explicit. I doubt if the individual frames in any other film, taken separately, are so deceptive."

-André Bazin-

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"I felt a strong affinity with Bernanos' [the author] and Bresson's Mouchette. It's a film I would have liked to have made myself, but which I didn't understand. In Mouchette the motif is expressed clearly and explicitly, free from all impurities. The girl in Mouchette and the girl in The Devil's Wanton [Prison] are sisters, sisters in two similar worlds. But while The Devil's Wanton is full of quirks and divagation and coquetry and jumps about all over the place, Mouchette is clear as daylight. It’s a pure work of art.I'm also tremendously fond of The 'Diary of a Country Priest', one of the most remarkable works ever made. My 'Winter Light' was very much influenced by it."

-Ingmar Bergman-

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"Robert Bresson is for me an example of a real and genuine film-maker... He obeys only certain higher, objective laws of Art.... Bresson is the only person who remained himself and survived all the pressures brought by fame."

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

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Andrei Tarkovsky's list of favorite films(1972):

1-Diary of a country priest - Bresson

2-Winter Light - Bergman

3-Nazarin - Bunuel

4-Wild Strawberries - Bergman

5-City Lights - Chaplin

6-Ugetsu - Mizoguchi

7-Seven Samurai - Kurosawa

8-Persona - Bergman

9-Mouchette - Bresson

10-Woman of the Dunes - Teshigahara

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"It seems to me that every original aspect in the work of genuine writers, genuine painters, musicians, filmmakers, always has deep roots. Therefore, finding references from far back in the past, is inevitable. I don't even know what it originates from. Perhaps it is not a characteristic of our spiritual stance, but a typical aspect of our time. Because time is nevertheless reversible. At least that is what I believe. We often discover something that we have already experienced. When I am working, it helps me a lot to think of Bresson. Only the thought of Bresson! I don't remember any of his works concretely. I remember only his supremely ascetic manner. His simplicity. His clarity. The thought of Bresson helps me to concentrate on the central idea of the film.'

-Andrei Tarkovsky-

75-The Films of Buster Keaton - Director:Buster Keaton - Cast:Buster Keaton

"He did things that was 30-40 years ahead of it's time.I mean,he was doing stuff that was surreal.He found in every man Character.And he put them in Extraordinary Circumstances."

-Richard Dreyfuss-

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"Charlie's tramp was a bum with a bum's philosophy.Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman, and honest.''

-Buster Keaton-

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"A cinema operator falls asleep at his machine and dreams he is a great detective—the kind that only the cinema can produce"

-TIME magazine,June 1924-

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"No man can be a genius in slapshoes and a flat hat.”

-Buster Keaton-

74-A Night at the Opera - Director:Sam Wood -Cast: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Kitty Carlisle, Allan Jones and Margaret Dumont.

"It is a dangerous thing to rate any Marx Brothers picture as their 'best', yet even at the risk of having to eat my own words, I would say that none of their previous films is as consistently and exhaustingly funny or as rich in comic invention and satire as A Night at the Opera."

-From the New York Post-

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"Some years back, after a childhood of preocupation with comedy that led me to observing the styles of all the great comedians, I came to the conclusion that Groucho Marx was the best comedian this country ever produced. Now I am more convinced than ever that I was right. I can't think of a comedian who combined a totally original physical conception that was hilarious with a matchless verbal delivery. I believe there is a natural inborn greatness in Groucho that defies close analysis as it does with any genuine artist. He is simply unique in the same way that Picasso or Stravinsky are and I believe his outrageous unsentimental disregard for order will be equally as funny a thousand years from now. In addition to all this, he makes me laugh."

-Woody Allen-

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"Ha Ha HaHa...Groucho Marx is the greatest entertainer of them all."

-Laurence Olivier-

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"I thought he was one of the brightest man overall...that I 've ever met.Groucho was special.Terribly special.He wasn't just another funnyman."

-Jack Lemmon-

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"It's the most surpring, fresh comedy ever.Because it was based in who they were."

-Kevin Spacey-

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"It was an event when you could get all three of them on the set at the same time. The minute you started a picture with the Marx brothers you hired three assistant directors. One for each Marx brother. You had two of 'em while you went to look for the third one and the first two would disappear.”

-Buster Keaton-

73-Sullivan's Travels - Director:Preston Sturges - Cast:Joel McCrea,Veronika Lake,Robert Warwick,William Demarest and Robert Greig.

"I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started."

-Preston Sturges-

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"I have no success formula. If I have attained any, it's an act of God. What I learned I picked up from sets. I just kept my eyes opened and learned, as my Filipino chauffeur learned to drive an auto. For five years he rode on seats near the bus driver and watched the driver. Then he went out and started driving."

-Preston Surges-

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"The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one."

-Preston Sturges-

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"He was truly a Renaissance figure. There were very few that came down the pike with his vision. If he had a little luck - and financing - it was there on the screen. A new voice that spoke with wit. Incisively. Daringly. Compared with the ninety percent of drivel that went on the screen, there was thought. There was a man of intellect, of size. A man who wrote literature."

-Billy Wilder-on Sturges

72-Detour- Director:Edgar G. Ulmer - Cast:Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald and Tim Ryan.

"The movie was shot on the cheap with B-minus actors, but it was directed by a man of qualities: Edgar G. Ulmer (1900-1972), a refugee from Hitler, who was an assistant to the great Murnau on ``The Last Laugh'' and ``Sunrise,'' and provided one of the links between German Expressionism, with its exaggerated lighting, camera angles and dramaturgy, and the American film noir, which added jazz and guilt."

-Roger Ebert-

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"Detour was shot in 6 days for only $20.000.The Director could only rely on his resourcefulness.In fact,his idiosyncratic style grew out of such drastic limitations.This is why Ulmer has become such an inspiration over the years to low-budget filmmakers."

-Martin Scorsese-A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

71-Le Samourai - Director:Jean-Pierre Melville. - Cast: Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Cathy Rosier and Jacques Leroy.

“I don’t want to situate my heroes in time; I don’t want the action of a film to be recognizable as something that happens in 1968. That’s why in Le samouraï, for example, the women aren’t wearing miniskirts, while the men are wearing hats—something, unfortunately, that no one does anymore. I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me: I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”
-Jean-Pierre Melville-

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"'Each time Jean-Pierre Melville releases a new film, all filmmakers, including those who hate him, book a seat to see 'how it's done'."

-L'Express in 1969-

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"Like a painter or a musician, a filmmaker can suggest complete mastery with just a few strokes. Jean-Pierre Melville involves us in the spell of ``Le Samourai'' (1967) before a word is spoken. He does it with light: a cold light, like dawn on an ugly day. And color: grays and blues. And actions that speak in place of words."

-Roger Ebert-

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"The only part of an actor's life that I like is the 20 seconds between 'roll it' and 'cut it'.I hate all the rest.It's against my nature."

-Alain Delon-

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"I have a fear of esthetics.Personally,I prefer ethics.My 'bad boy' characters all have a code of honor,of loyalty and courage."

-Jean-Pierre Melville-

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"My heroes or anti-heroes resemble me.Insofar as any creation resembles it's creator,just as John Wayne is a self-projection of John Ford--A Flattering one."

-Jean-Pierre Melville-