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AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies: The Top 5
From: American Film Institute
| By:
Vicki Botnick |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
To celebrate cinema's centennial, the American Film Institute selected a list of America's 100 Greatest Movies. The blue-ribbon panel of more than 1,500 leaders of the American movie community pored over a list of over 4,000 movies, searching for films that changed the face of moviemaking artistically, recorded social and cinematic history, and/or entertained audiences in new and exciting ways. One of the pleasures of the resulting list of the Top Five Greatest Movies of All Time lies in matching up your favorites against AFI's; another is to contemplate just how many moments of brilliance the big screen has afforded us in only one short century. |
<I>Citizen Kane</I>
When Citizen Kane hit the screens in 1941, its 26-year-old producer, director, co-writer and star, though a neophyte to film, was already a wunderkind. With  unprecedented control over his first film, Orson Welles focused more on character than on the picture's action, which followed the rise and fall of a megalomaniac publisher closely resembling William Randolph Hearst. |
Besides the screenplay's daring use of intertwining, varied point-of-view flashbacks, Kane also introduced many innovative filmmaking techniques then considered "radical" in the Hollywood system. Perhaps most importantly, cinematographer Gregg Toland developed a deep-focus procedure that allowed important action to be viewed in both the foreground and the extreme background of the same shot. In addition, the filmmakers refined overlapping sound montage; mastered the long take (which, as opposed to cutting the scene into edited pieces, tells the scene's story all within the same frame); and introduced composer Bernard Herrmann and actors Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead. |
After Hearst's motion-picture editor Louella Parsons warned him about Kane's main character, Hearst went on the warpath. As a result of his actions against the film, audiences backed away and Kane, often referred to as the best film ever made, did not recoup its box office costs. |
<I>Casablanca</I>
A cynical hero and a possibly untrustworthy heroine; a passionate love affair sacrificed for the greater good; the twin threats of misguided cowardice and true evil: Casablanca possessed all the ingredients  of a classic even before Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains signed on. Credit also goes to the oft-rewritten script, which was peppered with more great quotes than any other movie in history, including "Round up the usual suspects"; "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship"; "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine"; and "Here's looking at you, kid." (The most famous line of all, "Play it again, Sam," was never actually uttered in the film). And then there was the timeless tune "As Time Goes By," included only over the protests of producer Max Steiner. |
Casablanca's message, that goodness and self-sacrifice could triumph, set in an ending at once devastating and uplifting, resonated with weary World War II-era audiences. Bergman's luminous beauty, Rick's grand gesture and Morocco's jaded exoticism combined to create the ultimate romanticism--one that has continued to charm viewers for six decades. |
<I>The Godfather</I>
With its mythological themes of revenge, romance, betrayal and honor, The Godfather transformed the tawdriness of its Mafia universe into a paean to the beauty of  power. Audiences were seduced by this new spin on the American dream, one in which the very single-mindedness that drove an immigrant's family to wealth and influence also destroys them. The elegance and glamour of the film's rich hues, opulent trappings and sumptuous cuisine sours subtly until, by the end, the Corleones descend into Shakespearean excess and tragedy. |
Director Francis Ford Coppola's bold choices--the interplay of golden light and darkness, the intercutting between the baptism of Connie's infant son (played by Sofia Coppola) and Michael's brutal assumption of power--are by now axiomatic. With a cast of then-unknowns, including Al Pacino, James Caan and Robert Duvall, and a crew, including soundman Walter Murch and uncredited writer Robert Townsend, Coppola bucked studio interference to craft his complex ode to power. And what better time to revel in control than in an era of helplessness, highlighted by Watergate, Vietnam and civil-rights conflicts? |
Released in 1972, The Godfather confirmed America's desire for clarity, and our prayers that no evil would go unpunished. |
<I>Gone With the Wind</I>
Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone With the Wind, an immediate best-seller, overflowed  with characters so beloved that they seemed impossible to cast. After everyone from Jean Arthur to Bette Davis screen-tested for the role of ultimate Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara, British beauty Vivien Leigh won the role--a choice disapproved of by 65 percent of Gallup poll respondents. Clark Gable, reluctant to take the role of Rhett Butler, was reportedly convinced by a signing bonus that allowed him to divorce his wife and marry Carole Lombard. |
The production suffered from producer David O. Selznick's constant involvement, which resulted in a rotating roster of directors, including George Cukor, Victor Fleming and Sam Wood. To boot, censors initially refused to grant the film a PCA certificate because it included the word "damn," but eventually it passed on the grounds that "damn," though vulgar, was not a curse word. |
The blockbuster set box-office records in 1939, a year that also saw the release of The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights, and many modern sources agree that Gone With the Wind is the highest-grossing film of all time. Although stereotyped images of African-Americans continue to disturb viewers, the picture's eight Oscar wins included the first ever for a black actor, awarded to Hattie McDaniel. |
<I>Lawrence of Arabia</I>
It takes more than an almost-four-hour running time and stellar cast to earn a film the term "epic." David Lean's Lawrence of  Arabia also featured a complex protagonist and a story sophisticated enough to tackle such contradictory themes as compassion versus bloodlust, sanity versus madness and vastness versus constraint. The plot follows T.E. Lawrence, a British officer who led the Bedouin Arabs to defeat Turkish colonialists in the years just before World War I. In his astounding victory, Lawrence emerged as messianic; in the British and French betrayal of the Arabs, he grew unstable and disillusioned. |
A sweeping chronicle, Lawrence gained even more weight from its instinctive score and cinematographer Freddie Young's glorious desert vistas, photographed in Jordan, Spain and Morocco using 70 mm Super Panavision. The huge, emblematic compositions included one of the grandest film entrances ever for Omar Sharif, who subsequently became an international celebrity--as did the film's previously unknown star, Peter O'Toole. (Although the cast also included Alec Guinness, Josi Ferrer and Claude Rains, there was not a single female speaking part.) |
Steven Spielberg cites Lawrence as the film that made him want to be a director; for countless others as well, the film remains an inspiration. |
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