Don’t write to me with your complaints, and don’t assume I don’t know that my ratings don’t always make sense with my rankings. I am already aware that (a) I am a child of the 90s and (b) my taste is superior to yours.
100. Private Benjamin
Howard Zieff, 1980
Rating: BBBBB
Cast: Goldie Hawn, Eileen Brennan, Armand Assante, Robert Webber, Sam Wanamaker, Barbara Barrie, Mary Kay Place, Harry Dean Stanton, Albert Brooks, Richard Herd, Toni Kalem, Damita Jo Freeman, Alston Ahern, Gretchen Wyler, Craig T. Nelson, Sally Kirkland
My favourite Goldie Hawn movie. All her life, Judy Benjamin (Hawn) has been underestimated as a spoiled Jewish princess, and thus far she’s accepted it. After the death of her husband (Albert Brooks) on their wedding night, however, she goes into a state of depression and while at the very bottom of her emotional pit, falls for a recruitment officer’s sales pitch and joins the army. What the military doesn’t realize is that this bubbly, slovenly, completely discipline-challenged young lady is going to prove to be the best soldier they’ve ever had.
The screenplay is a marvelous collection of hilarious sight gags and witty one-liners (Hawn asks the personenl handing out the uniforms if they come in any other colour), but it’s also an inspiring story about learning to be the person you want to be and not the person others see in you.
Eileen Brennan has a wonderful supporting role as Hawn’s frustrated army leader, but this is the bright comedienne’s show all the way, and she’s a stunner.
99. The Home and the World
Ghare-Baire
Satyajit Ray, 1984
Rating: BBBBB
Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Victor Banerjee, Swatilekha Sengupta, Gopa Aich, Jennifer Kendal, Manoj Mitra, Indrapramit Roy, Bimala Chatterjee, Master Ajay Ghosh
Gorgeous drama, something of a reworking of Ray’s own Charulata, about a young woman who awakens to the political world around her. Her husband (Victor Banerjee), a wealthy, Western-educated landowner, challenges tradition by inviting his wife out of seclusion and encouraging her to become as educated as most men of her class. When she meets a revolutionary friend of his who has dreams of challenging British rule by organizing a boycott of foreign-made products, she immediately becomes swept up in the cause and into the rebel’s arms.
Rather than a boorish lecture on the dangers of educating women, Ray’s drawing-room epic sees the downside of intellectual freedom without the wisdom of experience, as our heroine learns to temper her passions with the reality of the outside world the hard way. Gorgeous cinematography and sturdy direction from a director (here in the last years of his career) who is the art world’s primary successor to the nineteeth-century subtleties of Henry James.
98. Swing Time
George Stevens, 1936
Rating: BBBBB
Cast: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Victor Moore, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick, Betty Furness, Georges Metaxa, Landers Stevens, Abe Reynolds
My favourite musical starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, which features lively musical numbers (including one, unfortunately and annoyingly, in blackface), snappy dialogue and a fun story. When his wedding is thwarted by his concerned friends, Astaire finds himself going to the big city to make some money that the bride’s father feels he owes the family in order to make things right and have another wedding take place. While trying to start up his own dance instruction business, he meets Rogers and they naturally make such a great team that they stick together, and once he realizes he didn’t really want to marry his intended fiancé, he and Rogers REALLY stick together.
Songs by Jerome Kern include the Oscar-winning “The Way You Look Tonight”, which has never in musical history sounded better than Astaire’s performance of it in this film.
97. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
This film is reviewed in The Films of Stephan Elliot
96. The Thomas Crown Affair
John McTiernan, 1999
Rating: BBBBB
Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary, Ben Gazzara, Frankie Faison, Fritz Weaver, Charles Keating, Mark Margolis, Faye Dunaway, Esther Cañadas
Superior remake of Norman Jewison’s 1968 film, notable for featuring the female performance of the year from its star Rene Russo: displaying strength, vulnerability and everything in between, her Catherine Banning is a fascinating and infectiously desirable lady. Pierce Brosnan stars and co-produces as multimillionaire Thomas Crown, a man who steals famous paintings because being so rich is just so boring. Russo is the elegant insurance claims investigator who is quite certain that the recent robbery of a classic Monet has something to do with the seemingly innocent billionaire.
In the original version, Steve McQueen’s Crown robbed banks, but here the addition of the art world gives the film a whole new dimension of interest it never had before. There’s also a killer sequence involving Crown fooling the authorities at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art by using countless body doubles, a hot-as-hell salsa sequence, a spirit-lifting score by Bill Conti and a very impressive supporting performance by Denis Leary. This is an action film that trades on its characters’ wits and not their guns, and succeeds at every step.
95. Thelma & Louise
This film is reviewed in the Top Ten Films of the 1990s
94. Clueless
This film is reviewed in the Top Ten Films of the 1990s
93. A League of Their Own
Penny Marshall, 1992
Rating: BBBB
Cast: Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Lynn Cartwright, Madonna, Eunice Anderson, Lori Petty, Kathleen Butler, Rosie O’Donnell, Vera Johnson, Anne Ramsay, Barbara Pilavin, Megan Cavanagh, Patricia Wilson, Freddie Simpson, Eugenia McLin, Tracy Reiner
With most able-bodied men fighting in the trenches during World War II, professional baseball team owners created a women’s league in order to keep the game alive and the crowds paying. A documentary about the All Girl League that lasted into the fifties has been turned by Penny Marshall into a very entertaining comedy detailing a fictitious version of the story, centering on two mid-western sisters (Geena Davis, Lori Petty) who join the league after a talent scout (Jon Lovitz) sees them play ball.
Following a successful tryout, they are trained on the field and in refinement classes (”each girl in the league shall be a lady”), and win over audiences all around the country in the baseball diamond while avoiding a personal emotional tension between them that will eventually threaten their bond.
Davis is exceptional, carrying the whole film without the slightest effort, while Tom Hanks lends excellent comedic support as the team’s alcoholic manager. Other roles in this delightfully scripted comedy (that has its share of genuinely touching moments as well) go to newcomer Rosie O’Donnell, Ann Cusack, (Joan’s sister), Tracy Reiner, Anne Ramsay, and a very charming Madonna as sexpot All-The-Way-Mae Mordabito (her casting reportedly prompted original star Debra Winger to drop out over objections to “stunt casting”). The whole thing is great fun, even if it does last longer than it should and features some uneven pacing, with high points going to Madonna for her fantastic dance number.
92. Bonjour Tristesse
Otto Preminger, 1958
Rating: BBBB
Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Jean Seberg, Mylène Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, Juliette Gréco, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, Roland Culver, Jean Kent, David Oxley, Elga Andersen, Jeremy Burnham
Preminger’s melodrama about the pains of coming of age may seem like trashy studio fare (the pangs of adolescence being set against a contrivedly beautiful French Riviera backdrop), but the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague considered this film one of their strongest inspirations for very good reason.
Jean Seberg is superb as a young woman who lives the high life with her playboy father David Niven, accompanying him to fancy parties in Paris during the social season, in summer amusing herself on the coast while he brings the latest in his long string of pretty young girlfriends for his own entertainment. Present day scenes are shot in inky black and white as she tries to kick off her cares and enjoy the night life while remembering the previous year, filmed in glorious full colour, when Niven attempted a serious romance with her late mother’s best friend (Deborah Kerr). Kerr is a fashion designer who hopes to cure Niven’s Peter Pan syndrome while taking her new role as Seberg’s female influence seriously; her interfering in Seberg’s affairs does not go well and the younger woman soon turns nasty in her attempt to go back to the glory days of being an unsupervised latchkey kid.
Seberg’s actions to get her father and potential new stepmother to break up end in consequences that are more than she bargained for, and the brilliance of the film is the honesty with which it treats the bitterness that ensues: Preminger doesn’t utilize the sun-drenched cinematography and gorgeous cast as a distraction from the misery, the plush aesthetics are ironically employed as the failed cover for Seberg’s painful entry into the moral snakepit that is adult life. Because he has the guts to keep his foot on that melancholic pedal until the very last shot, the film feels grown-up even by today’s standards, unwilling to reassure us of the kind of robust morality that studio fare usually favoured. This film isn’t about moral punishment, it’s an intelligent examination of ambivalence in which each character is stuck in an eternal purgatory of their own making. Setting it against the gorgeous backdrop of the Cote d’Azur only makes the emotional element that much more poignant.
Kerr’s role in particular shows off a more complex side to her than the fifties were used to, she revels in playing a character whose dignified demeanor is a brittle distraction from her insecurities and not the flawless armor that it usually is in her roles from this period. A film that grows richer with time and provides the viewer more every time they watch it.
91. The Heiress
William Wyler, 1949
Rating: BBBBB
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins, Vanessa Brown, Betty Linley, Ray Collins, Mona Freeman, Selena Royle, Paul Lees, Harry Antrim, Russ Conway, David Thursby
Much of the narrative and dialogue from Henry James’ novel Washington Square, upon which the play by Augustus and Ruth Goetz and this film were based, have been changed to allow for more outwardly-directed drama as opposed to the novel’s inner subtlety and perception.
Olivia de Havilland gives the performance of the decade as James’ heroine Catherine Sloper, a plain and painfully shy young woman who attracts the attentions of handsome (boy, he was handsome) Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift). She wishes to marry him, but her father (Ralph Richardson) objects, insisting that Townsend is a fortune hunter or else why would such a fantastic catch want such a homely woman for a wife?
The journey that Catherine undergoes towards self-confidence is fascinating, particularly thanks to the detailed and deeply complex work by de Havilland in a role that gives her an astonishing amount of range. Great filmmaking from a great filmmaker, rich with character and mood.