Chapter 23

Ten Films That Made an Impact

In This Chapter

Films with a message, whether you agree with it or not

Films that defined an era

No, this isn’t my list of the top ten films ever made, nor are they necessarily my favourites, but these are films that, for some very different reasons, made an impact in the twentieth century. You might miss a few titles – Citizen Kane for example, which I find impresses film directors more than it does the rest of us, or A Clockwork Orange, whose main impact lay in getting banned. I’ve also missed out two important film brands, Disney and Bollywood. Nothing against either, but their impact has been more as a whole genre rather than through any individual film. Of course, you may disagree. Inevitably, the list is dominated by American films, but I’ve included a few reminders that the rest of the world can make influential movies too.

Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915)

Griffith’s racist US Civil War epic is worth seeing as a document of its time, though it doesn’t make comfortable viewing. Its central message soon becomes pretty clear: North and South (that’s the white north and south, of course) could’ve been united in eternal friendship had it not been for those villainous blacks. And villainous the black characters certainly are in this film, plotting, scheming, and stealing women. In terms of history the film’s bunkum, but it’s an undoubted technical feat: Griffith was particularly skilful at recreating the panoramic battle scenes. Birth of a Nation’s long, so settle down with a sandwich, watch it through, and admire the camerawork and direction. And then go and have a bath.

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

Another silent epic, though from a very different ideological stable from Griffith (see preceding section). Battleship Potemkin tells the story of a naval mutiny during the 1905 revolution in Russia, though in more of a documentary style than the melodramatic style the Americans favoured. This film regularly features in directors’ and critics’ lists of the ten greatest films ever made, for its powerful close-ups of faces and the famous, much-copied scene where the Cossacks move in to shoot down the crowds on the Odessa steps. It was the first Soviet film to score a hit on the world stage and probably did more to spread the Soviet message than any number of Lenin’s speeches.

All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)

This tale of how a young German soldier in the Great War gradually loses his innocent enthusiasm is still one of the most powerful anti-war films ever made. All Quiet on the Western Front was based on the novel by the German writer Erich-Maria von Remarque, who drew on his own experiences in the trenches. The film caught the anti-war mood of the time and was also significant, for an American film, in presenting the story from the German point of view. As you watch it, in fact, it soon ceases to matter which side the boys are on at all.

Despite its success, however, the film got left behind when the international mood changed. The Nazis banned it – and burned the book – and as the world moved closer towards war in the 1930s fewer people had time for an anti-war message. All Quiet on the Western Front is a powerful and moving film, but it couldn’t change the world.

Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)

The Nazis had an unerring instinct for spectacle-as-propaganda and they built a vast complex of arenas and parade grounds outside Nuremberg where they could stage their mass party rallies. In 1934 Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite filmmaker, got permission to make a film featuring the annual Nuremberg rally: The result was Triumph of the Will, unashamedly Nazi but a triumph of the filmmaker’s art.

The Nazis, who didn’t usually have time for go-ahead, feisty women, let Leni Riefenstahl film as and where she liked, so she stretched out on the ground for those shots from below of Hitler looking masterful, where you can see up his nostrils, and had herself hauled up a flagpole to film some of the march-pasts from above. The result is overwhelmingly powerful, much more so, in fact, than if you were present at the rallies themselves, which were very long, very tedious, and you couldn’t see anything like as much as you could in the film. A disturbing masterpiece, but a masterpiece nevertheless.

The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

The munchkins weren’t allowed to mingle with the rest of the cast and Judy Garland was seventeen, not a little girl of eight (and you wonder that she was so screwed up?). When Princess Margaret told her that Somewhere Over the Rainbow still made her cry, Judy replied, ‘Ma’am, that song ruined my life.’ But what about the film: Witches, wizards, cowardly lions – what’s that all about?

Well, The Wizard of Oz isn’t about Kansas or even Oz: It’s about the Depression and how to get out of it. When it was being filmed, America was still in the grip of economic misery: The sandstorm that blows Dorothy’s house away would have reminded a lot of people of the dustbowl that had devastated the American Midwest only a few years before. It was only natural that Americans should wish for ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ and for a great wizard (President Roosevelt, perhaps?) to come down and solve all their problems for them. But the message of the film is that, in the end, Americans must look within themselves for the courage – yup, and the heart and the brain – to solve their own problems. Because, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Kurasawa specialised in Japanese historical epics, with lots of banner- wearing horsemen galloping across the screen slashing at each other with swords, like Kill Bill at the races. This film tells of a group of samurai warriors who risk all to protect a defenceless village against a gang of bandits. If that scenario sounds familiar, it’s probably because Seven Samurai was the inspiration for a famous American re-make, The Magnificent Seven.

Americans in the 1950s were understandably nervous of Japanese exports and culture so soon after the war, and anything about the samurai code was bound to spark off very uncomfortable memories: The samurai concept of honour lay behind the brutal treatment Allied prisoners of war had suffered at Japanese hands. However, Seven Samurai shows this code being attached to a much more noble cause. This film is also a powerful portrayal of ordinary people’s despair in the face of forces they can’t control. Okay, most people around the world saw the Yul Brynner version, but the original played an important part in the healing process after the war and is well worth seeing.

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Hitchcock’s masterpiece probably didn’t do too much for America’s motel trade, nor for shower manufacturers come to that, but it worked wonders for psychoanalysis. As the increasingly disturbing whodunnit unfolds, we realise we are dealing with a dangerously unstable boy with a decidedly unhealthy fixation on his mother, though we don’t realise the full horror until right at the end of the film (I won’t say any more in case you haven’t seen it).

Film buffs marvel at how Hitchcock breaks all the rules, killing off his glamorous star early in the film, twirling the camera round in a spiral to focus on her eye, but Psycho really reflects America’s growing love affair with Freud. This is a film about the strange games played out in the mind and how we love to try to unravel them. No coincidence that in the traditional gathering-in-the-library scene at the end, it’s not the detective who does the talking but a psychiatrist. America has never quite got off the couch since.

Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

Actually, that should be Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Issued only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this was Kubrick’s blackly satirical response to the nuclear tension of the Cold War. The plot is simple, but horrifying: A crazed American general, convinced that the Russians are somehow weakening American manhood, launches an unauthorised nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The US president and all his advisers gather in the underground war room, but are powerless to stop it and the world (and the film) ends in a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers to the accompaniment of Vera Lynn singing the Second World War favourite We’ll Meet Again.

The film has some wonderful performances, not least from Peter Sellers, who plays three parts: the mild-mannered US president, an English RAF officer, and the eponymous ex-Nazi Dr Strangelove himself. The comedy goes from beautifully-crafted lines like ‘Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here: This is the war room!’ to the final image of a gung-ho redneck astride the falling atom bomb he’s managed to free from its moorings.

In the face of the threat of nuclear annihilation, filmmakers could either try grim reality or they could opt for satire of the blackest kind. When you watch Dr Strangelove, you see the ordinary citizen’s response to the Cold War.

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

Pontecorvo’s masterpiece is a gripping exploration of terrorism and counter-terror at the height of the Algerian War, and it doesn’t pull its punches: The opening scene shows an Arab prisoner being tortured by French paratroopers. Pontecorvo got the authentic documentary feel he wanted by using ordinary people – the paras’ commander is one of the few parts played by an actor. That his sympathies lie with the Algerian rebels is obvious, but he doesn’t flinch from showing the appalling consequences of their actions: The scenes where they blow up a series of cafes and bars full of young people are shocking and very bloody. But he also shows how the French respond by planting bombs in Arab residential districts and torturing prisoners with electric shocks; in one scene, French residents suddenly turn on a harmless old man in the street simply because he’s an Arab. The Battle of Algiers is a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the way in which terrorism – on both sides – can corrupt a society, and is as relevant to the age of Iraq, Abu Ghreb, and Guantanamo Bay as it was when it was made.

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

This is the war film for people who don’t like war films. Or war. Apocalypse Now was Coppola’s reworking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for Vietnam, showing an idealistic young officer gradually learning the full horror of the war as he pushes ever further up river in search of the mysterious Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. The film’s full of helicopter imagery, from the opening shot of a ceiling fan in Saigon, and the sight of helicopters firing rockets at a Viet Cong village while playing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries at full volume has become one of cinema’s most famous set pieces. If you get the chance, see this film on the big screen for the full effect.

Directors turned to Vietnam as a way of exploring the soul of America itself. Apocalypse Now shows the corrupting nature of the conflict: One striking sequence, deliberately reminiscent of the scene at the US embassy when Saigon fell, shows GIs desperately clambering onto a rising helicopter, but not doing so for freedom or democracy: They just want to get at the Playboy models inside. At a time when the world was increasingly nervous about East–West nuclear confrontation, Apocalypse Now caught the height of the anti-war mood. It didn’t last long, though: Rambo was just around the corner.