I love lists of the top this and the top that, don’t you? Top surgeons, top roller coasters, top colleges, top pastrami sandwiches. Someone has done a lot of thinking and decision-making on my behalf, and I’m grateful.
In this spirit, I’ve come up with the Top Movies of All Time. Maybe you’re thinking, Aren’t these just her choices? Wouldn’t someone else make different, equally worthy choices?
No. My choices are the correct choices, and other choices are the wrong choices. My choices are correct because they are made disinterestedly—which, though I have to remind people about this ten times a day, doesn’t mean I don’t care! Disinterested means I’m impartial!—and because I have only listed films with universal themes and appeal, rather than those that I happen to enjoy, which would be self-centered of me.
You’re welcome, and here goes:
The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II tell the story of Carmela Corleone, a wonderful mother whose son grows up to be a big success. In Part II, he builds her a lovely home on the shores of Lake Tahoe right next to his, so she can spend her later years being cared for and paid obeisance to by her offspring, in the comfort every mother so richly deserves. Francesca De Sapio plays the young Carmela, and Morgana King plays the wise matriarch.
The Graduate: In this frisky, high-spirited romp, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) is a stylish lady who escapes her loveless marriage to a boorish businessman by finding a randy twenty-one-year-old to seduce. This backfires eventually, but not before she has gotten a summer’s worth of terrific sex out of it.
Chinatown: Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) is every Hollywood starlet’s nightmare—a fortysomething actress who’s scrambling for any part she can get. To make ends meet, Ida takes a sketchy “acting” job impersonating the wealthy Evelyn Mulwray, part of a scheme cooked up by the real Mrs. Mulwray’s degenerate husband. The gig has trouble written all over it, but what else is Ida to do? Women everywhere will identify with Ida’s plight—a woman in her prime, whose talents go unrewarded, to say the least.
The Wizard of Oz: Careworn Auntie Em (Clara Blandick) leads a hardscrabble life on a broken-down Kansas farm straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Of no help at all to her is the niece she has generously taken in, a dreamy, self-involved girl who moons around wishing she were elsewhere. When her impulse-control issues get the better of her, the girl runs away, leaving Auntie Em to deal with the girl’s disappearance as well as a nasty tornado.
Shane: This 1953 classic tells the tale of Marian Starrett and her lone campaign to end gun violence in the Old West. The whole town is gun crazy, including her husband and son, and things don’t exactly improve with the arrival of a handsome professional gunslinger. All the males develop big man crushes on him, which get more intense the closer he gets to a shoot-out with another gunslinger. Marian’s pacifism can’t hold a candle to all this phallic energy, but she just keeps at it, bless her heart. Jean Arthur plays the lovely, quixotic heroine.
The Departed: Vera Farmiga stars in this 2006 Martin Scorsese film as a brilliant Boston therapist who learns a hard but important lesson: It’s a very bad idea to date one of your patients, and an even worse one to date two.
Sophie’s Choice: Yetta Zimmerman runs a boardinghouse in Brooklyn just after World War II. It’s a lot of work, especially when two of her boarders turn out to be a complete lunatic and his codependent Polish girlfriend. He bullies and yells at the girlfriend, pounds on the piano at all hours, and keeps loudly moving out in the middle of the night, only to return the next day. Any other landlady would kick them both out, but Yetta, played beautifully by Rita Karin, remains amazingly patient and compassionate, even mourning the couple’s untimely end.
Lincoln is all about Mary Todd Lincoln, played with depth and poignancy by Sally Field. Don’t you just love Sally Field? How she hangs in there, doing fine work decade after decade while Meryl Streep gets all the best parts? And hats off to Field for fighting for the role after director Steven Spielberg told her she was too old looking to play the forty-two-year-old first lady. “Daniel [Day-Lewis] will look old and worn and thin and I will look old and worn and fat, and that’s what they were,” she told Spielberg. Way to go, sister!
Les Misérables is a hilarious look at the life of a slatternly but clever middle-aged innkeeper. Played by a delightful Helena Bonham Carter, the character manages to get through the lean post–French Revolution years by making some savvy financial deals. Sequel, please!
Silver Linings Playbook is about a kindhearted, overworked housewife whose husband and grown child are both insane and eat her out of house and home. Jacki Weaver plays the leading role with forbearance and endless good humor.
Finally, what list of great films would be complete without a shout-out to the beloved Mary Poppins? Glynis Johns stars as Mrs. Banks, the dynamic suffragette who discovers how much she can accomplish in the world once she hires a babysitter.