The Chris Moeller Archives

The 50 Great American Films 46-50

The last five films of the CM Top 50, alphabetically, from T to Z


TO BE OR NOT TO BE directed by Ernst Lubitsch (1942)

Jack Benny was primarily a star of radio and television, but his greatest film stands with the best. He was matched with the gifted comedienne Carole Lombard and Ernst Lubitsch, the German-born director and master of Hollywood's most sophisticated and witty comedies. Benny's perfect comedic timing is front and center, literally. As hambone Polish actor "the great, great Joseph Tura," Benny walks on stage in hose and blonde wig to perform Hamlet's famous soliloquy. Unbeknownst to him, his actress wife is having an affair and the "other man" is seated front row center in the audience. The man's cue to meet his lover backstage is Benny's line "To be or not to be..." Each night, as Benny begins the monologue, the man stands up and walks out. Benny's "slow burn" keeps getting longer and longer.
The Nazis are the greatest comic targets in movie history. Chaplin did "The Great Dictator," Billy Wilder did "Stalag 17" (which inspired TV's "Hogan's Heroes"), Jim Abrahams and the Zuckers did "Top Secret." Lubitsch's take, a story about a Polish theater company that becomes entangled with the Third Reich, was written and filmed before America had even entered the war. Audiences found it unsettling. It was certainly not considered light entertainment to be laughing at the Nazis during a time when their push seemed unstoppable. Also, Lubitsch had written with a coarseness that he had not with his other films. (His image had been used in caricature in a Nazi propaganda poster instructing Germans on how to recognize a Jew.)
Sixty years later, we recognize how attuned Lubitsch was to the Nazi threat, not just to racial and global harmony, but to freedom of expression and cultural creativity.


TOP HAT directed by Mark Sandrich (1935)

"Top Hat" is the greatest of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals and one of the quintessential American films of the time between the Wars when frivolousness was not yet considered dangerous. The characters dress in grand elegance, reside in fancy hotels, and dance to songs written for them by Irving Berlin.
The magical scenes include Astaire courting Rogers with "Isn't This a Lovely Day" in a gazebo during a rain shower; Astaire dancing upon scattered sand while singing a lullaby to the sleeping Rogers in the room below; and the immortal "Cheek to Cheek" ballroom finale.
More than any other performers, Astaire and Rogers now personify "the Jazz Age" on the big screen. This, despite the fact that the pair's nine picture collaboration actually took place in the decade that followed, the decade that Hollywood came into its own.
Rogers once famously remarked that she had to do everything Astaire did on the dancefloor, except backwards. True enough, but you can also see how hard she's working to keep up. (In another of their films, "Swing Time," her feet began to bleed during filming.) I think it's fairest to conclude, as one critic has, that he gave her sophistication, and she gave him sex appeal.
Today, these movies seem to take place in a kind of dream state. The couple's definitive biographer, Arlene Croce, believes that, in their best pictures, something happened "that never happened in movies again"-- "dancing was transformed into a vehicle of serious emotion between a man and a woman." The settings may have been pure fantasy, but the audience's emotions are real. They were Cinderella and Prince Charming at the ball.


THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE directed by John Huston (1948)

"I know what gold does to men's souls," says the grizzled old prospector. (Could an old prospector be described in any other way?) The actor is Walter Huston, father of the director, who outlines the film early on when he describes how the best intentions of men disappear after gold has been discovered. The elder Huston (performing without teeth) won an Academy Award for the role. He established the stereotype for 19th and early 20th century western prospectors when he danced his famous jig, but we find out during the course of the film that there's more to the man than first meets the eye.
The middle-aged man in the three-man morality play is Louis Dobbs, played by Humphrey Bogart in the performance of his life. Dobbs' soul is in for the most damage. The three men battle bandits and soldiers, and finally, themselves, as greed and the paranoia of lost treasure set in. The landscape of the Mexican mountains is harsh, but beautifully photographed, as is Bogart's descent into madness.
Two infamous aspects of the film are worth noting. That's an adolescent Robert Blake as the Mexican begger in the early moments. Also, the movie's most famous line never really was. The bandit leader never says, "Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges." The line was actually, "We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges." Credit Mel Brooks and "Blazing Saddles" for creating the confusion.


WHITE HEAT directed by Raoul Walsh (1949)

James Cagney in "White Heat" is explosive. The actor called his performance as trigger-happy Cody Jarrett and his return to the gangster genre-- "just another cheapjack job." Maybe that's why he was so willing to cut loose with such a bravura performance. At the time of the movie's release, the New York Times' Bosley Crowther compared Cagney to a bullfighter, "His movements are supple and electric, his words as swift and sharp as swords, and his whole manner carries the conviction of confidence, courage, and power." It's extraordinary that a man capable of such violent portrayals could also sing and dance, as he did in such classics as "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Here, he became the first man on screen to mine the depths of the gangster's psyche. The "Mama's Boy" angle is still fertile soil for the writers and performer behind today's gangland monarch, Tony Soprano. For Jarrett, the physical affliction is not anxiety attacks, but chronic headaches that, as one character explains, were his only means of attracting his mother's attention.
Virginia Mayo is also brilliant in a supporting role as Jarrett's philandering wife. Brash, sexy, and manipulative, she created one of the great floozies in film history.


YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN directed by Mel Brooks (1974)

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, "that's Fron-ken-shteen!," resents his famous scientist great-grandfather. He followed in his footsteps to a career in brain surgery, but he's never been able to resolve his feelings about the man's most famous experiment. (Hint: The one that involved grave robbing.) After being forced to travel from America to Transylvania to deal with the will, he stumbles across a copy of the old man's book, "How I Did It." Thus is the setup for Mel Brooks' funniest movie.
Like any great send-up, "Young Frankenstein" is effective because it's reverential to the subject it's spoofing. What gives it an extra level of insanity is that the movies it's spoofing are, themselves, spoofs. James Whale's monster, in "Frankenstein" and "Bride of Frankenstein," is no more Mary Shelley's literary creation than is Brook's. Gene Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay along with Brooks, is the brilliant comic centerpiece, but he's surrounded by other greats such as a campy Cloris Leachman as the housemaid, Frau, the voluptuous Teri Garr as the lab assistant, Inga, and an hysterical Gene Hackman as the blind man.
Lovable and goofy, Peter Boyle is a better monster than even Boris Karloff. If the scene in which Dr. Frankenstein tapdances with his monster in white tie and tails isn't the funniest in movie history, it's in the top three. And viewers who only remember Madeline Kahn from her stint on Bill Cosby's second most successful eponymous TV series will witness in "Young Frankenstein" how brilliantly funny she was at her peak. Oh, sweet mystery of life...
This is a great movie.

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That wraps it for the CM Top 50. I hoped it would keep me busy through the winter and it did. Since I started writing the reviews, I began collecting the films on DVD. I'm up to four. Almost all of the 50 are available on state-of-the-art Special Editions, loaded with extras. You know what you have to do.
The other 45 film reviews were posted Dec. 18th, 23rd, and 30th, Jan. 9th, 16th, and 23rd, Feb. 1st, 5th, 12th and 17th.

posted by CM @ 10:20 AM