Making a list of the 100 best movies is great fun. It's also inherently stupid; that's part of the fun. Why, then, do so many of us feel so hopelessly cheesed off at the American Film Institute's recent 100 Years...100 Movies extravaganza? Well, for starters, where the hell is Buster Keaton—The General or, even better, Sherlock Jr.? There's nothing from two of the most brilliant directors of Hollywood comedy, Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels) and Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise, The Shop Around the Corner). No Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, no Greta Garbo. No Nashville, The Quiet Man, Touch of Evil, The Adventures of Robin Hood...
Styled as a "definitive selection" of a century of American film, the AFI project was a titanic media event replete with an interactive website, promotional support from the major studios' home-video wings, a Newsweek commemorative issue, tie-ins with cable channels TNT and Turner Classic Movies, and—the glittering centerpiece—a three-hour prime-time CBS special on June 16 at which the "winners" were unveiled by Jodie Foster, Steven Spielberg...and such well-known cineasts as Donald Trump, Susan Lucci, Brooke Shields, and Bill Clinton. As a clip show, the special was superb (except for the Citizen Kane footage that unpardonably revealed the identity of Rosebud—that'll make newcomers run out to rent the tape). As an orgy of preening self-congratulation, it made the average Oscar telecast look like a convention of Carmelite nuns.
No His Girl Friday, The Night of the Hunter, A Star Is Born, The Producers...
Underneath all the 24-karat pomp was a seriously flawed balloting process. By circulating a list of 400 cinematic contenders among 1,500 members of the filmmaking community—an unnamed "who's who," we're assured—the AFI guaranteed that the 100 would be tilted away from the best films of all time and toward the best-loved. Despite a lot of overlap, the two just aren't the same. That becomes ringingly clear when you consider what films made it in and what got shut out. Yes, the 1931 Frankenstein is a revered touchstone of horror, but anyone who's seen the 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, knows it's superior. Easy Rider may be a cultural totem but it's a shoddy, superficial flick; why not the smarter, more moving Five Easy Pieces? Worst of all is the presence of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—a truly bad film and, sadly, the closest the AFI 100 came to examining race relations. (Oops, I forgot The Birth of a Nation.) The obvious choice would have been Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and, yes, its inclusion would have enraged a lot of people. Tough: Some movies are great because they bite you back.
No White Heat, Spartacus, Greed, Rosemary's Baby, Meet Me in St. Louis, Adam's Rib, Sunrise, Notorious...
Over and over, the voters chose flattering sentiment and Official Art over discomfiting visions, disreputable genres, and plain old good moviemaking—especially when the list dipped into the past 20 years. Amadeus, The Silence of the Lambs, Dances With Wolves, Fargo—this is the best of the bunch? No, it's the most awarded, and too bad for the two Aliens, Back to the Future, Rain Man, Glory, Beauty and the Beast, Airplane!, Bull Durham, The Player, Field of Dreams, The Last of the Mohicans, Little Women, Hoop Dreams, and—both the most egregious oversight and the most understandable—Blue Velvet.
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