It's the big dilemma of the video age: You walk into the local rental store, see that all 60 copies of Ghost are rented out, and scan the aisles with dread. Thousands of titles stare you down, and you haven't heard of one of them. How many bad movies can they make, anyway?
Wait a minute: Total obscurity doesn't necessarily mean that a film is unworthy, merely that it's unknown. In fact, there are movie treasures buried on the shelves of every video store. Lost classics hide behind lousy titles (I Walked With a Zombie has to be terrible, right? Wrong.) Neglected jewels suffer from hideous packaging; forgotten miracles are filed in the wrong section, because the stock-kid's cultural memory stops at Young Guns 2. None of it matters: They're still good movies.
Don't believe us? Fine, we'll prove it. On the following article, you will find 100 Great Movies You've Never Heard Of. You'll also meet some of the great unknowns who made them. You'll learn how bad things can happen to good movies, and how to unearth the gems of your choice when you can't find them at the neighborhood Blockbuster. And maybe next time the new Tom Cruise of Schwarzenegger flick isn't available, you'll take home a mysterious stranger with surprising charms instead.
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
A tense, claustrophobic
thriller from the days when John Carpenter made good cheap movies,
this is an imaginative urban update of Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo: Cops
and crooks band together for one night of survival when a guerrilla
youth gang lays siege to an L.A. precinct house. From the moment
one thug offhandedly kills a little girl (setting the plot in
motion), the movie takes no prisoners.
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
In a modern reworking
of the classic Western, one-armed Spencer Tracy shows up in a
Southwestern town that's got something to hide, and it has to do with
the treatment of Japanese- Americans during the war. Director John
Sturges captures, mercilessly, what it's like to be a stranger in an
unfriendly town. Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine are
astonishingly evil local villains.
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)
Sam Peckinpah's The Wild
Bunch came out the year before, and audiences probably expected more
slow-mo balletic violence from him. But Peckinpah decided,
cinematically speaking, to ''go fishin''' for fun. Jason Robards is an
ornery prospector who builds a prosperous stagecoach stop and becomes
an anachronism in his own time. It's a story of individuality, set
under spacious Western skies, that takes its own sweet time.
Barbarosa (1982)
Most '80s Westerns were bloated, jokey
affairs. Not this unpretentious winner, which gave Willie Nelson his
best role to date, as a desperado in the dusty Rio Grande valley.
Gary Busey is a farm boy- turned- sidekick in Fred Schepisi's fine,
funny campfire tale of a movie.
La Bete Humaine (1938)
Every
film buff worth his or her salted popcorn knows Jean Renoir's Rules
of the Game and Grand Illusion, but his feverish adaptation of the
Emile Zola novel is just as gripping. A dark moral chiller in which
railroad worker Jean Gabin is cajoled into murder by hot Simone
Simon, Humaine is a key influence on Hollywood noirs like Double
Indemnity — and its soul runs much deeper.
The Big Combo (1955)
''First is first and
second is nobody'' is the motto of racketeer and human slime Richard
Conte in this flashy and often unforgettable crime flick set on the
seamy side of the tracks. Cornel Wilde is the detective obsessed with
putting him behind bars, and Jean Wallace is the society girl Conte
keeps in sexual thrall. Surely one of the first movies to feature a
pair of homosexual lovers who are also thugs.
Black Narcissus (1947)
Deborah Kerr leads a group of
British nuns whose Himalayan outpost inflames their imaginations in
ways not at all in keeping with vows of chastity. This smartly
written, stunningly filmed, outrageously sensual psychology lesson
was, like most films directed by the great British director Michael
Powell, at least 20 years ahead of its time.
Brain Damage (1988)
A chatty parasitic slug attaches
itself to human spinal cords and trades a hallucinogenic secretion
for its prime dinner: fresh brains. This cheap, fast, gross, and
extremely funny horror-comedy by Frank Henenlotter (Frankenhooker)
manages to be both an antidrug parable and a sleazy B flick without
losing its cool. That's some kind of trashy feat.
The Brood (1979)
The title refers to the rampaging mutant
spawn of Samantha Eggar, but it could just as well mean the dour tone
of any horror movie from David Cronenberg (The Fly), in which the
real source of terror lies in the ways our bodies betray us. For a
cheap horror flick, The Brood echoes on levels you may not care to
acknowledge.
Burn! (1970)
Incendiary indeed. Marlon Brando gives one of
his seductively mysterious performances as an agent provocateur sent
by the British government to incite a slave uprising on a Caribbean
island in the 19th century. Director Gillo Pontecorvo's complex film
is as remarkable for its steaming, sensual surfaces as for its
sophisticated political thinking.
Candy Mountain (1988)
Codirected by esteemed still
photographer Robert Frank and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Walker),
this lovely shaggy-dog story takes a cocky kid from New York to the
wilds of Canada in search of a reclusive guitar maker. On the way, he
meets every musical eccentric from Buster Poindexter to Leon Redbone
to Dr. John and finds a surreal stillness at road's end.
Carrie (1952)
Unpopular because of its frank
treatment of unwholesome material, director William Wyler's
adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (not to be confused
with Brian De Palma's 1976 film) may contain Laurence Olivier's best
screen performance. As George Hurstwood, the married man who runs off
with Carrie (Jennifer Jones), Olivier paints an almost unbearably
painful portrait of dissolution. Carrie becomes a renowned actress as
Hurstwood falls deeper into the abyss of himself.
Caught (1949)
A dark, eerie weepie made by French
director Max Ophuls. Barbara Bel Geddes marries dashing, Howard
Hughes-like millionaire Robert Ryan, but he's revealed to be a
sadistic egomaniac. By the time James Mason rescues her, she's
nearly bonkers, a martyr to her dime-novel dreams of romance.
Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979)
John Heard wants last
year's girlfriend, Mary Beth Hurt, back, and so what if she got
married in the interim? Its studio originally released this film as
Head Over Heels, but the truth lies between the two titles; this
isn't so much a cerebral film or a romantic comedy as it is a mature
charmer about people using absurdity to keep loneliness from the
door.
Comfort and Joy (1984)
Scottish filmmaker Bill
Forsyth's gentle comedy about a Glaswegian deejay whose life has
slipped out of its normal groove is a true piece of eccentricity. A
walking Murphy's law, the music spinner gets caught in the cross fire
between two underworld families fighting for rights to an ice cream
concession — the oddest twist ever in the shoot-'em-up genre.
The Company of Wolves (1984)
What do you get when you
mix Little Red Riding Hood, Sigmund Freud, The Werewolf of London,
and Bruno Bettelheim, then toss in Angela Lansbury as Grandmama? This
maze-like fantasy is a tart, luxurious marriage of medieval fairy
tale and kinky coming-of-age symbolism, with a wild sense of play
that offsets its sizable pretensions.
Criss Cross (1949)
Robert Siodmak directed
this film noir hold-up movie with speed and surgical precision. Burt
Lancaster is the slightly dopey armored-car guard who gets the dirt
from a skirt — the extremely alluring Yvonne De Carlo as his
duplicitous wife. The robbery itself, executed with the thieves
wearing gas masks, is memorably surreal. And keep an eye out for a
kid named Anthony (Tony) Curtis, making his movie debut.
Dancing Lady (1933)
The mind boggles: Joan Crawford,
Fred Astaire, and the Three Stooges in the same movie? It's as if the
different levels of '30s Hollywood stardom had suddenly collapsed
into a wonderful ground-floor pigpile. The movie's like that, too: a
fine, weird MGM musical that runs the style gamut from Astaire's
lithe elegance to the Stooges' socket-popping rowdiness.
Dark Star (1974)
If John Carpenter's directorial
debut looks like a low-budget student film, it is. It's also a very
funny sci-fi parody in which four astronauts and one dippy-looking
alien go around the bend from boredom and lack of toilet paper.
Presenting space travel as a never-ending car trip with people you
used to like, it wickedly deflates the pomposity lurking behind
almost every episode of Star Trek.
Death Race 2000 (1975)
This zippy prototype of
post-apocalyptic-car- chase flicks offers something The Road Warriorand a zillion other clones don't: a gleefully sophomoric sense of
humor and a tough-guy antihero (Keith Carradine) with unexpected
reserves of wit, tenderness, and humility. As competing drivers
barrel across the U.S., racking up points by mowing down pedestrians,
director Paul Bartel keeps the gore almost discreet, and Sylvester
Stallone has a lowbrow field day playing Carradine's boorish rival.
Deception (1946)
Bette Davis plays Beethoven's
Appassionata Sonata while composer Alex Hollenius (Claude Rains, at
his sneering best) destroys the stemware in a jealous rage. He's
furious because cellist Paul Henreid has returned and reclaimed
Bette's heart. This is wonderful old kitsch in which people always
seem to be wearing evening clothes, gazing out at skyscrapers, and
saying such things as, ''Oh please, don't let's make a scene.''
Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle) (1983)
A
thinking person's Mad Max, this first film from Luc Besson (La Femme
Nikita) is a remarkable post-holocaust play-off between a nice little
guy and a big brute. There's no dialogue (chemical weapons ruined the
survivors' vocal cords), but gleaming sepia photography and surreal
touches like a rain shower of fish keep the viewer enthralled.
Detour (1945)
Edgar G. Ulmer's
brutally nasty cult thriller is perhaps the cheapest good movie ever
made. A hitchhiker (Tom Neal) is picked up by a femme fatale (Ann
Savage) and led down the road to ruin. The fun of Detour is its
absurdly economical technique: The entire film appears to have been
shot in a living room, yet this tumbledown shack of a movie works as
a raw evocation of the noir spirit.
Dodsworth (1936)
Made at a time when most films
portrayed the middle-aged as cantankerous characters or cute ol'
fools — gee, sounds like today's movies — this William Wyler drama
remains one of the most clear-eyed cinematic views of mid-life in
America. Walter Huston, as an industrialist dispirited by retirement
and his failed marriage, conveys a lifetime of can-do idealism by
trying to come to terms with its inadequacy — all played out on
striking, Oscar-winning sets.
Dreamchild (1985)
The girl on whom Lewis Carroll based Alice
in Wonderland arrives in America at age 80 to participate in the
author's centenary. Once there, the elderly Alice (Coral Browne) is
tormented by memories of Carroll (Ian Holm), who she realizes was
passionately in love with her. This is one of the most profound
movies ever made about the intermingling of art and life, and Holm is
superb as the tormented, stuttering fantasist-mathematician.
