National Film Registry 2007
Films
Selected to the National Film Registry, Library of Congress - 2007
Back to the Future (1985)
Before "Beowulf" or "The Polar Express," writer/director
Robert Zemeckis explored
the possibilities of special effects with the 1985 box-office smash
"
Back to the Future." With his writing partner Bob Gale, Zemeckis
tells the tale of accidental time-tourist Marty McFly. Stranded in
the year 1955,
Marty (Michael J. Fox)--with the help of Dr. Emmett Brown (played
masterfully
over-the-top by Christopher Lloyd)--must not only find a way home,
but
also teach his father how to become a man, repair the space/time
continuum and save his family from being erased from existence.
All this, while fighting off the advances of his then-teenaged
mother. It's "The Twilight Zone" meets Preston Sturges.
Bullitt (1968)
For his first American film, British director Peter Yates made an inspired
decision: shoot a crime drama on location in San Francisco, rather
than
on the usual streets of L.A. or New York City. The pitched streets
and
stunning vistas of San Francisco, backed by a superb Lalo Schifrin
score,
play a central role in this film renowned for its exhilarating 11-minute
car chase, arguably the finest in cinema history. Steve McQueen as
the
cop in the title role romances Jacqueline Bisset and solves a murder
case
while fighting off the mob and a sleazy district attorney, played by
Robert
Vaughn.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
After his 1975 blockbuster "Jaws," Steven Spielberg produced
this intelligent
sci-fi film in which the climactic scene is set far from an ocean:
Devil's Tower
National Monument in Wyoming. Long a sacred place in Native American
folklore,
the monument served as an iconic image around which to construct this
film about
the quest for extraterrestrial life and UFOs. Also making the film
effective and
believable is Richard's Dreyfuss' Everyman character Roy
Neary: "I wanna speak to
the man in charge." The five-tone musical motif used for communication
with the
aliens has become as quotable as any line of movie dialogue.
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
Although there were numerous women filmmakers in the early decades
of silent cinema,
by the 1930s directing in Hollywood had become a male bastion--with
one exception.
Dorothy Arzner graduated from editing to directing in the late 1920s,
often exploring
the conflicted roles of women in contemporary society. In "Dance,
Girl, Dance," her most
intriguing film, two women (Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara)
pursue life in show business
from opposite ends of the spectrum: burlesque and ballet. The film
is a meditation on the
disparity between art and commerce. The dancers strive to preserve
their own feminist
integrity, while fighting for their place in the spotlight and for
the love of male lead
Louis Hayward.
Dances With Wolves (1990)
A personal project for star Kevin Costner, "Dances with Wolves" disproved
a reputation
Western films had acquired in the latter years of the 20th Century
for being money-losers.
The film also became the second Western to win the Academy Award for
Best Film. The movie
presents a fairly simple, intimate story (the quest of a cavalry soldier
to get to know a
nearby Sioux tribe and his resulting spiritual transformation) in an
epic fashion, with
sweeping cinematography and a majestic John Barry score. The film marks
one of the more
sympathetic portraits of Native-American life ever shown in American
cinema, and introduced
the American public to Lakota Sioux folklore, traditions and language.
Days of Heaven (1978)
Often called one of the most beautiful films ever made (acknowledging
the sublime
cinematography of Nÿstor Almendros and Haskell Wexler), "Days
of Heaven" is an impressionist
painting for the screen. The wheat fields and prairies of the Texas
Panhandle--filmed in Alberta--
shine and undulate in wind currents and storms, framing the tale of
a love triangle (Richard
Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard)fated to end badly. The dialogue
is spare, punctuating
an elegiac score by Ennio Morricone and haunting narration by Linda
Manz, who speaks from
a child's point of view. After this film (his second after "Badlands"),
director Terrence
Malick disappeared from public view for 20 years, returning
in 1998 with "The Thin Red Line."
Glimpse of the Garden (1957)
Though Marie Menken's volatile marriage to Willard Mass served
as the inspiration for
playwright Edward Albee in his 1962 play, "Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf," her surprisingly
joyful and simple films rate among the more accessible works of avant-garde
filmmakers.
The beautifully lyrical "Glimpse of the Garden" is a serendipitous
visual tour of a flower
garden set to a soundtrack of bird calls.
Grand Hotel (1932)
Termed "The Lion Tamer" by critics for his skill in dealing
with temperamental Hollywood
stars, director Edmund Goulding ("Dark Victory," "Razor's
Edge," and "Nightmare Alley")
earned the plaudit many times over in "Grand Hotel." This
film put much of the MGM star
factory--Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, John and Lionel Barrymore,
Joan Crawford--into a single
film with multiple plots, arguably the first use of the all-star formula
later seen in
"
Airport," "Dinner at Eight," and "The Towering
Inferno." Crawford is reported to have
told the Barrymores: "All right, boys, but don't forget
that the American
public would rather have one look at my back than watch both your faces
for an hour." In
this film Garbo uttered the line, "I want to be alone."
The House I Live In (1945)
This short film directed by Mervyn LeRoy pleads for religious tolerance
and won an honorary
Academy Award in 1946. Singer Frank Sinatra takes a break from a recording
session to tell
kids that in America, there are a hundred different ways of talking
and going to church--but
they are all American ways. The film ends with Sinatra performing the
title tune, an
inspiring paean to America's diverse cultural mosaic.
In a Lonely Place (1950)
"
Rebel Without a Cause" is often given the nod as Nicholas Ray's
greatest film, but his
earlier scathing Hollywood satire, "In a Lonely Place," may
well rate that honor. Screenwriter
Humphrey Bogart, brilliant at his craft yet prone to living with his
fists, undergoes scrutiny
as a murder suspect while romancing insouciant starlet Gloria Grahame.
Their tempestuous
on-screen romance mirrors the real-life deteriorating marriage of Grahame
and director
Ray, who divorced shortly after the film was completed. With jaded
passion
and paranoid force of character, Bogart perfectly plays the talented
but psychologically
unstable artist who will not accept his society, proving it with periodic
violent,
self-destructive confrontations. The film's cynical, fatalistic
script marries film-noir
themes and doomed romance: "I was born when she kissed me. I died
when she left me. I lived
a few weeks while she loved me."
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
John Ford, a filmmaker since 1914, already had given the movie-going
public such classics as
"
The Iron Horse," "Stagecoach,""My Darling Clementine," "Fort
Apache," "She Wore A Yellow
Ribbon," and "The Searchers". Ford's last great
Western, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,"
makes explicit everything that was implicit in the genre which Ford
himself shaped so
heavily. By clearly showing that the conquest of the west meant the
triumph of civilization
(embodied in Jimmy Stewart) over wild innocence (John Wayne) and evil
(Lee Marvin), this
elegiac film serves as a film coda for Ford and also meditates on what
was lost as
progress and statehood marched across the West. The film's concluding
aphorism has
entered the American lexicon: "When the legend becomes fact,
print the legend."
Mighty Like a Moose (1926)
Actor/director/screenwriter Charley Chase is underappreciated in the
arena of early comedy
shorts. Chase began his film career in the teens, working for Mack
Sennett with the likes of
Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. Moving on to the Hal Roach Studios,
Chase starred in his own series of shorts. "Mighty Like a Moose," directed
by Leo McCarey,
is one of the funniest of his silents. A title card at the beginning
tells us this is "a
story of homely people--a wife with a face that would stop a clock--and
her husband
with a face that would start it again." Unbeknownst to each other
Mr. and Mrs. Moose
have surgery on the same day to correct his buckteeth and her big nose.
They meet on the
street later, but don't recognize each other; they flirt and
arrange to meet later at
a party. A side-splitting series of sight gags follows including Charley's "fight
with
himself."
The Naked City (1948)
During the oral narration of the credits at the opening, we are told
this is a different
kind of movie; not filmed on a Hollywood back lot but on actual locations
in New York
City. Winning Oscars for best photography (William Daniels) and editing
(Paul Weatherwax)
and nominated for best writing (Malvin Wald), this cutting-edge, gritty
crime procedural
introduced a new style of film-making. "The Naked City" offers
up slices of several stories,
building and dove-tailing into a logical solution with a heart-pounding
resolution.
Based on six months of interviews with the NYPD and using three-dimensional
characters,
it changed the way police were portrayed in film and how crimes were
solved. Another unique
aspect of Mark Hellinger's production and Jules Dassin's
direction was to hire local radio
and theater actors new to film – it launched several character-acting
careers.
Now, Voyager (1942)
The film's title comes from Walt Whitman's "Leaves
of Grass:" "The untold want, by life
and land ne'er granted/Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek
and find." A resonant
woman's picture, "Now, Voyager" features Bette Davis
as a dowdy spinster terrorized by
her possessive mother and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Psychiatrist
Claude Rains
cures Davis and suggests a cruise, where she falls in love with married
Paul
Henreid. The impossible romance does not depress Davis but rather transforms
her into
a confident, independent woman. Davis' final words electrify
one of the most famous
endings in romantic cinema: "Oh Jerry, don't let's ask for the
moon. We have the stars."
Oklahoma! (1955)
The publicity campaign said it all: "A motion picture as big
as all outdoors." In this
beloved musical, an idealized vision of a turn-of-the-century small
town, chicks and
ducks and geese scurry right across the wide screen. The literalized
film treatment
appeared a dozen years after the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway premiere.
The film
eliminated two songs and substituted breathtaking Technicolor vistas
and stereo sound
for theatrical innovation. Set shortly before Oklahoma statehood, the
movie features such
Western-film staples as the cowman/farmer feud (subject of a memorable
song sung by
Gordon MacRae). As choreographer Agnes de Mille noted: "It's
different, but I find it
very beautiful to look at."
Our Day (1938)
Wallace Kelly of Lebanon, Kentucky, made this exquisitely crafted amateur
film at home
in 1938. "Our Day" is a smart, entertaining day-in-the-life
portrait of the Kelly household,
shown in both idealized and comic ways. This silent 16mm home movie
uses creative editing,
lighting and camera techniques comparable to what professionals were
doing in Hollywood.
His amateur cast was made up of his mother, wife, brother and pet terrier.
"
Our Day" also contains exceptional images of small-town Southern
life, ones that counter
the stereotype of impoverished people eking out a living during the
Depression. The 12-minute
film documents a modern home inhabited by adults with sophisticated
interests (the piano,
literature, croquet) and simple ones (gardening, knitting, home cooking).
Kelly was also
an accomplished photographer, painter, and writer. He began shooting
film in 1929 and
continued until the 1950s.
Peege (1972)
Director Randal Kleiser ("Grease") crafted this renowned,
extremely moving student film
while at the University of Southern California. Members of a family
visit their blind,
dying grandmother Peege at a nursing home, but leave in despair at
her condition. Remaining
behind, the grandson recounts memories to Peege and manages to connect
emotionally with
the lonely woman and bring a smile to her face.
The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928)
Humorist Robert Benchley's career was both varied and distinguished:
essayist, member of
the Algonquin Round Table, writer for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker,
actor in Hollywood
features ( "Foreign Correspondent") and several dozen short
comedy subjects. "The Sex Life
of the Polyp," Benchley's second short (following "The
Treasurer's Report") features him
as a daft doctor delivering a droll but earnest lecture on polyp reproductive
habits to
a women's club.
The Strong Man (1926)
Harry Langdon, widely considered one of the great silent comedians,
had a career that
can only be described as meteoric. A vaudevillian for much of his professional
life, Harry
Langdon was discovered and brought to Hollywood by Mack Sennett in
the early 1920s. But
he languished until lightning struck in 1925, when director Harry Edwards
and then-gagman
Frank Capra worked with him on three features and several shorts. The
features, "Tramp,
Tramp, Tramp," "Long Pants" and "The Strong
Man" put Langdon solidly into the foursome
Walter Kerr calls "The Four Silent Clowns" --with
Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and
Harold Lloyd. "The Strong Man" predated "City Lights" by
several years with its plot of a meek
man in love with a blind woman.
Three Little Pigs (1933)
Voted the 11th-best cartoon of all time in a 1990s poll of animators, "Three
Little Pigs" falls
midway through a series of classic shorts ("Skeleton Dance," "The
Band Concert," "The Old
Mill,") that Walt Disney produced as he learned and refined the
art of animation; each film
marked another development in his path toward the 1937 feature "Snow
White and the Seven
Dwarfs." The wildly popular "Three Little Pigs" proved
a landmark in "personality animation"--
each of the three pigs had a different personality--and the title
tune "Who's Afraid of
the Big Bad Wolf" became a Depression-era anthem.
Tol'able David (1921)
Henry King (1886-1982) had a 50-year career in Hollywood, winning a
reputation as one of the
most talented directors in capturing the values, culture, history,
personality, and character
of the nation. His nostalgia was honest, and often bittersweet. In "Tol'able
David,"
King tells a coming-of-age story about a youth who must overcome savage,
bullying neighbors
as he takes on his first job delivering mail in rural Virginia. "Tol'able
David" was studied
by Russian filmmakers of the 1920s. They were inspired by King's memorable
conjunctions
of shots that evoked personalities and emotions without a need for
explanatory titles.
"
Tol'able David" remains a powerful drama and is also known for
its craftsmanship, which
was tremendously influential on subsequent filmmaking.
Tom, Tom the Piper's Son (1969-71)
Ken Jacobs' landmark avant-garde film reverently re-photographs
an early cinema short of
the fairy tale song to explore the parameters of film art. A "structuralist
film"
masterpiece, Jacobs uses techniques ranging from slow and studied examinations
of individual
paper print images to probing experiments in manipulation of motion
and light.
12 Angry Men (1957)
In the 1950s, several television dramas acted live over the airways
won such critical
acclaim that they were also produced as motion pictures; among those
already honored by the
National Film Registry is "Marty" (1955) . Reginald Rose
had adapted his original stage
play "12 Angry Men" for Studio One in 1954, and Henry Fonda
decided to produce a screen
version, taking the lead role and hiring director Sidney Lumet, who
had been directing for
television since 1950. The result is a classic. Filmed in a spare,
claustrophobic
style--largely set in one jury room--the play relates a single
juror's refusal to conform
to peer pressure in a murder trial and follows his conversion of one
juror after another
to his point of view. The story is viewed a commentary on McCarthyism,
Fascism, or
Communism.
The Women (1939)
Probably no movie in history has combined more leading Hollywood ladies
(Norma Shearer,
Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Mary Boland, Paulette Goddard, Joan
Fontaine) without,
as advertising noted, "a man in sight." Yet "It's
all about men." Based on the hit play
by Clare Boothe Luce, "The Women" explores the new options
open to women with the possibility
of divorce, following several intertwining paths to the courts in Reno.
The characters
learn of the various affairs and entanglements of their husbands with
others, and are
forced to decide between "freedom" and surrendering pride
for love. "See them with their
hair down, and their claws out!" promised MGM, and delivered.
George Cukor secured his
reputation as a women's director with this movie.
Wuthering Heights (1939)
Director William Wyler had great difficulty in convincing Laurence
Olivier to leave England
to play the part of Heathcliff in this adaptation of Emily Brontë's
work, especially since
Olivier's wife Vivien Leigh was not offered the leading- lady
role of Cathy, which went to
Merle Oberon. Eventually, Olivier agreed and Leigh, while visiting
Olivier during the
filming, managed to get a screen test for what became her greatest
role: Scarlett O'Hara
in "Gone With the Wind." Producer Samuel Goldwyn always
claimed credit for the film,
reportedly once saying: "I made "Wuthering Heights;" Wyler
only directed it." Gregg
Toland's deep-focus cinematography deftly creates the moody,
ethereal atmosphere of
haunted love in a film universally acclaimed as one of cinema's
great romances.
|