Why the best films of all time are boring

The 70s were the Golden Age of film buffery. In NYC there seemed to be as many revival houses as there were first run theaters, and to some extent, these revival houses each had their own personalities. One might be dedicated to deep-cut Hollywood musicals, another might be mostly foreign films, another might be consciously arty, another more modern. At the same time, almost any movie might play at any of them, insofar as, say, Humphrey Bogart films seemed to fit into most categories, and if they didn’t, who cared, because Bogey brought in the audiences, and at some point one did have to pay the rent. Meanwhile, of course, there was a lot going on in the contemporary filmmaking of the time, and a lot of people consider the 70s not only a great time to see old movies but one of the best times to see new movies.

One of the things about a Golden Age is its contagion. It wasn’t just that there were a lot of old movies around for the viewing, or that Hollywood was redefining itself with a new more personal style of film in the mainstream, but there was an audience for all of this. A big audience. It seemed as if everyone and their uncle was a film buff. Every conversation was about the latest movie, or the meanings lurking within the old movies. Every date was a movie date. And nothing was out of bounds. The most mundane programmer samurai films and the equivalent oater serials of the Poverty Row studios and the latest incomprehensible Antonioni film or mumbly Jean-Luc Godard meditation on communism—they were all part of the mix. At the risk of glib analysis, what rock had been to the sixties, movies were to the seventies, the front line of popular culture.

In this heady cinematic atmosphere, a new kind of critic was born. As happens with any art form, sooner or later one stops connecting the art to life and begins to connect it with other examples of the art form. In movies, that means that you no longer respond to a film because it enlightens the human condition; you respond to a film because it quotes another film, or extends another film, or critiques another film. Film criticism became a self-feeding loop, its only referents being other films. Of course, this is not true of literally all film criticism, but it does sum up the mass. Now that there were film schools that could teach you to be a critic, by explaining all the machinery but perhaps none of the sense, critics were born who were a part of the machinery. The end result is, as with the art critics who rave most about art that is incomprehensible and ugly to the average individual who likes art, and as with the music critics who rave most about music that is unlistenable to the average individual who likes music, now there were film critics who raved most about movies that left the average individual cold. Because of the great expense of movies, unlike most art and music, there was never a sense that modern creators were working only for the critics. But the critics, as far as the average individual was concerned, weren’t watching the same movies, and weren’t responding in the same way. It’s not that the average individual is a schlub and the critic is a refined arbiter. It’s that the critic has virtually nothing in common anymore with the average individual when it comes to thinking about movies. So movie critics, and the rest of us who watch movies, have little or nothing in common.*

The best example of this distance between academic critics and the rest of us is the BFI list of The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time. If you’ve followed the flap, the big news is that Vertigo supplanted Citizen Kane at the top. As far as I’m concerned, this means that the critics have finally taken over completely, and the rest of us are totally out. Vertigo, of all of Hitchcock’s pictures, is the one that most appeals to critics, for a variety of reasons, none of which are related to the movie being really a great viewing experience. It is to Hitchcock what The Searchers (which is also on the list) is to John Ford, the movie the critics all swoon over that the rest of us sort of greet with a giant “meh.” The critics see all sorts of things that we don’t see, or so one would imagine, without ever seeing what it is that we do see in movies, to wit, a transcendent experience of art. Or failing that, a transcendent experience of being in the picture and not in our seat. Citizen Kane is one of the few movies on the list that actually does the job of carrying us away. I hate to see it demoted, so to speak, because in the past you could recommend the so-called top film of all time to somebody who had never seen it, and they could watch it, and they’d be captivated and blown away. Show them Vertigo, and they’ll sort of shake their heads. It’s a film critic’s movie, as simple as that.

For the record, the top ten pix are 1: Vertigo; 2: Citizen Kane; 3: Tokyo Story (which I sort of like, but absolutely the dullest movie on the entire list); 4: La Regle du jeu (closest to Kane in some respects, but a little cold); 5: Sunrise (the most consciously arty in a very dated way); 6: 2001 (which is one of my favorite movies but, again, a little dull); 7: The Searchers; 8: Man With a Movie Camera (one of the few I haven’t seen); 9: The Passion of Joan of Arc (also haven’t seen); 10: 8½ (a personal favorite that is incomprehensible to the average filmgoer). The list goes on. The unifying factor seems to be a level of dullness, although a couple aren’t. Seven Samurai, which really is one of the best movies ever made without a single dull moment, does come in at 17. But then again, Apocalypse Now comes in at 14 while The Godfather comes in at 21? In what universe?

I’m not suggesting that we need a top 50 films judged by average schlubs, because if we did create that list, we’d have to account for Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead being number one and number two, but by the same token, there are some movies I have watched and enjoyed many times, but only a handful of these are on this list. Mostly these are movies I’ve seen, maybe liked, maybe not, but would never put in my top 50. Oh, well. At least Psycho is on there, at 35. If you and I were voting, it would be North by Northwest and Psycho, and Vertigo wouldn’t even make the list.

But then again, that’s what makes lists like this so much fun.

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* We should point out that Pauline Kael came to prominence in this period, and she was anything but academic. She was a critic who reported on how a movie knocked her socks off, and she'd talk as much about her socks as about the movie. For years, she and the cartoons were the only reason I read The New Yorker.