A Clearly Defined Issue

Here’s a question for you. It was one asked to me last Friday week when I was out at the birthday bash. One of the guests was a wonderful character actor I hadn’t seen for well over a decade. After we were reintroduced and were catching up, standing outside having a quick gasper, he posed a question that had been put to him perhaps a month earlier:

You have to introduce someone to the world of cinema with only six old black & white movies. What would they be?

It wasn’t something to answer immediately. Especially since, for the few of us standing around who heard this, our initial reaction was to stand open mouthed and say, “Uh.....?” For the next couple of hours, when we’d regroup to spark up, I would throw a few titles out as suggestions, but still didn’t manage to have a concrete list by the time I called it a night and was on my way home.

I probably would have let it go, but then when I was up at the local A&E last week, waiting for tests and then waiting for the results to come back, it came to mind and helped pass the time. Outside the pub I had decided there had to be a film by Stanley Kubrick, Powell & Pressburger, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, which immediately went over the half dozen, so that wasn’t going to work.


When I tried a different tack, the selection contained far too many comedies including Buster Keaton’s The General, The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, Ealing Studios’ Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Palm Beach Story, simply because everyone should be introduced to the drunken goings on of the Ale and Quail hunting club. But then if I had Sturges’ screwball comedy on the list, that would make Howard Hawk’s His Girl Friday redundant. So one, if not more, would simply have to go.

Moved from a hospital bed to a wheelchair and then deposited in a corridor to wait my turn for a CT scan where, due to the continual opening and closing of various doors periodically blew a rather substantial breeze up under the hospital gown, I decided to concentrate on picking one film from six different genres. Counting off on my fingers I decided there should be a war movie, science fiction/fantasy, horror, western, romantic comedy, musical, drama, comedy, and a thriller.

Except that still didn’t work because it went well beyond the requisite half dozen, so which would have to be omitted? And I hadn’t even included animation, which stupidly gets listed as a genre, even though it’s a filmic technique rather than a category of story. After all, you don’t get “live-action” included in a genre list. Still, it wouldn’t stop Gertie the Dinosaur or Steamboat Willie making the shortlist.


For war movies I was thinking of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went The Day Well or The Small Back Room or even Ice Cold in Alex, but ultimately it would be a toss up between Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, with the latter most probably taking the edge. In the science fiction/fantasy category I’d have to choose from Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête, Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still or Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

A horror movie would have to be picked from either Wise’s The Haunting, Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Bride of Frankenstein, or Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People. If a western made it into the final six it would be John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance over My Darling Clementine and Howard Hawks’ Red River. At least picking a musical would be easier. Without any question that would be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat.


When it came to romantic comedies I’d put Billy Wilder’s The Apartment above The Philadelphia Story, The Shop Around the Corner and Ninotchka. As for romances I’d like to put forward I Know Where I’m Going or FW Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, but I can’t help feeling they’d both be beaten to that top spot by Jean Vigo’s utterly captivating L’ Atalante about a French barge captain and his new bride.

By this point I’m already over the six and still haven’t mentioned dramas like Sweet Smell of Success, All About Eve and Sunset Blvd., or the great action adventure films like King Kong or Gunga Din. Then there are the thrillers such as Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes and Notorious, or Double Indemnity, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s nerve-jangling The Wages of Fear and Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate.


Hot on their tail are the great noir thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past and Kiss Me Deadly. And that’s even without mentioning the classics that easily come to mind like Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, Citizen Kane, The Public Enemy, Night of the Hunter, On the Waterfront and Some Like it Hot, plus the films of Kurosawa, David Lean’s adaptations of Dickens, and even Italian Neo-Realism, although truth be told I wouldn’t say the latter were particular favourites of mine.

Back when the question was posed, I should have asked why the restriction of only black and white movies being available. As I worked down this ever-expanding shortlist before I even got to a semblance of a final list, I began to understand why. Sure there have been black and white films made in more recent years, such as Manhattan and The Man Who Wasn't There, but going back to the 1930s through to the 1950s, the films had to stand on the sole merits of a great script, great acting and great direction.

Obviously not all of them ticked all the boxes, but those earlier movies didn’t have the fourth option used far too many times now, which is: rely on hollow spectacle when all else fails. A couple of weeks ago I watched Terminator 2 for the first time in ages. While it was still very slick and shiny, with the liquid metal man effects now rather passé I was surprised by how empty it ultimately was. When it came to the horribly mawkish sermon at the end of this particularly expensive bowl of soup I reached for the off switch, wishing that I had spent the time watching a wonderful old Raoul Walsh B-movie instead.

Having stumbled across Night at the Museum on Sunday night, which Channel 4 felt the need to screen on two consecutive weekends, I watched for a few minutes, foolishly expecting at least a couple of jokes to turn up. For a comedy I thought that would be quite essential but apparently CGI shenanigans take priority over actual gags nowadays. If today’s audience laps up this kind of nonsense its because they are ignorant of the sharp scripts Billy Wilder co-wrote with Charles Brackett and then Izzy Diamond or the marvellous physical comedy of Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy.

Maybe this shouldn’t be about deciding on the six movies to introduce someone to cinema, but the six movies to reintroduce modern audiences, who obviously don’t know any better, to the real power of cinema. Either way my six would be: Dr Strangelove, The Apartment, L’ Atalante, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Top Hat and La Belle et La Bête. Tomorrow, of course, might me a different story. In the meantime, what would you choose?