For most VCR owners and movie fans, building a library of classic and favorite films on tape has now become an affordable option. Videocassettes that cost $80 or $100 to purchase just two or three years ago are going for $15 and less, some for $10 and less.
But what would you like to own, and what would you like receive as a gift? Not all great movies bear repeating. Not all repeatable movies are great.
Keeping in mind that this is strictly subjective, here are tapes I`d buy if I were starting a cassette library today. They`re all movies I`ve seen several times and want to see again, and they`re all $20-or-less bargains:
”American Graffiti.” The golden oldies on the soundtrack of this 1973 celebration of early-1960s growing pains are crucial to the mood of the piece. So are the easy wit of the script and George Lucas` direction, and the youthful freshness of a cast that includes several now-familiar faces (Ron Howard, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Richard Dreyfuss).
”Annie Hall.” A bittersweet romantic comedy about a relationship that didn`t last, Woody Allen`s best movie is a gold mine of quotable lines: ”I feel that life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable,” ”If I get too mellow, I ripen and then rot,” ”A relationship is like a shark; you know, it has to constantly move forward or it dies.” Warning: See it enough times and you`ll start talking like this.
”Beetlejuice.” Great fun the first time, Tim Burton`s 1988 comedy about the hereafter just gets better and better. There`s the ”Day-O” number, of course, and Michael Keaton`s manic performance as a sleazy ”bio-exorcist.”
But Burton has mined the entire film with eccentric touches that continue to surprise after multiple viewings.
”The Big Sleep.” Raymond Chandler couldn`t explain the plot of this 1946 Howard Hawks mystery based on Chandler`s novel-and neither will you. Still, you`ll have a fine time trying, while savoring the punch of the dialogue, the sultry atmosphere and the confident glamor of the performances by Bogart, Bacall, Martha Vickers and Dorothy Malone.
”Blade Runner.” Ridley Scott`s 1982 futuristic detective story is not just a good-looking movie. Scott`s tale of imitation humans confronting their creator has a mythic resonance, and Rutger Hauer`s supporting performance makes up for Harrison Ford`s somewhat stolid work in the leading role.
”Blue Velvet.” David Lynch`s dreamy, blackly comic 1986 thriller, which Lynch once half-jokingly called ”The Hardy Boys Go to Hell.” Perhaps the most lavish and sophisticated midnight-movie ever made, it still turns some people off in a big way, though it has also established itself as a landmark in American surrealism.
”Bonnie and Clyde.” Arthur Penn`s violent account of the brief lives of Depression criminals shocked audiences, confused critics and hit a nerve during the Vietnam-protest era. Today it has a classical feeling to it, with rich, on-target performances by Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons and Michael J. Pollard.
”Breakfast at Tiffany`s.” This 1961 romantic comedy features the funniest and most creatively choreographed party Blake Edwards ever directed. There`s a lot of life in the movie after the party`s over, too, chiefly in Audrey Hepburn`s definitive performance as Holly Golightly, a gold-digging hillbilly eccentric who acquires New York chic.
”The Bride of Frankenstein.” Perhaps the wittiest of all horror movies, James Whale`s giddy 1935 sequel goes over the top and keeps on going, without for a moment losing momentum or inspiration. Everything works: John Mescall`s crazy camera angles, Franz Waxman`s souped-up score, Elsa Lanchester`s electric hairstyle, even the dark-and-stormy-night prologue in which Mary Shelley cooks up the story line.
”Bringing Up Baby.” This fast-paced Howard Hawks production virtually defines the 1930s genre ”screwball comedy,” even though it wasn`t popular with Depression audiences. The ”baby” of the title is Katharine Hepburn`s pet leopard, who inadvertently helps her land Cary Grant.
”Casablanca.” During the last decade, this 1943 Warner Bros. melodrama has almost eclipsed ”Gone With the Wind” as everyone`s favorite Hollywood melodrama. There are lots of good reasons, including the electric pairing of Bogart and Bergman, the graceful comic tension that develops between Bogart and Claude Rains, the exotic and dangerous wartime setting, Max Steiner`s inspired mixture of familiar and original music, and director Michael Curtiz`s underrated ability to make it all play.
”Citizen Kane.” Pauline Kael once wrote that Orson Welles` 1941 masterpiece about a Hearstlike newspaper tycoon ”may be more fun than any other great movie.” Welles was still in his mid-20s when he made it, and his youthful exuberance allows for no dull stretches, even when the story turns dark and cynical. Because of the flashback structure, and the different viewpoints represented, it`s the kind of jigsaw-puzzle movie that reveals something fresh with each viewing.
”City Lights.” Charles Chaplin`s miraculously successful 1931 attempt to continue using his silent-film techniques in the sound era. Although the comedy sequences are as well-orchestrated as they were in his 1920s films, there`s an unexpected emotional maturity in his handling of a potentially sentimental relationship between a blind girl and Chaplin`s tramp character.
”Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Stanley Kubrick`s 1964 doomsday satire is essential viewing for anyone living through the second half of the 20th Century. Kubrick approaches the unthinkable by turning nuclear war into a hideous joke, made possible by human nearsightedness. Some of the comedy bits may seem coarse today, but the performances of Peter Sellers (in three roles) and George C. Scott lend validity to everything they do.
”Duck Soup.” The Marx Brothers at their purest and funniest-no romantic subplot, no musical interludes with Harpo, no distractions from the fun of watching Groucho deflate Margaret Dumont as he becomes dictator of Fredonia and frivolously declares war. Cleverly directed by Leo McCarey, it was the team`s least popular 1930s film, perhaps because the tone of non-stop anarchy proved too unsettling to Depression audiences.
”East of Eden.” Overwrought and overheated under Elia Kazan`s insistent direction, James Dean`s first movie is still the most explosive demonstration of his wounded-lost-rebel appeal. He`s particularly charismatic in the scenes with his evil mother (Jo Van Fleet), the sequence in which he kicks his father`s ice blocks down the chute, and the Ferris-wheel episode in which he fails to resist kissing his brother`s girlfriend (Julie Harris). All demand instant replay.
”From Russia With Love.” No. 2 in the James Bond series, and the one with the most memorable villains (Robert Shaw, Lotte Lenya), the most exciting fights and chases, and Sean Connery in his prime. At this point in the series (1963), the gadgetry hadn`t taken over, the budgets were still relatively modest, and the director, Terence Young, had to rely on his actors and his own filmmaking ingenuity to create excitement.
”The General.” It`s almost universally regarded as Buster Keaton`s best work (it keeps turning up on international critics` lists of the 10 best films of all time). If you`ve never seen it, you may be surprised to find that it`s as much a train-chase film, a Civil War movie and an adventure as it is a comedy. Disney later turned the same true story into a straight action film,
”The Great Locomotive Chase.”
”The Gold Rush.” Perhaps only Chaplin could have made a great comedy about hunger, poverty, greed and loneliness. Although ”City Lights” may have a more memorable ending, this 1925 classic has more great scenes than any other Chaplin picture: the shoe-eating episode, the melancholy New Year`s Eve fantasy, the cabin sliding off the mountain as Chaplin tries to escape.
”The Graduate.” The most popular American movie of the late 1960s, Mike Nichols` sweet-and-sour comedy about an unmotivated college graduate (Dustin Hoffman) who has a mechanical affair with a burned-out older woman (Anne Bancroft) survives with most of its humor and poignance intact.
”Hope and Glory.” Some people are convinced they lead charmed lives. If you survived a childhood like the one writer-director John Boorman re-creates in this autobiographical memoir of London during the blitz, you`d probably come to the same conclusion. Without once resorting to black comedy or bad taste, Boorman has made a great movie about how much fun it was to be a child during the war. It`s an unapologetic celebration of life lived at the brink of extinction.
”King Kong.” Thanks to Ted Turner, the 1933 special-effects classic is now available in an almost-complete, restored version that includes the once- censored shots of the big ape trampling natives and removing Fay Wray`s clothes. For the same price you can buy the black-and-white original or Turner`s colorized version-which has won praise from some surprising sources, including the purist film historian William K. Everson, who claims that colorizing makes the visual trickery look less transparent.
”Lonely Are the Brave.” Just after they finished ”Spartacus,” Kirk Douglas and writer Dalton Trumbo got together for this bitter, unpopular but very affecting 1962 western about a nonconformist cowboy who breaks into jail to see a friend, then breaks out and gets chased around by a reluctant lawman. A year later, Douglas played McMurphy in the first stage production of ”One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest,” and this film now plays like a prelude to it.
”The Magnificent Ambersons.” Despite heavy cutting and an ending that was reworked by another director, Orson Welles` second effort is in some ways even richer than ”Citizen Kane.” It may be the most moving film ever made about the inevitability of change; it`s nostalgic for the past and at the same time acknowledges that nothing stays the same. It`s an ensemble piece in which some of the actors (Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead) do the finest work of their film careers.
”The Manchurian Candidate.” The theatrical reissue added significantly to the growing reputation of John Frankenheimer`s 1962 political satire, in which the extremes of the right and the left are treated with equal contempt. While the picture loses its shock value after one viewing, it`s fun to go back and see how craftily Frankenheimer puts all the elements in place-especially the standout performances of Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra, who never topped their work here.
”Meet Me in St. Louis.” One of the great original screen musicals, Vincente Minnelli`s 1944 treatment of family life at the turn of the century is irresistibly rose-colored Americana. The dramatic placement of Judy Garland`s original rendition of ”Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”
instantly makes you forget the cloying replays of the song that turn up every holiday season on the radio, and Margaret O`Brien`s subversively funny performance as Garland`s sometimes-horrid little sister keeps the
sentimentality in check.
”My Favorite Year.” Actor and role have rarely been better matched than in this 1982 comedy vehicle for Peter O`Toole, in the role of a swashbuckling, philandering, usually drunken movie star who panics when he has to appear on a live television show. The script ingeniously works in a lot of early-1950s television lore (Joseph Bologna plays a character who`s a dead ringer for Sid Caesar), and it slips in a surprising amount of material about the backstage atmosphere and writing conferences that launched the careers of Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Mel Brooks.
”North by Northwest.” Alfred Hitchcock`s wittiest summing-up of his career, this 1959 thriller puts Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in a series of dangerous situations that recall his earlier pictures. Although it holds together well enough as a narrative, you tend to watch it for the outlandish set pieces: the murder at the United Nations building, the auction scene, Grant being attacked in the middle of nowhere by a ”crop-dusting plane,” the cliffhanging finale on Mt. Rushmore.
”Nosferatu.” The first and still the spookiest of all ”Dracula”
adaptations, F.W. Murnau`s unauthorized 1922 version of the Bram Stoker novel stars a rodentlike actor named Max Schreck as the vampire count. The movie is available in several choppy versions, and not all of it makes sense, but you don`t forget the creepy images of Schreck`s corpse-strewn voyage to Bremen, the rats and coffins that fill the streets of the city after he arrives, or Schreck`s shadow on the door of the terrified heroine.
”Places in the Heart.” Beginning with the phrases of the opening hymn,
”This is my story, this is my song,” blended with familiar shots of small-town Texas, Robert Benton`s autobiographical 1984 movie announces its personal vision of heartland faith. The famous finale in church certainly startles, although it doesn`t come out of left field. The tie that binds and revives the characters is Christian symbolism and ritual, and at film`s end Benton miraculously draws the audience into it.
”The Producers.” Mel Brooks has directed smoother, more technically assured comedies, but not all of them have aged well. This one is still very funny, thanks to Gene Wilder`s comic hysteria as an accountant who talks himself into a corrupt business deal with a crooked Broadway producer (Zero Mostel), and Brooks` writing and direction of the stupefying Nazi production number, ”Springtime for Hitler.”
”Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Forget the temple of doom and the last crusade. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford got it right the first time, when audiences didn`t even know they wanted to see a self-mocking $20 million reworking of Saturday-matinee cliffhangers.
”Raising Arizona.” Joel and Ethan Coen followed up their low-budget wonder, ”Blood Simple,” with 1987`s funniest comedy: the broad, rambunctious tale of the kidnapping of a baby by an ex-convict (Nicolas Cage) and his policewoman wife (Holly Hunter). The put-upon Cage turned himself into a live- action version of Wile E. Coyote (with his hangdog look and stand-up hair, he even resembled the Roadrunner`s hapless pursuer), while Hunter milked the maximum out of such no-nonsense instructions as ”Don`t you come back here without a toddler.”
”Rear Window.” This droll, morbidly satisfying thriller may be the ultimate statement about movies as a form of voyeurism. Hitchcock in effect turns his camera on the audience, making an invalid photographer (James Stewart) the hero, and forcing us to join him as he spies on his neighbors`
squabbles, love affairs and crimes. When Stewart recruits Grace Kelly to venture out into the world he`s been watching as if on a screen, it`s shocking because she seems to have violated a sacred cinematic rule.
”The Red Shoes.” Backstage British corn at its ripest, with Moira Shearer as the driven ballerina forced to make an impossible choice between life and art. Although produced in England in 1948, the movie continues to have an impact on the international dance world (as one of the characters in
”A Chorus Line” points out), and its versatile, prolific director, Michael Powell, continues to be a recognizable name chiefly because of it.
”Robocop.” Paul Verhoeven`s first all-American movie is a brilliantly made science-fiction shocker, a comic-book action thriller that has been paced and photographed in a restless style that makes the images seem to pop off the screen. On another level, it`s as disturbing and relentless a vision of 20th Century urban evil as anything directed by Kubrick or David Lynch.
”The Rules of the Game.” Although it was banned in France and considered lost for years (few Americans have seen it), Jean Renoir`s 1939 satirical classic continues to turn up as frequently as ”Citizen Kane” on international ”10 best” lists. It`s a merciless assault on European hypocrisies of the prewar years, presented in the form of a conventional farce about adulterous aristocrats who spend a weekend in the country.
”A Salute to Chuck Jones.” This priceless, hour-long collection of Warner Bros. cartoons created by Chuck Jones includes the science-fiction spoof ”Duck Dodgers in the 24th Century”; Bugs Bunny`s assault on high culture, ”What`s Opera, Doc”; Pepe LePew in the Oscar-winning ”For Scent-imental Reasons”; and the wonderfully wry tale of a reluctant talking amphibian, ”One Froggy Evening.”
”Singin` in the Rain.” Everyone`s favorite MGM musical is also an exceptionally well-written comedy about Hollywood`s transition from silent films to talkies and the precarious business of maintaining stardom. Not widely recognized as a classic at the time of its original 1952 release, it now seems head-and-shoulders above any other film released during that period. Gene Kelly`s title-song dance has passed into legend.
”Some Like It Hot.” Marilyn Monroe may have given better performances, but she was never sexier or funnier than in this 1959 Billy Wilder romp about 1920s Chicago gangsters pursuing a couple of witnesses to a gangland massacre. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are the two fugitives, forced to dress up in drag disguise as members of an all-female jazz band.
”Stage Door.” Terrific early vehicle for Katharine Hepburn, as a rich, arrogant young would-be actress, and Ginger Rogers, as her tough, envious roommate. The script features some of the most biting and hilarious backstage dialogue this side of ”All About Eve,” though Andrea Leeds` supporting performance brings the film surprisingly close to tragedy. One of the most satisfying and least-dated Hollywood movies of the 1930s.
”Stop Making Sense.” Spellbinding concert plus clean, straight filmmaking minus backstage interviews equals great concert film. There haven`t been that many of them. The Talking Heads and director Jonathan Demme have created the first one since ”Woodstock” that so deftly captures the immediacy of the event that it breaks down the wall between film and audience. ”Sunset Boulevard.” Billy Wilder`s macabre 1950 masterpiece about a demented silent-film star (Gloria Swanson), the young script-writer she keeps (William Holden) and her butler and ex-husband (Erich von Stroheim). The actors, who also include Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille, come so close to playing their off-screen selves that the movie becomes a unique blend of Hollywood documentary, satire and nightmare.
”Taxi Driver.” This may seem an unlikely choice for a movie you`ll want to watch many times, but director Martin Scorsese and composer Bernard Herrmann establish such a hypnotic mood that they go beyond the unsavory plot and discover a larger subject: the loneliness of urban existence and the limited potential for heroism. Sadly, Robert De Niro`s solitary, alienated Vietnam veteran and Jodie Foster`s runaway child prostitute now seem more recognizable types than when the film was released in 1976.
”The Terminator.” One of those unheralded, small-scale, action-oriented science-fiction films that tends to grow in stature the more you watch it. Writer-director James Cameron`s script, loosely drawn from some of Harlan Ellison`s time-travel stories, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as an apparently unkillable cyborg who escapes from the future and turns up in modern Los Angeles, to stop the birth of a man who will grow up to become his 21st Century enemy.
”That`s Entertainment.” Nearly 2 1/2 hours of highlights from MGM musicals from ”Broadway Melody” (1929) to ”Gigi” (1958), expertly selected and edited by Jack Haley Jr. While classics like ”Singin` in the Rain” are well-represented, Haley also does an excellent job of picking bright numbers from dull films and creating giddy montages from Esther Williams` water ballets and the Rooney-Garland back yard musicals.
”To Kill a Mockingbird.” Robert Mulligan`s warm, skillful, splendidly acted 1962 version of the Harper Lee novel about two children and their widower father (Gregory Peck) confronting racial prejudice in the South during the Depression. Elmer Bernstein`s score helps tremendously in establishing the nostalgic mood, and this remains the only way you can hear it-the LP disappeared years ago, and there is no CD version.
”2001: A Space Odyssey.” The most influential movie of the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick`s deliberately mysterious epic about man`s first contact with extraterrestrials never wears out its welcome. You find yourself returning to it as you do to a favorite piece of music.
”West Side Story.” Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise`s exhilarating 1961 movie of Robbins` stage classic, updating ”Romeo and Juliet” with New York street gangs separating the lovers. The Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim songs and Robbins` choreography combine to create several of the finest dance sequences in film history, including the explosive opening number, ”The Jet Song,” ”America,” ”Dance at the Gym,” ”Gee Officer Krupke” and
”Cool.”
”Who`s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Mike Nichols` 1966 movie of the Edward Albee play about a college professor (Richard Burton) and his wife
(Elizabeth Taylor) who do verbal battle with each other and their guests during one long night`s journey into day. This may be the most quotable American play ever written, and under Nichols` astute direction, it`s one of the few dramatic films that can be savored again and again.
