Once again, the experts have proved they are morons.
The best movie ever made is not “Citizen Kane.” Nor is it “Gone With the Wind” or “Singin’ in the Rain” or “Casablanca” or any of the films that made the American Film Institute’s list last week of the 100 greatest American movies.
The greatest movie ever made is, of course, “The Parent Trap.”
Hayley Mills, Brian Keith and Maureen O’Hara star. Hayley plays two girls who meet at summer camp and discover they’re twins separated as infants by their parents’ divorce. Once the twins stop loathing each other, they plot to get Mom and Dad back together.
Is that the best plot ever invented, or what? And Haley’s performance as the twins was an acting tour de force rivaled only by Patty Duke’s 1960s incarnation as identical sitcom cousins.
That, at least, would have been how I voted had the American Film Institute polled me at the age of 7.
By the age of 18, had the institute solicited my opinion, I would have had to inform them that the hands-down No. 1 movie of all time was “Summer of ’42.” Jennifer O’Neill. Gary Grimes. She’s a sexy war widow. He’s a lovestruck teenager. It’s the end of the innocence, his at any rate, there on a sizzling island in the summer of 1942.
Is that the best plot ever invented, or what? And never in the history of American cinema has a heroine worn better-looking dresses.
By the time I was in my 20s, my taste in movies was more discerning. By then, I realized that the best movie ever made, bar none, was “Chariots of Fire.” It starred a couple of British actors no one had ever heard of and whose names no one can now remember. They were hard-core runners. So was I. The psychic connection between us was incredible. Who cared about the plot?
The point here is that the movies we love and admire are to some extent a function of who we are when we see them. We bring our own fantasies and desires in any given moment to bear on what’s on the screen.
So one critic’s “Citizen Kane” is another person’s “Porky’s III.” You say “Casablanca,” someone else says “Dumb and Dumber.” Greatness is in the eye of the ticket holder.
The experts who composed the Top 100 no doubt brought years of movie expertise to their opinions, unlike the rest of us, who bring simply years of buttered popcorn. But their opinions, just like ours, can’t help but be colored by their time of life.
You can figure out who you were by which movies you loved when. By loved, I mean the movies that left you thinking, “Wow.” And that left you thinking, period.
What was your favorite movie at the age of 8? Twenty? Thirty-five? And what does that say about you?
You can map your life through your favorite movies, and no two people’s maps will be the same.
Ask any group of people to name their favorite movies and the list will span from “Les Enfants du Paradis” to “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” The only guarantee is that no woman will say her all-time favorite movie was “The Wild Bunch” and no man will name “The Sound of Music.”
My map takes me through “The Sound of Music” (Julie Andrews morphs from nun to singing governess to baroness, a progression hoped for by many a little Catholic girl of a certain generation). It moves on to “Little Big Man” (Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway play cowboys and Indians) and then to “The Conversation” (Gene Hackman, murder, etc.). From there, it advances to some 1970s French flicks whose idea of plot was talking, eating and having sex while it rains. More recently, it landed on “The Last Days of Chez Nous,” a tale of tangled love and sisters in Australia.
As you get older, finding movies to love becomes more difficult. Your affections are already spoken for. Your standards, for better and for worse, improve.
Many of the movies you loved at one age are apt to disappoint you if you see them again. Some movies are like certain people. Great while it lasted, but another visit would just spoil the memories.
Maybe, though, that’s the difference between the great and the merely beloved. The great movies can stand to be revisited. By that standard, any greatest-hits list would include “The Parent Trap.”
