Ah, we've reached T in my list of my favourite A-Z films of all time. Surely it can't be as big a category as S?
So, T films then. I was hoping for an easier category after the mammoth S project, but T is almost as bad – there’s 125 films in this category. I’ll try and do them in just the one blog, so apologies if I miss a few decent ones out!
From the early days there’s a mix of Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy. Chaplin’s entry here is The Tramp, in which the tramp character makes his first appearance of many. More prolific were Laurel and Hardy – ten of their films fit into this category, the best of which include Their Purple Moment, Towed in a Hole, Twice Two and Thicker than Water. Not forgetting Them Thar Hills, a classic short which is the only Laurel and Hardy film to get its own sequel – Tit for Tat – which is also a contender in this category, revolving around a dispute between shopowners. With Laurel and Hardy as one of the pair of shop owners, you know it’s not going to end well! Moving on from comedy, Hitchcock made The 39 Steps in 1935, one of his best British films featuring Robert Donat and Madeline Carrol. Its themes of the wronged man would be found in many of his later films, most notably North by Northwest.
Into the 1940s, and I’ll whittle the films down to four contenders. David Lean’s This Happy Breed follows the lives of a British family in the years between the two world wars. It’s like a who’s who of British cinema of the 40s with performances from, among others, Celia Johnson, Robert Newton, Stanley Holloway and John Mills. Howard Hawks brought us To Have and Have Not – an adaptation of the Hemmingway book starring Humphrey Bogart and Laurel Bacall. Okay, the plots eerily similar to Casablanca but I guess there’s worse films to be compared to. Staying in the US, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is another Bogart film which also stars the director’s father, Walter. Trivia fans note – this if the only film in which father and son have both won Oscars (John for directing, Walter for Best Supporting Actor). Rounding off the decade and back to the UK (well, Vienna actually) for one of the greatest British films (it came top of a BFI poll to find the best British film), The Third Man. Don’t ask me why it’s classed as British – it stars American actors Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles and is set in Austria. Still, it’s got a British director and he does a great job creating a noir classic, famous if nothing else for its zither music and Orson Welles’ speech on the ferris wheel.
From the 1950s, The Thing from Another World is good fun – an enjoyable alien film, a genre that was most popular in the US at the time. The Titfield Thunderbolt is worth a mention for being a typically British Ealing comedy from Charles Crichton, but to be honest it's not quite up there with the best of the studio’s output. From Japan comes a film that frequently tops critics’ lists of best films of all time: Tokyo Story. Yes, it’s slow and no, there’s not much action, but if you let yourself be drawn into it, it’s a fine, moving film. I wouldn’t describe it as one of my favourite films of ALL time, but then, I’m not a proper critic! Two entries from Hitchcock emerge from the decade; both laced with humour. To Catch A Thief is a cinematic soufflé of a film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly; if you don’t like the tale of cat-burglary and romance, you’ve at least got something to look at. I probably prefer The Trouble With Harry, Hitch’s dark comedy about a group of people trying to decide what to do with a dead body they’ve found. Several people all think they’re responsible for the death and it’s the closest Hitch came to filming a farce. Plus the lovely Shirley Maclaine is in it too. Kurosawa’s excellent take on Macbeth, Throne of Blood is worth a mention, as indeed is Sidney Lumet’s classic Twelve Angry Men starring Henry Fonda as the juror not quite in agreement with his peers. Rounding off the decade is Touch of Evil; Orson Welles directs and appears in this marvellous noirish thriller starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, also made famous for its long unbroken take that kicks off the film.
So, the 1960s then. The Time Machine isn’t a bad film, and is infinitely better than its Guy Pearce remake. Two Rode Together starring James Stewart is a decent enough John Ford western, even though not one of his best. 1962 brought To Kill a Mockingbird, the sterling adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel, with Gregory Peck as the all-American hero Atticus Finch, voted the greatest movie hero by the American film institute a few years back. Thunderball’s an ok Bond film, This Sporting Life is a good example of the British New Wave cinema, and Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain is probably one of his films that’s worth forgetting. Three good entries from 1968 are Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, and most famously, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey – his highly influential sci-fi film that baffles and enchants in equal measure. After watching that you’ll probably fancy a knockabout comedy and that comes the following year with Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run. Just don’t make the mistake of watching another rare Hitchcock failure in Topaz. Trust me, it’s really not very good at all.
The 1970s arrive and I’ll just pick out three films from this decade for brevity’s sake. From 1974 we have The Taking of Pelham 123, a brilliant heist thriller starring Walter Matthau as the rail worker trying to foil a group of hijackers. To be honest, I’ve not seen the recent remake, but I can’t see it living up to the original, especially given the remake is directed by Tony Scott. Also from 1974 came The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – it seems to have a reputation as being a classic horror but to be honest it didn’t do much for me. A group of teenagers are individually picked off by a masked chain saw wielding maniac, but after you’ve met the annoying teenagers, you’ll probably be on the side of old Leatherface anyway. Our final example of 70s cinema is Taxi Driver, Scorsese’s classic with Robert De Niro as the borderline psychotic Taxi Driver, seeking to romance Cybil Shepherd, save teenage prostitute Jodie Foster, and gain vengeance on her pimp, Harvey Keitel. Bloody, cine-literate and stylish, how the film lost out to Rocky at the Oscars is beyond me.
And to the decade that taste forgot – the 80s – but surprisingly there are some contenders here. Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits is visually interesting, as are all his films, Tootsie is perhaps the best example of the cross-dressing genre (if it exists) with Dustin Hoffman giving a fine performance as the actor who resorts to becoming an “actress” in order to get work. Staying with comedy, Trading Places is one of my favourite 80s films, with Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd and Jamie lee Curtis all at the tops of their games – it’s well worth watching if you’ve not seen it. The following year (1984) came the first Terminator film – the second best of the franchise, basically a feature length chase, but it racks up the excitement and is highly entertaining. The same year comes the classic comedy This is Spinal Tap, a mockumentary that has yet to be bettered – it goes all the way up to 11. More comedies from the 80s include Teen Wolf, Top Secret, The Three Amigos, Throw Momma from the Train, Twins, Tremors, and Turner and Hooch. And that’s without even mentioning Three Men and a Baby! The 80s also brought the gayest film ever (in the homosexual sense) with Top Gun, and more seriously, one of the greatest film documentaries of all time with The Thin Blue Line; Errol Morris’ documentary exposed police incompetence in a murder case, and led to the innocent man finally being released from jail.
Right, a ridiculous number of T films from the 90s so I’ll shoot through them, inevitably leaving out the majority of the dross or semi-dross. There’s Terminator 2; in my opinion the best of the 4 Terminator films that have so far been released. Thelma and Louise was the feminist’s dream in 1991, although us men were allowed to enjoy bits of it too – I think. Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy took many of the plaudits of the early 90s – all three films stand up on their own as great stories but put together they make up one of the best film series in cinema – my favourite incidentally is the comedy, Three Colours White. 1993 brought True Romance from Tony Scott which is fun ride while it lasts. True Lies from 1994 is my guilty pleasure – it was the last film I saw at the cinema before my 8 years illness-caused absence (my first film on return in 2002 was About a Boy, for those of you who are interested. Anyone? Hello? Nope, thought not). 1995 was a good year, containing as it did films such as Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead, To Die For, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Twelve Monkeys, and the glorious Toy Story which would eventually produce an arguably even better sequel. All those films are well worth watching, especially Twelve Monkeys, but if you’re just going to watch one, it’s got to be the Toy Story – genius filmmaking, and the first wholly computer generated animation. The big film from 1996 was Danny Boyle’s excellent, if grim at times, Trainspotting; another much lower budget film I enjoyed was Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge, a low key story. We’ll gloss over Titanic in 1997 (if only we could back then too) and arrive in 1998 with the rather rude, but very funny There’s Something About Mary. The same year brought The Truman Show, a fine satire that was ahead of its time – it doesn’t seem so funny watching it now as it becomes more like a documentary! The last year of the decade brought Toy Story 2 (brilliant) and Three Kings (almost brilliant).
So into the noughties which start with Thirteen Days, a fine dramatic reconstruction of the Cuban Missile Crisis under JFK in the early 60s. Even though you know the outcome, it’s still extremely tense. Stephen Soderbergh’s Traffic is a sprawling multi-story film, focussing on the drug trade, inspired by a Channel Four mini-series. It’s intelligent filmmaking and well worth viewing. From Japan we have Twilight Samurai and from South Korea, Tale of Two Sisters. Danny Boyle returns with effective horror, 28 Days Later and Kevin Macdonald’s documentary Touching The Void made for incredible viewing too. 21 Grams was a hard hitting drama, notable for me for the fact I watched it in the cinema and I was the only one in the screening. Team America: World Police came from the South Park creators and lampooned everything in sight – Americans, French, Iraqis, terrorists, the Hollywood right, the Hollywood Left, no-one was safe, not even MAATTT DAAAMON. Spielberg’s The Terminal got some sniffy reviews but I thought it was a perfectly fine film, Wong Kar Wai followed up In the Mood For love with 2046, another film that baffled the viewer at the same time as hypnotising them with its mood and palette. Thank You for Smoking is a fine little satire, and then there’s Taxidermia – more a film to be endured than enjoyed, though entertaining in a scatological type of way. Finally from Britain we have Shane Meadow’s excellent portrayal of England in the 80s with This is England, and then from France, Tell No One was a marvellous thriller about a grieving husband finding his wife might not be as dead as he thought she was.
So that’s that for the Ts and fortunately the last mammoth category. Just time for the final five:
Well this is almost impossible to get down to a final five. So far I’ve narrowed it down to 23.
Hmm, okay another go…
Right, here’s the final five
Twelve Angry Men – Shows you don’t need multiple sets to make a gripping story.
To Kill a Mockingbird – A fine adaptation, and portrayal of a thoroughly decent man in Atticus Finch
Taxi Driver – Arguably Scorsese’s best film, De Niro gives a virtuoso performance
This is Spinal Tap – Great comedy mockumentary about the rock band Spinal Tap
Toy Story 2 – Just about outclasses its predecessor, it’s not just a great animation. It’s a great film, full stop.
And the winner is Toy Story 2. The first animation to win on my list, it may not be better than the others, but it sort of wins by default, because I can't decide which film out of about 15 I prefer. Tomorrow, no doubt, a different film would have won!
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