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One of the great, not guilty, pleasures of this exercise was to spend lots of quality schmoozing time—on the phone, through e-mail and frequently in person—with my colleague on the other coast. I live and work in Manhattan, Schickel is based in L.A. But whereas I do all my work for TIME, the magazine and website, he is a busy-busy freelance: writing books, contributing a book review column to the Los Angeles Times and cobbling up feature-length documentaries on top auteurs, most recently Woody Allen, Charles Chaplin and Martin Scorsese. (He has a documentary on science-fiction films, Watch the Skies, premiering Tuesday, July 6, on Turner Classic Movies.) He's a one-man film-critical conglomerate, a grand resource of probing, sensible thought.
My bibliography isn't nearly as long as Schickel's, but my will is as strong, So we had a few debates. He snorted at some of my selections (notably, The Fly); I yawned at some of his. He thought I was too much the China hand and Bolly-woosiast; I rankled at the inclusion of nearly every film noir melodrama ever made. I argued that, with A Streetcar Named Desire representing Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan, the presence of the Kazan-Brando On the Waterfront was redundant; he trumped my nagging by citing Waterfront in the Great Performances and Top Scores sections. (I used the sidebars to introduce favorite films, performances and music not covered in the prime TIME 100.)
Over the months of discussion, I learned many things—not least that Schickel, whom everyone at TIME calls Dick, prefers to be known as Richard. (Hence my frequent use here of his surname, to avoid reader confusion.) And the debate never degenerated into rancor. Schickel and I knew we were playing a game; we did our research; and we're still married.
CUTTING ROOM FLOOR:
Here are the films from our original lists that were dropped:
INSIDE THE LISTS
A scanning of both lists shows that Schickel and Corliss agreed on 31 films that got into the holy hundred: Sherlock Jr., Sunrise, City Lights, King Kong, Bride of Frankenstein, His Girl Friday, Pinocchio, The Lady Eve, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Children of Paradise, Detour, White Heat, Kind Hearts and Coronets, A Streetcar Named Desire, Singin' in the Rain, Ikiru, Ugetsu, Smiles of a Summer Night, Sweet Smell of Success, Yojimbo, The Manchurian Candidate, 8-1/2, Persona, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, E.T. and Talk to Her. Note that, as we approach the present day, agreement gets rarer. We had 10 coincidental selections in the 1940s, exactly as many as we did in the four-and-a-half decades from 1960 to today. That mirrors a consensus on classic films, especially classics from Hollywood, and a fragmenting of taste ever since.
There were also five movies on both early lists that didn't make the final selection: Potemkin, Scarface, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Raise the Red Lantern and All About My Mother. All worthy films. What happened? I guess we came to think of Potemkin an "official" great film that lodged in our memories more than in our guts. Raise the Red Lantern I reluctantly dumped in favor of another Gong Li-starring Chinese film, Farewell My Concubine, with its explicit approach to Chinese politics and a great performance by Leslie Cheung. As for directors of the other three films, they already had films on the final list—though Hawks, Sturges and Almodovar are all as deserving of being multiple-film directors on the TIME 100 as Scorsese, Lubitsch, Wilder, Bergman, Stanley Kubrick and Leone.
Ah, Leone. You see The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West—consecutive films from the director of spaghetti westerns—and ask, Why both? (Perhaps you demand, Why either?) Well, because Schickel preferred the first film, and I love the second, and neither of us would budge.
A more general question: Why directors? Listen to the conversation Mark Coatney conducted with Schickel and me, and you'll learn that, among the strategies Richard the First used in preparing his original list, one was to start with the directors he thought the best, then choose his favorite of their films. Further, he wanted to reward peak periods in the careers of great directors. Chaplin, Sternberg, Vidor, Lubitsch, Hawks, De Sica, Kazan, Godard, Scorsese, Allen and Almodovar all are cited for two works within a few years, sometimes consecutive films. Sturges gets three mentions in four years. A director-centric selection is one way to go. A film-savvy fellow I know said he would have found slots for all six of the films Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich.
I didn't work that way. For me, in compiling this list, the films were the thing, not their makers. In the Church of Auteurism, I'd be sitting in the back pew, sometimes agreeing with the dogma, sometimes whispering heresies. Not an anti-auteurist, but a not-quite. I'm a bit like Henry, the hero of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing, who is agonizing over his choice of eight Desert Island Discs for a radio show. He knows he is expected to name eight pieces of "real music"—yet he is haunted by his unfashionable, unabashed love for the perkier forms of old pop rock. "I like Herman's Hermits, and the Hollies, and the Everly Brothers, and Brenda Lee, and the Supremes," he says, adding, "I don't mean everything they did. I don't like artists. I like singles."
Well, I do like directors. But they aren't the only artists who make films great. Hence Swing Time for the music and dance, Camille for Greta Garbo's brave and merciless performance, and Baby Face for its thrillingly low moral tone. Schickel also had a few non-auteur choices, such as "Norman Z. McLeod's" It's a Gift. I guess Schickel would make the case, and I wouldn't quibble, that W.C. Fields is the author of that rough comedy gem.
We have favorites, but we didn't play favorites—reward friends with slots. Schickel, out in L.A., necessarily is on nodding terms with lots of filmmakers, some of whom are very good ones, and represented on the 100. I put four Chinese films on the list and, as it happens, I have dined congenially (once or twice) with the makers of all those films: King Hu, Chen Kaige, Jackie Chan and Wong Kar-wai. But that's mostly because I do some reporting along with critiquing for TIME Asia movie stories, and because these filmmakers agreed to have a meal with me. (Conversely, I've noshed with only two of the Americans on the final 100, Scorsese and Spielberg.) Schickel can fairly say he dines with one of his honorees every night. He put the 2004 restored version of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One on his list, and he did the restoration. Nice job too. But it didn't make the cut.
Our work wasn't over when we finished the 100. We still had the Guilties, the Greats and the Scores, and I did a selection of Short Subjects. Richard and I used these slots as a kind of B list for some of our original favorites. He worked Gun Crazy and Anatomy of a Murder showed up among his five Guilty Pleasures. I managed to get nine of these into subsidiary sections: The Rules of the Game and Awara in Great Performances, Jules and Jim in Soundtracks, Gone With the Wind and School Girl in Guilty Pleasures, some of the animated and experimental films in Selected Short Subjects. And if you're wondering why Robert Bresson's Mouchette (obviously a Corliss choice) appears on the final list but not on my original one, the answer is: the first time around, I forgot! If there's a theme to this column, it's that we're all human, even critics.
POLITICS AND GEOGRAPHY
Of the 33 TIME 100 films before 1950, all but six were from Hollywood. Assessing the so-called golden age, we seem to be very Home Team. Ah, but of those 27 American films, nearly half, 13, were directed by men born abroad: three in England (Chaplin, Hitchcock and James Whale), three in Germany (F.W. Murnau, Wyler and Lubitsch), three in Austria (Sternberg, Wilder and Edgar G. Ulmer are all native Viennese), one each in Hungary (Michael Curtiz), France (Jacques Tourneur) and one in Sicily (Capra).