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1. THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)
The Hollywood blockbuster was born in 1915. During a time when it seemed as if Europe had the monopoly on the feature film, D.W. Griffith struck out to make an epic that would help define American cinema. All of the technical developments he had helped create came together to maximum effect, teaching future directors, from Sergei Eisenstein to David Lean to James Cameron, how to combine detailed narrative with the sweep of history. At the same time, The Birth of a Nation is one of the greatest outrages in film history. Part of a campaign against interracial marriage, the film introduced many of the destructive stereotypes of black men and women that were perpetuated by Hollywood for decades. Its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan triggered riots in some cities -- and helped the organization's membership campaigns as it revived in strength following the Leo Frank lynching. The protests put the then young NAACP on the map, while the film also inspired the early work of African-American filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux. Even today, The Birth of a Nation provides one of the most vivid examples of film's power to inflame and propagandize.
2. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)
Spoofed, referenced and copied in dozens of films, the “Odessa Steps” sequence from BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN may be the most influential scene in film history. Drawing on the montages in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Sergei Eisenstein created mini-narratives, repeated shots of specific characters and groups, to humanize his story. His technique is so convincing most viewers think that the scene reflects an actual historical event (it's an amalgam of several attacks on the actual protesters). Filmmakers ever since have used the same tools to give personal meaning to epic scenes. And everybody from Woody Allen (Bananas) to Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) has borrowed details from it for their own films. Eisenstein’s greatest legacy was to demonstrate to future filmmakers how to use montage to promote an agenda. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was so impressed by this Soviet film, that he encouraged using their techniques to terrible effect in anti-Semitic movies. The Germans also banned the film, as did censors in England, France and Spain. In capitalist Hollywood, film moguls showed it to employees to teach them how to edit, even though they would have fired anyone trying to mirror Eisenstein's revolutionary message.
3. METROPOLIS (1927)
Arguably the most influential science fiction film ever made, Metropolis has inspired everything from video games to rock videos to comic books. Its futuristic sets helped spread the popularity of art deco, while the gadget-filled lab of mad scientist Rotwang has become a sci-fi staple. Eugene Schufftan's special effects work set new standards for the craft. And Gottfried Huppertz' original music, with leitmotifs for key characters and themes, was one of the first modern motion picture scores. Beyond its technical and design influences, Metropolis virtually invented the genre of dystopian science fiction on screen: the creation of bleak visions of a future still afflicted with contemporary problems has become the heart of numerous films. The plot, created by director Fritz Lang and his screenwriter-wife Thea von Harbou, revolves around class struggle, anticipating decades of dangerous visions in the struggle to define humanity. The film's dehumanized laborers are the spiritual ancestors of the affectless astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey as much as the villainous, sexy Robot Maria would give birth to the runaway replicants in Blade Runner and the tragically human Cylons of Battlestar Galactica.
4. 42ND STREET (1933)
Although the form had helped launch the talkies, by 1933, musicals were box office poison. Too many numbers shot as if on stage, shoehorned into contrived plots had driven off audiences. Visionary producer Darryl F. Zanuck had the idea for a backstage story that would capture the effect of the Depression on hard-working chorus girls. And he was smart enough to put Busby Berkeley in charge of the dance routines. His dizzying geometric patterns and dazzling camera movements revitalized the genre and saved Warner Bros. from bankruptcy. 42nd Street’s success would lead to two decades of great movie musicals. It also became the yardstick against which all backstage musicals would be measured, providing plot elements for later films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Doris Day and even Twiggy (in The Boyfriend).
5. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)
When Clark Gable removed his shirt to reveal a bare chest, undershirt sales plummeted around the country, and bus travel rose in popularity. Such was the impact of this surprise hit. More important to director Frank Capra, the film nobody wanted to star in (after being turned down by several actresses, he had to offer Claudette Colbert twice her usual salary) established him as a major filmmaker and elevated Columbia Pictures from Poverty Row status to major film studio. When It Happened One Night became the first comedy to win a Best Picture Oscar® and the first film to sweep the five top awards, Hollywood started taking comedy more seriously. With its rapid banter and outrageous comic situations, It Happened One Night became the prototype for the screwball comedies that flourished through the '30s. And it made the road trip sexy, as When Harry Met Sally and The Sure Thing would prove again in later years. Its influence even reached the world of animation, where the fast-talking masher who comes on to Colbert and Gable's rapid delivery of one-liners while eating a carrot provided inspiration for Bugs Bunny.
6. SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937)
Without Snow White, there would be no Pixar. No Snow White, no anime, no Shrek, no Cartoon Network. It's as simple as that. "Disney's Folly" was the name most Hollywood insiders gave Walt Disney's dream of producing the U.S.' first animated feature. Of course, nobody in Hollywood could have realized what a perfectionist Disney was. With convincing human animation, creative character design for the seven dwarfs, Technicolor and the use of a multiplane camera to create the illusion of depth, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs didn't just look better than any previous Disney film. It looked better than most major studio productions. Little wonder it would become the U.S.' top grossing film until Gone With the Wind supplanted it two years later. But there was a price for success. For better or worse, Snow White set U.S. animation in pursuit of a more realistic look for decades to come. For Walt Disney, that meant a string of triumphs, as he personally produced 18 more animated features, including such classics as Dumbo and Bambi. For more surrealistic animators like Max Fleischer and Ub Iwerks, it meant adapting to the new style. Iwerks, who had created Mickey Mouse, eventually returned to Disney to work on integrating animation with live-action footage on Song of the South and other films.
7. GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)
If one film epitomizes the Hollywood blockbuster, it's Gone With the Wind. Made in Hollywood's annus mirabilis, 1939, it remains the most popular film of a sterling crop. Not only has it sold more tickets than any other American made film, but with its box-office adjusted for inflation, it remains the highest-grossing film of all time. Something in the tale of the Southern belle fighting to save her beloved Tara has struck a chord for generations of audiences, from the U.S. of World War II to post-war Europe to Japan in the '80s. Scarlett O' Hara has inspired a legion fiery females caught in the sweep of history, like Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain and Kate Winslet in Titanic. Gone With the Wind is the definitive producer's film. David O. Selznick defied conventional wisdom to purchase the rights to Margaret Mitchell's novel, personally supervised every detail of the film and spearheaded three years of publicity to raise public interest to a fever pitch. He spent the rest of his life trying -- and failing -- to top it. And decades of Hollywood blockbusters have drawn on his work to create and sell romantic dreams writ large on the screen.
8. STAGECOACH (1939)
Stagecoach would not only herald the birth of an American icon, John Wayne, but also the revival of one of the Hollywood's greatest genres. 1939 was marked by a number of A-budget Westerns. But it was Stagecoach that coupled depth of character with hard-riding action to remind audiences that the winning of the West was more than just popcorn fodder. In the hands of a great director, it could reflect the dreams and conflicts behind the building of a nation. Director John Ford created a film that did just that, crafting a legendary tale of the battle to tame a frontier represented by both rampaging Apaches and Wayne's untamed Ringo Kid. And, along the way, he discovered his perfect location: the majestic Monument Valley. The failure of Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail in 1930 had relegated its leading man, Wayne, and the Western genre to poverty row. Almost a decade later, Ford couldn't get a single major studio to finance Stagecoach, eventually turning to independent producer Walter Wanger, who didn't want to cast Wayne. The film's unexpected success influenced not just the rise of the Western, but filmmakers of every genre. While shooting Citizen Kane, Orson Welles screened Ford's classic over 40 times to learn how to put a film together. Ultimately, Stagecoach would set the mold for the Western genre, re-telling the American myth over and over again in the coming decades.
9. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
When Orson Welles arrived at RKO Pictures to make his first feature film, he crowed, "This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!" It could have been the battle cry for generations of enfants terribles. Welles' (nearly) total control of Citizen Kane paved the way for a director-centric cinema that has produced some of the screen's greatest achievements and worst excesses. Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography and the use of directional sound and overlapping dialogue made Citizen Kane the first film to let the audience see and hear as they did in the real world. And the fragmented story-telling -- with Charles Foster Kane's life presented as a mosaic of different viewpoints-- left viewers to put the pieces together like one of Susan Alexander Kane's giant jigsaw puzzles. It was a technique that would influence numerous other films, from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Welles' playful eye brought together unconventional filmmaking techniques that would raise him to uncharted terrain as a director with a freedom he would never again enjoy.
10. THE BICYCLE THIEF (1947)
The movies returned to the streets, where they had begun in the pioneering works of the Lumieres and D.W. Griffith, with this 1949 masterpiece. Shot on real locations in Rome with a factory worker in the leading role, The Bicycle Thief was among several post-war Italian films that provided an alternative to Hollywood's big-budget studio productions. Although not the first Neorealist film -- that honor goes to Roberto Rossellini's Open City -- it is the most famous and most accessible of the movement, thanks largely to director Vittorio De Sica's skill at directing actors and his ability to create moving images that seem totally unplanned. If the director's cinema traces its roots to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, then the impetus for the modern realistic film lies in De Sica's masterpiece. Beyond his influence on European directors like Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, his work would inspire the rise of independent film in America, from unsung heroes like Ruth Orkin and Morris Engel in the '50s to Cassavetes in the ‘60s.
11. RASHOMON (1950)
Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon added a new word to the dictionary, one that was used to describe any situation prompting conflicting interpretations. Kurosawa had trouble producing the film, given its unconventional narrative that depicted conflicting versions of the same two crimes. His studio was reluctant to fund the project and the Japanese government considered it too far outside the mainstream to represent their country at the Venice Film Festival. Yet, his groundbreaking film ultimately put Japanese cinema on the international map. Kurosawa's editing techniques (the film has twice as many shots as the average feature), gave it a sensual power that attracted audiences to the emotionally charged story. The director filmed directly into the sun for the first time in film history, a pioneering move that created dramatic lens flares. He also created beautiful outdoor images, shot by reflecting sunlight in a mirror borrowed from the costume department. Kurosawa transcended the challenges of a low-budget and censorship to create a new cinematic world that would inspire filmmakers like George Lucas and Martin Scorsese.
12. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
Almost 20 years after he revitalized the genre with Stagecoach, director John Ford pointed the Western in a new, revisionist direction. Although far from a total reevaluation of the winning of the West, The Searchers offers one of the screen's first attempts to depict the racism underlying U.S.-Native relations. Ford views the problem from both sides, showing how both John Wayne's obsessed Indian hunter Ethan Edwards and the equally obsessed Comanche chief, Scar, have been shaped by violent acts of the past. The conflict between these two victims of Manifest Destiny turns the film from Western into a revenge tragedy set against the impassive, timeless vistas of Monument Valley. One of the most influential of all Westerns, the film inspired David Lean's landscapes in Lawrence of Arabia, several shots in George Lucas' Star Wars films and the final shoot out in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Buddy Holly based one of his biggest hits on Wayne's catchphrase, "That'll be the day." And Wayne, who considered Ethan his best performance and The Searchers his best film, named a son after the character.
13. BREATHLESS (1959)
Drawing on B-crime thrillers to create a chic nihilism, critic-turned-filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard not only defined the French New Wave, but also used his theory of “the cinema of reinvention” to change the look of film. With jarring quick cuts between scenes, jump cuts within them and long takes filled with dizzying camera movements, he made movies with a rough cinematic technique that was even reflected in his scripts. "Don't use the brakes," Jean-Paul Belmondo orders at one moment in Breathless. "Cars are made to go, not to stop!" By the end of the '60s, younger directors like Arthur Penn and Francis Ford Coppola were mining Godard's movies and imitating their distinctive style. And the film's anti-establishment attitude became a mainstay for a whole cinema of alienation in films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
14. PSYCHO (1960)
Following several big-budget, color productions like North by Northwest and Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock found inspiration in the low-budget black-and-white horror films of the day. Psycho ended up re-defining the genre, throwing the audience off-guard with major surprises, like killing off its biggest star, Janet Leigh, a third of the way into the movie. Hitch also pushed other boundaries: showing a flushing toilet on-screen (the first time in a Hollywood film), introducing the word "transvestite" to U.S. movie houses and, in the classic shower scene, making the audience think they had witnessed more violence than was actually shown on screen. But his perversity went way beyond that. By making viewers identify first with a petty crook, then with a cross-dressing serial killer, the master of suspense showed just how far a master director could go in making the medium -- and the audience -- his own. Before long, the filmmakers that Hitchcock had imitated started imitating him. The psycho killer became a horror film staple, leading to the slasher flicks that arrived with Halloween and Friday the 13th. The lasting influence of Psycho was also apparent in Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy, as the director opened each film with the murder of a “name” actress in the first act.
15. STAR WARS (1977)
A long time ago, in a Hollywood far away, movies only made their money from ticket sales. With Star Wars, however, new markets opened up for merchandising-- not just of toys-- but novels, comics, television series and eventually video games. Adding to what would become known as the "Star Wars Expanded Universe" were a series of sequels and prequels more tightly connected than in other franchises. Over the course of 28 years, George Lucas created a six-part serial that has grown into the epic tragedy of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Star Wars did more than create expanded economic opportunities. At a time when science fiction was relegated mostly to low-budget productions, Lucas' created a multi-million dollar sci-fi epic based on the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of his youth. The use of sophisticated special effects would have a lasting effect on future big-budget epics of all genres. His childhood obsessions helped a new generation of filmmakers, the movie nerds, dominate the screen. For Lucas, Star Wars was the chance to do his favorites right. His vision of a lived-in universe (he deliberately gave sets and props a used look) inspired later, more serious works like the Alien films and Blade Runner.
This is a pretty solid list. It was limited to fifteen because TCM is celebrating it's fifteenth anniversary. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of room on this list. Actually there's only four films (Rashomon, The Bicycle Thief, 42nd Street and Battleship Potemkin) on the list that I haven't seen. Although I have seen the famous "Odessa Steps" scene in Battleship Potemkin. So I feel pretty good about that.
I think my only issue with it is having two John Ford westerns on the list (It's a little redundant). I can buy Stagecoach but including The Searchers is stretching it. Don't get me wrong The Searchers is a great film and I think it is a better film than Stagecoach but I don't believe that it was more influential (especially for its time) than Stagecoach.
If I were to add one film to the list (thus subtracting Stagecoach), it would be Toy Story. Pixar ushered in a revolution in animation--both from a technical aspect and from a storytelling aspect. Toy Story is not Pixar's best film but is the one that put Pixar on the map and got the ball rolling.
To read more critiques click here and here.
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