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10
classic films that changed the face of cinema
You must remember these... Tom Charity charts the enduring influence of ten classic Warner Bros. titles that no film buff should be without
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“We’ll always have Paris,” Humphrey Bogart assured Ingrid Bergman. And the movies make it so. No matter if we’re watching flashbacks in black and white, or sci-fi in 3D, we only ever experience films in the present tense. And movie stars? They live for ever. Fashions come and go, but classics earn their status the hard way – by withstanding the test of time, speaking to generation upon generation, revealing core truths that remain constant in the human heart. Remember this? “A kiss is just a kiss, but the fundamental things apply – as time goes by.” Hollywood hasn’t always done justice to its rich and varied legacy. But the Warner Bros. shield still stands for something, evoking not just millennial blockbusters but a tradition of quality and innovation that goes right back to The Jazz Singer, the first sound movie, which catapulted this family firm into the big league back in 1927. In the 1930s Warner Bros. had a reputation for pioneering tough, working class, urban dramas. Gangster movies like Little Caesar with Edward G Robinson, The Public Enemy with James Cagney, and The Petrified Forest with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis. Other studios did glamour and tinsel; Warner Bros. was hard-nosed, taking stories from the headlines of the day and sticking to the most demanding production schedules in town. But that discipline didn’t hurt one bit. Quite the opposite. Warner Bros. movies were on-point, sharp, and hard hitting. To watch these movies today is to be transported to a snappier place, in many ways more vividly and acutely alive than what we see around us. By the mid Forties the studio was top of the heap and determined to retain its advantage. In the latter half of the 20th century other film factories lost their way. MGM was sold and sold again. RKO bit the dust. Over time, Warner Bros. was able to acquire the rights to a treasure trove of Hollywood movies from what we now know as the Golden Age, preserving such timeless gems as Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, and An American in Paris, and making them available to audiences on screens of all sizes. Oh, yes, we’ll always have Paris... So long as there are movies and people like you and me to savour them.
Casablanca
The wartime melodrama with the most magnetic screen pairing in film history
If any single movie can sum up the Golden Age of Hollywood studio filmmaking, it would have to be this one, the ultimate romantic melodrama. Ironically, the studio didn’t entertain high hopes for it. It was based on an unproduced play, and the producers originally wanted to cast Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan and Dennis Morgan. Happily Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid worked out just fine. Released in 1942, the movie captured the mood as the Second World War finally turned against Germany, and it went on to win Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. But it was in the late Sixties that the film – and Bogart in particular – became a cultural phenomenon. The endlessly quotable dialogue includes the toast “Here’s looking at you, kid”, and Claude Rains’ world-weary “Round up the usual suspects”, which gave director Bryan Singer the title for his 1995 neo-noir mystery. Casablanca is also a touchstone for Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. Pamela Anderson starred in a loose remake (or rip-off) called Barb Wire, and it was the clear model for Steven Soderbergh’s Forties throwback, The Good German. More famously, Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam (in which he takes tips on women from an imaginary Bogie) is a misquote. What’s actually said is: “Play it Sam. Play As Time Goes By.”
Director: Michael Curtiz, 1942 Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains
The piano Sam (Paul Dooley) played in the film sold at auction in 2014 for $3.4 million.
Trivia
The peerless musical comedy that puts a permanent smile on your face
Singin’ in the Rain
Director: Stanley Donen, 1952 Stars: Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse, Donald O’Connor
The famous title number took three days to shoot, with Gene Kelly running a temperature of 103, and the 15-hour shoot for Good Morning left Debbie Reynolds’ feet bleeding.
Citizen Kane
The greatest movie ever made – directed, co-written and acted in by a 25-year-old genius
Director: Orson Welles, 1942 Stars: Welles, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead
Welles had to be in make-up from 2.30am to play old Kane – but he also had extensive work to make him appear more young and vigorous for the early scenes.
The iconic ruby slippers were silver in the original novel, and were changed to showcase Technicolor. Five pairs are known to have survived, including one exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum and another that was stolen, then recovered in 2018 by the FBI after a 13-year search.
“We started with zero,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut. The zero in question is Madison Avenue executive Roger O Thornhill; the “O” stands for “nothing”, he says. It was probably a dig at fabled Hollywood producer David O Selznick, whose middle initial was also an affectation. Like so many Hitchcock heroes, Thornhill (Cary Grant) is the wrong man in the wrong place at the worst time. Mistakenly identified as a spy, this nonentity is propelled into an insane adventure that will be the making of him. Incorporating business from The 39 Steps, Saboteur, Notorious and others, this is in some ways the definitive Hitchcock picture – a necklace of brilliant set pieces, strung together on a slippery chain. In that sense, it’s a model for today’s action blockbusters, by way of Steven Spielberg’s Hitchcockian hits, Jaws, Duel and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and especially another couple of zeroes: 007. Ian Fleming wanted to cast Cary Grant as James Bond, the design of Dr No was influenced by this film, and the famous crop duster sequence inspired the helicopter chase in From Russia with Love. You can spot Hitchcock’s influence on James Cameron’s True Lies and the Mission: Impossible franchise without breaking a sweat.
The perfect playful, romantic thriller whose set pieces make you stand up and clap
North by Northwest
Director: Alfred Hitchcock, 1959 Stars: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau
Although he had made several films with Hitch, Cary Grant thought this one would be a flop right up until it opened to great acclaim. It didn’t stop him making Charade a couple of years later in a very similar vein.
Plane scary: a film poster shows Thornhill almost coming a cropper
Eva Marie Saint played the mysterious Eve Kendall
This classic Raymond Chandler adaptation is all about sex appeal, style and atmosphere. Less neurotic than most film noir (the term was coined by French critics the same year), it’s much more interested in the Bogie and Bacall romance than in anything so mundane as a plot. Introduced by the same director in To Have and Have Not, they were by now a hot gossip item and the movie was fashioned around them as a kind of courtship comedy with corpses. Hawks reportedly lost track of who killed who in the meantime and phoned Chandler for explanations. He too claimed to be mystified. It matters not: the movie is sheer pleasure from start to finish, probably the most famous private-eye flick of them all. As such, its influence is almost incalculable, running from Mickey Spillane to Sin City and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but we have to mention Robert Altman’s 1973 The Long Goodbye, which cast Elliott Gould as a shambling and apologetic Philip Marlowe, and the Coen brothers’ cult comedy The Big Lebowski, which is a kind of stoner hybrid of the two. The Big Sleep was also a model for Roman Polanski’s classic Chinatown, Stephen Frears transposed the hardboiled style to Newcastle in the early Seventies for the quirky mystery, Gumshoe, and Ridley Scott imagined a world-weary detective tracking replicants in Los Angeles, 2019, in Blade Runner.
The film noir that positively oozes style and menace enough to keep you awake at night
The Big Sleep
Director: Howard Hawks, 1946 Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall
When the chips are down: Bacall and Bogart
Bacall said she and Bogart had so much fun on set they got a note from the studio head telling them “this must stop”. Three months after filming Bogart had divorced his wife and they married.
High hopes: Bogart wore platform shoes because he was shorter than Bacall
The first film of the sound era to win the Academy Award for Best Picture was The Broadway Melody in 1929. But An American in Paris was the first musical of the Technicolor era to earn that honour (beating A Streetcar Named Desire), and with its sophisticated palette of ballet, tap, George Gershwin and French Impressionism, it marked the moment when this most American of genres became truly respectable. The movie itself (which follows an American ex-GI living in bohemian Montmartre, trying to make it as a painter and falling in love with shop girl Leslie Caron) is about the romantic exultation of art – an ideal theme for a musical, a genre that by definition transcends realism. Doing the PR rounds for La La Land, Damien Chazelle admitted that An American in Paris was “a movie we just pillaged”. The film’s success with audiences and critics in 1951 laid the foundation for comparably ambitious, “serious” efforts such as A Star Is Born, Funny Face, Guys and Dolls, Gigi, West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Funny Girl, right up to Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, which starred the daughter of the director of An American in Paris: Liza Minnelli.
This six times Oscar-winning musical combines art and opulence with the fanciest footwork
An American in Paris
Director: Vincente Minnelli, 1951 Stars: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron
The final 17-minute ballet sequence took a month to shoot, and at half a million dollars it cost more than the entire budget of many movies of the time.
A star is born: Kelly suggested ballet dancer Leslie Caron for the movie though she hadn’t acted before
The fedora… a raincoat pulled over a crumpled suit… a cigarette insolently protruding from the corner of the mouth. We all know what a private eye looks like, and Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon set the mould. His creator – the novelist Dashiell Hammett – had been an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency back in the 1920s, and he knew what he was talking about. In fact, there were two previous adaptations of the book in the 1930s, but it was screenwriter turned director John Huston (this was his first film in that capacity) who finally nailed it. Set in a shadowy backlot in San Francisco but populated with a cast of genuine oddballs and eccentrics (Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr) and with a byzantine plot of double and triple crosses, the movie is rooted by Humphrey Bogart’s cynical, sardonic performance. A gangster-movie heavy up to this point, Bogie proved here he was leading-man material and kickstarted the wave of downbeat urban crime thrillers that came to be known as film noir. Sam Spade has been parodied many times, in Murder By Death and The Black Bird, for starters, but this movie is authentically hard-boiled, and stands the test of time. Thirty years later, John Huston would act up a storm as Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s neo-noir classic, Chinatown.
The fast-talking noir classic that raised the bar for all private-eye yarns
The Maltese Falcon
Director: John Huston, 1941 Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet
On the line: Lee Patrick and Bogart
When the movie prop said to have been used as the Maltese Falcon went up for auction in 2013, it sold for a record-breaking $4 million.
Gang of four: Bogart, Lorre, Astor and Greenstreet
Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski was arguably the single most influential performance in the history of American film and theatre. This was the first production to come out of director Elia Kazan’s Actors Studio, and its intensity and psychological realism rocked Broadway. In Tennessee Williams’ play, Stanley is a working class brute, a mechanic who likes drinking and cards and resents the airs of his destitute sister in law, Blanche. Brando’s “Method” school naturalism was a shock – moviegoers weren’t used to seeing sweat on screen – but so was his physical power and sexual magnetism. Although the film version was inevitably censored, it still carried enough of a punch to knock holes in the Production Code, ushering in a new period of sexual and emotional inquiry in Hollywood cinema. (Two decades later, Brando would star in Last Tango in Paris, the most successful X-rated movie of its era.) It would be quicker to list which American actors of the 1950s, 60s and 70s weren’t influenced by Brando. Simply put, he became the benchmark, and only Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have come close to the standard he set. (All three appeared, albeit separately, in the Godfather series, where he and De Niro played Don Vito Corleone at different stages of his life.)
The masterful adaptation that took risks, broke moulds and launched Brando
A Streetcar Named Desire
Director: Elia Kazan, 1951 Stars: Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh
The film earned Marlon Brando the first of four consecutive Academy nominations for Best Actor. Also nominated was composer Alex North, who contributed what many consider the first jazz score for a Hollywood movie.
‘Stella!’: the Production Code censors demanded 68 script changes from the Broadway staging
This was the movie that invented the modern teenager. So long Mickey Rooney, hello trouble! Kids had spending power in the 1950s, but they weren’t happy, and their middle-class parents couldn’t understand why. Director Nick Ray pointed the finger right back at them: “You’re tearing me apart,” rails Jim Stark (James Dean), a line picked up by Tommy Wiseau in his infamous turkey, The Room. Rebel taps an intense adolescent poetry of tumultuous sexual confusion and frustration – channelled through Dean’s extraordinary and iconic Method performance. Dean was dead before the movie even opened and thus achieved a kind of immortality. (His co-star Natalie Wood died at 43, and Sal Mineo at 37.) He cast a long shadow: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, even John Travolta and Fonzie on TV, the Eighties Brat Pack stars, James Franco… they all emulated Jimmy Dean, the patron saint of juvenile delinquents. In La La Land, Ryan Gosling goes to watch Rebel in the cinema, and takes Emma Stone on a pilgrimage to the Griffith Park Observatory, setting for Rebel’s climax. Director Ray was a big favourite with the French auteurist crew: Jean-Luc Godard declared that “Cinema is Ray”. Not to be outdone, Matt Groening put his Futurama hero Fry in a red jacket in honour of Jim Stark.
The searing teen-rage melodrama that gave us an icon of everlasting cool
Rebel Without a Cause
Director: Nicholas Ray, 1955 Stars: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo
Former child star Natalie Wood was considered too goody-goody for the part by the director – until she crashed her car and was called a “juvenile delinquent” for it.
The truth hurts: the director made the supporting cast fight each other as an audition
An essential part of our culture whose spell, 80 years on, simply can’t be broken
The Wizard of Oz
Director: Victor Fleming, 1939 Stars: Judy Garland, Margaret Hamilton
Following the yellow brick road: Dorothy and co head to the Emerald City
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CASABLANCA
Crush landing: Dorothy’s house drops on the Wicked Witch of the East
Deep focus: Gregg Toland’s cinematography was nominated for an Oscar
Let’s dance: Kelly hoofs it before a chorus line
'You must remember this…' Bogart and Bergman
Read on to discover how these ten classics continue to influence cinema today, or press "Menu" to go straight to a specific film
Rediscover a classic film today
Even people who don’t like musicals love Singin’ in the Rain – yet it is the quintessential musical, the apotheosis, conceived as nothing more (and nothing less) than a celebration of the form: “Gotta dance! Gotta dance! Gotta dance!” The script (by Adolph Green and Betty Comden) was written around some two dozen numbers by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. The title song hails from one of the earliest screen musicals, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and it was Green and Comden’s inspiration to make that transitional period the fulcrum of their story. The movie’s influence is deeply ingrained in almost every subsequent musical, from Cabaret to La La Land, while its Hollywood insider comedy would become fashionable decades later, via the work of Mel Brooks. Woody Allen’s character in Crimes and Misdemeanours talks about rewatching Singin’ in the Rain every couple of months, and indeed the movie has cropped up hundreds of times on screen in other films: in Brooklyn, in Silver Linings Playbook, in The Full Monty… But perhaps its most unexpected homage came in Stanley Kubrick’s notorious A Clockwork Orange, where the joyful title song is used in ironic counterpoint to a vicious assault.
Is Citizen Kane the greatest movie ever made? For most of the past 79 years that has been the consensus, although more recently it has been supplanted in critical favour by Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Granted unprecedented freedom by RKO, 25-year-old prodigy Orson Welles conjured the most sophisticated, complex, aesthetically audacious movie to come out of the Hollywood studio system to that time. It made Welles a talisman figure for future aspiring auteurs, like French critic turned director François Truffaut, who had recurring dreams about Kane in his movie-movie, Day for Night. Personal filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Federico Fellini in Italy and Ingmar Bergman in Sweden all owe Welles and Kane a debt. Even Peter Jackson pays homage to Welles in both Heavenly Creatures (where he’s a fantasy figure for the young Kate Winslet) and King Kong (the filmmaker played by Jack Black is clearly inspired by Welles), while the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the warehouse holding the key to Kane’s dying words. Kane’s ostentatious and groundbreaking use of deep focus and extreme camera angles fed into the expressionism of 1940s film noir, and its non-linear story structure and kaleidoscopic portrait of a man of immense contradictions influenced work as different as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, Christopher Nolan’s jigsaw puzzle movies, Warren Beatty’s Reds, and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. David Fincher’s latest, Mank, stars Gary Oldman as the co-writer of Citizen Kane.
Joel Coen (of the Coen brothers) claimed that “every movie ever made is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz”. Indeed, researchers combed a database of 47,000 films and discovered that this one has been referenced in more movies than any other. David Lynch crammed dozens into Wild at Heart. No guesses where John Boorman’s ill-fated Zardoz took its title. Spielberg’s AI is an Oz movie. So is Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, which is set in 1939 and not by accident. David Bowie “borrowed” the chorus of Somewhere (Over the Rainbow) to write Starman, and Salman Rushdie said this movie “made a writer of me”. So what’s the appeal? Well, partly it’s that the movie – which was not a box office hit in 1939 – became a staple on TV from the 1950s and for decades thereafter. But it’s thematic too. A country girl finding her feet in the big (Emerald) city, Dorothy Gale is one of the most enduring and endearing characters in movie history. Part of what she discovers on her voyage over the rainbow is that apparently heroic, magical, or at any rate much admired folk – like the Wizard of Oz – will probably turn out to be no better than anybody else. As parents will recognise, Oz is the father figure in the movie: not a bad man, but not someone who can solve all his children’s problems for them either. All he can do is appreciate them for what they are, so that they learn to appreciate themselves.
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Introduction
Director, writer, star: Orson Welles in Citizen Kane
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Road movie: Grant’s Thornhill is forced to flee from a gang of killers
Plane scary: a film poster shows Thornhill almost coming a cropper; (right) Eva Marie Saint played the mysterious Eve Kendall
