An Intensely Personal Top 10 List for 1987 : Top 10 Films

The film year we’ve just concluded could, in some ways, try the patience of an oyster. It was marked by a deluge of films, enough to make banner Variety headlines, but probably a quarter of those films, and maybe more, were the sort that you forget before you’re out of the parking lot, with any luck.

The good films came in waves, and in the early part of the year some of those waves came from Britain. To these eyes the very best from Britain is the film in the No. 1 slot below; but there were also such strong personal movies as “Rita, Sue and Bob Too,” “Withnail and I,” “Wish You Were Here” and, for some, “Prick Up Your Ears” and “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.” The year also marked a first-to-my-memory Welsh film, “Coming Up Roses,” in a mysterious-sounding, quite wonderful language which resembles someone gargling in Russian.

The American independent movement, which flexed some very impressive muscles last year, seemed more to be marking time than forging ahead in 1987. However, there were some exceptional memories: “Waiting for the Moon,” “Working Girls,” “Sherman’s March,” “Matewan” and that starry curtain call, “The Whales of August.” Among the forces that shape the films in our future, 1987 marked the end of David Puttnam’s short-lived and adventurous studio regime and an unprecedented scattering to the winds of all the people connected with him. Retribution of that kind can’t help but make one worry for the talents and the eclectic projects that may have been lost in its wake.

International politics touched the film scene as glasnost became manifest in such Soviet-made eye-openers as the widely heralded “Repentence” and the less splashy but equally outspoken “My Friend Ivan Lapchine” and “Scarecrow.” And Richard Attenborough used the power of the screen to register a cry of outrage at South Africa’s policies of apartheid in “Cry Freedom,” a film more heartfelt than thought-out.

Sexual politics had their day too, as “Fatal Attraction” became the buzz-movie for far longer than its shrewdly calculated characters warranted. Shrill and silly, filled with oddly twisted righteousness, it preyed on subliminal fears about what career women really are: insatiable predators. In the rush to see this one, a more thoughtful and better-acted variation on the same theme, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” got lost in the shuffle.

It was also a big year for the big film. “Cry Freedom” certainly didn’t limit any of its horizon-filling crowd scenes and “The Last Emperor” and “Empire of the Sun” probably put more Chinese bodies in motion than any event since The Long March. Bigger was perhaps more eye-filling but not necessarily better. John Huston used only 83 minutes and a cast of less than two dozen to make a masterpiece of James Joyce’s novella, “The Dead.”

Oddly enough, in the face of all this hyperinflation, some of the very nicest films were small scale, singular and without precedent. And they were literate. If these best films of 1987 proved anything, they underlined the power of words, and in a great many cases, those words were by writer-directors (from the list below, try Woody Allen, John Boorman, James Brooks, Lasse Holstrom, Stanley Kubrick, Barry Levinson, Louis Malle) or even writer-director-producers. That would seem to suggest--in addition to an outrageous concentration of talent in one person--a certain steely desperation on the part of writers who realize that the only way they can protect their words is to escort them onto a sound stage themselves.

If I had any wish, it would be for another position in my list of 10 best pictures, in order to squeeze in a film which probably provided more people--me included--more pure pleasure than any movie I can remember in decades: “Dirty Dancing.” But the rule of 10 has to stand, or we’d find ourselves with a Best 40, and rising.

So--to the list, intensely personal, as always, in order of preference:

1--”Hope and Glory”--John Boorman’s look at World War II through the eyes of the 7-year-old he had been at that time, really seemed to have it all: humor, heart, irony, performances, scenes of the purest cinema, an extraordinarily calibrated sense of time, place and Empire and an elegance of structure that is underlined at the close when the family string quartet tackles a little Mozart.

2--”The Dead”--For John Huston at 81 to have left this subtle, ribald, soaring magnificence as his final legacy seems unprecedented. Rich with a sense of the real Ireland and the depths of the James Joyce novella on which it’s based, “The Dead” had a sterling cast of great Irish actors, as well as two lucid bits of invention which made it work even more powerfully on the screen.

3--”My Life as a Dog”--In his story of a little boy’s unique defenses against the tragedy looming in his life, director Lasse Holstrom somehow caught exactly that knife-edge between pain and delight that is childhood. Funny and lacerating by turns, it looks at the world of the young with kind but unsentimental eyes, but its bedrock faith is in the simple goodness of all human beings.

4--”Broadcast News”--A dazzlement. James Brooks manages to coat his deep concern over the decline of our television news to an Entertainment Tonight level of journalism with dialogue and performances that are fast, wicked, funny, shrewd, smart, tenderly played and hell’s own insightful.

5--”Tin Men”--To make a breed of wildly inventive sucker-hustlers like “Tin Men’s” aluminum-siding salesmen as crass yet as touching as they are here takes insight and real poetry, and Barry Levinson has it by the bucketful. An ensemble piece of the highest delicacy, it’s also--with “Radio Days”--one of those quintessentially American-made human comedies.

6--”Au Revoir Les Enfants”--In his retelling of an incident of betrayal and conscience from his childhood in Occupied France, Louis Malle proceeds with the steadfastness of maturity and the inexorability of the purest music. This is somewhat the same ground as “Lacombe, Lucien”--betrayal arising from the most petty and ignorant motives--yet its cumulative effect may be even more devastating.

7--”Roxanne”--”Cyrano” was its springboard but Fred Schepisi and most certainly Steve Martin made this into a nimble, adorable, utterly contemporary romance with no trauma to the classic and with all its values intact. Love still looks beyond the surface here, and nicest of all, smart is beautiful. A revolutionary message for today’s romantics?

8--”Moonstruck”--A radiant and somehow nourishing comedy that keeps its balance between the solid joys of home, hearth and family and the ravishments of . . . well, ravishment. Norman Jewison seems to have hit every one of his story’s references, from “La Boheme” to “Cinderella,” with perfect pitch.

9--”Radio Days”--One of Woody Allen’s warmest, this is a tribute to an era when everything you knew about the world came from a glowing golden radio dial--and your imagination. There’s something here, too, about the tensile strength of families, done with the tender sense of a mature artist, pinning down the ephemeral with the greatest care.

10--”Full Metal Jacket”--Stanley Kubrick’s powerful and centered statement of outrage about Vietnam. Perversion of the innocent is at the heart of his vision, which he shapes with pure, almost clinical inexorability. The astonishing attack of its first half may almost have the effect of overshadowing the combat scenes that close the film, but the movie as a whole seems to work subliminally, rising to confront us again when we least expect it.

Among my colleagues, Kevin Thomas picked as his favorites “Au Revoir les Enfants”; “Welcome in Vienna,” part of a trilogy by Axel Corti; “The Dead”; “Comic Magazine” (Yojiro Takita); “The Funeral” (Juzo Itami); “Maurice” (James Ivory); “The Last Emperor” (Bernardo Bertolucci); “Law of Desire” (Pedro Almodovar); “Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring” (Claude Berri) and “Born in East L.A.” (Cheech Marin).

Michael Wilmington’s preferences were “The Dead”; “Full Metal Jacket,” “Hope and Glory,” “The Legend of Surami Fortress” (Sergei Paradzhanov, Dodo Abahidze), “Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring,” “My Life as a Dog” (Lasse Hallstrom), “Au Revoir les Enfants,” “Radio Days” (Woody Allen), “The Runner” (Amir Naderi) and “The Last Emperor.”

In addition to some duplications on my list, Leonard Klady’s favorites were “Wish You Were Here” (David Leland), “Dark Eyes” (Nikita Mikhalkov), “Pouvoir Intime” (Yves Simoneau) and “The Last Emperor.”

The favorite choices of Benson’s colleagues appear at the end of this article on Page 37.

Benson’s List

1--”Hope and Glory”

2--”The Dead”

3--”My Life as a Dog”

4--”Broadcast News” 5--”Tin Men”

6--”Au Revoir Les Enfants”

7--”Roxanne”

8--”Moonstruck”

9--”Radio Days”

10--”Full Metal Jacket”