A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : ‘CITIZEN KANE’? WHAT’S THAT? : The Best Nov. 15 Interview With the Author of ‘A Book of Movie Bests’

What is “The Best Line Delivered by a Woman to the Jealous Husband She Is Dumping” in a movie? Or “The Best Pre-Code Lingerie”? Or even “The Best Version of the Faust Legend (Incorporating Best Devil, Best Heaven, and Best Resurrection of an Old Joke)”?

The answers to those movie “bests” and 118 more can be found in the soon-to-be-published “From Cyd Charisse to Psycho: A Book of Movie Bests” (Walker & Co.: $19.95 hardback, $12.95 softcover), by New York-based advertising consultant and film writer Dale Thomajan.

According to Thomajan, Norma Shearer delivered the best line (By a Woman to The Jealous Husband, etc.) in 1930’s “The Divorcee”: “From now on, you’re the only man in the world that my door is closed to.”

Actress Virginia Bruce wore the best lingerie in “Winner Take All,” Thomajan says, and Stanley Donen’s 1967 comedy “Bedazzled” is the best version of the Faust legend.

Many of the categories in the book were created “backward,” Thomajan explains. “Instead of thinking of a movie to fill it, I thought of a movie I wanted to write about. I invented and maybe even forced the category.”

A case in point is the 1947 June Allyson-Peter Lawford college musical “Good News.”

“It is the best what?,” asks Thomajan, who has seen about 5,000 movies during his lifetime. “It is not the best musical. It is not even the best MGM musical.”

So he came up with “The Best MGM Musical Not to Involve Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly or Vincente Minnelli.”

It may surprise some MGM musical buffs that “Good News” beat out the more acclaimed 1954 Stanley Donen musical, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

“I recently re-saw (“Seven Brides”). I loved it as a kid and for some reason I didn’t like it quite as much, though it is a very nice picture,” Thomajan says.

Thomajan’s mission: to make his book “popular and entertaining without being gushy. I tried to strike a balance between something that would be fun and something that would have a little substance and not be academic or over everybody’s head.”

Of course such “best” lists are subjective. Thomajan, who writes for Film Comment, the Village Voice and Spy, acknowledges they are his candidates. In fact, he hopes he’ll start a few healthy arguments with his opinions. Thomajan believes most will probably disagree with his candidate for “Best Film of All Time”: “Les Enfants Terribles,” Jean-Pierre Melville’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s novel about the obsessive love between a teen-age girl and her brother.

“I hoped that a lot of these things will induce people to perhaps rent it or see it in an old movie theater,” Thomajan says.

Thomajan’s choice for “Best Western Star” is Randolph Scott, not John Wayne. The category is “a little bit of a cheat,” Thomajan admits. “I am almost coming out and saying, ‘Look, John Wayne is really the better Western actor,’ but there has been so much written about John Wayne and so little about Randolph Scott. Wayne sometimes would be quite good in war movies and even modern-day movies, but Scott seemed to be terrible in everything but Westerns.”

Among other Thomajan topics: “The Best Two-Character Movie” (“Hell in the Pacific”); “The Best High School Movie” (“Margie”), and “The Best Reason to Stop Going to Woody Allen Movies” (“They’re unbearable”).

“Everybody started liking Woody Allen with ‘Annie Hall’ and I stopped liking Woody Allen with ‘Annie Hall,’ ” Thomajan says. “My Woody Allen now is Albert Brooks.”

“I guess I could be wrong about some of these opinions,” admits Thomajan, who refers to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” as an “overstuffed turkey.” “I guess I was trying to get a little negativity in the book.”