10 Films That Merit a Reverent ‘Thank You’

Every movie critic can thank the movies for his or her profession, of course--and also for providing a rich, imaginative life and an entry to many different worlds.

And many of us--critics or not--can thank the movies for changing our lives in some way. Each of the following movies, in some way, changed mine.

Because the movies that affect us most profoundly are often ones we see in youth, this may seem to many to be too “vintage” or old-fashioned a list. But that can’t be helped. These are the movies for which I’m most thankful (as opposed to a “best movies” roster)--listed, with the exception of the last one, in the order I came to see them:

1. “Dumbo” (Ben Sharpsteen-Walt Disney; 1941). Like many a grown-up child, I’m thankful to “Dumbo” for easing some of youth’s bad stretches. I watched this movie on TV many, many times. At 64 minutes, it was one of the few Disney cartoon features that could be squeezed into a TV format. And I especially appreciated Dumbo’s predicaments: those huge, floppy ears that made him a laughingstock among the other circus animals, and the way his mother was cruelly taken from him. ‘Dumbo” gave me hope that, as Timothy Mouse says, “What’s holding you down is going to lift you up, up, up!”

2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock; 1958). As a youngster, I loved mystery stories, and I was very aware that there was a movie director named Hitchcock who was considered “the master of suspense.” In 1958, my mother took me to the Elkhorn, Wis., theater to see my first Hitchcock, “Vertigo.” At 11, I couldn’t comprehend all the psychological twists and perverse turns of this classic erotic thriller--the tense tale of a San Francisco detective afraid of heights (Jimmy Stewart) and the love he loses twice--but I was spellbound by the story, haunted by the images. From then on, Hitchcock became my favorite movie-maker. With a few additions (Welles, Bergman, Ford, Scorsese, Renoir), he still is.

3. “The Bicycle Thief” (Vittorio De Sica; 1948). In my hometown, Williams Bay, Wis., they had no movie theaters--and the ones nearby rarely showed foreign-language movies and never undubbed ones. In my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I began regularly attending art theaters and campus film showings to catch up on what I’d missed. Among the movies that made a huge impression was De Sica’s artfully simple Italian neo-realist classic about the impoverished Roman worker who has his bicycle stolen--the transportation he needs to keep his hard-won job putting up movie posters--and who then combs the city with his young son, desperately trying to find it. Before “Bicycle Thief” (or “Bicycle Thieves,” as it’s known in Italy), I never fully realized how the stuff of ordinary lives could be turned on screen into poetry and high drama, how movies with none of the usual stars and heavy production values could open your eyes and wring your heart. This film changed not just how I looked at movies but the way I looked at the world around me.

4. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa; 1954). Seven masterless samurai--or, to be more accurate, six samurai and one samurai wannabe--come together to aid some helpless villagers who are plagued every year by bandit raids. What follows is the greatest adventure film ever made--and the film that, in a way, stands in for all the many others I love and could have chosen (“Potemkin,” “The Searchers,” “Red River,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Little Big Man,” “Blade Runner”)--not simply because Akira Kurosawa, with his three-camera shooting and miraculous editing, staged action like nobody else, not because Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura (the wise leader) are archetypal heroes, but because of the power and idealism of the film’s premise. It’s a great fantasy: to fight against power and injustice. To fight when the odds are against you. To fight to the last breath.

5. “It’s a Wonderful Life” (Frank Capra; 1946). Long before it became quite the pop icon it is today, Capra’s shining American classic--with its gut-grabbing tale of George Bailey (Stewart again), the small-town guy who lives for others and is nearly destroyed by his enemy’s greed--was a movie especially loved by the hard-core film buffs I knew. At the Wisconsin Film Society, it was shown every Christmas from the late ‘60s on, and drew huge audiences--of the same, often politically radical students who were commonly viewed by outsiders as spoilers and wreckers. Why did the film draw those students? Because the outsiders didn’t understand them, and because “Wonderful Life,” though frequently damned as establishment schmaltz and “Capra-corn,” really is a movie about the little guy who stands up against rotten power and corrupt elitism, stands up for his community. And wins.

6. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen; 1952). No true movie lover alive isn’t thankful for this great silents-to-talkies backstage movie comedy--or for that sublime five-minute dance in the rain by Gene Kelly. In that dance, under that MGM sound stage downpour, waving his umbrella and sloshing ecstatically through the soaked streets, Kelly defines for all time what it means to be in a movie and in love.

7. “To Have and Have Not” (Howard Hawks; 1944). In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the University of Wisconsin probably showed more movies per square foot than anywhere else. In its heyday, more than 20 film societies were operating there. And it was mainly at Madison that I discovered both the classic American movie and the classic foreign art cinema--as well as French critics and directors like Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who had a much different take on American films. One special French passion was for that master-of-all-movie-genres and male-bonding specialist Howard Hawks. And for many years I regarded him (followed by John Ford, Jean Renoir, Hitchcock and Welles) as my favorite filmmaker and Hawks’ 1944 Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall picture, “To Have and Have Not,” as my favorite movie. I don’t feel quite that way anymore--though I still love that picture. Hawks had adapted the movie, in part, from his buddy Ernest Hemingway’s Key West novel, transferred it to wartime Martinique, added some “Casablanca” elements and used it as a showcase for Bogey and the debuting 19-year-old Bacall--who deliver the most smoldering love-combat scenes in any Golden Age Hollywood movie.

8. “Belle de Jour” (Luis Bunuel; 1967). The most amazing 24 hours I ever spent took place in Chicago in the summer of 1968. During that span, I arrived in the city with a group of five male and female friends to see the Chicago Democratic Convention street demonstrations, checked out Evanston and the city, watched “Belle de Jour”--Bun~uel’s great surreal sexual nightmare with the impossibly beautiful Catherine Deneuve as a Parisian wife plunged into prostitution--at the old Playboy theater, and walked out into the middle of the very violent Lincoln Park riots. The next day we made it to Grant Park, where three of us moved through angry crowds and wisps of tear gas to climb aboard a TV van parked near the intersection of Michigan and Balbo, right in front of the Conrad Hilton hotel, to get a better look. We did. Many of you saw on television what happened five minutes later, shot by the camera people right over our heads, only a few feet away. All Chicago hell broke out in front of us, and it was a Chicago cop--one of a number who weren’t taking part in the fierce beatings--who helped get us out of there. Am I thankful for that great movie and its wild aftermath? And that cop? I can’t imagine my life--or my view of the world--without them.

9. “Do the Right Thing” (Spike Lee; 1989). One of the fringe benefits of movie criticism, especially in Los Angeles (where I worked for 10 years), is that you occasionally meet the makers of films you love. It was not in L.A. though, but in Atlanta--at Clark College--that I first met Shelton “Spike” Lee, director of that incendiary modern classic “Do the Right Thing.” It was 1982, four years before his debut feature “She’s Gotta Have It,” and I was at Clark with my then-New York roommate and old Madison friend Barry Alexander Brown, trying to recruit talent for an indie feature on growing up in the South. (I would co-write and Brown would direct.) We tabbed Lee, then a teaching assistant for the Clark and Morehouse College production classes, as our assistant director--and though the movie never got made, I’ll always remember our first exchange. After watching one of Lee’s NYU student films, “The Answer” (a short comedy that, like “Bamboozled,” was about media racism), I walked over to the future trailblazer and, trying to offer encouragement, said, “That’s the best student film I’ve ever seen.” He gave me a bemused look and replied: “Well, you can’t have seen very many student films!”

That’s Spike Lee. Seven years later, I was in the Brooklyn offices of Lee’s company, Forty Acres and a Mule, sitting at an editing console with Brown (who had become Lee’s main editor), watching the film he’d just cut, “Do the Right Thing”: that great, controversial movie about racial conflict at a Brooklyn pizzeria. You could feel the heat; you could smell the tension. From the start, I knew Lee was good, but I didn’t know he could deliver a picture like this.

10. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles; 1941). When I was 11, I had been watching movies systematically on TV and in theaters for about a year, and writing my own little reviews. One night I sneaked after hours into our living room, turned the TV on, but very low, and for the first time watched a movie I had been reading about for a year or so: Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.” Like many, many others before me, I was transfixed, amazed. What a movie! It was a way of telling stories--grand, eloquent, multileveled, witty, bewitchingly intelligent and visually mesmerizing--unlike anything I’d ever seen. And it made an impact beyond any film I’ve seen since. “Citizen Kane” made me fall in love with the movies for keeps. So my biggest thanks of all to someone in the movies will always go to that prodigious 25-year-old who made “Citizen Kane”: Orson Welles, first citizen of the cinema.