8 1/2
The Third Man
Citizen Kane
Dead Man
Pather Panchali
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I love I Vitteloni, Nights of Cabiria, and la Dolce Vita, but I hated la Strada.
The Bicycle Thieves and l’Ossessione are great Italian movies from that time too.
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Waterfront’s pro-HUAC propaganda, which is basically the underpinning of the whole film, has prevented me from embracing the film as great.
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The Maltese Falcon is a master class in noir B&W.
The Thin Man movies, for sure, at least the first three.
honestly, there are too many to list, but everyone has hit a bunch of my favorites already.
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Killer of Sheep (1978) Charles Burnett
ETA: Why We Fight series
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The radio series was pretty good, too. Gotta love that zither!
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And generally considered the first! Also while the Heuston one is usually described as the same as the pre code one apart from the earlier having sexual innuendo, it isn’t. It’s much, much better. The acting in particular. What they have in common is that the dialogue from Hammett is movie ready on the page and some of the best dialogue sequences are just straight out of the book. Bogey is literally perfect at it for me.
A later noir I watched recently was Double Indemnity and it’s absolutely fantastic. Nerve racking despite the fact that it starts off with the narrator already shot and confessing into his office recorder.
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Roma (yeah, not really classic, but B&W)
The Bedford Incident
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Besides some classics already mentioned:
- His Girl Friday
- You Can’t Take it With You
- Anatomy of a Murder
- Arsenic and Old Lace
- M (Fritz Lang)
- Anything by Hitchcock
- Anything with the Marx Brothers.
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Great list! M is amazing. I remember watching a Mizoguchi movie (Ugetsu Monogatori? It’s a long time ago) and thinking that Lang had bitten Mizoguchi and then I looked at the times and it was the other way round.
Also Ozu: Tokyo Story and the whole sequence late spring etc. great. I will watch any Korean movie where the filmmaker is a fan of Ozu.
I was thinking of doing a list by country but I would fall far short of doing justice.
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That reminds me of another grayscale classic: Sunset Boulevard. B&W also stands for Billy Wilder.
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Saw it in a double bill with Mulholland Drive! Fantastic fun. It’s a bit like Shakespeare: the big lines just keep coming!
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To me there are two kinds of classic b&w movies: those that combine good visuals with a good story (many of which have already been named) and those with lousy stories that are just good to look at. William Cameron Menzies’ Chandu the Magician (1932) is one such. Another is Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1949), which has a deplorable script but is visually superb, thanks largely to cinematographer John Alton.
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Yes, Double Indemnity is one of the greatest Noir movies.
Also, you can’t leave Tarkovsky out… Andrei Rublev.
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I read about that in an Orson Welles biography (have we mentioned touch of evil? I was just describing the dolly shot hotel interrogation at length to a mate on the phone on the bus home today!) wasn’t Harry Lime a hero/ international man of mystery in it?
I happen to have just watched Bil Douglas’s “”My Childhood” today. Fuck me that’s grim. Very good though but it makes me think of other black and white childhood films. I loved the 400 blows by Truffaut and only saw comparatively recently Zero de Conduite by Vigo which is so obviously and influence on it. It at least has a sense of joy and delight in the camera which raises it up. L’Atalante is of course one of the great poems to romance. In any medium.
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I am surprised no one has mentioned the one black and white movie I watch all the time:
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
(EDIT: Apologies, @allenk did mention it, I just missed it when scrolling through. Credit where credit is due!)
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I was fortunate enough to see Casablanca, The Big Sleep and La Dolce Vita at The Paramount in Austin. (For the last 2 films, that was when & where I saw both for the first time.) Come to think of it, I saw The 39 Steps there, too, though it’s not a favorite like the others.
Not B&W but The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was utterly magnificent on that big screen.
Watch out, the (Criterion?) DVD has an auto-play intro with Martin Scorsese. Big spoiler alert if one has never seen the film at all.
Is that Roma città aperta or something else? I’d definitely put the former in the classics column…
That’s upthread somewhere! I saw that in the theater, when I was 11 or 12, really before I’d seen any of the films excerpted therein. But I recognized most of the “cast”, enough to get the joke & enjoyed it very much. The more of those films I’ve seen, the more I enjoy coming back to Dead Men.
Speaking of similar titles Dead Man is sitting on the pile of movies to watch when I have more time sometime.
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Yeah, that’s a reasonable description of Harry Lime in it. It verges on comedy. The Third Man was quite a unique radio show for the time, like Voyage of the Scarlet Queen or Bold Venture, but much more tongue-in-cheek.
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For sure! Right up there with the best noir.
I just saw Bogart in In a Lonely Place. Very absorbing and fun, kept me guessing until almost the end.
No love for Brief Encounter???
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