A Cinema Canon for the Ages

[oscar jubis]

1939 is said to have been the best year in the history of film. I have been sharing my on-going, perrennially revised cannon for decades now, and I have organized it according to year of world release. In my opinion, the most prolific year as far as great cinema is...1959, 20 years later. Here's my

1959 TOP 11 (in alphabetical order)

-------THE 400 BLOWS (Truffaut)
-------ANATOMY OF A MURDER (Preminger)
-------FLOATING WEEDS (Ozu)
-------FRITZ LANG'S INDIAN EPIC (Lang)
-------HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (Resnais)
-------IMITATION OF LIFE (Sirk)
-------MOI, UN NOIR (Rouch)
-------NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Hitchcock)
-------PICKPOCKET (Bresson)
-------SOME LIKE IT HOT (Wilder)
-------THE WORLD OF APU (Ray)



But today I am adding to the list a film from 1939 and It's not The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind but Ernst Lubitch's NINOTCHKA.

THE QUOTE BELOW BELONGS TO CHICAGO READER WRITER BEN SACHS. IT SAYS SOMETHING CRUCIAL ABOUT THE FILM'S ACHIEVEMENTS.

Incarnated by Greta Garbo in a performance directed by Ernst Lubitsch, the title character of Ninotchka is one of the great creations of satirical cinema. Garbo’s Soviet commissar at first seems like a caricature of the zealous revolutionary, as the filmmakers generate laughs from her humorlessness and rigid adherence to government protocol. But when Ninotchka falls in love with French count Leon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), something shifts in the characterization. One begins to see an erotic charge beneath her political fervor, a sensitivity behind her idealized worldview. And so, what had begun as a skeptical view of Communism on the filmmakers’ part transforms into one of respectful ambivalence.(Ben Sachs)