Shooting Down Pictures

“It came to me while watching …And God Created Woman for the Shooting Down Pictures project, that Brigitte Bardot may be the only reason why this film is on the 1000 list.”

Well, the film definitely had champions: it was one of the principal films used by the Cahiers critics as a club to beat the mainstream French cinema with, even though some of them seemed to feel afterward that they’d overrated Vadim. And, unlike Tracy, Bardot became a sociological phenomenon, with people like Simone de Beauvoir weighing in on her.

That was me posting above.

“I thought of one more – David Niven!”

I’m not prone to raining on anyone’s parade, least of all to the man who shoots down pictures (and most eloquently, at that), but David Niven appears most prominently and effectively in Powell/Pressburger’s “Matter of Life and Death”(#181), and not-so prominently as an extra (according to IMDB) in “Mutiny on the Bounty” (#862).

That’s okay Bill – I’ll put one past you just yet…! Just give me time…

Dan – re: sociological phenomenon, when I was watching this film I felt like Bardot’s presence had more in common with those 50s sci-fi monsters than women in other films of that time. She’s like a wild force of nature who clearly poses a threat to the status quo and whom civilization must find a way to subdue. The film has a thoroughly unsatisfying denouement, but revealing in its own way – there is no easy solution for a woman like this in a place like that.

I’m not a movie buff, but I find this question fascinating. There’s hardly an American actress of her generation more lauded than Meryl Streep, yet virtually none of her films appear on these Top 100 Film Lists, no matter who’s doing the compiling. And if a Streep movie does appear, it’s usually something like Deer Hunter or Manhattan where she has a small supporting role. How can this be? Same with Spencer Tracy or Bette Davis. If Davis gets on, it’s always All About Eve. And yet these were among the most feted performers of their era.

Now either they were overrated then and the passage of time is showing this, or the compilers of these lists don’t pay close enough attention to the actors’ contribution to the overall success of a picture. I mean, is North By Northwest really a great film? Not in my book. It’s enjoyable spectacle, not great art. It’s a fun piece of fluff, but it’s not worthy of standing alongside a movie like The Passion of Joan of Arc or M, great achievements which burn their searing central performances into the viewer’s memory forever.
If Peter Lorre or Falconetti had sucked in those parts, the movies themselves would have sunk as well. Those films are created to showcase great actors, whereas something like North by Northwest is not – and as fun as it is to watch, it didn’t any lasting impression on my mind. So I think the compilers of these lists ought to think more deeply about what it is an actor brings to the table, instead of just calling, say, De Niro lucky to have worked with Scorsese. Sure he was, but Scorsese was equally lucky to have had De Niro. Actors need great directors, but directors also need great actors just as much. Maybe if Sylvester Stallone had been the lead in Raging Bull, it would be a forgotten film today, no matter how virtuosic Scorsese’s editing and camera angles. Isn’t that not only possible, but likely?

SOPHIE’S CHOICE was an eyebrow-raising inclusion in the recent update to the AFI 100 Greatest Films; to me it was clearly a token inclusion to acknowledge Streep’s importance as an actress. When you look at her filmography on IMDb (http://imdb.com/name/nm0000658/) the films don’t seem to impress as all-time greats.

I’d beg to differ about NORTH BY NORTHWEST, which I haven’t seen in some time but loved when I was a kid. And I savor it in my memory not the least because of Cary Grant’s terrific performance. Though at least one person whom I deeply respect found the film awfully slight upon a recent re-viewing. I’m almost afraid to re-watch it now for having a favorite film diminished before my eyes – who would want to experience that?

Your RAGING BULL example is well taken and indeed it is almost impossible to think of an actor at that time who could have played Jake LaMotta, a presence which indeed is the heart and soul of the film. You’ve got me wondering if there are great directors out there whose films would have been even more revered had they teamed up with better actors. I still think a great director is more likely to make a great film with mediocre actors than a great actor can with a mediocre director, and there have been many examples of this, especially with neo realist filmmaking.

For the record, Bette Davis does have four or five films in the top 1000, not a small feat at all, and all in starring roles unlike Streep. I prefer Streep as an actress myself, but Davis definitely has a more impressive filmography. I ascribe this mostly to the relative paucity of great scripts involving leading women in the 80s compared to the 30s and 40s.

As for Passion of Joan of Arc or M, no doubt those are great films with landmark performances grounding each of them, but on the other hand they are also two of the most outstanding directorial achievements of all time. Falconetti’s closeups might have seemed laughable if Dreyer didn’t frame them properly or cut to the right complementary shots of her persecutors. And M is full of many, many other cinematic elements than Lorre’s performance, and is virtually unequalled in mapping out an entire society’s response at various levels to a criminal threat.

As an aside, I’m quite surprised that ADAM’S RIB isn’t included in the TSPDT 1000 – that’s probably my favorite of the Tracy/Hepburn films.

alsolikelife, your points are well taken. I didn’t mean to suggest Bette Davis or Streep didn’t have any good films to their credit, what I was getting at was that unless they do expand the list to 1000, they tend to be left off. Sure, Bette has lots of films on this particular gargantuan list, but almost all other Best of… Lists halt at 100, or at most 200, and that’s where her work gets ignored.

“I still think a great director is more likely to make a great film with mediocre actors than a great actor can with a mediocre director”

Maybe. Like I said I’m not a diehard cinephile, and doubtless you know a lot more about this than me. But while I used to think this, I’m less and less sure.

It seems to me that if you compare movies to other art forms, how important “characterization” is depends on what the “form” and subject matter are to begin with. In Shakespeare, character and personality are everything, because he writes stage dramas – and moreover, he wrote for a stage, the Elizabethan stage, that had very little opportunity for visual spectacle – the words and the actors had to do it all – no Andrew Lloyd Webber-style special effects for the Elizabethans. Whether you watch it on stage or read the play for yourself, you can see that there is very little to them outside of what the characters say and do.

On the other hand, an epic novel like MOBY DICK has plenty of digressions and a great deal of the story has to do with vivid descriptions of the seascape and the whale itself, and a lot of factual information that doesn’t advance the plot but Melville wanted to include it anyway. So obviously, the novel MOBY DICK is sort of an epic where a lot of what stays in your mind is the environment itself, the natural environment, not simply the characters.

So if we make an analogy with movies, some movies are like HAMLET or MACBETH (the central character IS the movie i.e. the work of art stands or falls with its protagonist – the story is a “classic” only insofar as the hero is), whereas other movies are like MOBY DICK (much of what you remember has to do with landscape, imagery, symbolism, quite apart from the characters themselves, who are not necessarily as vivid or constantly the center of attention the way they are in a Shakespeare play).

A movie like THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC is in the HAMLET mode, whereas a movie like, say, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is in the MOBY DICK mode.
Captain Ahab and HAL the computer are memorable characters, but there’s other stuff going on that captures your interest that doesn’t directly pertain to them. in that sense I guess I agree with you that a director can make a great film without requiring great actors as collaborators. but when that happens, it seems to me that the storyline itself determines it. Sure, Kubrick didn’t need great actors for 2001, but he sure did for DR. STRANGELOVE: the movie largely stands or falls with Peter Sellers. If you find him funny, you admire the film; if you don’t find him funny, you don’t like the film.

but I still maintain that there’s a bias on the part of compilers in favor of movies that emphasize camera angles and editing and cinematography, whether or not the acting is good. whereas movies where the performances are great, but the direction is rather staid and conventional, tend to get underestimated. for instance i watched THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE starring Maggie Smith on TV a while ago, and Smith’s performance is still in my mind. The character is one of the most memorable and strange I’ve ever seen in a film.
But because the visuals weren’t memorable, and there was nothing in the way of editing or cinematography that stood out, it’s the sort of movie that critics overlook. I mean JAWS or SHOWGIRLS or KING KONG has a better chance of making a critics’ list of best films than MISS JEAN BRODIE, because of all the spectacle going on. I’m just saying that I find the bias in favor of “director’s cinema” as opposed to “actor’s cinema” to be more questionable and debatable tha most people seem to find it. I still maintain that RAGING BULL or TAXI DRIVER are as much, or very nearly as much, De Niro’s achievement as Scorsese’s – and I’m not knocking Scorsese – I just feel critics tend to forget that lousy lead performances can completely sabotage movies that ought to have turned out well. It’s no use praising camera angles and deft film editing if the story and characterization are dead in the water.

And God Created Women has always been one of the films on the TSPDT list that always gets me to raise an eyebrow. Sure, Bardot is a hottie, but she’s vapid as hell. And surely her disgusting bigotry over the past decades should have erased her popularity completely. Actually, it’s kind of funny. I was digging in a CD store once and found one entitled “Brigitte Bardot’s Greatest Hits”. This was before I knew what a bitch she was, but I think I enjoyed that CD far more than any of her movies (including Contempt, though I do need to rewatch that.

I love Meryl Streep, btw, and I’d include several of her films prominently on my own list. Sophie’s Choice first and foremost. I was as surprised as any to see it on AFI’s new list, mostly because I thought others didn’t like it.

zetes, I don’t think I’m too familiar with Bardot’s discography, except for the duet of “Bonnie and Clyde” that Bardot does with Serge Gainsbourg, which has got to be one of the coolest sounding tracks ever.

Given her sexpot reputation and many nude scenes in film and photography, it’s ironic that she declined to duet with Serge Gainsbourg for that song “Je t’aime…” which sounds like two people fornicating on vinyl. Jane Birkin was kind enough to fill in for Bardot on that one.

Hey Chris,

You’ve really opened up an interesting number of thoughts on this matter, thank you.

Your analogies to stage and literature as corollaries to cinema bring up a lot of issues, many of which have come up recently in the appraisal of Ingmar Bergman’s career after his recent death. Bergman has been knocked around for being too indebted to a stage theater aesthetic (lots of dialogue, people addressing the camera as if it were an audience, etc.) and therefore less of a purely cinematic artist – even though he did experiment extensively with film form, esp. in the 60s. He obviously relied on great performances from great actors and actresses – and no doubt he was greatly talented in eliciting such performances. But the desire persists among many to define cinema as an artform that is distinct from any other.

I appreciate what you are getting at with the JOAN OF ARC/HAMLET vs. MOBY DICK/2001 analogy. Hope you don’t mind if I complicate things by saying that a film like JOAN OF ARC is as much a “spectacle” driven film as 2001, it’s just that the spectacle mostly resides in Falconetti’s facial expressions, which are as vast and emotionally expressive a space as the star-dotted darkness that backdrops Kubrick’s odyssey.

Also I don’t think it’s entirely fair to equate cinema as mere “spectacle”, which to me implies pure action over the more subtle feelings you might get from a great actor. The beauty of cinema is that it can be quite emotionally expressive, at times even without resorting to actors. My own favorite Kubrick movie is BARRY LYNDON. I don’t think there’s a more emotionally devastating film in his entire career, which is really ironic because the acting in that film is probably the most “flat” of any of his films, even 2001. But that flat acting has a purpose in reflecting the behavior of the society presented on screen, and when you see how that social behavior affects people’s lives, it is quite devastating.

Inspired by your remarks, I looked at the TSPDT top 100 (http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_ranking1-100.htm) to see if I could pick out any films where a performance was far and away the central component to why the film was a masterpiece. No doubt the list is graced with some of the finest performances in movie history, from Orson Welles (not to mention the Mercury Theatre ensemble) in CITIZEN KANE at #1 to John Wayne in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE at #100. Both of those films, and many others, have a dominating central performance that haunts you long after the film is over. But there’s no question that those performances are just one aspect of many other outstanding elements: script, direction, editing, cinematograpy, sound, etc. The closest films on the list that I could come with to being purely performance-driven was Charlie Chaplin’s films, CITY LIGHTS and THE GOLD RUSH where your eye is always trained on his presnece and what amazing comic bits he’ll get himself into. But even with Chaplin, there have been entire books devoted to dissecting his ability as a filmmaker to highlight his performances, from devising the clever scenarios to staging them in just the right way to emphasize different areas of activity on the screen to get the effect he wants, and then doing up to well over 100 takes on a given shot just so he can get that perfect take. So even in this instance, it’s more than just a performance driving a movie towards immortality.

All of this is to say that the greatest films are bound by definition to be more than just what a single great performance can bring to the table. So in this light it’s not surprising that even an immortal actress like Bette Davis can only manage to appear once in the TSPDT top 100 films, in ALL ABOUT EVE, which happens to feature what is considered by many to be one of the all time greatest Hollywood screenplays, as well as an Oscar-winning director.

I definitely agree that a great performance is often critical to holding a masterpiece together. But let’s not also forget all the other elements that go into a great film, from the script to the direction to the editing (which in my view is an aspect of filmmaking that is even more grossly underappreciated). In the end they are all needed to come together to bring out the possibilities of the medium to their fullest.

It’s interesting that people mostly remember the closeups of Falconetti in JEANNE, because the camera work in that film is really wild – Dreyer seems to want to throw the camera around for its own sake at that point in his career.

The only moving shot I remember is that tracking shot near the beginning across the courtroom that glances over the bald tops of some of the inquisitors’ heads. Otherwise a lot of canted angles of people from various perspectives (which is quite wild). Is there really a lot of movement???

RE: Passion – it’s been a while, but there’s so many edits that it does feel like the film is moving a lot. I don’t recall too many tracking shots. There is one shot late in the film when the villagers are storming the camp and the camera flips upside down.

“Bergman has been knocked around for being too indebted to a stage theater aesthetic”

yeah. and I don’t think that’s entirely fair. i have a big problem with that assumption. if a director wants to avoid a theater aesthetic, great, that’s fine, no problem. but it should be permitted as one of various ways to make a film. there’s no one right way and I feel Jonathan Rosenbaum (a critic I admire) missed the boat on this one.

“it’s not surprising that even an immortal actress like Bette Davis can only manage to appear once in the TSPDT top 100 films”

but that’s the question, isn’t it? is she “immortal”? you see so many movies, but i haven’t seen a tiny fraction of what you’ve seen, and the casual moviegoer has seen even less. if these lists are any indication, if what keeps an actor’s name “immortal” is the movies themselves, somebody like Claude Rains is in better shape than Bette Davis, because his movies include Adventures of Robin Hood, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, Notorious, and Lawrence of Arabia. These continue to be some of the best-known and perenially **watched** (by the non movie-buff public) of all classic films. the **only** Bette Davis film as widely known and widely **seen** as those five is All About Eve.

therefore, in a real sense, far more people alive today, outside of cinephile circles, have probably seen Claude Rains in action than Bette Davis in action.

I agree with what you’re saying about actors not operating in a vacuum and there is more to a movie than performances. and actors themselves of course all want to work with the best directors and the best writers they can. I also concur that movies aren’t mere spectacle – I mainly was thinking of NORTH BY NORTHWEST, which is how i responded to it despite its vaunted reputation. but i wouldnt describe a movie like Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, for example, as mere spectacle, even though it’s clearly not an “actor’s movie” – you don’t watch a movie like that for the acting.
again, however, I think the subject matter itself affects how much the actor has to do. in METROPOLIS, the quality of the acting is fairly unimportant, whereas in M with Peter Lorre and the rest, it’s much, much more important, and in fact, if Lorre had given the kind of stylized performance the actors in METROPOLIS gave, I think it would have been laughable. Far from being haunting and chilling, I think M would have been a debacle if Lorre had done the kind of acting that took place in METROPOLIS. What works in one context would just sink the movie in another context. No doubt Fritz Lang is the captain of the ship either way, but the more realistic context of M required more genuine artistry, more intelligence and craft on the part of the actors than METROPOLIS did.

but I still find it interesting how many of the most acclaimed performers of every era seem NOT to be well-represented by most Top 100/Top 1000 lists.

Here’s another name for your Top 1000 omissions: Glenda Jackson. Not that I disagree with them. I think the only movie of hers I’ve seen is WOMEN IN LOVE, but I do recall that she was a repeat Oscar nominee, a double winner, and along with Maggie Smith and Vanessa Redgrave, one of the Big Three English actresses of her generation. Yet she’s been relegated to obscurity, here and everywhere, it seems.

all of which is a long-winded way of saying that Spencer Tracy is far from an anomaly. it seems almost as if actors who don’t seem like they’re acting, like Cary Grant, get ignored for awards and Oscars and whatnot in their own lifetime, but posterity is kinder to them than their contemporaries. because at the end of the day, it’s the movies that matter. no matter how acclaimed Tracy was in his day, if more and more people watch Cary Grant’s movies, and fewer and fewer with each passing decade watch Tracy’s, then for all intents and purposes Grant has been elevated in the eyes of posterity to being a much better actor than Tracy. implicity, that’s what is being suggested. and that may well be the case. and I find that quite interesting and surprising.

Regarding Jeanne, here’s something I wrote in 1983, just after seeing the film: “Every imaginable camera gimmick finds its way into the film at some point, including upside-down shots, several pendulum shots in which the camera swings back and forth, circular pans, swish pans, and extreme low angles. Even in relatively calm sections, the moving camera is used extensively, a fact pointed out more often in older criticism.”

Dan, it’s remarkable to see his progresion from the eclecticism (influenced by Murnau?) of JEANNE and VAMPYR towards the austerity of DAY OF WRATH and onward. What could have prompted this change?

Murnau? Maybe. Definitely Eisenstein, with the final twenty minutes or so.

Kevin – I’m just speculating, but it’s not so uncommon for artists to purify and simplify their style when they get older. And the thing about Dreyer is that he had huge gaps in his career: it’s as if Ozu went from I Was Born, But…. to There Was a Father to Tokyo Story with no films in between.

Of course, it’s not as if Jeanne is the opposite of austere. That strange sense of timelessness is already there.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is available online here Free

Get an Original Brigitte Bardot on her Harley poster at Lead Pipe Posters!
his huge, classic poster of actress and sex idol Brigitte Bardot was produced in 1967
by the famous poster company Berkeley Bonaparte and shot by Herman Scoop.
It was printed on good quality, heavy poster stock and is in mint to near mint condition. Price

Great! Thank for information, I'm looking for it for a long time,