Top Ten 1940s

We're almost done with these quickie surveys of my favorites and yours from decades past. Herewith the 1940s which I hesitated jotting down as there are more classics from this decade that I haven't seen than in arguably any other. If I keep waiting until I've watched everything it would never be posted. In truth, I need a project which forces me to fully deal with the gaps in my 40s viewing. A pleasurable project it would be, surely. But for now, off the top of my list-manic head....

Black Narcissus (1947)

top ten
01 The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
02 Casablanca (1943)
03 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
04 Meet Me in St Louis (1944)
05 Double Indemnity (1944)
06 Black Narcissus (1947)
07 Citizen Kane (1941)
08 Notorious (1946)
09 It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
10 Gilda (1946) 

with apologies to other greats
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1945), Beauty and the Beast (1948), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Lady Eve (1941), Red River (1948), The Bicycle Thief (1949), Pinnochio (1940)

honorable mention
Rope (1948), The Heiress (1949), Spellbound (1945), Now Voyager (1942), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), The Search (1948), Fantasia (1940)

I'll admit I don't love these three quite as much you're supposed to... 
His Girl Friday (1940), Rebecca (1940), All the Kings Men (1949)

I've never seen (gulp)
Too many to list. More than in any of these other quickie top tens I'll gladly take your word for it with your top ten lists in the comments. Maybe we'll do a poll to force me into a handful of 40s films as follow up. 

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1930s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2010s (thus far)  
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Coming Soon... Dead Ringers

Dead Ringers poster designed by Jay ShawDon't forget that Wednesday we'll be celebrating David Cronenberg's masterfully creepy Dead Ringers (1988) in Hit Me With Your Best Shot.

This film about twin gynecologists (Jeremy Irons) who fall for the same troubled actress is widely regarded as one of Cronenberg's very best. To kick off the episode, which is dedicated to Nick Davis's new book "The Desiring Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema", Nick himself has posted his choice for "Best Shot". As is my habit, I don't read these articles until I'm done with mine, so I'm excited to see what he's chosen. But, alas, I'll have to resist the curious urge for a few hours. But if you don't need to wait, click over now.

5 other early bird participants have already chimed in at: Antagony & Ecstacy, Amiresque, Fistful of Films, Entertainment Junkie and Film Actually.

Now back to your regular programming but join us late tonight as we pull out the speculum to investigate this mutant film together.

Review: Depp & Tonto (and The Lone Ranger, Too)

This review was originally published in my weekly column at Towleroad

If Hollywood has its own wild wild west, a mythic frontier to tame, it is undoubtedly a time rather than a place: Next Summer. And the one after that. Release dates famously come before screenplays and the studios start laying down their tracks to get there: concept, screenplay, pre-production, casting, filming, editing, promotion, release though not usually quite in that sensible artistic order. Budgets often balloon on the way to the imagined gold at the end of the line. Or silver, as is the case with the name of a certain iconic horse, and the coveted metal driving the plot and the literal train tracks in the new version of THE LONE RANGER.

Hollywood hasn't revived this particular franchise in over 30 years, for what one assumes are three reasons: westerns have been notoriously difficult sells for modern mainstream audiences; the last time they attempted this franchise, it failed; and the Tonto character opens you up to charges of racism and cultural insensitivity in modern times. But if anyone could revive this dead franchise and skirt these issues, the thinking went, wouldn't it be director Gore Verbinski and his masses-beloved star Johnny Depp (rumored to have some sort of Cherokee heritage, and adopted into the Comanche Nation last year) who together did the impossible 10 years ago in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, making a well reviewed, Oscar-nominated, mega-blockbuster out of a famous amusement park ride while also navigating another even more notoriously pricey and difficult to sell outmoded genre: the pirate movie!

The director and star aren't so lucky this time around. [more]

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Stage Door: Snow White's Final Humiliation in "WS"

I'm not sure that "stage door", our live theater series, is the right place for a video installation but since it's only "live" in NYC, here goes... 

If Snow White were a real Princess rather than a fictional one, you'd have to consider her corpse thoroughly exhumed by now. From the 75th anniversary of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) which we celebrated right here through the release of three new filmed incarnations of the princess (Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror Mirror and, the best of them, Spain's silent feature Blancanieves) and even a Broadway show Vanya and Sonia and Sasha and Spike which uses her costume (on Sigourney Weaver) as plot device and laugh generator, Snow White just isn't getting any sleep these days. She must be exhausted. But sleep deprivation might just be preferrable to the nightmare she's experiencing on Park Avenue right about now...

Elyse Poppers as "White, Snow" and Paul McCarthy as "Walt Paul" in WS

Read on if you can handle NSFW riffs on fairy tales...

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How Many Biopics is Liz Going To Get?

Late last year Lindsay Lohan did her best Elizabeth Taylor for Liz & Dick on Lifetime though by all accounts her best wasn't very good. Now BBC is getting in on the action with the far more respectable Helena Bonham Carter as the movie star of movie stars. This will be Helena's most challenging role in a good long while, don't you think? [More after the jump...]

Helena as Liz & Liz as Liz; she did love her caftans!

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