It’s central to Dreyer’s greatness that he had to reinvent cinema and film language on his own terms, as if they had never existed before his own features. This was never more true than on his first sound film, which defines the uncanny in terms of film style as well as its characters and settings, developing the already transgressive styles of editing and camera movement in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer’s last silent picture) into something even more spatially disorienting.

For many years, prior to the advent of videos and DVDs, most of Dreyer’s oeuvre was achingly out of reach, especially in prints that did justice to the carnal assault of his sounds and images. Now that this situation has radically improved, the most conspicuous gap in our appreciation of his work is a decent version of Vampyr --in some respects his creepiest and most erotic film (as well as his only foray into fantasy and horror). What we now have on DVD is invariably something cobbled together out of the separate English, French, and German versions of the film that he prepared in Berlin (after shooting the film silently in France), so that the same characters sometimes shift languages without warning, and the visual quality is often equally inconsistent. By all accounts, the best surviving version of the film is Martin Koerber’s restoration of the German version, done for ARTE Television in 1999, which reportedly runs a reel longer than all other surviving versions, but this has yet to appear anywhere on DVD. Let’s hope someone at Criterion and/or Masters of Cinema is scheming to make this available.   

2.     The Man Who Could Work Miracles (Lothar Mendes, 1937).

It seems that the H.G. Wells film that almost everyone has heard about is Things to Come (1936), a rather grandiose SF effort directed by William Cameron Menzies. But back in the 50s when there were still double features on a regular basis at some theaters, I caught Things to Come playing with another British movie adapted by Wells from his own work, made the following year—a piece of very English whimsy that’s also a serious fable about the tyranny of desire, at once more modest and more cosmic than its predecessor. A mousy young haberdashery clerk named George McWhirter Fotheringay (Roland Young, better known as Topper) gets picked at random by some quarreling gods in the starry sky and, as an experiment, is given the capacity to perform miracles, without offering him any explanation why. (He can do just about anything in the physical world, but he can’t alter how people think and feel.) Much of what ensues is pretty funny, and made all the more appealing by a fine supporting cast that includes Ralph Richardson as blustery Colonel Winstanley, Joan Gardner as the hero’s coworker Ada (whom he can’t induce to fall in love with him), and even George Sanders in a bit part as one of the quarreling gods.  

3. I Married a Witch (René Clair, 1942).

After a prissy 17^th century puritan (Fredric March) fingers Jennifer (Veronica Lake), a leggy blond witch who enticed him into a hayloft, she and her father (Cecil Kellaway) get burnt at the stake, vowing in revenge that all his descendents will have unhappy marriages. And so they do, until the present--when their smoky essences are freed from an oak tree and, once she’s back in human form, she sets about winning prissy gubernatorial candidate Wally Wooley (March again) away from his shrewish fiancée (Susan Hayward), contriving for him to rescue her own naked body from a burning hotel.

This is a grand entertainment that first won me over when I caught a revival at age six. For my money it has more of Clair’s wit and poetry than any of his other Hollywood pictures; and the fact that Preston Sturges served as Clair’s (uncredited) coproducer on this comedy and acquired Lake for it (fresh out of Sullivan’s Travels) seems telling, because it has a few noticeable Sturges touches. It was adapted by many hands from The Passionate Witch--a novel left unfinished by Thorne Smith (of Topper fame) when he died, and completed by Norman Matson. The same novel served as the basis for the popular TV series Bewitched and its less popular Nicole Kidman spin-off, but for me this much earlier version of the story comes a lot closer to getting it right. And there’s something audacious as well as magical about having Lake and Kellaway converse while they’re smoke inside adjacent bottles; thanks to her deep, husky offscreen voice, she contrives to conjure up a seductive feminine aura of water, vapor, air, smoke, and flesh, making me fantasize even as a first-grader about taking a dip in the Lake of Lady Veronica.  

4. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951).

Reading various reviews of Lee Server’s recent biography of Ava Gardner, I was shocked to find the movie that defined her apotheosis--surpassing even George Cukor’s neglected 1956 Bhowani Junction in its erotic splendor-- dismissed without a second thought. (It’s her first film in color, and lusciously shot by Jack Cardiff--the cinematographer on The Red Shoes, Under Capricorn, and The Barefoot Contessa, a film clearly indebted to this one.) This dismissal could never have happened in France, where this masterpiece is available on DVD and rightly revered as a summit for producer-turned-auteur Albert Lewin (a kind of Val Lewton on the six singular features he made, but with the benefit of big budgets) and James Mason as well as Gardner. (To commemorate what it meant to him as an adolescent, Jean Eustache featured a lengthy clip from it in Mes Petits Amoureuses.)  

NOTE: Shortly after the preceding was written and posted, Kino brought out a box set, "Glamour Girls," containing Pandora and thus making it available again in the US.

People tend to forget nowadays that MGM was capable of making glossy art movies in the early 50s. A prime example is the star-studded The Story of Three Loves, containing three loosely connected 40-minute sketches—each one a bittersweet parable about love and art, a compromise between American fantasies about Europe and continental émigré fantasies about the U.S., in which pop existentialism serves as the main bill of fare. (If you consider that 1953 was the year Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness came out in English, this was being pretty up to date.)

Mademoiselle, directed by Minnelli, is the inspired centerpiece and only fantasy. An 11-year-old American boy (Ricky Nelson) in Rome who seems modeled on Daisy Miller’s bratty kid brother hates his literary French governess (Leslie Caron), but then he falls in love with her after an obliging American witch in the same hotel (Ethel Barrymore) enables him to turn into Farley Granger for one enchanted, Cinderella-tense evening. Miklós Rósza wrote the lush music, and Minnelli’s magical feeling for dreamlike drifts is fully in place.  .

6. The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (Fritz Lang, 1959)

Lang’s return to his German roots—-belatedly filming a fairy-tale-like script that he and Thea von Harbou had written during the silent era (and that had been filmed, to his consternation, by Joe May rather than himself)—-never had much of a chance to register in the English-speaking world after the two features got dubbed, drastically reduced in length, and cut together into a single feature called Journey to the Lost City that was critically greeted with scorn. These opulent color films fared better with the public in Europe, though Lang himself, perhaps embarrassed by their unabashed directness, (in the lushness of their décor, the eroticism of Debra Paget’s dancing with a cobra, and the artificiality of certain effects, such as the cobra being moved about with wires, became somewhat dismissive of them. To accept their deliberately childlike and somewhat kitschy innocence may require a certain tolerance and trust on the part of the viewer, but this luscious celebration and exploration of Lang’s favorite tropes and themes fully repay the effort.

7. Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957).

Shot in England, this is the best horror film Jacques Tourneur made after his stint in the 40s with Val Lewton which yielded Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man. And since none of these films with the possible exception of the first really functions as a horror film, except for in its ads, Night of the Demon might well be his greatest horror film; it’s almost certainly the scariest. Neither Tourneur nor screenwriter Charles Bennett wanted the title demon to be seen, however, and bitterly complained when producer Hal E. Chester insisted on inserting a few glimpses of this beast. Like Clair above and Joe Dante below, among others, Tourneur considered the audience’s imagination one of his key artistic tools, and not allowing it to function as fully as it might was actually depriving him of something, not making any significant addition to his bag of tricks. (A good example of Tourneur using our imaginations is the sequence near the end where an unidentified hand in the foreground appears on a stair banister and is never explained or accounted for. This hand, incidentally, belonged to Tourneur himself.)   

A fascinating, well-researched recent book about the making of this film (Tony Earnshaw’s Beating the Devil: The Making of Night of the Demon, Sheffield, England: Tomahawk Press, 2005) suggests that Chester, who brought in an old crony, blacklisted writer-director Cy Endfield, to do additional, uncredited work on the script, may have also gotten Endfield to direct the added shots of the demon, although the evidence supporting this is ambiguous. (For whatever it’s worth, Endfield—whose masterpiece Zulu is the focus of an even more detailed and definitive book by the same publisher, also brought out last year--once told me he did a rewrite of the script that wasn’t used and thought he could have done a better job directing the script that was used than Tourneur, but said nothing about directing any part of it.)

Is it excessive to include two Vincent Price opuses here? (See The Masque of the Red Death, below.) Maybe, but this truly bizarre Z-film, also known as Souls for Sale and Evils of Chinatown, is so off the map that it scarcely qualifies as an alternate version of anything--including the famous Thomas DeQuincey book, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, that this movie half-heartedly claims to be based on. As producer and/or director, Albert Zugsmith was responsible for some of the best and worst things to come out of Hollywood. (Among the best were The Incredible Shrinking Man, Touch of Evil, The Tarnished Angels, and this curiosity; among the worst were The Beat Generation and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve.) 

“If Poe had lived today he would probably have been a filmmaker,” writes Diane Johnson at the end of her Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales. This is persuasive--even though it’s debatable whether Poe himself would have made this adaptation (by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell) of his lushest apocalyptic tale. (Poe’s “Hop-Frog,” written seven years later, is also woven in as a subplot--an understandable addition, because the original “Masque” story consists of little more than seven pages of moody description, and most of the movie’s storyline doesn’t come from Poe at all.)

10. Martin (George A. Romero, 1977).

Romeo’s second midnight-movie success after Night of the Living Dead was his fifth feature. It appeared around the same time as David Lynch’s much better-known Eraserhead, which may have muted its impact, and it lacks the stripped-down action and cascading gore of Romero’s other horror films. Yet as a kind of genial shotgun marriage between James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and Dracula, set in a Pittsburgh suburb called Braddock, it has a sweetness about being a lonely teenager that for me gives it a special place in Romero’s oeuvre. In our 1983 book Midnight Movies, J. Hoberman and I concluded, “it is the most technically proficient of all his hits and arguably his best film to date.” So it’s a pity that his fascinating and more obviously satirical quartet of Dead films has tended to overshadow this quieter chamber piece, a kind of low-key comedy.     

Dante has on occasion cited this as his personal favorite, but many of his fans, myself included, have a tendency to overlook it, maybe because it lacks the sociopolitical edge that gives most of his best efforts a lot of their bite (Gremlins, Matinee, The Second Civil War, Small Soldiers, and Homecoming, for instance). It also takes a little while for this goofy comedy to get started—-that is, just over 26 minutes to arrive at the point where the central premise clicks into place. But then, for the remaining 94 minutes, it’s pretty clear sailing.

I persist in regarding Arthur Schnitzler’s extraordinary Traumnovelle better than Kubrick’s long-contemplated adaptation, perhaps to the same degree that I prefer Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita to Kubrick’s. And I differ with Kubrick’s widow in considering Eyes Wide Shut the apotheosis of Kubrick’s career, even if he virtually completed it just before his death, insofar as I actually prefer Steven Spielberg’s realization of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. But none of this prevents me from cherishing Kubrick’s final feature-—regarding it as the most misunderstood masterpiece in his career, and therefore still awaiting a measured and reasonable assessment from much of the public.