12 Angry Men

Year: 1957
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 87
Writer: Reginald Rose
Director: Sidney Lumet
Star: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Klugman

“12 Angry Men” exists in that minute gray area between logic and emotion—the place where men (and women) develop their personal set of morals and emotions. Learning the answers to the questions raised within the confines of that claustrophobic jury room would be anticlimactic, and writer Reginald Rose wisely chose to steer clear of them.

The 12 men in the title are jurors assigned to a murder case. The person on trial is a young (I think) Latino man accused of stabbing his father to death after being hit in the face one too many times. The judge seems bored as he instructs the jury of the weight of their situation, almost as if he is late for a lunch date. The men walk into a cramped, hot jury room without a working fan and windows that all but refuse to open. They seem to have collectively come to a logical conclusion already.

The first vote is 11-1 in favor of guilt, with Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) as the only hold-out. But at first Fonda doesn’t even seem so sure of himself, only asking that the other men at least spend a little time looking at the case before making such a weighty decision too quickly. Fair enough, some suppose, though others are in a rush to get out of the heat on the hottest day of the year.

It is important to note that Rose goes out of his way to ensure that all of the jurors are smart, free-thinking individuals. No one in the room asks stupid questions for the sake of the audience, and those who speak loudest and most eloquently are not always those who should be listened to. In fact, for the first act of the film Rose and director Sidney Lumet seem to go out of their way to be as unbiased as possible. But as the second act begins, Rose makes the creative choice to follow Fonda’s character into the bathroom instead of staying with the majority of characters. It’s a small moment, sure, but by doing this they show their support of Fonda’s character and his point-of-view in the surroundings. “Here is your hero,” they tell the audience, as if we didn’t already know. The movie would have been much stronger without this scene and this idea of how and what to think.
Fonda soon becomes a crusader for the accused, insisting that there is reasonable doubt in the case. At first he seems completely insane, but uses both logic and emotion to win over the other jury members. There is no precise moment where Lumet shows us that the tides have turned in favor of Fonda, and because of that there is an added layer of tension in the room. Up until the final reel, Fonda’s case seems lost because the viewer feels that two jury members will never change their vote, causing a hung jury and the boy’s subsequent conviction upon retrial.

Slowly but surely, the jurors go through every single piece of evidence in the case, from the testimony of the two eye-witnesses to the knife to the L-train, and amazingly there seem to be slight holes in each bit of evidence. One by one the jury is won over and soon Fonda seems more like the voice of reason as opposed to the lone, crazed crusader.

The movie was released in 1957 and, while its handling of race relations would seem overly clumsy or heavy-handed today, it’s fascinating to view the film as a portrait of a past time’s view of other races. I mentioned earlier that the accused is Latino, but he could just as easily be any other minority in America. The jurors never say exactly what race the boy is, instead referring to him as “one of them.” And it’s surprising to see how much racism several of the jurors get away with by saying it in passing.

For most of the movie Lumet is wonderfully understated in his visual style. Watching the film again, I was struck by how long several of the takes are. These are not showy, Hitchcockian long takes, but simply shots that focus on one or two characters as they try (and often fail) to communicate with one another. Lumet does go out of his way to show off once, though, and it’s a great moment. As one of the jurors begins a horrendous, racist rant against the accused and all of “his kind”, the camera slowly pulls back from the table to the corner of the room, supporting the viewer’s desire to remove himself from the scene. Then, one by one, the other jury members stand and turn away from the racist juror, mimicking the move of the camera.

The acting is wholly superb. Next to Fonda, many of the faces are familiar from episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits” and other B-films from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Most of the cast underplays their parts, and as a result their work is much more impactful than if they would have shot for the rafters. Look in particular at the work of Jack Klugman as the juror with a past in the slums and E.G. Marshall, who quietly continues to insist that logic must be supported in all aspects of the case and eventually becomes the most even-minded person in the room.

Despite all this, the movie does not convince me that the jurors came to the right decision. The climax of the film shows the lone hold-out babbling against the kid, listing desperately all of the evidence that seemed so damning earlier in the day. He finally stops and admits that he will change his vote…but his speech oddly convinced me that he might have been right. Sure, the jurors managed to poke minute holes into every major piece of evidence against the accused, but the chances of every single bit of that happening is impossible.

I’d buy that the boy lost the knife he bought and that he forgot the films he was watching because he was too emotional over the death of his father. I’d buy that the woman lying in bed across the street didn’t get her glasses on in time. I’d buy that the man didn’t get to the door in time to see the boy running down the stairs. I’d buy that he didn’t quite hear the boy’s voice threatening his father. I’d buy that you can find multiple examples of a knife in any given neighborhood. But all of those things together? I don’t think so.

Ah well, it’s nicer to imagine that the men came to the right decision. That their walk down the court steps and into the wet but cool evening was more triumph than tragedy.

And maybe I’m just cynical.

My Score (out of 5): ****

Rocky

Year: 1976
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 57
Writer: Sylvester Stallone
Director: John G. Avildsen
Star: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burgess Meredith

Like its title character, the film “Rocky” is a huge underdog. Bluntly cut from the fabric of a thousand other sports films, the film layers cliché upon cliché on top of a (admittedly) preposterous premise…and yet it works. Works wonderfully, as a matter of fact. There are a hundred small reasons for this, but the one big one is Sylvester Stallone, who anchors the film with one of those “lightning in a bottle” performances that come along once in a generation.

Stallone (who also penned the screenplay) slowly lets us get to know the character through the opening sequences, first at a fight, then on his long journey home through the slums of Philadelphia and finally in his apartment. We see him talking to his turtles (Cuff and Link) and fish (Moby Dick), lamenting to them that if they could only sing and dance then he wouldn’t have to go out and fight. It’s crucial that we follow the Rocky character through these scenes, because without them we might be quick to judge or mock him and his persona. But thanks to these scenes, we like the schlub, and by the time he walks into a pet-shop to buy some turtle food and try once more to catch the eye of the pretty-yet-painfully-shy clerk Adrian (Talia Shire), we are rooting for him to get a smile from her.

On the other end of the city sits Apollo Creed. When his rival for the World Heavyweight Championship is injured, he picks out Rocky as his rival on a whim. He likes Rocky’s figter name: The Italian Stallion. Everyone thinks it must be a joke, but soon Rocky is in training with a piss-and-vinegar ex-fighter (Burgess Meredith), punching a lot of raw meat and praying for nothing more than to finish the match. When the match comes, he summons up everything inside him and surprises Creed with his resilience.

As I alluded to earlier, everything in this movie is riddled with clichés of hundreds of sports films. But then again, what’s wrong with taking a simple story and telling it exceedingly well, which is just what Stallone has done with his screenplay. It doesn’t matter anyway, the movie isn’t about boxing at all, is it?

It’s really about the love between Rocky and Adrian. The love story is one of the best told in all of film, because Stallone and director John G. Avildsen aren’t afraid to spend time with the characters. Romances in these types of films are often an afterthought or completely ignored, but here the love story is given all the space it needs to blossom.

I’m not sure how long Rocky and Adrian’s first date lasts onscreen (a half hour? More? Less?) but I adored having the opportunity to watch the two people feel each other out slowly through the course of the evening. Rocky asks Adrian’s brother what she likes to do and, when told that she likes ice skating, ensures that she gets to do just that…even though the place is closed. Even though he has to pay off the janitor. Even though it’s only for ten minutes. And even though he doesn’t skate.

Adrian asks him why he fights. His answer just about sums up his character as perfectly as any other could: “Because I can’t sing or dance.” By the end of the night, when Rocky asks Adrian to take off her glasses and tells her how beautiful she is, we not only believe them as a couple, but we care more about them than the Championship match. When he is asked about their relationship, Rocky says “She fills gaps. She’s got gaps. I got gaps. Together we fill gaps.” There’s so much brilliance in simple turns of phrase like that, moments that remind you what a fantastic writer Stallone can be when given the right material and characters.

In both his writing and performance, Stallone keeps Rocky vulnerable by making him more honest than he probably should be, both about his feelings and how much of a longshot he is. Avildsen puts Rocky alone in the frame as much as possible (except when he is with Adrian) and often putting him in shots with things much bigger than he is, reminding us that while Rocky might be big in stature he is small in comparison to so many other things. The streets he walks along are mostly empty and loom large over him. We see Rocky dwarfed by large boats, huge buildings and, near the end of the second act, his own poster.

If there is a major fault to the film, it’s in the supporting performances. Meredith and Burt Young are both excellent actors, and yet their characters here grate and creak from the stereotype. Perhaps in 1976 they were doing great work that was pioneering, but we’ve seen so many variations on these same bullheaded characters so many times that it’s difficult to see the performances as anything but cliché.

I realize I’ve gone the entire article without talking about the big fight, and perhaps it’s because most of it is anticlimactic. We inherently know Rocky is going to hang in there until the end and know that he won’t win—he tells Adrian as much the night before. The entire affair is about seeing just how far Rocky is willing to go to make it to the end, and seeing him be brutalized--and give it as good as he’s getting it—is both cheer and cringe-worthy. By the time he is asking to have his swelling eye cut back open, it’s almost too much.

You go into “Rocky” thinking you’ll see a film as blunt as an uppercut to the jaw. But its magic lies within its subtleties, and because it builds its story slowly and takes time to build to its big moments they have all the more impact.

My Score (out of 5): ****1/2

Jaws

Year: 1975
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 56
Writer: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Director: Steven Spielberg
Star: Roy Schneider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw

For a movie about a great white shark that attacks a New England town then stalks a boat and ultimately jumps onboard to catch its prey, “Jaws” feels pretty damn plausible. This is because everyone in the film, from the leads down to the day-players, reacts to the situation the way real people would react.

Newer action and films seem to have forgotten this, instead trying to stun the audience with a moment shock and awe moment with little set-up or afterthought. We rarely get more than a reaction shot of John Cusack driving his vehicle through the disintegrating Los Angeles in “2012,” and therefore our only emotional reaction to the situation is to think we are looking at some really expensive special effects.

The most famous moment in “Jaws” happens when Chief Brody (Roy Schneider) and the viewer get the first full view of the Great White. He jumps in shock, backs into the hold of the boat and tells Quint (Robert Shaw) that “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Great moment. But even better when taken in the context of Brody’s character. He loathes the ocean and hates the ship, and after this moment will repeatedly ask Quint to return to shore to get a bigger boat, not just for the shark’s carcass, but also for his sanity. This is a “real person” reacting to a crazy situation in the exact way we would expect him to react.

Of course there is a good hour-and-a-half of film before the first time we really get a good look at that shark. We see traces (the fin, of course, but also one or two brief glimpses of its body when it attacks a boy on a raft), and Spielberg is brilliant to play it that way. After the opening scene, where a woman pulled back and forth like a Barbie doll on the surface of the ocean by an unseen entity just below, our minds form a specific idea of what the shark is like. Then a shark is caught, and it’s pretty damn big and impressive to anyone who hadn’t seen the film’s poster. But no, Richard Dreyfuss’ Oceanologist Hooper tells us, the shark that has killed two people so far would be bigger. While investigating the shark’s feeding territory, they find an abandoned boat with a tooth the size of a shot-glass embedded in the hull. Our expectations have become exceedingly high…and then it appears, and it still manages to surpass all of them.

From that point onward, we see the shark often, though Spielberg still teases us with its presence by attaching three floating barrels to its body to signal its arrival before we actually see it. The most affecting shots of the shark are the ones showing its gigantic twenty-five foot body swimming past the ship it is stalking because it looks more massive than the barely-together deathtrap. That ship is nothing to the shark, and we sense that. There’s some real-life footage of a great white thrown in during the final act, and these shots seem out of place. We don’t need to see a real shark swimming in its entirety when the short glimpses are so much more effective.

While “Jaws” walks and talks like an action flick, at its heart it’s a horror movie. It’s a well-made horror movie, to be sure, but there are a few moments where Spielberg along with writers Peter Benchley (author of the novel the film is based upon) and Carl Gottlieb are too fast to exploit the more annoying clichés we are so apt to groan at. Take the scene on the Fourth of July, where there are at least a dozen boats filled with officers, rifles and ammunition lining the beaches of Amity just waiting for a shark. A shark fin appears and every swimmer runs for shore, and we learn that the fin was a prank pulled by two young boys. Not only are we supposed to believe that they could stay underwater for long enough to convincingly make that fin seem like a shark (huge lungs. Huge!), but also that all those officers would not shoot the fin to try and kill the shark. Oh, and then there’s the thought that the shark would avoid all this noise and swim through the narrow channel into the pond area because it is smart enough to know people will be there with guns. There’s also a moment late in the film after the shark bites one of the main characters in half where it seems to teleport to the other side of the ship in order to scare Brody (and, by extension, us) by exploding through the submerged glass window behind him. Uh huh.

But again, the fact that the wholly excellent cast reacts to these situations so honestly makes up for some of these leaps in logic. Schneider, Dreyfuss and Shaw, the three men who anchor (no pun intended…well…maybe a little) the film give superb performances. All have one or two moments in the spotlight to really let loose and show what great acting is (the most memorable being Shaw’s five minute monologue about the sinking of the Indianapolis and aftermath), but the film is at its best when the three men are interacting with one another. All could easily become clichés if in the hands of lesser actors or a lesser writer, but here the things that would define two-dimensional characters in other movies are small parts of the characters’ personalities. Look at Hooper. We learn he’s a rich kid, and though that makes us better understand some of his later actions, he’s so much more than that. Just because he’s rich doesn’t make him a whiny brat or a know-it-all. The supporting cast is also filled with rich performances, most notably Lorraine Gary as Brody’s wife and Murray Hamilton as the town’s oily mayor.

Thanks to the great cinematography and oceanic locations, the film still feels very visceral and real. As enjoyable as Renny Harlin’s shark movie “Deep Blue Sea” was, there wasn’t a moment of real tension or terror anywhere to be found. We know that those actors are on studio sets reacting to CGI sharks, whereas here they are on an actual ocean with a huge mechanical shark with very sharp teeth inches away from them.

If I didn’t already loathe the idea of going into the ocean for any reason, “Jaws” would still convince me to keep the hell out of the water. And any film that wields that kind of power over its audience deserves the screams it gets.

My Score (out of 5): ****1/2

Sullivan's Travels

Year: 1941
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 61
Writer/Director: Preston Sturges
Star: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick

“Sullivan’s Travels” is a pretentious little comedy that thinks it’s much funnier than it actually is. More than that, for a film that ultimately claims to be all about the laughs, it’s pretty damn preachy and I don’t agree with its message. Perhaps there would be some redemptive quality to the film if its stars had chemistry and charm, but their scenes together are the cinematic equivalent of watching two storefront mannequins try to hold a conversation.

It opens with a dedication to “those who made us laugh.” These sort of pre-film dedications always make me cringe a little bit, as they often seem less like a dedication and more like the filmmaker saying “You have to like this! We are making it for you with the very best intentions!” Sorry, Sturges, it didn’t work.

What makes this entire affair bittersweet is that the first ten minutes of the film are fantastic, and for the rest of the movie you keep wondering where that movie went to and if someone loaded the wrong reel into the projector. Popular movie director Sullivan (Joe McCrea) meets with two studioheads (Robert Warwick and Porter Hall) to convince them to let him make “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, which he is convinced will be the pinnacle of American tragedy and a fantastic representation of the down-and-out times they live in. The brilliant dialogue is spoken at such a rapid fire pace that even Howard Hawks and the cast of “His Girl Friday” would have been impressed. We get quotable quote after quote, my favorite being the following exchange:

Sullivan: “What do they know in Pittsburgh?”
Exec: “They know what they like.”
Sullivan: “If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh.”

Through the conversation, Sullivan somehow gets the idea to go undercover as a homeless man as research for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” And then the problems begin—for us, not for him. The executives try and follow him in a large bus to record the entire thing to use as publicity, so Sullivan hops on a young boy’s go-kart (or something) and leads them on a long chase through the Los Angeles countryside (because apparently we have countryside now). During the chase, the poor cook in the trailer is decked with every imaginable food and thrown to-and-fro with the twists and turns of the road. This bit would be done later (and much better) by Lucille Ball in “The Long, Long Trailer,” but I mention it here because it is the first of several times the film throws in a random, uncalled for, slapstick sequences that really, really drag.

From this point onward the movie changes tone and humor-style every two or three minutes. Sullivan manages to find himself back in Los Angeles, where he meets a Girl (Veronica Lake) and they start what I assume to be verbal sparring with one another. I assume this because they are often the only two people in any given space together, but I can’t be sure since they never seem to look at or address one another. The Girl invites herself on the journey for reasons known to no one, packing only a small sack of belongings, which (as far as I can tell) is mostly a lot of lipstick so she can still look great while hopping on a train and sleeping in straw.

Why is she there? A police officer asks the same question at one point, and Sullivan responds, “There’s always a girl in the picture. What’s the matter, don’t you go to the movies?” Just because writer/director Preston Sturges called out how unbelievable it was that she was involved with Sullivan doesn’t make it any less contrived.

Perhaps I’d care more if Lake and McCrea had anything resembling chemistry with one another, or if either one was trying to act. Instead, Lake seems to be lazily reading off cue-cards for most of her scenes. McCrea does something similar for his scenes, though at least he speeds up his delivery when his character is supposed to care about something, even if he can’t change his tone or inflection. Sturges seemed to realize that McCrea wasn’t going to grip people emotionally with his one-dimensional performance, so instead of hiring a better actor just got McCrea shirtless as often as possible and hoped that people concentrated more on his body than his acting.

Then again, Sturges had a bigger problem, and that was finding a tone for the movie. For a movie that barely breaks the hour-and-a-half mark, it doesn’t even get started for the first hour by not letting its main characters escape from Los Angeles to set out on their trek. When they finally do begin their experiment, we get an four-minute, dialogue-free montage of the twosome wandering about amongst the bums. They seem to get no major life-lessons from the journey other than that the bums are really darn nice people, which is quite the letdown since this is what the first hour of the film has been leading up to.

But then Sturges contradicts that lesson moments later by having Sullivan (now normal again and handing out five-dollar bills to the bums before heading back to Hollywood) mugged and beaten by a greedy bum. The bum is then hit by a train. Seriously. Sullivan is dragged into a work camp for some reason or another where no one believes he is who he says he is. At one point at the work camp he and his fellow prisoners are taken to see a Disney cartoon, and he discovers the power of laughter.

Eventually rescued and reunited with the Girl, we are then spoon-fed the message of the movie, which is that people want nothing more than pointless humor, and then ends with a montage of people laughing in the same way mad scientists laugh when people call them crazy. Sullivan’s “discovery” doesn’t even make sense in messed-up logic of the film, since we learn early on that he has made several well-regarded comedies and musicals, so for him to just then realize that people like funny things makes zero sense.

On a deeper level, I’d bring up the notion that comedy cannot work unless you care about the characters involved in it, and that great comedy stems from you caring deeply about the drama of a given situation, however funny it might be, but then again I’m just an AFI student and this film is on their top 100 list, so what do I know?

There are many more moments I’ve missed, not out of laziness but because they are already fading from my memory. I remember something about him staying with a widow for a day, and also a subplot about McCrea’s character being married for tax purposes, but, like any given episode of “Two and a Half Men,” these memories are fleeting at best.

To me, “Sullivan’s Travels” doesn’t know what it wants to be, so it tries to be everything to everyone. Then, when that doesn’t work, it tries to make a statement about comedy that the entire movie that preceded that statement seems to contradict. Ah well, at least it’s trying, even if all it ultimately tries is my patience.

My Score (out of 5): *1/2

The Best Years of Our Lives

Year: 1946
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 37
Writer: Robert E. Sherwood
Director: William Wyler
Star: Frederic March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell

“The Best Years of Our Lives” picks up a few days after every WWII movie faded to black. Instead of just having the three ex-Army and Navy officers ask the question “What do I do now?” the film also, incredibly, has the strength to have other characters ask the question “What do we do with you?” The answers to those questions remain resonant and are, at times, incredibly insightful.

The director, William Wyler, seemed to enjoy embracing the alternate version of what most other movies would present. He focused on the family instead of the soldiers in “Mrs. Miniver,” turned his attention from Jesus to “Ben-Hur,” stuck with the murderer instead of the investigation in “The Letter” and, of course, showed us what Bette Davis might have been like as Scarlett O’Hara in his “Jezebel.” Here we expect that the servicemen returning home will be welcomed with open arms and everything will go back to normal. Whoops.

In the very first scene we meet Dana Andrews’ Fred Derry, who is attempting to get home after years abroad. But there’s no room on the flight he’s booked, and he might have to wait days to get a flight out. Another man comes up to the counter and explains that he has reserved a ticket. We have every expectation that the man will see Fred, praise him for his service and then give him the ticket. Nope. Later, when he returns to his former place of employment (just to look around, he insists), the new manager is quite vocal about the fact that he is not under any obligation to hire him back. And his wife insists she’s being patient with him as she tries desperately to get out and about.

Along with Andrews, the movie follows Al Stephenson (Frederic March) and Homer Parrish (Harold Russell). Al is a family man with a loving wife Milly (Myrna Loy), son and beautiful daughter (Teresa Wright) who not only gets his job at the bank back, but a promotion at that. However, that promotion sees him sometimes having to turn down loans former military men ask of him. His children seem to have gotten away from him in the years he’s been gone. His son recites random facts about the war and asks Al questions about his experiences with radiation that he doesn’t understand. His daughter Peggy seems to have matured, but parts of her remain immature.

Al’s return home is a fantastic example of subtle excellence. When he walks inside he holds his hand to his children’s mouths in order to surprise Milly. Watching Loy and March discover one another again is beautiful. Sure, they remember most things about one another (though Al forgets Milly doesn’t smoke), but they need a few hours to remember how they felt as a couple and why they clicked in the first place. Watching those two actors dance around one another, smiling subtly and frowning at accidentally doing or saying something wrong is one of the most honest, simple moments I’ve ever seen.

Homer returns home with hooks in the place of his hands, but at least on the surface, effects a jolly demeanor. His family embraces him, and we watch in wonder as he manages to do so much with those hooks (I held my breath when he lit not one, but two matches in an early moment). Cathy O’Donnell plays his girl Wilma, and I’m not familiar with her as an actress. Perhaps this is for the best, since Wilma personifies the perfect woman, and no name actress could have pulled it off. Despite smiling and making jokes, Homer has deep emotional scarring, and Wilma gives him the time he needs while supporting him with those big, expressive eyes. We should all be so lucky. Russell was a non-actor who really had hooks for hands, which lends every scene he is in an extra layer of poignancy and beauty. As an actor, he rises to every challenge and, because of that, when his character successfully slips a ring on Wilma’s figure, we are beaming.

Fred was a big hero during the war. He was a fantastic bomber, was decorated many times, and took pride in showing off his bombshell of a wife (Virginia Mayo) to his friends in uniform. But being home is a different story entirely. Aside from his difficulties with finding gainful employment, he just cannot bring himself to emotionally adjust. The nightmares that haunt his sleep certainly don’t help, but Fred seems intent on isolating himself from everyone who cares about him. He ignores his wife and snaps at her, instead focusing all of his intention and affections on Al’s daughter Peggy, who of course he cannot have. At no point does he look to the heavens and scream “No one can ever understand me!” but you get the feeling that he probably would if given the opportunity, and were this film made today, he’d be listening to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” on repeat for days. There’s an eerie scene where he walks through a graveyard of planes from the war that is the perfect metaphor for his life, and how that graveyard affects his future is just about perfect. Andrews does not play the character in a sympathetic way, but we still understand his situation.

Peggy falls deeply in love with him despite herself, and is open about the feelings with her parents. After a disastrous double date she goes on with Fred and his wife (she is * gasp * nice to Peggy and he broods the entire time), there is a scene between her and her parents that represents the heart of the movie. Peggy rants and raves about her love for Fred and how the parents could never understand because they’ve forgotten what it means to be in love. The scene could have gone in so many directions, with more yelling or slamming doors or just having the editor cut from that line, but instead Al almost laughs off the statement. Milly looks at her husband of twenty years, all the love welling up in her eyes and bittersweet smile, and she says “How many times have I told you I hated you, and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?”

Al and Milly find themselves in love all over again, but Fred and Homer have more difficulty. Ultimately, Homer embraces Wilma and the film ends with their wedding, but Fred and his wife eventually divorce. I have mixed feelings about the ending, where Fred claims Peggy for his own. He’s in no state to have a significant other, and Peggy has proven that she has a lot of maturing to do. But perhaps that is the point. The final lines of the film, delivered to Peggy by Fred in between kisses, remind us that they have a hard life ahead of them with many falls and failures. Perhaps they will both mature and be able to work as a couple. Perhaps.

The movie is almost three hours long, but doesn’t feel long at all. The thing that struck me throughout the film is that Wyler lets the scenes breath and create a life of their own before cutting away to other characters. Here, we get an idea of what the characters are like before they enter scenes and how the actions of the scene have affected them. Wyler had the knowledge to understand that we would be interested in these characters enough to be patient with them through six-to-eight pages scenes. As a result every character, even write-offs like Fred’s wife and Homer’s girl, gain an extra dimension and allow us to realize just how amazing the cast as a whole really is.

If there is a major fault here, it’s in the music, which pushes you forcefully toward the feelings you should discover for yourself. It doesn’t let you discover the scenes as much as tell you what you are in for, and I wish that most of the music had been simple underscoring.

“The Best Years of Our Lives” is at once heartbreaking and heartwarming. The characters here are more damaged than most modern heroes and heroines, and the film doesn’t given them the tidy endings a lesser film would. Their lives might always be a struggle, but a worthwhile one that will ultimately bring them a lot of joy between the tears.

My Score (out of 5): *****

Modern Times

Year: 1936
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 78
Writer/Director: Charlie Chaplin
Star: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard

Though it is the last of Charlie Chaplin’s silent films, “Modern Times” represents the best possible introduction for viewers into the art of the silent movie. It’s a sad fact that most of the public will dismiss all silents with nary a second thought, but here is the movie you can put on for them and, by the end, you will have convinced them to open their minds to the magic of Chaplin, Keaton, Murnau and the non-racist version of Griffith. You see, the movie tricks the viewer into thinking it is a sound film before the words all but disappear, and the best part is that you don’t even notice. In fact, when dialogue returns later, it is almost an annoyance. I adore how the movie was made in 1936, entitled “Modern Times,” and actually is one of the most successful throwbacks in all of cinema.

In my last article on “American Graffiti” I noted how tired many of the plots and gags were because they had been imitated so many times since, and most of the major gags in “Modern Times” have also been re-used multiple times. The early moment of Chaplin needing to screw every bolt on a conveyor belt that keeps increasing speed was most famously re-done in “I Love Lucy,” I can think of a dozen films that use the broken-down house jokes (most memorably “Dick Tracy”) and Chaplin accidentally sinking a ship was re-done (badly) last year in “Sherlock Holmes.” And yet, unlike “Graffiti,” these jokes haven’t soured over time. Chaplin invests himself so fully into these moments that it becomes impossible to not be won over by his humor and charisma. He goes above and beyond to earn every one of the film’s belly laughs.

Time has been kind to the movie, allowing the realism of Chaplin’s stunts to make them all the more awesome today. There is a scene near the mid-point of the movie where Chaplin is roller-skating while blindfolded (seriously) right near a huge hole in the floor that drops four stories. You gasp through your laughs at the thought that there is actually a hole in the floor (!) that Chaplin is skating perilously close to (!!!). Holy shit! And then there’s the moment Chaplin (famously…but then again, what sequence here hasn’t become famous?) is swallowed into the mechanics of the machine he has been working on all day, or when he dives into a lake only to realize it is only a foot deep. We can see Chaplin’s face and know it’s him, making the moments all the more real.

The plot is surprisingly topical. Chaplin plays a man caught in the cogs of modern industrialization who has a nervous breakdown from being treated more like machine than man (at one point The Tramp is strapped to a machine that feeds him his lunch, but of course it malfunctions and begins stuffing his mouth with more food than he can eat—and a couple pieces of metal as well). He ends up in jail (where he takes cocaine!), where he becomes a hero, but when he is released the country has gone deep into a depression and he finds himself unable to keep a job. After several attempts at getting back into jail, Chaplin meets a beautiful street Girl (Paulette Goddard) and, together, they try to build a life together. Chaplin wasn’t just writing the film for the comedy, he had ideas about the time and political climate of the time and got them across with subtle beauty throughout.

I was shocked at how well the plot held together and became more than just the expected gag after gag. Chaplin and Goddard have a believable love story and share a character arc that resonates long after the final, bittersweet moments. When the Girl introduces the Tramp to the ramshackle home she has built for him on the banks of a lake, your heart leaps. When the Tramp and the Girl finally (Finally!) seem to achieve stability and success only to have it shattered by her past, your heart breaks. There are so many moments where Chaplin could have stepped wrong, but he rarely does. Chaplin must have thought so long about if The Tramp would speak at all and knew that if he didn’t, the audience would have been let down. And The Tramp is indeed heard for the first and only time here, singing a nonsense song when he can’t remember the words to the wild applause of his audience. Perfect. Because really, what else could he have said or sang that would have worked any better?

The one place the film falls short is in the characterization of the Girl. Though she is first seen cutting bananas to throw to homeless children, Goddard never becomes more than the woman The Tramp loves. She eternally plays his straight man, and there are opportunities missed for her to display the same type of humor Chaplin does. I’m thinking specifically of the scenes in the department store and when she is showing Chaplin the house she built for him. Goddard was a great actress, and still manages to make you love her despite not being as lovably engaging as she could have been.

Despite its dark underlying issues, “Modern Times” had remained lightweight up until its final few moments, but for Chaplin to pull away from the expected happy ending and give us something completely unexpected yet perfectly realized makes this movie transcendent. More than that, the music that underscores those final moments—which would later be turned into the song “Smile”—is one of the greatest melodies of our time. In its own way, I’d dare to say the ending to “Modern Times” is just as emotional as the (more famous) finale to “City Lights.” Whereas “Lights” is a fairy tale, “Times” reminds us that life will never be one—but as long as we love one another all will not be lost. We’ll get by.

My Score (out of 5): *****

American Graffiti

Year: 1973
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 62
Writer: George Lucas, Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck
Director: George Lucas
Star: Richard Dreyfuss, Ronny Howard, Paul Le Mat

We’ve all had magical nights like the one in “American Graffiti,” haven’t we? Well, probably not, but give it ten years, a couple drinks and a really good cinematographer and you just might think you have. As the film begins it tricks you into thinking it will be at least a bit cynical, but by the end of the movie you are almost choking on the movie’s nostalgia. Here is a film that has become the archetype for so many other coming-of-age stories that tend to take place over the course of a single day, and each generation has a few very good ones (most recently “Superbad” and “Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist”) and helped to cement the caricatures that appear therein. And while “American Graffiti” is certainly a good film that still resonates with you emotionally and makes you laugh, several of its pupils have surpassed it (I’m looking at you, John Hughes movies) and because of that, time has not been kind.

The year is 1962 (really, AFI, you ranked the movie 62nd? Okay, it is kind of cute) and we follow several young men on the final night before they (most of them, anyway) embrace adulthood. The movie begins at dusk and ends at dawn. You know the types well by now. There’s the wishy-washy smart guy unsure of what he wants in life (Richard Dreyfuss), the clean-cut popular guy unsure if he wants to end his relationship or continue it (Ron Howard), the rebel with the coolest car in town (Paul Le Mat), and the geek who doesn’t need more words to describe him (Charles Martin Smith). And I’m guessing you can also guess just by my descriptions where they find themselves at the end of the night.

I have no idea whether or not “America Graffiti” accurately portrays 1962, but I’m guessing that while many of the small details are honed to perfection, the spirit of the times might have been fudged a bit for the sake of the movie. In the film’s version of the time period murderers will only stoop low enough to stealing quarters from pin-ball machines and forcing their kidnapping victim-cum-new cohort to sabotage a police car. Girls will gladly allow their little sisters to spend all night with a greaser known for drag racing. The card at the end revealing the respective fates of the four main characters doesn’t so much as sober up the audience but make you sigh loudly at the attempt to lend weight to the proceedings.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t numerous moments of enjoyment to be had throughout the movie. The script balances the four subplots easily and injects a lot of wit and laughter into the proceedings. Think about lines like this, “Your car is uglier than I am. That didn’t come out right,” or the moment where the nerd is accosted by a used car salesman determined to get a sale.

But then there are the scenes we’ve seen so many variations on that we’ve got the beats of the scene memorized before they begin. Look at when Smith goes into a drug-store to try and buy alcohol despite being underage. Or when Dreyfuss meets a man who may or may not be Wolfman Jack in an almost abandoned radio station. And then there is the race that serves as the film’s climax and Dreyfuss’ obsession with finding the beautiful blonde in the T-bird. As much fun as they once probably were, they drag horribly now and the movie feels long as a result.

All the film’s leading men turn in good, solid performances. Dreyfuss convinces us that he is indeed torn about his future, Howard is a pretty good douchebag when he wants to be, and Smith sure is charmingly geeky. Le Mat is the most charismatic and I enjoyed his subplot the most, and funnily enough he’s the actor who has done the least since “American Graffiti.”

But as good as these actors are, it’s the women who steal the movie despite being forced into playing second fiddle to the brooding men they interact with. It’s no coincidence that Dreyfuss’ subplot is my least favorite—the woman involved in it never materializes. Cindy Williams steals every scene she’s in, and is such a strong, sympathetic presence that when she reunites with Howard you really want her to move on and find someone better. Candy Clark is the definition of charisma and has most of the best lines and reactions in the movie, my favorite being her argument with Smith about who should pay for alcohol. Mackenzie Phillips is so very fun as the rebellious teenager both stuck in the car with Le Mat and also holding him hostage.

Ultimately, I admired “American Graffiti” more than I liked it. It engaged me to a certain level, but real moments of greatness were fleeting thanks to the countless other films that have used it as a jumping-off point. It has to be said that it did make me want to spend a night in the ‘60s, but with the exception of the ladies, I’m not sure I’d want to spend the night with these characters.

My Score (out of 5): ***