BEST DRAMAS EVER? It Depends On What You Call Drama.
May 10 '00 (Updated Mar 30 '07)
The Bottom Line THE 10 BEST DRAMAS EVER were for the most part, under-rated, unseen, box office failures. You now have a chance to experience them in repertory or on video.
When I set out to create a list of the 10 BEST DRAMAS EVER, I thought: "Easy!"
Not so!
We Americans prefer Melodrama or Comedy in our movies rather than Drama, the vulgar, cruder the better, especially with a loud sound track of current popular music to back them up (or for calculated "date movies": a sentimental romance, or a wish fulfillment at the end).
Drama is something else.
Drama, by definition, true, is simply a series of events involving conflicting forces, but as soon as the hero or heroine draws a knife, unlimbers an Uzi, knocks someone through the living room wall (melodrama), hits the villain with a cream pie (comedy) to settle the play's Conflict, drama is cheapened. In fact, it vanishes.
A rule in modern theater (increasingly violated) advises sudden movement, extended romantic physicality, or violent acts on stage be avoided. Other than in Opera and Musical Theater, such acts break an audience's rapport with whatever drama exists. When that happens, audiences tend to laugh. While all Aristotelian Unities need not be observed, this violation of staging in film is critical, where sudden cuts, romance, or violent action provoke not just laughter, but enthusiastic cheers, even admiring catcalls.
When I started to make my list, I looked at play adaptations, but found few made satisfactory movies. They tend to excessive talk (i.e., THE CHILDRENS HOUR, Wyler, 1962) or are not sufficiently "opened up" (i.e., A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, Kazan, 1951). It was surprising how few truly cinematic adaptations of plays there were.
Aha! I thought, I will go to The Works of William Shakespeare! For a century, adaptations of his plays have been filmed: since the war, a number of damned good ones. Alas, as Orson Welles said years ago, all Shakespeare's serious plays, with the exception of The Tempest and King Lear, contain melodramatic elements. Othello strangles Desdemona on stage; Macbeth and McDuff never say, "Hold, enough," but lay on with claymores; Hamlet and Laertes duel to the death surrounded by corpses. There is no successful motion picture of The Tempest (although Paul Mazursky came close in 1964), nor of King Lear. (In fact, many critics say no modern stage production of the latter has ever met their standards.)
After I threw out many favorites, I had a list of four films which met the criteria: Films with no violent "on stage" action against other humans; films with no comedy, except for "relief," films not primarily musical in nature; and ONLY films that are brilliantly cinematic. Gone were Film Noirs like DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Wilder, 1944), the Westerns (THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE: Huston, 1948; THE SEARCHERS: Ford, 1956; THE WILD BUNCH: Peckinpah, 1969), Epics (FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: Anthony Mann, 1964), Gangster Films (THE GODFATHER's: Coppola, 1972-1990), the Musicals (SINGING IN THE RAIN: DONEN, 1953), the Comedies (SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS: Sturgis, 1941), etc. For the other six films, I had to leaf through over 1,000 pages of The VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever for reminders.
How can we find films that eschew melodrama, sentimentality and slapstick, but are vibrant?
Here is my list, picked from about 30 films, meeting the rigid criteria:
10. THE ENTERTAINER (Richardson, 1960): The only play adaptation on the list. Taken from John Osborne's best drama, it tracks the decline of an old vaudeville star, playing out his run at a seaside music hall. In an allegory of the End of the British Empire, Laurence Olivier creates a kind of singing, dancing Frankenstein Monster, repeating what most critics consider his finest performance on stage or screen. Probably also Director Tony Richardson's best motion picture
9. NIXON (Stone, 1995): Little seen and underrated, this film is a brilliant drama about our political system, as it actually functions. Its only rival is Frank Capra's MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939). All of Director Stone's technical genius comes to bear here, in a controlled fashion, to create Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins), his wife Pat (Joan Allen) and his courtiers (James Woods, et al) in a tragedy which encompasses the Nation, but keeps the bodies off stage.
http://www.epinions.com/content_160044715652
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8. THE SWIMMER (Perry, 1968): Adapted by Eleanor Perry for her husband, Director Frank Perry, from the superb short story by John Cheever, this parable may be as close to an American art film as we can produce. Burt Lancaster spent two years of his life personally producing it. The film's monumental failure at the box office marked his descent from Super Stardom. Lancaster plays a Mid Century Middle Class man, who has neglected everything for vanity and success. He "swims" home one afternoon through the social detritus of his life to the inevitable end of our hedonistic, material dreams. Audiences didn't understand the surrealism. AMERICAN BEAUTY fans who really want to see how it should be done, please rent this movie. With a large, excellent cast including Janice Rule, Kim Hunter, Rose Gregorio, Marge Champion and (I kid you not) Joan Rivers.
I have not reviewed THE SWIMMER, but millienocket has done an excellent one on this little known sleeper. I recommend it:
http://www.epinions.com/content_100025798276
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7. LE PLAISIR (Ophuls, 1951): Three short French dramas based on stories by Guy de Maupassant about love: Director Max Ophuls' habitual subject. The film gives unsentimental vignettes: 1) the pathetic attempts of a man to remain attractive to young women; 2) a house of prostitutes on their annual holiday to the country, where they recover for a couple of days a bit of their innocence; 3) the tragedy of a man who gets what he wants. With Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux, Simone Simon, Claude Dauphin, Pierre Brasseur, Daniel Gelin. Narrated in English by Peter Ustinov (Jean Servais in the original French). For people who think French films are often overrated (and I do), this film is a winner!
6. 'ROUND MIDNIGHT (TAVERNIER, 1986): Master Saxophonist Dexter Gordon is aging, alcoholic Dale Turner (based on Bud Powell), grieving for his friend Francis (based on Lester Young); he has come in exile to the Club Blue Note in Paris for a final despairing gig. He falls into the hands of another Francis (Francois Cluzet), a poor, obsessed fan, who saves and then destroys him. It is a musical film full of human triumph and tragedy. Jazz score arranged and played by Herbie Hancock, with Wayne Shorter and Bobbie Hutcherson. A cast of exiles includes John Berry.
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-7DFE-85D27C-39A706EF-prod1
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5. MY MOTHER'S COURAGE (Verhoeven, 1995): Another superb examination of Nazism by former doctor Michael Verhoeven (THE WHITE ROSE, 1982; THE NASTY GIRL, 1990), not to be confused with Paul Verhoeven (SOLDIER OF ORANGE, 1977; SHOWGIRLS, 1995). Michael Verhoeven has had trouble raising money to make films in his native Germany, and trouble getting distribution in America. The former is not too hard to explain, the latter rather mysterious. This film is no exception. Championed in Great Britain, it is virtually unknown here. I think it the best theatrical film about the Holocaust, just because the whole story is so unsensational, unsentimental. This film eschews the hideous but gives us the experience. Brilliantly framed by the New Germany, based on a memoir, it tells of an Hungarian Jewish housewife, a widow, who goes to visit relatives outside of Budapest one day in 1944. She is ordered onto a train, goes to the jaws hell, and arrives late for her bridge game. It has all the dark magic we feel when we almost fall into the hands of Monsters.
http://www.epinions.com/content_340828851844
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4. THE CONVERSATION (Coppola, 1974): Francis Ford Coppola's best film, Gene Hackman's finest performance. A man, in the employ of the United States Government, makes his living listening to the conversations of fellow American Citizens. One day, he hears what he believes is a murder plot. He does what any good American would do; he tries to inform the Authorities. It ruins his career and his life.
http://www.epinions.com/content_80664563332
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3. LETTER FROM AN UNKOWN WOMAN (Ophuls, 1948): Max Ophul's finest American motion picture. His wonderful tracking shots, soft focus, long lens techniques, reveal an all too human drama of love set in Vienna. Once again (as in THE EARRINGS OF MADAM de . . .[1953] and LOLA MONTEZ [1955], etc), he teaches us that women remember, and men tend to forget, the emotion once inside them. Ophuls, like many great artists, has essentially one story to tell. I find this version warmer than some of his others. With Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan.
2. CITIZEN KANE (Welles, 1941): If, as many critics say, this film is the greatest ever made, why do I have it at Number 2? I don't quite know. I think, because Kane (Orson Welles), for all his tragic stature, never demonstrates a satisfactory adult capacity to love. As his friend Jed Leland (Joseph Cotton) said: "That was Charlie's tragedy. He wanted love, but he didn't know how to give it." Nevertheless, by any other measure, on multiple levels, CITIZEN KANE is the finest drama (and tragedy) ever created expressly for the screen.
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-4874-81FD18C-38741497-bd4
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1. THE RED SHOES (Powell, 1948): This film has EVERYTHING: All the layers of meaning . . . KANE has, plus a love story (Moira Shearer and Marius Goring), a triangle (add Anton Walbrook), a fairy tale (Hans Christian Andersen), gorgeous music (Brian Easdale), marvelous dance (Shearer, Ludmilla Tcherina, Leonide Massine, Robert Helpman), and superb groundbreaking Technicolor photography (Jack Cardiff). Boris Lermontov (Walbrook), the greatest tragic villain in film history, teaches Vicki and us the Iron Law: You may create great Art, or you may have a conventional life. You may have neither, but you can't have both!
Nothing quite as true, unsentimental, beautiful, timeless, quite so perfect -- nothing so dramatic exists in the motion picture medium as THE RED SHOES.
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-6FFA-8A3D9A5-389B6CC3-prod1
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And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is my list.
Enjoy.
Good Night and Good Luck.
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Location: San Francisco, Ca.
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12/21/09: Ten years ago, today, I published my first epinion. Many thanks!
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