I've gotten a good response to that top 10 1940s films I wrote the other day, so I'll probably make lists for the 1950s and 1960s soon. But in the meantime, I thought it might be a good idea to make a thread where I can just put my thoughts on other old films that are worth watching. Some of these are classics that barely stayed out of my top ten, some are flawed but still pretty good, and at least one I want to talk about is an engaging mess. I'll be posting about four films today, but I'll probably revisit this thread as I watch more films and make more top 10s.

If your idea of a noir detective film involves a lot of old school witty, quippy dialogue dialogue from a clever detective, films like this are where that comes from. The script, partially written by William Faulkner, is a solid one, even if the plotting is kind of iffy. This is a very "fridge logic" film. Like it's well directed and paced, so it takes you from scene to scene in such a way that it feels like it flows at the time, but the day after I first watched this, I realized I couldn't tell you much about what the overall plot was. But if you're willing to put up with that for some great dialogue, great performances, and a generally iconic film? I recommend giving it a watch.

I got this only knowing that it was a noir directed by Orson Welles, and when I watched it with a couple of friends, we kept coming back to one question: "What the fuck is this movie?" Orson Welles does his best attempt at sounding Irish as he sails a boat full of rich weirdos who talk and act like they came out of a hazy dream rather than real people. One of those guys repeatedly tries to get Orson to murder him. Welles was clearly going for something here, but as with most of his post-Kane films, the studio butchered it, doing heavy reshoots and cutting out big chunks, and whatever Welles' intentions were is lost, at least to me. But what's left is fucking bonkers. I was utterly captivated by this strange thing, trying to figure out both what it was doing and where it was going. It's not a good movie, and it's not really a bad movie night movie, but it's a strange, fascinating film that I'm glad I watched.

This film made me wonder if I should check out more romantic comedies. Katherine Hepburn is a wealthy socialite who's about to get married, but her ex husband (Cary Grant) got invited over against her wishes, a reporter with little respect for her family or their position (Jimmy Stewart) forces his way into things, and then she has to decide whether to marry the asshole she was planning to or one of the two guys who matter. The jokes hold up surprisingly well, and you get to watch three legendary actors be compelling as hell together. Hepburn and Stewart have incredible chemistry together. If I extended my top 10 1940s films list, this would probably be number 11.

A pair of mobsters hold a diner hostage, saying they're after someone who as far as anyone else knows, is just a gas station attendant. After that, a life insurance investigator looks decides to research just who he was, giving us a frame narrative and series of flashbacks reminiscent of Citizen Kane. This is based on a short story by Earnest Hemmingway, which takes up the first 20 or so minutes of the film. And if that were a short film by itself, it probably would have made my top 10. But they decided to expand it with the reporter segment, and I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I feel like the ambiguity was part of the point of the short story and filling in the gaps makes it weaker. You can also tell that the style of the dialogue shifts to something a bit cheesier once they're out of Hemmingway's words. On the other hand, the new segments are themselves a good noir film. This is one of those films you often see on "top 10 noir" lists and the like, and it's worth seeing if you are getting into the genre.

Marlon Brando's performance in this film is often considered the best in the history of American films. It is fantastic, as is pretty much everyone else's in this film. The famous "I coulda been a contender" scene might be one of the all time greatest scenes in film. Purely considering how much of a showcase a film is for acting, this might be the best film of the 1950s. And if you want to just enjoy this film as much as possible on your first watch, stop reading this post here and go watch it, because what I have to say after the break might ruin it for you.

For some reason, no one ever talks about this middle part of the Dollars trilogy. It's easily a better film than A Fistful of Dollars, and you get the kinds of moments of greatness you'd expect of the team that next made The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef are two rival bounty hunters after a group of criminals planning on a huge bank robbery, and you get the kind of over the top, stylized spaghetti western you'd hope for out of it. Lee Van Cleef is really good in this and had more range to work with than in the sequel where he plays a different character.

Some of you might have been surprised not to see film about police corruption in my top 1950s film list. It's often considered one of the best pieces of film noir, one of the best films of the 50s, and Welles' best work after Citizen Kane. I agree that it begins and ends amazingly, but I feel like it has a lot of pacing issues between those points. That's probably due to this being yet another feature that the studio took out of Welles' hands and fucked up. There is a cut from 1998 that's based on Welle's notes, but that was sadly too late for laserdisc, so I haven't seen it yet. Maybe it'll change my mind when I eventually do. But in any case, the pacing issues don't ruin the film, and it's still worth watching even though it's not one of my favorites.

If you haven't seen this film, it opens with a three minute twenty second tracking shot that's one of the most impressive pieces of film making from the 1950s. And luckily, you can at least see that part on Youtube for free:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhmYY5ZMXOY

The young son of the French ambassador stumbles onto the fact that the family's butler, who he basically regards as a father figure, is having an affair, though he's too young to understand what he's seeing. What he does see is the death of the butler's wife, and he starts to suspect that his beloved butler might be a murderer. This film has the same writer and director team as The Third Man, and as you'd expect, they bring us a strong film that almost made my 1940s list. This film has a lot of fun exploring truth vs lies, their consequences, and what people tell you the consequences are. Highly recommended.

A group of British spies along with a token American (Clint Eastwood) are dropped in the alps with a mission to infiltrate a Nazi castle. But they soon start ending up dead one by one, and they realize there must be a mole in their midst. Thus begins our 60s spy film. But around the middle of the movie, when it started having scenes of Clint Eastwood dual wielding MP 40s and mowing down Nazis that kept inexplicably charging into his hallway, I realized that this thing had turned into an 80s action movie two decades early. This is a dumb film, but it's a blast. A perfect recommendation for someone into 80s schlock.

William Greaves is making a documentary about auditioning for acting, and he hired a second film crew to make a documentary about the making of his documentary, then hired a third film crew to document the making of the documentary about his documentary along with other stuff that was just going on around. This film is at least as meta as something like 8 1/2, even including a section where that last film crew on their own decides to film themselves trying to figure out what the fuck this project is. It's at least partially fictional, as they note that the director behaves much differently when the camera is on, and he seems to have given the actors an intentionally terrible script that he seems to be oddly incompetent about shooting. But which layer of this is real? Is any? And by how much? An utterly fascinating puzzle of an art film.

At the moment, you can watch it on Youtube here as long as you don't mind some Russian subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGLYOSlDRjY
And I learned about this film existing from stumbling onto this Evasive video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Wh9kTU5dM

Edit: I decided that maybe I should give a small content warning: you're going to get straight guys from 1968 talking about homosexuality in this, and they use the kind of language you'd expect from that. If people casually throwing slurs around ruins a film for you, you've been warned.

I've gotten a good response to that top 10 1940s films I wrote the other day, so I'll probably make lists for the 1950s and 1960s soon. But in the meantime, I thought it might be a good idea to make a thread where I can just put my thoughts on other old films that are worth watching. Some of these are classics that barely stayed out of my top ten, some are flawed but still pretty good, and at least one I want to talk about is an engaging mess. I'll be posting about four films today, but I'll probably revisit this thread as I watch more films and make more top 10s.

If your idea of a noir detective film involves a lot of old school witty, quippy dialogue dialogue from a clever detective, films like this are where that comes from. The script, partially written by William Faulkner, is a solid one, even if the plotting is kind of iffy. This is a very "fridge logic" film. Like it's well directed and paced, so it takes you from scene to scene in such a way that it feels like it flows at the time, but the day after I first watched this, I realized I couldn't tell you much about what the overall plot was. But if you're willing to put up with that for some great dialogue, great performances, and a generally iconic film? I recommend giving it a watch.

I got this only knowing that it was a noir directed by Orson Welles, and when I watched it with a couple of friends, we kept coming back to one question: "What the fuck is this movie?" Orson Welles does his best attempt at sounding Irish as he sails a boat full of rich weirdos who talk and act like they came out of a hazy dream rather than real people. One of those guys repeatedly tries to get Orson to murder him. Welles was clearly going for something here, but as with most of his post-Kane films, the studio butchered it, doing heavy reshoots and cutting out big chunks, and whatever Welles' intentions were is lost, at least to me. But what's left is fucking bonkers. I was utterly captivated by this strange thing, trying to figure out both what it was doing and where it was going. It's not a good movie, and it's not really a bad movie night movie, but it's a strange, fascinating film that I'm glad I watched.

This film made me wonder if I should check out more romantic comedies. Katherine Hepburn is a wealthy socialite who's about to get married, but her ex husband (Cary Grant) got invited over against her wishes, a reporter with little respect for her family or their position (Jimmy Stewart) forces his way into things, and then she has to decide whether to marry the asshole she was planning to or one of the two guys who matter. The jokes hold up surprisingly well, and you get to watch three legendary actors be compelling as hell together. Hepburn and Stewart have incredible chemistry together. If I extended my top 10 1940s films list, this would probably be number 11.

A pair of mobsters hold a diner hostage, saying they're after someone who as far as anyone else knows, is just a gas station attendant. After that, a life insurance investigator looks decides to research just who he was, giving us a frame narrative and series of flashbacks reminiscent of Citizen Kane. This is based on a short story by Earnest Hemmingway, which takes up the first 20 or so minutes of the film. And if that were a short film by itself, it probably would have made my top 10. But they decided to expand it with the reporter segment, and I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I feel like the ambiguity was part of the point of the short story and filling in the gaps makes it weaker. You can also tell that the style of the dialogue shifts to something a bit cheesier once they're out of Hemmingway's words. On the other hand, the new segments are themselves a good noir film. This is one of those films you often see on "top 10 noir" lists and the like, and it's worth seeing if you are getting into the genre.

Marlon Brando's performance in this film is often considered the best in the history of American films. It is fantastic, as is pretty much everyone else's in this film. The famous "I coulda been a contender" scene might be one of the all time greatest scenes in film. Purely considering how much of a showcase a film is for acting, this might be the best film of the 1950s. And if you want to just enjoy this film as much as possible on your first watch, stop reading this post here and go watch it, because what I have to say after the break might ruin it for you.

For some reason, no one ever talks about this middle part of the Dollars trilogy. It's easily a better film than A Fistful of Dollars, and you get the kinds of moments of greatness you'd expect of the team that next made The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef are two rival bounty hunters after a group of criminals planning on a huge bank robbery, and you get the kind of over the top, stylized spaghetti western you'd hope for out of it. Lee Van Cleef is really good in this and had more range to work with than in the sequel where he plays a different character.

Some of you might have been surprised not to see film about police corruption in my top 1950s film list. It's often considered one of the best pieces of film noir, one of the best films of the 50s, and Welles' best work after Citizen Kane. I agree that it begins and ends amazingly, but I feel like it has a lot of pacing issues between those points. That's probably due to this being yet another feature that the studio took out of Welles' hands and fucked up. There is a cut from 1998 that's based on Welle's notes, but that was sadly too late for laserdisc, so I haven't seen it yet. Maybe it'll change my mind when I eventually do. But in any case, the pacing issues don't ruin the film, and it's still worth watching even though it's not one of my favorites.

If you haven't seen this film, it opens with a three minute twenty second tracking shot that's one of the most impressive pieces of film making from the 1950s. And luckily, you can at least see that part on Youtube for free:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhmYY5ZMXOY

The young son of the French ambassador stumbles onto the fact that the family's butler, who he basically regards as a father figure, is having an affair, though he's too young to understand what he's seeing. What he does see is the death of the butler's wife, and he starts to suspect that his beloved butler might be a murderer. This film has the same writer and director team as The Third Man, and as you'd expect, they bring us a strong film that almost made my 1940s list. This film has a lot of fun exploring truth vs lies, their consequences, and what people tell you the consequences are. Highly recommended.

A group of British spies along with a token American (Clint Eastwood) are dropped in the alps with a mission to infiltrate a Nazi castle. But they soon start ending up dead one by one, and they realize there must be a mole in their midst. Thus begins our 60s spy film. But around the middle of the movie, when it started having scenes of Clint Eastwood dual wielding MP 40s and mowing down Nazis that kept inexplicably charging into his hallway, I realized that this thing had turned into an 80s action movie two decades early. This is a dumb film, but it's a blast. A perfect recommendation for someone into 80s schlock.