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.

I've been watching a lot of old, classic movies over the last few years, largely through collecting laserdiscs, and I've found it really rewarding. So like with the 1940s and 1950s, I'm going to give my top 10 film recommendations for this decade. My knowledge of this decade's films is far from exhaustive, and I don't have any kind of film studies background or anything, but hopefully I can convince you that at least 1 or 2 of these films is worth watching.

A romantic drama film that uses pool as a metaphor for finding oneself. Iconic performances, a solid script, and a 40 hour session of pool against a guy named Minnesota Fats. What more could you want?

Anthony Perkins plays an office worker who finds himself "under arrest" one morning for a crime that no one will explain to him. What follows is a dream logic plot about bureaucracy, corruption, and legal malpractice with an explosive ending. This was the first time Orson Welles had full control of a production in a long time, and he gives us some of the best visuals he ever put on screen. There was a time when I was baffled that Welles was approached to direct Altered States, but after seeing this, I can see why they thought he'd be perfect for something that trippy.

A mysterious stranger comes to a town run by two groups of evil doers and decides to make it his business to stop them. If that sounds like a Western, there's two reasons for that:

1. Akira Kurosawa was a big fan of John Ford and liked Westerns. He used techniques from them plenty of times, but this film feels the most like a Western overall to me.

2. I'm not the only person who saw that, as Sergio Leone turned it into the Clint Eastwood breakout film A Fistful of Dollars, a surprisingly good remake that only narrowly avoided being on this list.

I love Toshiro Mifune in this film, particularly when he just looks so delighted to be fucking with these assholes. If you ever wondered why he's so iconic, this is a good place to start. One of best samurai films ever made.

Charles Aznavour¹ plays a man who used to be a famous concert pianist, but who now lives under an assumed identity playing piano for a bar. Things all falls apart when he meets a girl, gangsters get involved, and we get our hard to classify sort of noir sort of comedy sort of drama. French New Wave is an important movement in film, and this is one of the more accessible entry points (there's a reason I'm recommending this over Breathless).

1. If you anime fans are thinking "Gee, that sounds kind of like Char Aznable," this guy is who Tomino stole the name from.

One of the great Hollywood epics and the film that made Steven Spielberg want to get into filmmaking. Pretty much everything you could want in a movie like this. Beautifully shot? Check. Great action? Check. Well acted? Check. A great script? Check. Historical accuracy? ....well you can't have everything. This is still a British film made by white people over 60 years ago loosely based on memoirs that already had a few exaggerations, but if you can deal with that for some great film making, this is well worth a watch.

Toshiro Mifune is an executive and a shoe company, and he's just gotten enough money together to buy it out before the other executives can kick him out of the company. But then he gets a phone call telling him that his son was kidnapped. This will cost him pretty much all that money, but he doesn't hesitate to save his son's life. But then the unexpected happens: his son just casually walks into the house. It turns out that the kidnappers accidentally took his driver's son, and all of a sudden, he's much more reluctant to part with this money.

I feel like most people only really talk about Akira Kurosawa's samurai films, but he made some damn good contemporary dramas as well, and this is often considered one of his best. The first half is a bit better than the second half, which is mostly a police procedural, but it's still a solid film throughout.

Corinne Marchand plays a spoiled pop star who recently had a biopsy, and in an hour and a half or so, she's going to find out whether she has cancer. The film follows her in real time as she goes shopping, tries to work, goes for a walk in the park, and finally to the hospital, dealing with themes of mortality, narcissism, and figuring out what actually matters, and it does this without the tone ever getting too grim somehow. I'm new with French New Wave films, but this is the first one I've seen that I'd call a masterpiece.

Toshiro Mifune is a man whose father was driven to suicide by a corrupt corporation, so he took on a fake identity and married the daughter of one of the executives and uses his new position to try to take them all down. A dark as hell noir inspired by Hamlet. If you've been reading my lists, you already know that I'm a sucker for noir, and this is Kurosawa embracing all of those tropes and just hitting it out of the park for most of the movie. If this had nailed the landing, it might have been number 1 here. But still, despite my issues with the ending, the film overall is great.

Theoretically a film about a director trying to make a sci fi film, but it plays with the line between reality and dreams, between the film he's making and the film you're watching, and between the protagonist and the actual director of this film, Federico Fellini. If this really is Fellini we're watching, you rarely see someone present themselves that raw in a film. You see this listed in "greatest films of all time" lists a lot, and there's a good reason.

I can't believe your dad was right about this movie.

This is one of those films I picked up because I heard it was a pretty good western, and I'd been meaning to watch more westerns. I was absolutely not expecting to see what might be the best directing I've ever seen in a film, nor a character relationship as compelling as the one between Blondie (Clint Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach). Their weird on-again, off-again...friendship? Rivalry? Relationship? Whatever it is, you never quite know where they stand with each other, and it's just fascinating to watch. It's kind of a western, kind of a war movie, and the best epic I've ever seen. It might seem a little weird to put this above so many films that were aiming higher, but this was executed perfectly, and it's stuck with me more than anything else on this list.