For several decades I preferred feature films to TV fare. My preference has flipped in the past several years, as the quality of feature films has declined and TV fare has become more watchable with the advent of Amazon Prime Video and the access it affords to excellent offerings from Britain and Scandinavia. The following piece is an assessment of the more than 2,400 feature films that I had seen as of four years ago. The subsequent addition of a few dozen feature films to my inventory hasn’t changed my assessment.
According to the lists of movies that I keep at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), I watched 2,444 feature films released from 1920 to 2018. That number does not include such forgettable fare as the grade-B westerns, war movies, and Bowery Boys comedies that I saw on Saturdays, at two-for-a-nickel, during my pre-teen years.
I have assigned ratings (on IMDb’s 10-point scale*) to 2,141 of the 2,444 films. (By the time I got around to assigning ratings at IMDb when I joined in 2001, I didn’t remember 303 films well enough to rate them.) I have given 691 (32 percent) of the 2,141 films a rating of 8, 9, or 10. The proportion of high ratings does not indicate low standards on my part; rather, it indicates the care with which I have tried to choose films for viewing. (More about that, below.)
I call the 691 highly rated films my favorites. I won’t list all them here, but I will mention some of them — and their stars — as I assess the ups-and-downs (mostly downs) in the art of film-making.
I must first admit two biases that have shaped my selection of favorite movies. First, my list of films and favorites is dominated by American films starring American actors. But that dominance is merely numerical. For artistic merit and great acting, I turn to foreign films as often as possible.
A second bias is my general aversion to silent features and early talkies. Most of the directors and actors of the silent era relied on “stagy” acting to compensate for the lack of sound — a style that persisted into the early 1930s. There were exceptions, of course. Consider Charlie Chaplin, whose genius as a director and comic actor made a virtue of silence; my list of favorites from the 1920s and early 1930s includes three of Chaplin’s silent features: The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), and City Lights (1931). Perhaps a greater comic actor (and certainly a more physical one) than Chaplin was Buster Keaton, with six films on my list of favorites of the same era: Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), The Cameraman (1928), and Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928). Harold Lloyd, in my view, ranks with Keaton for sheer laugh-out-loud physical humor. My seven Lloyd favorites from his pre-talkie oeuvre are Grandma’s Boy (1922), Dr. Jack (1922), Safety Last! (1923), Girl Shy (1923), Hot Water (1924), For Heaven’s Sake (1926), and Speedy (1928). My list of favorites includes only nine other films from the years 1920-1931, among them F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu the Vampire (1922) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) — the themes of which (supernatural and futuristic, respectively) enabled them to transcend the limitations of silence — and such early talkies as Whoopee! (1930), and Dracula (1931).
In summary, I can recall having seen only 51 feature films that were released in 1920-1931. Of the 51, I have rated 50, and 25 of them (50 percent) rank among my favorites. But given the relatively small number of films from 1920-1931 in my personal catalog, I will say no more here about that era. I will focus, instead, on movies released from 1932 to the present — which I consider the “modern” era of film-making.
My inventory of modern films comprises 2,393 titles, 2,091 of which I have rated, and 666 of those (32 percent) at 8, 9, or 10 on the IMDb scale. But those numbers mask vast differences in the quality of modern films, which were produced in three markedly different eras:
Golden Age (1932-1942) — 238 films seen, 208 rated, 117 favorites (56 percent)
Abysmal Years (1943-1965) — 370 films seen, 289 rated, 110 favorites (38 percent)
Vile Epoch (1966-present) — 1,785 films seen, 1,594 rated, 439 favorites (28 percent)
There is a so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, but it is defined by the structure of the industry, not the quality of output. What made my Golden Age golden, and why did films go from golden to abysmal to vile? Read on.
To understand what made the Golden Age golden, let’s consider what makes a great movie: a novel or engaging plot; dialogue that is fresh (and witty, if the film calls for it); strong performances (acting, singing, and/or dancing); a “mood” that draws the viewer in; excellent production values (locations, cinematography, sets, costumes, etc.); and historical or topical interest. (A great animated feature may be somewhat weaker on plot and dialogue if the animations and sound track are first-rate.) The Golden Age was golden largely because the advent of sound fostered creativity — plots could be advanced through dialogue, actors could deliver real dialogue, and singers and orchestras could deliver real music. It took a few years to fully realize the potential of sound, but movies hit their stride just as the country was seeking respite from the cares of a deep and lingering economic depression.
Studios vied with each other to entice movie-goers with new plots (or plots that seemed new when embellished with sound), fresh and often wickedly witty dialogue, and — perhaps most important of all — captivating performers. The generation of superstars that came of age in the 1930s consisted mainly of handsome men and beautiful women, blessed with distinctive personalities, and equipped by their experience on the stage to deliver their lines vibrantly and with impeccable locution.
What were the great movies of the Golden Age, and who starred in them? Here’s a sample of the titles: 1932 — Grand Hotel; 1933 — Dinner at Eight, Flying Down to Rio, Morning Glory; 1934 — It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, Twentieth Century; 1935 — Mutiny on the Bounty, A Night at the Opera, David Copperfield; 1936 — Libeled Lady, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Show Boat; 1937 — The Awful Truth, Captains Courageous, Lost Horizon; 1938 — The Adventures of Robin Hood, Bringing up Baby, Pygmalion; 1939 — Destry Rides Again, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Wizard of Oz, The Women; 1940 — The Grapes of Wrath, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story; 1941 — Ball of Fire, The Maltese Falcon, Suspicion; 1942 — Casablanca, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Woman of the Year.
And who starred in the greatest movies of the Golden Age? Here’s a goodly sample of the era’s superstars, a few of whom came on the scene toward the end: Jean Arthur, Fred Astaire, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Nelson Eddy, Errol Flynn, Joan Fontaine, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, William Holden, Leslie Howard, Allan Jones, Charles Laughton, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald, Joel McCrea, Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, William Powell, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, James Stewart, and Spencer Tracy. There were other major stars, and many popular supporting players, but it seems that a rather small constellation of superstars commanded a disproportionate share of the leading roles in the best movies of the Golden Age.
Why did movies go into decline after 1942’s releases? World War II certainly provided an impetus for the end of the Golden Age. The war diverted resources from the production of major theatrical films; grade-A features gave way to low-budget fare. And some of the superstars of the Golden Age went off to war. (Two who remained civilians — Leslie Howard and Carole Lombard — were killed during the war.) With the resumption of full production in 1946, the surviving superstars who hadn’t retired were fading, though their presence still propelled many films of the Abysmal Years.
Stars come and go, however, as they have done since Shakespeare’s day. The decline into the Abysmal Years and Vile Epoch have deeper causes than the dimming of old stars:
The Golden Age had deployed all of the themes that could be used without explicit sex, graphic violence, and crude profanity — none of which become an option for American movie-makers until the mid-1960s.
Prejudice got significantly more play after World War II, but it’s a theme that can’t be used very often without becoming trite. And trite it has become, now that movies have become vehicles for decrying prejudice against every real or imagined “victim” group under the sun.
Other attempts at realism (including film noir) resulted mainly in a lot of turgid trash laden with unrealistic dialogue and shrill emoting — keynotes of the Abysmal Years.
Hollywood productions often sank to the level of TV, apparently in a misguided effort to compete with that medium. The use of garish technicolor — a hallmark of the 1950s — highlighted the unnatural neatness and cleanliness of settings that should have been rustic if not squalid. Sound tracks became lavishly melodramatic and deafeningly intrusive.
The transition from abysmal to vile coincided with the cultural “liberation” of the mid-1960s, which saw the advent of the “f” word in mainstream films. Yes, the Vile Epoch brought more more realistic plots and better acting (thanks mainly to the Brits). But none of that compensates for the anti-social rot that set in around 1966: drug-taking, drinking and smoking are glamorous; profanity proliferates to the point of annoyance; sex is all about lust and little about love; violence is gratuitous and beyond the point of nausea; corporations and white, male Americans with money are evil; the U.S. government (when Republican-controlled) is in thrall to that evil; etc., etc. etc.
To be sure, there have been outbreaks of greatness since the Golden Age. During the Abysmal Years, for example, aging superstars appeared in such greats as Life With Father (Dunne and Powell, 1947), Key Largo (Bogart and Lionel Barrymore, 1948), Edward, My Son (Tracy, 1949), The African Queen (Bogart and Hepburn, 1951), High Noon (Cooper, 1952), Mr. Roberts (Cagney, Fonda, and Powell, 1955), The Old Man and the Sea (Tracy, 1958), Anatomy of a Murder (Stewart, 1959), North by Northwest (Grant, 1959), Inherit the Wind (Tracy, 1960), Long Day’s Journey into Night (Hepburn, 1962), Advise and Consent (Fonda and Laughton, 1962), The Best Man (Fonda, 1964), and Othello (Olivier, 1965). A new generation of stars appeared in such greats as The Lavender Hill Mob (Alec Guinness, 1951), Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly, 1952), The Bridge on the River Kwai (Guiness, 1957), The Hustler (Paul Newman, 1961), Lawrence of Arabia (Peter O’Toole, 1962), and Dr. Zhivago (Julie Christie, 1965).
Similarly, the Vile Epoch — in spite of its seaminess — has yielded many excellent films and new stars. Some of the best films (and their stars) are A Man for All Seasons (Paul Scofield, 1966), Midnight Cowboy (Dustin Hoffman, 1969), MASH (Alan Alda, 1970), The Godfather (Robert DeNiro, 1972), Papillon (Hoffman, Steve McQueen, 1973), One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Jack Nicholson, 1975), Star Wars and its sequels (Harrison Ford, 1977, 1980, 1983), The Great Santini (Robert Duvall, 1979), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Nicholson, Jessica Lange, 1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (Sigourney Weaver, Mel Gibson, 1982), Tender Mercies (Duvall, 1983), A Room with a View (Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day Lewis 1985), Mona Lisa (Bob Hoskins, 1986), Fatal Attraction (Glenn Close, 1987), 84 Charing Cross Road (Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench, 1987), Dangerous Liaisons (John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, 1988), Henry V (Kenneth Branagh, 1989), Reversal of Fortune (Close and Jeremy Irons, 1990), Dead Again (Branagh, Emma Thompson, 1991), The Crying Game (1992), Much Ado about Nothing (Branagh, Thompson, Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington, 1993), Trois Couleurs: Bleu (Juliette Binoche, 1993), Richard III (Ian McKellen, Annette Bening, 1995), Beautiful Girls (Natalie Portman, 1996), Comedian Harmonists (1997), Tango (1998), Girl Interrupted (Winona Ryder, 1999), Iris (Dench, 2000), High Fidelity (John Cusack, 2000), Chicago (Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere, 2002), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Russell Crowe, 2003), Finding Neverland (Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, 2004), Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2005), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005), The Painted Veil (Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, 2006), Breach (Chris Cooper, 2007), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt, 2008), The King’s Speech (Colin Firth, 2010), Saving Mr. Banks (Thomson, Tom Hanks, 2013), and Brooklyn (Saoirse Ronan, 2015).
But every excellent film produced during the Abysmal Years and Vile Epoch has been surrounded by outpourings of dreck, schlock, and bile. The generally tepid effusions of the Abysmal Years were succeeded by the excesses of the Vile Epoch: films that feature noise, violence, sex, and drugs for the sake of noise, violence, sex, and drugs; movies whose only “virtue” is their appeal to such undiscerning groups as teeny-boppers, wannabe hoodlums, resentful minorities, and reflexive leftists; movies filled with “bathroom” and other varieties of “humor” so low as to make the Keystone Cops seem paragons of sophisticated wit.
In sum, movies have become progressively worse since the end of the Golden Age — and I have the numbers to prove it.
First, I should establish that I am picky about the films that I choose to watch:
Note: These averages are for films designated by IMDb as English-language (which includes foreign-language films with English subtitles or dubbing): about 84,000 in all as of August 24, 2019.
The next graph illustrates three points:
I watched just as many (or more) films of the 1930s than of the 1940s. So my higher ratings of films of the 1930s than those of the 1940s aren’t due to greater selectivity in choosing films from the 1930s. Further, there is a steady downward trend in my ratings, which began long before the “bulge” in my viewing of movies released from mid-1980s to about 2010. The downward trend continued despite the relative paucity of titles released after 2010. (It is plausible, however, that the late uptick is due to heightened selectivity in choosing recent releases.)
IMDb users, on the whole, have overrated the films of the early 1940s to mid-1980s and mid-1990s to the present. The ratings for films released since the mid-1990s — when IMDb came on the scene — undoubtedly reflect the dominance of younger viewers who “grew up” with IMDb, who prefer novelty to quality, and who have little familiarity with earlier films. I have rated almost 1,600 films that were released in 1996-2018, and also 1,200 films from 1932-1995.)
My ratings, based on long experience and exacting standards, indicate that movies not only are not better than ever, but are generally getting worse as the years roll on. The recent uptick in my ratings can be attributed to selectivity — I have seen (and rated) only 23 feature films that were released in 2015-2018.
Another indication that movies are generally getting worse is the increasing frequency of what I call unwatchable films. These are films that I watched just long enough to evaluate as trash, which earns them my rating of 1 (the lowest allowed by IMDb). The trend is obvious:
The graph represents 61 films, most of which earned good ratings by IMDb users:
You have been warned.
Will the Vile Epoch End? I’d bet against it, but I’ll keep watching (occasionally) nonetheless. There’s an occasional nugget of gold in the sea of mud.
There are those who mistake mud for gold nuggets. Two examples are Birdman, which won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2014. I tried to watch it, but it failed to rise above trendy quirkiness, foul language, and stilted (though improvised) dialogue. I turned it off. It’s the only Best Picture winner, of those that I’ve watched, that I couldn’t sit through. I will not waste even a minute on a more recent Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water.
My general point is that there are many, many films that are better than the Best Picture. Business Insider offers a ranking of Best-Picture winners in “All 91 Oscar Best-Picture Winners, Ranked from Worst to Best by Movie Critics“, which covers releases through 2018. Business Insider bases its ranking on critics’ reviews, as summarized at Rotten Tomatoes. But the Business Insider piece doesn’t help the viewer who’s in search of a better film than those that have been voted Best Picture.
I am here to help, with the aid of ratings given by users at Internet Movie Database (IMDb). IMDb user ratings aren’t a sure guide to artistic merit — as the latter is judged by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), or by movie critics. But members of AMPAS and movie critics are notoriously wrong-headed about artistic merit. The aforementioned The Shape of Water exemplifies their wrong-headedness:
This Guillermo del Toro film has gotten rave reviews from critics, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 93%, and lots of awards-season buzz. And while some elements of the film are praiseworthy, … the film turns out to be little more than a collection of manipulative and ludicrous set-ups for social-justice lectures lacking any nuance or wit. The Shape of Water assumes its audience to be idiots, which makes this the kind of painful and unoriginal exercise that is all but certain to win awards throughout this winter in Hollywood….
… The Shape of Water never allows the audience to get the message of tolerance from the central allegory of the love between Elisa and the creature. Instead, del Toro and the writers fill up every square inch with contrivances and lectures.
And those lectures come with all of the subtlety of a jackhammer. Giles lost his job in the advertising business for unexplained reasons, but which seem to be connected to his sexual orientation. He tries to reach out to a waiter at his favorite diner, who rejects him just as the waiter also gets a chance to demonstrate his racism by refusing service to a black couple, both of which are completely gratuitous to the film or to Amphibian Man’s fate. Shannon’s Strickland spouts religious nonsense to justify cruelty, and sexually oppresses his wife in another gratuitous scene, sticking his gangrenous fingers over her mouth to keep her from expressing pleasure…. The bad guys are the US space program (!) and the military, while the most sympathetic character apart from the four main protagonists is a Soviet spy. Strickland dismisses Elisa and Zelda as suspects, angrily lamenting his decision to “question the help,” just in case the class-warfare argument escaped the audience to that point. Oh, he’s also a major-league sexual harasser in the workplace. And so on. [Ed Morrissey, “The Shape of Water: Subtle As a Jackhammer and Almost As Intelligent“, Hot Air, March 5, 2018]
In any event, IMDb user ratings are a good guide to audience appeal, which certainly doesn’t preclude artistic merit. (I would argue that audience appeal is a better gauge of artistic merit than critical consensus.) For example, I have seen 10 of the 14 top-rated Oscar winners listed in the Business Insider article, but only 5 of the winners that I have seen are among my 14 top-rated Oscar winners.
The first table below lists all of the Best Picture winners among films released through 2018, ranked according to the average rating given each film by IMDb users. The second table lists the 100 highest-rated features released through 2018. (The list includes films that have been rated by at least 4,000 users, which is the approximate number for Cavalcade, the least-viewed of Oscar-winning pictures.) Only 16 of the 92 Oscar-winning films (highlighted in red) are among the top 100. (Lawrence of Arabia would be among the top 100, but IMDb categorizes it as a UK film.)
In short, there are many better-than-Best Pictures to choose from. (Keep reading to see a list of my very-favorite films.)
Below is a list of my very-favorite films, the ones that I’ve rated 9 or 10 out of 10.
* This is my interpretation of IMDb’s 10-point scale:
1 = So bad that I quit watching after a few minutes.
2 = I watched the whole thing, but wish that I hadn’t.
3 = Barely bearable; perhaps one small, redeeming feature (e.g., a cast member).
4 = Just a shade better than a 3 — a “gut feel” grade.
5 = A so-so effort; on a par with typical made-for-TV fare.
6 = Good, but not worth recommending to anyone else; perhaps because of a weak cast, too-predictable plot, cop-out ending, etc.
7 = Enjoyable and without serious flaws, but once was enough.
8 = Superior on at least three of the following dimensions: mood, plot, dialogue, music (if applicable), dancing (if applicable), quality of performances, production values, and historical or topical interest; worth seeing twice but not a slam-dunk great film.
9 = Superior on several of the above dimensions and close to perfection; worth seeing at least twice.
10 = An exemplar of its type; can be enjoyed many times.