Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

One of the greatest epics of all time, Lawrence of Arabia epitomizes all that motion pictures can be. Ambitious in every sense of the word, David Lean’s Oscar-grabbing masterpiece, based loosely on the life of the eccentric British officer T.E. Lawrence and his campaign against the Turks in World War I, makes most movies pale in comparison and has served as an inspiration for countless filmmakers, most notably technical masters like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The latter eventually helped restore Lawrence to its proper length and luster alongside fellow enthusiast Martin Scorsese. From Maurice Jarre’s sweeping score to Robert Bolt’s literary script to Freddie Young’s gorgeous desert cinematography to the literal cast of thousands, the film deserves and demands to be seen and heard on the big screen.

Designed for 7omm projection, the format enhances the film’s minute details, from star Peter O’Toole’s piercing blue eyes to the sun beaming down on the constantly shifting sand. Lawrence of Arabia’s famous images and set pieces, such as Omar Sharif’s appearance out of a desert mirage, the famed cut from a lit match to the sunrise, and the mind-boggling assault on Akaba, look spectacular and, indeed, unrepeatable. They were especially impressive for a picture made in the days before computer-generated special effects. Spielberg, for one, estimates the cost of making Lawrence today at around $285 million, and he would know, but the truth of the matter is that no filmmaker would dare attempt to outdo Lean, a superb director and storyteller at the top of his game.

That substance runs parallel to the spectacle only enhances the stature of Lawrence of Arabia and the reputation of Lean. The follies of colonialism and the hypocrisies of war are cast into stark relief, as Colonel Lawrence lets the success of his Arab-fought campaign against the Turks go to his head. Yet his larger-than-life persona is cut down to size once he realizes that bloodlust has replaced honor and arrogance has replaced courage. It’s a sad fall from grace shown with subtlety, literacy, and craft—a true epic with the scope and scale of great literature.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1962, Genre – War, Country – U.S.A, Language – English, Producer – Sam Spiegel, Director – David Lean, Music Director – Maurice Jarre, Cast – Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolf it, I.S. Johar, Gamil Ratib, Michel Ray, John Dimech, Zia Mohyeddin

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War bestseller was snapped up by megalomaniac producer David O. Selznick, who resisted Mitchell’s suggestion that he cast Basil Rathbone as Rhett Butler in favor of the fans’ only choice, Clark Gable. After a nationwide talent search and a Hollywood catfight involving every potential leading lady in town, Selznick hired British Vivien Leigh to play Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara. Insistent from the first that every detail be sumptuous, Selznick then wore out at least three directors (Sam Wood, George Cukor, and Victor Fleming), set fire to the surviving King Kong sets to stage the burning of Atlanta, hired enough extras to refight the Civil War, and sat back to watch the Oscars and acclaim roll in.

Conceived from the outset as the ultimate Hollywood movie, Gone with the Wind became the benchmark for popular epic cinema for decades to come. Though the film is monumental enough to be beyond criticism, most of its really great scenes come in the first half, which was substantially directed by Cukor, who brought his skilled touch with character and nuance to the material with a great epic sweep. Fleming, meanwhile, best known for directing macho action, somehow wound up handling the soapier stretches as the leads’ marriage falters through postbellum ups and downs far less compelling than the war-torn cross-purposes romance that got them together.

The motor of the plot is the vacillating heart of Scarlett, whom Leigh plays first as flighty then flinty: she is so infatuated with gentlemanly Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) that she marries several lesser (and doomed) milksops when he opts for the more conventionally feminine (and doomed) Melanie (Olivia de Havilland). Rhett Butler, a pragmatist rather than an idealist, enters the picture and she is drawn to him as the war overturns the Southern way of life, marrying him after she has sworn never to go hungry again and to do anything it takes to keep Tara, her father’s plantation, going despite the depredations of Yankees and carpetbaggers. Only when Rhett rejects her does she realize she truly loves him, prompting the classic have-it-both-ways ending in which he walks out (“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”) and she swears to win him back (“Tomorrow is another day”).

Like The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind tidies up a lot of complex history, showing only happy devoted slaves and depicting Ashley’s postwar involvement in a hooded Klan organization as a genuinely heroic (if doomed) endeavor. But the sweep of the movie is near irresistible, and Selznick’s set pieces are among the most emblematic in cinema history: the pullback from Scarlett as she walks amongst the wounded to fill the screen with injured soldiers in gray, the dash through the blazes as Atlanta burns, Gable carrying Leigh upstairs into sexual shadows. Dressed up with gorgeous 1939 Technicolor, pastel-pretty for the dresses and blazing red for the passions, and a thunderous Max Steiner score, this still has a fair claim to be considered the last word in Hollywood filmmaking.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1939, Genre – Romance, Country – U.S.A, Language – English, Producer – David O. Selznick, Director – Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Music Director – Max Steiner, Cast – Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland, Thomas Mitchell, Barbara O’Neil,Evelyn Keyes, Ann Rutherford, George Reeves, Fred Crane, Hattie McDaniel, Oscar Polk, Butterfly McQueen, Victor Jory, Everett Brown

Casablanca (1942)

The most beloved Academy Award Best Picture winner of all, this romatic war melodrama epitomizes the 194os craze for studio-bound exotica, with the Warners lot transformed into a fantastical North Africa that has far more resonance than any mere real place possibly could. Casablanca also offers more cult performers, quotable lines, instant clichés, and Hollywood chutzpah than any other film of the movies’ golden age.

Humphrey Bogart’s Rick (“of all the gin joints…”), in white dinner jacket or belted trenchcoat, and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa (“I know that I’ll never have the strength to leave you again”), a vision in creations more suited to a studio floor than a desert city, moon over each other in a café-casino as that haunting tune (“As Time Goes By”) tinkles in the background, transporting them back to a simpler life before the war soured everything. But the best performance comes from Claude Rains as the cynical but romantic police chief Renault (“round up the usual suspects”), a wry observer of life’s absurdities who is at once an opportunist survivor and the film’s truest romantic—fully deserving of the famous final moments (“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”) that show it is he not Ilsa who is the fitting partner for Rick’s newly-dedicated-to-freedom hero.

Also memorable in an enormous supporting cast: Paul Henreid’s Czech patriot Victor Laszlo, leading the scum of the continent in a rousing rendition of “La Marseilleise” that drowns out the Nazi sing-along and restores even the most ardent collaborationists and parasites to patriotic fervor; Peter Lorre’s hustler Ugarte, shyly admitting that he trusts Rick because the man despises him; Conrad Veldt’s heel-clicking Nazi villain Major Strasser, reaching to make a phone call he’ll never complete; Dooley Wilson’s loyal Sam, stroking the piano and exchanging looks with the leads; S. Z. Sakall’s blubbery majordomo Carl, a displaced Austro-Hungarian sweating despite the ceiling fan; and Sydney Greenstreet’s unlikely Arab-Italian entrepreneur Ferrari, squatting befezzed on what looks like a magic carpet. Even the extras are brilliantly cast, adding to the lively, seductive, populated feel of a movie that, more than any other, its fans have wanted to inhabit—an impulse that fuels Woody Allen’s charming homage in Play It Again Sam.

Curtiz tells a complicated, gimmicky story, weighted down with exposition and structured around a midpoint Paris flashback that breaks most of the screenwriting rules, with so little fuss and so much confidence that the whole assembly seems seamless even though it was apparently rewritten from day to day so that Bergman did not know until the shooting of the final scene whether she would fly off with Henreid or stick around with Bogey. Lasting cult greatness came about through its attitude, but also its rare sense of the incomplete— made before the war was over, it dares to leave its characters literally up in the air or out in the desert, leaving its original audiences and the many who have discovered the film over the years to wonder what happened to these people (whose petty problems don’t amount to hill of beans”) during the next few turbulent years.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1942, Genre – Drama, Country – U.S.A, Language – English / French / German, Producer – Hal B. Wallis, Jack L. Warner, Director – Michael Curtiz, Music Director – M.K. Jerome, Jack Scholl, Max Steiner, Cast – Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veldt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, S.Z. Sakall, Madeleine LeBeau, Dooley Wilson, Joy Page, John Qualen, Leonid Kinskey, Curt Bois