The best film ever?
BY JAMES CHRISTOPHER
Finally Citizen Kane has been knocked off its perch, as Halliwell's list of the Top 1000 films awards the No 1 spot to the 1953 Japanese classic Tokyo Story
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ONE of the most popular sports among film buffs is compiling the definitive list of greatest hits, an activity that reveals rather more about a person than they might care to admit. For a critic it’s like being asked how much you are paid. People’s eyes glaze over at your brilliant and utterly obscure choices. They wince at your passionate case for Withnail & I. And they are horrified that you haven’t seen Once Upon a Time in the West. Mostly they wonder how on earth you got the job.
But the arrival of Halliwell’s Top 1000 films “in order of merit” has confounded the expectations of the most ardent fan. With the exception of the last instalment of The Godfather Trilogy (1990), there isn’t a single film in the Top Ten that is less than 25 years old. The list, composed by John Walker, is erudite, meaty and dominated by vintage auteurs. There is hardly a frivolous bauble in sight. But I wonder how many pub pundits would have earmarked Tokyo Story as the greatest film? Halliwell’s bold and dramatic decision to nominate this “obscure” classic by the Japanese maestro Yasujiro Ozu flies in the face of conventional — or contemporary — wisdom. It’s a spectacular victory for those of us who believe that less is more. The film is as bare as one of Aesop’s Fables. It sits at the top of the pile, as inscrutable and compelling as a three-line haiku.
A fresh print of Ozu’s film was unveiled at the NFT in January last year, and I was lucky enough to catch it. The crusty 1953 stock has been digitally remastered, the subtitles given a good dusting and the soundtrack beautifully retuned. The spare wonder of Ozu’s masterpiece is that his characters and plot are as plain and honest as old shoes. The film is a portrait of a scattered, grown-up family who put on their Sunday best when their elderly bumpkin parents travel to meet them in Tokyo. The excitement of the genial old couple is salted by a gradual and unspeakable awareness that they are an expensive and time-consuming inconvenience. The humble grace with which Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama accept the drift between themselves and their impatient children would make stones weep.
The original release was totally unmatched by anything happening in Western cinema. It took 19 years before the film percolated to America. The critics were stunned. They still are. Ozu would rather die than impose a jazzy sleight of hand. His camera barely moves from the sitting position adopted by his elderly stars, and the dialogue rarely rises above small talk. You leave the cinema feeling that wisdom is a bleak blessing. That kind of emotional stock is what divides Asia and Europe from the commercial hell of Hollywood.
Halliwell’s Top 1000 is not alone in championing the spartan merits of this singular film. Sight & Sound hailed Tokyo Story as “one of the three greatest films of all time”. To pound Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (1939) into second place is something you can normally achieve only with a wrecking ball. If the maestro were still alive (he died in 1963) he might even have cracked a smile. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.
Well done, Mr Walker. Precious few would have dared to elevate Ozu to such dizzy heights. But I’m seriously concerned about several of your other Top Ten choices. Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy (No 4) was beginning to suffer lethal doses of déjà vu by the time it crawled into Part III some 16 years after the end of Part II (1974). I’d be tempted to nudge the director’ s hallucinatory Vietnam folly Apocalypse Now (1979) into the same slot.
I’m not sure, either, how thrilled Alfred Hitchcock would be to see Vertigo (1958) steal his artistic thunder. His favourite film according to Philip French, who grilled him mercilessly about such matters for the BBC, was The Lady Vanishes (1938), starring a sparkling Margaret Lockwood and dapper Michael Redgrave. And the perverse inclusion of Billy Wilder’s ghastly comedy Some Like It Hot (1959) at No 9 makes me seriously wonder about the glaring absence of “modern” talent.
True, I live in terror of having to name my all-time favourites, and most buffs have an odd habit of putting films in the cellar to see how they age before pronouncing on their worthiness. But I’m not sure I can wait a quarter of a century to find out if Groundhog Day will finally cut the mustard.
Halliwell’s Top 1000 is published by HarperCollins on June 13 (£17.99)
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14931-1645927,00.html
