Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Well, that was fun… right?

With the fifth year of voting for the Muriels Hall of Fame behind us, I guess now is as good a time as any for us to take stock of where this thing is now. The longer this has been going on, the more I’ve come to see it as a kind of attempt for us to create our own version of the cinematic canon, such as it is. For one thing, I see our HOF inductees as a damn fine starting point for anyone who wants to become versed in classic cinema. This is one reason I made an extra attempt to get the voters to recognize movies from around the world this year, rather than just the usual regions that tend to be studied by Film Studies 101 courses: the USA, Western Europe, and to a lesser extent Japan.

So, did we accomplish that goal. Well… yes… ish? It was definitely good to see us inducting movies from Eastern Europe and even one that’s kinda-sorta from Africa, and it was doubly nice that we could keep up our streak of three years running that we’ve been able to induct at least one film directed by a woman. Yet the switch to the voting format also highlighted another issue we continue to face. To put it bluntly, it seems like we’ve burned off most of the “obvious” consensus choices for really old (say, pre-1950) inductees, and now we’ve focusing somewhat disproportionately on movies that only recently became eligible for induction.

To wit: after five years of inductees, the Muriels Hall of Fame has inducted seven films from before 1930. This year, we inducted that same number of films from 1966 alone. As great of a year as ’66 was – and I’m not denying that it was awesome – it does seem like we favor more recent films than the really old-school classics. I like to think there are at least a few really great and worthy titles that haven’t made it in yet (hello, Griffith and Méliès!) and that the well hasn’t run dry. Maybe we need to divide up the ballot again next year, only by time period rather than by nationality. Thoughts?

One disappointment, for me anyway, was that for the first time this year no short film mustered up enough votes to be inducted. In fact, only three of the 88 films on the final ballot, only three - The House Is Black, Ménilmontant, and Window Water Baby Moving - were short films. Have we just not seen enough short films beyond the handful of classics that have already made the cut? I’m open to the possibility of setting up a smaller group of voters who are better-versed in classic shorts enough to select a worthy inductee, but only if there’s interest. Is there anyone who’d be down with doing something like this?

A few more observations:

- When we like a filmmaker, we really, really like him. Consider that, out of the seventy films we’ve inducted to date, fifteen of them have were directed or co-directed by Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Buñuel and Hawks. Add to this additional “double dippers” like Buster Keaton, John Huston, Fritz Lang, David Lean, Orson Welles and Billy Wilder, and we tend to show a lot of filmmaker loyalty. And while that’s not a problem in and of itself, there are also some great filmmakers who haven’t yet made the cut – of directors who’ve directed a decent number of films during the eligible period, people like Preminger, Clouzot, Kazan, Capra, Cocteau, Rossellini, Vidor, Wyler, and aforementioned Messrs. Griffith and Méliès spring immediately to mind, but there are plenty of other worthy names besides. It’s bound to happen for at least some of those dudes eventually, I’m sure.

- Something interesting I noticed when looking over the master list of inductees is that every inducted film that whose primary spoken language is something besides English has been released on DVD and/or Blu-Ray at some point by The Criterion Collection. Every. Single. One. Again, not categorically a bad thing. Just sort of interesting to see how much of a dominant presence Criterion has been in shaping today’s cinematic culture, especially with regards to classic foreign-language films. And while it’s tempting to chalk it all up to Criterion’s vigilant effort in bringing canonical classics before the eyes of true film lovers, it’s also hard to deny that at least a handful of the titles in question would probably have had little to no chance of being inducted if not for their getting a Criterion release. Daisies, anybody?

Finally, while I’m grateful for all the enthusiasm the voters and especially the people who wrote pieces this year were able to muster, I sometimes get the nagging feeling that, aside from the voters themselves, there might not be all that much interest in Muriels Hall of Fame voting. Am I wrong about this? I’m not as active on the Film Twitter as a lot of you are, so maybe I just haven’t picked up on it.

Anyway, here’s how the voting went down. It should be noted that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was inducted on the basis of winning the 50th Anniversary Muriel Award earlier this year. Titles marked with an asterisk were inducted this year:

12 votes:
*High and Low (1963, Kurosawa)
*Persona (1966, Bergman)

10 votes:
*Rashomon (1950, Kurosawa)
*Daisies (1966, Chytilova)

8 votes:
*The Earrings of Madame De… (1953, Ophüls)

7 votes:
*Metropolis (1927, Lang)
*Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Hawks)
*Notorious (1946, Hitchcock)
*Godzilla (1954, Honda)
*Viridiana (1961, Buñuel)
*Andrei Rublev (1966, Tarkovsky)
*Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, Bresson)
*The Battle of Algiers (1966, Pontecorvo)
*Blow-Up (1966, Antonioni)

6 votes:
Nosferatu (1922, Murnau)

5 votes:
*Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Resnais) [inducted following runoff vote against Hiroshima Mon Amour as both films have narrowly missed induction over the past five years]
The Crowd (1928, Vidor)
Pandora’s Box (1929, Pabst)
Grand Illusion (1937, Renoir)
Black Narcissus (1947, Powell & Pressburger)
Johnny Guitar (1954, Ray)
A Man Escaped (1956, Bresson)
Wild Strawberries (1957, Bergman)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Resnais)
Peeping Tom (1960, Powell)
Contempt (1963, Godard)
The Haunting (1963, Wise)
Kwaidan (1964, Kobayashi)
Woman in the Dunes (1964, Teshigahara)
Black Girl (1966, Sembène)

4 votes:
I Was Born, But… (1932, Ozu)
The Old Dark House (1932, Whale)
Bringing Up Baby (1938, Hawks)
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Welles)
Detour (1945, Ulmer)
La Belle et la Bête (1946, Cocteau)
Daisy Kenyon (1947, Preminger)
All About Eve (1950, Mankiewicz)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Hawks)
Paths of Glory (1957, Kubtick)
Imitation of Life (1959, Sirk)
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Brakhage)
La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Mulligan)
The House Is Black (1963, Farrokhzad)

3 votes:
Greed (1924, von Stroheim)
The Gold Rush (1925, Chaplin)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940, Ford)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Lubitsch)
Cat People (1942, Tourneur)
Children of Paradise (1945, Carné)
The Big Sleep (1946, Hawks)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Capra)
Out of the Past (1947, Tourneur)
Orpheus (1950, Cocteau)
A Star Is Born (1954, Cukor)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Aldrich)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Siegel)
The Killing (1956, Kubrick)
Horror of Dracula (1958, Fisher)
The Apartment (1960, Wilder)
Lolita (1961, Kubrick)
The Birds (1963, Hitchcock)
The War Game (1965, Watkins)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, Nichols)

1 or 2 votes:
Our Hospitality (1923, Keaton & Blystone)
Safety Last! (1923, Newmeyer & Taylor)
Ménilmontant (1926, Kirsanoff)
Vampyr (1932, Dreyer)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, LeRoy)
It Happened One Night (1934, Capra)
The Awful Truth (1937, McCarey)
Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, McCarey)
Gone With the Wind (1939, Fleming)
Stagecoach (1939, Ford)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941, Sturges)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, Wyler)
Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Sturges)
The Steel Helmet (1951, Fuller)
Lola Montes (1955, Ophüls)
12 Angry Men (1957, Lumet)
A Face in the Crowd (1957, Kazan)
Ashes and Diamonds (1958, Wajda)
Mon Oncle (1958, Tati)
The Housemaid (1960, Kim)
A Hard Day’s Night! (1964, Lester)
Tokyo Drifter (1966, Suzuki)

And as always, a big thank you to our awesome voters!
Jason Alley
Danny Baldwin
Kent M. Beeson
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Scott W. Black
Danny Bowes
Donald G. Carder
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Odie Henderson
Stacia Jones
Sam Juliano
Benjamin Lim
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Willow Maclay
Patrick J. Miller
Marya Murphy
Matt Noller
Cole Roulain
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Philip Tatler IV
Ian Scott Todd
Scott von Doviak
Patrick Williamson
Bryce Wilson
George Wu

See you in January!