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!

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Godzilla

And this year's final inductee is...

"The film trusts us to be human in our response, because goosing the viewer with emotional tricks wouldn’t just be cheating. It would cheapen everything Godzilla has to say. Because what it wants is for the audience to not only take in what a nuclear world means, but also, what it means to have nuclear weapons."

~ Kent M. Beeson

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Daisies

"Though Daisies may have bloomed from the context of the Czech New Wave, its unruly ethos has reverberated through the subsequent decades. Watching it now, it’s still unpredictable with its explosive burlesque of a narrative. It’s still filthy and feminine and fun.”

~Alice Stoehr

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: High and Low

“What follows is an exciting thriller-slash-police procedural, a real nail-biter of a yarn that's all the more remarkable in light of Kurosawa's meticulous planning, framing and choreography. High and Low is so heavily micromanaged that by all rights it should be dull and plodding, but Kurosawa is a master of cinematic control." ~ Stacia Jones

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Only Angels Have Wings

"Only Angels Have Wings seems to me, each time I see it, to rank as the greatest movie Hollywood ever produced. It’s Hawks’ perfect, profound, entirely unfussy fusion of his love of adventure, his admiration of professional aptitude and passion, for simple (but not simplistic) skill, and even his own deftness with strains of melodrama and comic energy, the template for the sort of action experience that seems more and more out of the reach of modern filmmakers with each passing, terminally bloated and self-important season."

~ Dennis Cozzalio

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: The Earrings of Madame De...

“Someone once said of Max Ophüls that the mere mention of his name makes all cameras stand rigidly to attention. Never was it more evident than here in this wonderfully cynical yet romantic eulogy to the very idea of romance and, indeed, truth."

~ Sam Juliano

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Notorious

"It may be an espionage-fueled film noir, with Grant’s cynical G-man recruiting Bergman’s tormented daughter-of-a-Nazi-spy to infiltrate a Brazil-based crew of Nazis by getting close to one (Claude Rains), who just happens to be an old flame of hers. But no matter how suspenseful and intrigue-infested this movie gets, you’re always reminded that Notorious is about two people whose desire for each other is so palpable, so intense, so friggin’ sexy, they can’t hide it...!"

~ Craig D. Lindsey

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Blow-Up

"Like its cinematic cousins... Blow-Up uses the ‘sculpting in time’ element of film to shatter time itself. It’s at once a capsule of a place/culture/era and a living, breathing item that may or may not be completely different the next time we view it. Like those images the photographer pulls out of his negatives, the film reveals stranger and stranger layers the more we obsess over it." ~ Philip Tatler IV

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Last Year at Marienbad

“Representative of cinema as modern art, Last Year at Marienbad moved away from narrative and resists precise elucidation. The viewer must work to assign meaning in the film only to find the film evades any single interpretation... Marienbad points the way toward the postmodern.

~ George Wu

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Viridiana

“Viridiana marked Luis Buñuel’s return to shooting films in his home country of Spain. His decision raised as many eyebrows as his Palme D’Or-winning film ultimately did. For biting the hand that thought it was feeding him, Buñuel had his most delicious provocation banned by the Catholic Church and Franco’s government of Spain."

~ Odie Henderson

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: The Battle of Algiers

"The legendary stature of The Battle of Algiers is hardly in question. From the infamous stories of Black Panthers taking notes during screenings on how to stage a revolution, to its showing at the Pentagon just before the invasion of Iraq (obviously more than a few lessons were ignored), the relevancy and potency of its message has perhaps only gotten stronger as the film approaches the 50th anniversary of its U.S. premiere. However, the message would mean very little indeed without a form, and Gillo Pontecorvo provides a truly remarkable one, full of anger, passion, and most of all humanity."

~ Ryan Swen

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Metropolis

“Fritz Lang’s Metropolis may not be the first science-fiction movie ever made, but it comes close, and 90 years after it was released, it remains possibly the genre’s most influential work. Especially in the version restored and released in 2010, it’s an epic of boundless imagination and passion, as awe-inspiring and relevant now as it was in 1927."

~ Josh Bell

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Au Hasard Balthazar

“Bresson is rightfully revered for taking great big abstractions like loss and transcendence and making fearless and unflinching films about them. On the surface, Au hasard, Balthasar details the life and cruel death of a donkey in rural France, yet also encompasses the suffering and descent into sexual nihilism of the donkey’s first owner Marie (the haunting Anne Wiazemsky), the cruelty that one man can inflict, indiscriminately, on beast and woman and fellow man, and the horrifyingly self-focused nature of humanity."

~ Jason Shawhan

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Andrei Rublev

"No other filmmaker has ever rivaled Tarkovsky’s ability to make the dreariest of settings feel sublimely beautiful. Andrei Rublev is a testament to the power of the artist to transcend—and transform—the world around him.”

~ Ian Scott Todd

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Persona

"Any number of established classics are good, even great, films to watch and re-watch, but how many of them possess this ability to turn themselves and the viewer inside out every time? How many can show you something new, no matter how many times you come back to them?”

~ Cole Roulain

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Rashomon

“Most modern works in which unreliable narrators reveal their motives and deceptive self-images by constructing competing narratives around the same event end up playing the discrepancies for laughs, or, worse, use it as a set-up before triumphantly revealing what ‘really’ happened. Rashomon leaves you uncertain about everything that happened... Now that the film is canonical, many people may overlook the fact that using a visual meeting that capitalizes on people's inclination to believe whatever their eyes are telling them to convey this message is highly subversive.”

~ Phillip Dyess-Nugent

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Hey everybody! Welcome to the announcement of this year's Muriels Hall of Fame inductees!

Before we get to our first movie, I just wanted to say something about a change to our voting system this year. Normally, our voters nominate their favorite eligible movies, then everyone simply picks from the nominees. But this year, in the interest of diversity, I decided to split up the ballot by region - the US, Western Europe, and the rest of the world. It was my hope that this might help us honor movies that weren't American, British or French, which are by far the most-represented nationalities in the Hall of Fame. Did it work? Stay tuned!

As always, we'll start with this year's 50th Anniversary Muriel Award winner, then announce the other inductees two per day until we've unveiled them all. So keep an eye on this page for the next week or so.

But enough of my yakkin' - let's boogie!

“How many hundreds of times have we heard Morricone's iconic coyote-howl theme used to signify ‘this is a western’? It's ironic that Leone's deconstruction of the genre has become one of its benchmarks, its imagery and sounds as famous as anything it was meant to satirize. But then again, it makes perfect sense." ~ Vern

Click here for the full piece.