Believe it or not, this year’s class of inductees brings us to a nice round 100 films in the Muriels Hall of Fame. And despite a few blind spots (I’ll get to those in a bit), I think we’ve built ourselves a pretty darn good list of classic films. If someone was trying to learn more about film history, I’d proudly point them to our list as a good starting point.
Before we get to this year’s voting results, here’s something for all you statistics geeks out there:
- All but three of our inducted films appeared in the most recent “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” compilation of the greatest films of all time (the holdouts: Duck Amuck, Gojira, and What’s Opera, Doc?). 49 of the inductees are among TSPDT’s top 100. The highest-placing films that we haven’t inducted yet are: Battleship Potemkin (#14), Some Like It Hot (#28), La Dolce Vita (#29), Ordet (#33), and L’Avventura (#37).
- 75% of our inductees ranked in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll’s top 250 films list. Highest-ranked holdouts include: Battleship Potemkin [again] (#11), Late Spring (#15), L’Avventura (#21), Contempt (#21), and Ordet (#24). Hey, what do you folks have against Eisenstein?
- Twelve of our inducted films were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Three of them won (Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Lawrence of Arabia).
- Only two documentaries have been inducted thusfar. Not awesome, but maybe not surprising either. A lot of eligible documentaries are in a style that’s pretty different from what we generally associate with non-fiction filmmaking today, thus rendering folks like Robert Flaherty out of fashion. Side note: Pretty much every Frederick Wiseman film can be found on Kanopy!
- Muriel’s favorite filmmakers are: Howard Hawks (six inducted films), Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa (5 apiece), and Luis Buñuel (3).
- Three of our inducted films were directed or co-directed by women. That doesn’t sound like a lot, except that directing jobs for women weren’t exactly plentiful 50+ years ago. So hey – not too shabby!
- Five directors who’ve been inducted are still alive: Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising), John Boorman (Point Blank), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless and Weekend), Roman Polanski (Repulsion), and Michael Snow (Wavelength). Two more- Stanley Donen and Agnès Varda- were inducted while they were still alive but have since passed away *sniff*.
- 51 of the inducted films contain dialogue that is primarily in English. The next most-spoken languages are: French (16, not counting Battle of Algiers), Japanese (8), and Italian (3). Thirteen of the films are silent.
- 56 out of the 100 inducted films have been released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Criterion Collection or, in the case of Daisies, by Eclipse. This includes, believe it or not, every film with a primary spoken language other than English. I supposed that says something about the “Criterion-ization” of world cinema history, with the good folks at Criterion largely shouldering the burden for bringing classic foreign films to American audiences. However, that would be a job for a better writer than I, and someone with rather more space than I’ve given myself here.
- Finally, here’s the breakdown of the inducted films by decade: 1 from the 1900s (take a bow, Georges Méliès!), 9 from the 1920s, 13 from the 1930s, 20 from the 1940s, 26 from the 1950s, 30 from the 1960s. I could speculate as to why the distribution has been weighted toward more recent work, but one obvious factor is the 50th Anniversary Awards automatically inducting films, and considering we’ve only been voting in this category since 2007 (for 1957 releases), that certainly would skew the results.
Anyway, for those of you who are still with us, here are this year’s voting results. This year, we divided up the final ballot into three categories, as shown below. An asterisk denotes this year’s inductees.
Category A - Directors of Previously Inducted Films
* Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks, USA) [8 votes]
* Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks, USA) [6 votes]
* Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa, Japan) [6 votes]
* Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone, USA) [6 votes]
* Week-End (1967, Jean-Luc Godard, France) [6 votes]
5 votes
The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk, USA)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski, USA)
4 votes
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles, USA)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson, France)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford, USA)
One Froggy Evening (1955, Charles M. Jones, USA)
Strangers on a Train (1951, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch, USA)
Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Germany)
Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
3 votes
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles, Spain)
Day of Wrath (1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
Gertrud (1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin, USA)
I Was Born, But… (1932, Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, Alain Resnais, France)
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray, USA)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder, USA)
2 votes:
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel, France)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick, USA)
Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls, France)
Lolita (1962, Stanley Kubrick, UK)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941, Preston Sturges, USA)
Umberto D. (1952, Vittorio de Sica, Italy)
1 vote:
The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
Summertime (1955, David Lean, USA)
Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
Category B - Directors With No Previously-Inducted Films (English-Language)
* Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero, USA) [12 votes]
* It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra, USA) [10 votes]
* Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim, USA) [8 votes]
7 votes
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich, USA)
6 votes
All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA)
5 votes
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn, USA)
A Hard Day’s Night! (1964, Richard Lester, UK)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer, USA)
4 votes
The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols, USA)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli, USA)
Portrait of Jason (1967, Shirley Clarke, USA)
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage, USA)
3 votes
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone, USA)
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith, USA)
Report (1967, Bruce Conner, USA)
Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer, USA)
The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, UK)
A Star Is Born (1954, George Cukor, USA)
2 votes
The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise, USA)
Park Row (1952, Samuel Fuller, USA)
Shadows (1959, John Cassavetes, USA)
1 vote
The Hitch-Hiker (1953, Ida Lupino, USA)
Category C - Directors With No Previously-Inducted Films (Non-English-Language)
* Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju, France) [12 votes]
* La Belle et la Bête (1946, Jean Cocteau, France) [11 votes]
* Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné, France) [11 votes]
* The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti, Italy) [10 votes]
8 votes
Black Girl (1966, Ousmane Sembène, Senegal)
Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Louis Malle, France)
Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin, France)
6 votes
Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst, Germany)
4 votes
Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff, France)
Unsere Afrikareise (1966, Peter Kubelka, Austria)
3 votes
The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR)
2 votes
Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor, India)
Fires on the Plain (1959, Kon Ichikawa, Japan)
The Human Condition, Part I: No Greater Love (1959, Masaki Kobayashi, Japan)
Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Orpheus (1950, Jean Cocteau, France)
Thanks to everybody for follow us for this year’s festivities. The site should be updated within the next week. See you this winter for this year’s Muriels!
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