Nearly 20 years ago (time flies) the American Film Institute made a list of the top 100 American movies for the centenary of American film. They made the list by
[inviting] more than 1,500 leaders from across the American film community – screenwriters, directors, actors, producers, cinematographers, editors, executives, film historians and critics among them – to choose from a list of 400 nominated films compiled by AFI and select the 100 greatest American movies.
Which is okay, I guess. This is a pretty good crowd to ask about movies; they should know a fair bit about them. But they limited them to a pre-culled list of 400, which is not so great. But the really interesting thing was that 9 years later, in 2007 they did it again.
The brief text on their site makes it sound like they asked all the same people again, thought I would have expected at least a few of them to have been unavailable. Perhaps some of them had died in the intervening years, or were out of town, disinclined to participate, something. Be that as it may, the differences between the lists are what really caught my attention. And there are some significant differences. Hit that jump and let’s discuss.
In the space of 10 years, the list turned over by nearly a quarter. 23 films dropped off and 23 new ones were added. If this is the list of the best of the best of the best, then I wouldn’t have expected that much change and if it did have that much change I would have thought that most of the new films were from the intervening 10ish years. Nope. Only 3, maybe 4, of the “new” 23 were not yet made when the first list released. (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Sixth Sense, Saving Private Ryan, and maybe Titanic.)
Here are the other 19 newly added films:
- Toy Story
- The Shawshank Redemption
- Do the Right Thing
- Sophie’s Choice
- Blade Runner
- All the President’s Men
- Nashville
- Cabaret
- The Last Picture Show
- In the Heat of the Night
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- Spartacus
- 12 Angry Men
- Sullivan’s Travels
- Swing Time
- A Night at the Opera
- Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
- The General
- Intolerance
- Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
- A Place in the Sun
- My Fair Lady
- The Jazz Singer
- Patton
- Frankenstein
- Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
- Fargo
- Giant
- Dances with Wolves
- Wuthering Heights
- An American in Paris
- The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- Stagecoach
- Rebel Without a Cause
- Fantasia
- The Third Man
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- Amadeus
- From Here to Eternity
- The Birth of a Nation
- Doctor Zhivago
Neh 