Aaron Schimberg’s Top10

A couple years ago, someone over at the British Film Institute must have made some kind of clerical error, and as a result I was accidentally asked to submit to the Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll. I knew I would spend hundreds of hours agonizing over my choices, so I set a timer and gave myself ten minutes to produce a list. Then I showed my list to my friend John, who was staying with me at the time. He looked it over and said, “Bicycle Thieves? Come on, man.” So I replaced it with Bimbo’s Initiation.

A few months later I revisited Bicycle Thieves, which I stubbornly still call The Bicycle Thief, and regretted omitting it. What can I say—it’s a perfect film; I love The Bicycle Thief, and I won’t be shamed. Hear that, John? My six-year-old liked it too—though, truthfully, I think she preferred Bimbo’s Initiation.

There’s a moment where Pépé leans over and his suit jacket opens up, and you see his silk shirt with the monogram JG. Jean Gabin—the actor playing him. We like to think movie stars are mere mortals who are only playing these larger-than-life figures, and here JG is playing one of the most seductive, badass alpha-male antiheroes in French cinema. Yet, when we see his monogrammed shirt, he seems to be saying to us, “You adore Pépé, but he is nothing, a one-dimensional two-bit rogue—a local legend, maybe, in the casbah, while I am a legend to the world. I am Pépé and all the other great men who ever lived. I could play Napoleon (when will they let me?), Voltaire, Louis XIV, but these are all slugs compared to JG. This Pépé—if he existed, he would have my picture pinned to his wall, and he’d gaze up at it each night, copying my gestures and facial expressions, wishing he could be Gabin, dreaming that he had monogrammed shirts of his own. Meanwhile, I’m here on this Algerian-themed movie set twenty kilometers from my mansion in Paris, and after Julien yells ‘cut,’ my driver will take me home so that I can make love—real love, not make-believe movie love—to my costar Mademoiselle Balin.” That’s what his shirt says to me.

I like Harold Lloyd. You can learn something from him about what it’s like being an all-American go-getting everyman. Where else are you gonna learn about these things?

One of the best New York films, Speedy has Babe Ruth, a chase along the Williamsburg waterfront, Luna-era Coney Island making a mockery of the glorified parking lots we call amusement parks today. The plot revolves around public transportation. The industrialists—or is it the mob, or is it the local government?—are forcing out Pop’s horse-drawn streetcar line by any means necessary, so they can secure their electric-streetcar monopoly. Progress is another word for investment opportunity, and some very scary people are going to get their pockets lined. There’s no stopping it. The law won’t protect you, the preservation committee can’t save you, and no one is going to be sentimental about you when you’re gone, because soon they’ll plant some flowers on this abandoned train track and call it the High Line and the New York Times will declare it the greatest architectural marvel of the century and it will be packed with tourists saying, “So what should we do next?” New York works exactly like Speedy says it does, and that’s why New York no longer looks like it does in Speedy. That, and the fact that much of it was shot in Los Angeles.

Samuel Fuller—another all-American go-getter. And this film is another New York masterpiece. I saw it when I was quite young, with my dad, at the Oak Street Cinema in Minneapolis. Oak Street always played double features, and the first time we went there we couldn’t find it, so we pulled over and asked some college kids, “Can you tell us where there’s a theater playing Citizen Kane and Casablanca?” They looked at us like we were Marty McFly and Doc Brown just arrived from 1942 in our DeLorean.

For better or for worse, this movie is the reason I moved to New York. From the opening scene, I was hooked. I wanted to live alongside these lowlifes, and I wanted to live in a waterfront hovel. Half of my dreams came true. This movie basically captures city life. You got your commies; you got your cops who want them dead. Some things never change. This movie moves at its own pace, and it could conceivably break your neck, so strap in. It’s frivolous and heavy at the same time. Even the bit parts are tragic figures. To me, Rear Window is just another movie starring the woman from Pickup on South Street.

I have a soft spot for first films, or first-ish, or . . . what’s the word . . . early work. Some filmmakers emerge fully formed. They’ve made a masterpiece right out of the gate, so where do they go from here? If you’re one of these filmmakers, one option is to start making your films longer.

Then again, I like late films. Some directors run out of steam, lose their touch, get lazy, age gracelessly. Quentin Tarantino has strong feelings on this matter, but maybe he should watch more Carl Theodor Dreyer and less Fred Zinnemann.

. . . or middle-period films . . . or whatever period this counts as in a sixty-year career.

Some people find Bergman too theatrical, but I don’t understand the criticism. He obviously loved the theater and had a whole other career devoted to it, but he used theater and cinema to pursue different ends. An obvious example: he tended to direct established plays, whereas he wrote his films. I can think of plenty of classic movies that would be right at home on the stage, but the Bergman films of the sixties would not survive the transition, though people have tried.

The first fifteen minutes of Winter Light consist solely of a church service. Nothing else happens. All the dialogue in this scene is the pastor’s sermon, or whatever you call it. But the whole movie is laid out—the location of the church, who all the characters are, the nature of their relationships, what torments them—before the scene ends and you realize you’ve just sat through a quarter of an hour of church, and you were actually paying attention—in fact, you were riveted. Not many filmmakers could pull that off or would even think of trying. The experience of watching this same scene onstage would feel a lot like sitting in church.

I watch this every election year. What intrigues me about Altman is that he hit upon—or, I should say, developed, invented—this unique filmmaking process or formula, and he could apply it to a sprawling three-hour film with 217 characters, or to a one-man, one-room show, or to a half-hour TV show, or to a western, musical, noir, dreamy psychological thriller . . . and the formula tends to work like magic, and the result is this singular body of work.

But then sometimes it doesn’t work and you’re watching the worst thing you’ve ever seen. Strangely, the terrible films don’t appear to be substantially different from the masterpieces—you can’t tell what’s going wrong, why it’s not coming together, what he could have done differently. You can’t even kind of appreciate it for what it is; there are no redeeming qualities except that it’s unmistakably a Robert Altman film. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing the only thing he knows how, and he’s the only one who knows how to do it.

My wife Airbnb’d at Monte Hellman’s Laurel Canyon house with the man himself. He showed off his Super Audio CD collection—she got there just as his long-awaited SACD of Let It Be . . . Naked arrived from Japan. In my fantasy, Neil Young was going on about audio quality to Dean Stockwell, who told Jack Nicholson, and eventually word got to Monte, and that’s how he went down the SACD rabbit hole. But I have no evidence to support this.

He defrosted some Trader Joe’s pizza and then he and my wife sat on the edge of his bed and watched his film Road to Nowhere—speaking of late films. He didn’t hit on her; nothing untoward happened. Very friendly. I’ve heard he watched this film with his other Airbnb guests as well—an underrated film!

She said his swimming pool was like the one Joe Gillis ends up in. She came home and said, “I don’t want to move to Los Angeles anymore.” Hollywood doesn’t always appreciate its finest artists.

The older I get, the more I sympathize with Dylan yelling at all these people.