The Top Five

A former student of mine, an intelligent and sincere young man, says he's not all that big on movies. That's too bad. He certainly understood all the books and poems he read in my class, and some of them were pretty difficult. Heart of Darkness is not for duffers.

Maybe he's been watching the wrong movies.

I'm an unapologetic film enthusiast. I like movies better than books, and I really like books a lot.

But it has to be the good stuff. I don't watch mass mania products like Batman Unfurled, or whateve the hell it's called.

So in the spirit of a would-be connoisseur, fan, and semi-snob, let me offer what I consider the top five among all the movies I've seen. I'm not saying that these were necessarily the best films ever made, but just the ones that I've enjoyed the most, and that I can watch again and again.

1. A Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick in about 1970. Stars Malcolm MacDowell as the dangerous, charming, and completely sane sociopath Alex DeLarge. With his gang of "droogs" he spends the London nights roaming and stealing, committing random acts of senseless violence, and casually fornicating. The thefts and sex are just garnishes; raw sadism is the real payoff.

Anthony Burgess, who wrote the novel, didn't like Kubrick's movie because it leaves out the concluding and ambivalent twenty-first chapter. For my money, it's the best examination of the origins and rationale of sociopathy there ever was. It also takes up the question of whether such people's minds can be conditioned into more normal proportions, or you might say, into "morality."

This movie is not for the squeamish.

2. Fellini Satyricon, based on the fragmentary first-century Roman novel by Petronius, directed by Federico Fellini about 1969, and starring nobody in particular.

Nothing can prepare the viewer for the purely visual and audial impact of this film, and it's not meant to be understood or even watched so much as looked at and listened to. No other film looks like this, and I've heard from several sources that the genius behind the vision was not Fellini, who had very little understanding of the technical requirements of his craft, but his set builder and artistic director, a gentleman named Danilo.

Only disconnected pieces of Petronius's story remain, and this is reflected in the movie's lack of continuity. There's little or nothing in the way of segue or logical organization.

Satyricon is a study of perversion, corruption, the rootlessness and purposelessness of ordinary people in a demoralized and rigidly stratified society, the debasement of art and morality, and the cynicism born of the death of idealism. There's no doubt Fellini saw people's circumstances under the ancient and decrepit empire as an analog for life in modern times.

Like A Clockwork Orange, this movie is also not for the faint of heart. Every scene is a freak show.

3. Colonel Chabert, a 1994 surprise masterpiece by first-time director Yves Angelo stars Gerard Depardieu in the title role and features an incredible performance by Fabrice Luchini as the high-powered lawyer who volunteers to help the old soldier recover his property and his place in society.

Based on a novel by Honore de Balzac, the story concerns a Napoleonic war hero thought to have been killed at the Battle of Eylau, and the movie begins and ends on the battlefield, in the aftermath of the bloodletting. When Chabert shows up in Paris years later and after the fall of Napoleon, there are numerous people who are understandably unhappy to see him alive.

This is another film which, like the first two on the list, might be called an anatomy of corruption. A scene in which Luchini as the lawyer Derville describes to Chabert the betrayals and moral atrocities he witnesses daily in his office, and in which he sometimes participates, is almost unbelieveably simultaneously restrained, quiet, and intense.

This movie is completely tight and crafted. It has no weaknesses that I can see, and this from a rookie director. I wonder what else he has up his sleeve. Unfortunately, as of this writing the film is not yet available on DVD.

4. The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks, is a 1946 adaptation of the novel by Raymond Chandler. The ultimate noir film, it stars Humphrey Bogart as the hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe, and Lauren Bacall.

For reasons I don't understand, one of this movie's charms is that its plot is so byzantine and convoluted that it's impossible to follow or understand. Even Chandler admitted to having a hard time comprehending it. This is tantamount to an admission by the film's creators that their production isn't the least bit about story, but an abstract exercise in ambience, texture, and atmosphere.

When the first version of The Big Sleep was shot in 1945, Bogart and Bacall had just met. When it was partially re-shot nearly a year later they were married. You can't watch this movie without picking up on the tremendous electrical charge of sexual energy between the lead actors. Some of the looks Bacall gives her leading man would melt glass.

5. Barry Lyndon was made by Stanley Kubrick in about 1975, and stars Ryan O'Neil in the title role, and the fashion model Marissa Berenson as the rich, beautiful, and vapid Lady Lyndon.

This is a protest film. At a time when the pacing of Hollywood films was constantly accelerating through the use of frenetic cross-cutting, constant camera movement, and rapid-fire dialogue, Kubrick deliberately emphasized the slow, august unfolding of a classical eighteenth-century tale, written in the nineteenth century by William Thackery. In many scenes the camera is motionless, there is almost no action, and the overall effect is stagey.

At the same time, Kubrick's technique is sometimes revolutionary here. He was experimenting extensively with high-speed film, and some of the interior scenes were shot using only candlelight. A wildly careening hand-held camera captures some of the rare action scenes where appropriate, creating a sharp contrast with the placid, almost glacial pace of the greater part of the narrative. There's even a silent movie within the movie -- a couple minutes shot through a blue filter in which the lead actors, moving like Kabuki players in powdered wigs, engage in a stylized embrace and kiss to the slow, spare, echoing notes from a classical keyboard piece.

This is a connoisseur's film, and its impeccable technique combined with ideological insolence impelled the director Martin Scorsese to watch it for 100 consecutive days, every afternoon at a theatre in lower Manhattan.

The story concerns a brash young rake and social climber who climbs too high, then topples off his perch like a sack of coal. Don't even try to watch it if your idea of a good movie is one with lots of car chases and fight scenes, and don't be in a rush to go anywhere; it lasts about three hours.