THE BEST:

UNFORGIVEN (1992)



To my way of thinking, the best Best Pictures are both flawless examples of their genre and also communicate something about the era that produced them. Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western scores on both counts. Not only does the film offer blue ribbon acting from a Master Class ensemble featuring Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Frances Fisher, Jaimz Woolvett, Richard Harris and the Man With No Name himself, but Unforgiven also draws on the audience’s familiarity with Eastwood’s (and America’s) history of violence to reevaluate those legacies after twelve years of the Republican Party’s '80s go-round with faux-cowboy heroics. The beautifully constructed screenplay by David Webb Peoples is a sharp rebuke to the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Reagan/Bush years (not to mention a fair handful of Eastwood’s earlier films): drunken cowboys in the town of Big Whiskey maim one of the local whores, the whores seek retribution by hiring gunmen to kill the cowboys, and the town’s sadistic sheriff beats and kills the gunmen who show up. In the end, a lot of people are dead, nobody’s better off and justice has not been served. Sadly, the film’s grim portrayal of the futility of violence is just as timely now as it was at the dawn of our last “hope and change” administration.

AMADEUS (1984)



For starters, Amadeus is probably the best of the four other films nominated in 1984 (A Passage To India, The Killing Fields, Places In The Heart and A Soldier's Story), so it passes that basic test. Oddly enough, Amadeus is also one of the few movies that won Best Picture that I'd consider one of the ten best of its year — or at least close — and for a year that included Stranger Than Paradise, Once Upon A Time In America and The Terminator (just for starters), that's not bad at all. Amadeus probably won because it hit a number of reflexive buttons: it's a period costume drama where all the production and costume money is on-screen, it genuflects before Culture in the form of classical music without losing anyone with something truly alienating, it's based on a hit play, and it comes from a respectable, previously-lauded producer-director team. But the reasons Amadeus is actually pretty great have nothing to do with that and everything to do with the typical dry intelligence Milos Forman brought to the film. Forman treats this like a gigantic Brechtian exercise, paying meticulous attention to physical verisimilitude, then blowing it out with the likes of Jeffrey Jones and Tom Hulce — unmistakably American, out-of-place types. As in his later (not as good, still misunderstood) The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon, Forman scrupulously obeys the biopic formula, hitting all the high points of his subject's lives while refusing to shed any light on what made them tick. Point being:  who/what could possibly explain that?  It drives Salieri crazy that he can't figure out why God would waste his music on a drunken, disrespectful buffoon, but to Forman, that's just par for the course.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)



Arguably the first action movie to win Best Picture, The French Connection really announced (along with 1969's Midnight Cowboy triumph) a shift in what was considered acceptable award-winning fare; only a few years before, it was all treacly musicals and your occasional "serious" film. (In 1971, it was up against Nicholas And Alexandra, whose makers badly miscalculated the changing zeitgeist at some point.)  But it wasn't a permanent shift: The French Connection — absolutely lean, more reliant on atmosphere and street grit than characterization or take-home morals — is as anomalous-seeming a Best Picture winner now as it was then, which speaks badly of the Academy's heavy suet-pudding tastes. (Cue outraged Dark Knight fans here.)

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)



David Lean is perhaps the only filmmaker whose natural inclinations and talents coincided perfectly with exactly the kind of material the Academy responds to: big, splashy physical filmmaking, heavy on conspicuous visual coups and visibly virtuoso acting. As it happens, Lawrence is one of my favorite films, and therefore the most important time the Academy got it right. Lawrence actually is the Best Picture of 1962, a beautiful film that (without getting too heavyhanded about it) uses exterior landscapes as a mirror for its otherwise unknowable protagonist. But surely it helped that it's long, launched Peter O'Toole in an instantly starmaking performance, and somehow managed to avoid taking a single meaningful political stance. Lawrence Of Arabia wears its ambitions plainly in every aspect — title, length, subject matter — but it lives up to them, too.

REBECCA (1940)



Hitchcock’s first American film was a contentious one, as the Master of Suspense famously quarreled with mega-producer David O. Selznick over myriad issues regarding his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel. Such squabbles may have resulted in a film that feels somewhat more conventional than Hitch’s prior British works, but its preoccupation with emotional and psychological traumas nonetheless ultimately helped pave the way for the director’s future daring psychodramas. In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine takes up residence in the Brontë-esque home of her wealthy husband Laurence Olivier, where the specter of his deceased first wife looms large thanks in part to Judith Anderson’s unsettling manor servant, who remains devoted to her dead employer. Although devoid of significant aesthetic inventiveness, the director still generates a sumptuously creepy, unreal atmosphere that’s equally indebted to Wuthering Heights and Val Lewton’s horror classics. A technically superb thriller, it’s also an enduringly resonant depiction of societal expectations for, and demands on, women.

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager