Taking a cue from a Facebook friend, I recently visited a "Movie Challenge" site listing "100 Movies to See Before You Die." I scored pretty well, having seen all but eight of the films enumerated. However, I wouldn't recommend this "challenge" as any sort of test of cinematic literacy; to my mind, that requires a much deeper grasp of film history than this round-up represents. It's a list decidedly skewed toward the relatively recent.
A few observations to illustrate my point:
The oldest movie listed is 1939's Gone with the Wind. This excludes all sorts of foundational works, from films by the German and Soviet masters (Murnau, Lang, Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov) to Hollywood's silent kings of comedy (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd), from the pioneering shorts and features of D. W. Griffith to thirties musicals.
Roman Polanski's 1974 Chinatown (a great work, to be sure) is on the list, but the hard-boiled detective tradition to which it belongs is otherwise absent. John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), without which Chinatown would have been inconceivable, aren't there.
Similarly, the only Westerns included are Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992). Not that these are bad films by any means, but where are John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956), Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959), Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1953), and Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969)?
Classic art-house cinema is represented only by Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) and Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960). There's nothing by Renoir, Rosselini, Bergman, Antonioni, Bresson, Ozu, or the French New Wave.
Alfred Hitchcock, arguably the most influential and certainly the most written-about director in the Anglo-American tradition, is represented only by Psycho (1960). Steven Spielberg, on the other hand, is there with four—count 'em, four—films: Jaws (1975), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Schindler's List (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
And what are some other dubious inclusions? Almost Famous (2000), The Artist (2011), Chicago (2002), District 9 (2009) Donnie Darko (2001), Moneyball (2011), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Superman (1978), WALL-E (2008). None of these is a terrible film, and some of them are actually pretty good. But movies you should see before you die? There are better lists out there. For starters, check out the British Film Institute's "50 Greatest" compilation.
