The Red Shoes(Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
Moonrise(Frank Borzage)
Bicycle Thieves(Vittorio de Sica)
Letter From an Unknown Woman(Max Opuls)
Hamlet(Laurence Olivier)
The Pirate(Vincente Minnelli)
Bodyguard(Richard Fleischer)
Germany in Year Zero(Roberto Rossellini)
Oliver Twist(David Lean)
Call Northside 777(Henry Hathaway)
A Foreign Affair(Billy Wilder)
The Naked City(Jules Dassin)
The Paleface(Norman Z. McLeod)
A Woman's Vengeance(Zoltan Korda)
Macbeth(Orson Welles)
Drunken Angel(Akira Kurosawa)
Louisiana Story(Robert Flaherty)
Corridor of Mirrors(Terence Young)
Rope(Alfred Hitchcock)
For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.
Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are
marked with if I
currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to
being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit
them and they get a numeral. (Lists from prior to about 1988 are
especially suspect, as I compiled them long ago from memories that were
in many cases already pretty dusty.)
Seen but currently unrated (and not
presumptively among my top 10):Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein (Barton); All My Sons (Reis); Force of
Evil (Polonsky); Key Largo (Huston); La terra trema
(Visconti); The Last Stage (Jakubowska); Raw Deal
(Mann)
As yet unseen:Act of Violence
(Zinnemann); A Hen in the Wind (Ozu); Pitfall (De Toth)
I occasionally write reviews of older movies, but it happens too infrequently to file them by year.