Best Film Ensembles of All Time Part III: 11-20 Adam's List

This is Part III of a series in which Adam Spector of Adam's Rib and I count down out top 50 film ensembles of all time. Part I is here and Part II is here and the final ten are here. Because Adam and I went into so much detail, we split this entry into two with the other entry here. Part V is here.

Adam's List
11. The Sting 12. Dazed and Confused 13. Do the Right Thing 14. Eight Men Out 15. Fast Times at Tidgemont High 16. American Graffiti 17. Short Cuts 18. Glengarry Glen Ross 19. Prince of the City 20. The Royal Tenenbaums

 Orrin's Response:

In your attempts to disqualify certain films from my list for not being ensemble films, you make an interesting point. While we've both pointed to films with ensembles we admire (Dead Poets Society or Back to the Future fall into this category), the ensemble film itself is a genre of sorts both in how it's presented to the audiences and how those audiences look for familiar conventions (for example, the skillful spreading out of a narrative over several characters) within those films. 

Put in more commercial terms, an ensemble film is also how a movie is sold: Look at the posters to Grand Budapest Hotel or Emilio Estevez's Bobby and the main message is "look at how many stars we were able to get into one picture!"

I would argue that the "ensemble film" angle is pretty much the only reason anyone could possibly have gotten excited about the 2012 film The Avengers (or any of its subsequent sequels and pseudo-sequels) and why it's the fifth highest grossing film ever. 

Part of what we've applauded is bold ways of going about casting (in commercial terms, we can call this a gimmick although I don't think it deserves the pejorative connotation). Salt of the Earth used actual miners, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 used actual ex-convicts, Around the World in 80 Days loaded the cast with cameos, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (and Stephen Soderbergh's Informant also tried this) used a who's who of comic actors, but as you point out in the latter case, just putting in those people on screen doesn't equal great results.

An example is Do the Right Thing. Spike Lee's bold approach (or gimmick) was having a full cast loaded with more black people than I imagine audiences even knew of at the time. I imagine it was just Denzel Washington, Lawrence Fishburne (who worked with Spike Lee on his last film), Ossie Davis, Morgan Freeman, and that guy who won an Oscar for An Officer and a Gentleman were the only black people audiences could name at the time, and he showed one could fill a great film with a dozen or so black actors all turning excellent performances. He even took a chance on his own sister and it worked! What's more, there's a lot of texture and color in all of the parts which must have been a game changer. And that's not to mention the humanizing turn of Danny Aiello.

Prince of the City, similarly, is a bold achievement in casting. It condensed a highly detailed police case with an incredibly dense source material, Robert Daley's 1978 account of an informant in the police department responsible for 52 indictments. The fact that the final screenplay has over 100 speaking parts must be a big deal as it's mentioned on both TCM and IMDB's trivia section (and pretty much any review of the movie if you google "over 100 speaking parts" "prince of the city"). But at the risk of offending the Sidney Lumet estate (and you for graciously lending me the DVD), this is another case where bold casting doesn't necessarily equal a great ensemble in my opinion. I don't really need to argue this through quantitative means because I got all the evidence I need when I went over to the IMDB page to write about the actors and couldn't remember any of them except for the ones I already knew (all three of them). All I remember about this film a mere three weeks after watching it is Jerry Orbauch has a sinister smile and that Bob Balaban is in the film with an inordinate amount of hair. And I'll go a step further and posit that because the ensemble fails, the film fails as a whole to justify its 3-hour running time (something that admittedly tries my patience more with home viewing). The film needed some of the color that say Danny Aiello or Ossie Davis bought to their parts.

A great example of a supporting role that adds color is in my favorite Coen Brothers film, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Charles Durning delivers a larger-than-life performance that plays on our imagination of Southern populist archetypes as Pappy O'Daniel. It was because of that performance that whenever I see Durning in a film's opening credits, I get a tinge of anticipation over what he will do. That's how character actors and ensemble pieces serve as gateways to other films. It's how Prince and the City (at least for me) failed to introduce me to a single intriguing actor, but how I started to get intrigued enough to decide to give The Sting a try. 

I'm glad I did because there are a million great things about both the film and its ensemble. Chief among them, Robert Shaw is a terrifying villain. His physical embodiment of the part was so masterful, that I half-believed he trained himself not to blink. It also helps that Charles Dierkop mirrors the gravity of his presence so well as a personal body guard. I also think it's interesting to note that Eileen Brennan is downright oozing with sexiness here and this is only seven years removed from her role in Private Benjamin where she's largely an asexual and menacing counterpoint to the happy-go-lucky troops under her command. There's also Robert Earl Jones in a part that treats race as such a non-issue, it almost feels like the part could have been written for a white person. I suppose that's good? But appropriately enough, this is largely about the lead and that's Robert Redford. I always found it odd that Paul Newman and Robert Redford are two actors of roughly equivalent caliber yet Paul Newman has nine Oscar nominations and Redford has one. I just looked it up and it's apparently this movie that Redford has his only Oscar nomination which is fitting since he really steals the show. His character is a guy who has to project confidence for a living, but Redford imbues the role with a definite sense of anxiety layered underneath and that adds a much needed sense of tension.

Lastly, Eight Men Out: I like this plenty as a movie, but I think I love it as an ensemble pick. It just looks so ridiculous on paper: Sherriff Pepper (the silliest character bar-none in the entire JamesBond series) as a baseball commissioner? You have rising stars Charlie Sheen and John Cusack in your cast but you're going to relegate them to supporting roles while having a nobody (D.B. Sweeney) as Shoeless Joe Jackson (the only character I knew of from this chapter in history)? Turns it out it's a far more interesting film to make Joe Jackson more of an uninteresting accessory and honing in on John Cusack as the main character because his character of Buck Weaver did actually have the free agency to at least decide something while Jackson sat on the fence. It's thematically appropriate to have the more charismatic actor steal the thunder. They don't have much Charlie Sheen here but after watching some episodes of Two and a Half Men, I don't mind never seeing that guy act again, though I found it a puzzling from a commercial perspective. Michael Rooker also is a striking image as first baseman Chick Gandil because he has the body type of a jock which is why it's understandable he might not have been cast in much else.

The other actor that I felt glued to here was David Strathairn who is perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated turn in Good Night and Good Luck but who I have come to know on a weekly basis from the SyFy series Alphas (which made my top ten a few years ago) where he plays a Professor X type. It was really surreal to see him play a youthful athletic type and I was really impressed.

I didn't get around to watching Short Cuts, but, hey I've seen seven Robert Altman films at this point, and while I like his style just fine, I couldn't get myself to watch another one of his films because I know so much what to expect. To use a Passover reference, let me ask you the manishtana of movie questions (and feel free to imagine the voice of an 8-year old singing these words): "Why is this Robert Altman film different from all other Robert Altman films?, from all other Robert Altman films?"

The other film I never got around to watching was Dazed and Confused? Are you sure you're not confusing that with Slackers? They seem like the exact same thing?

Adam's response:

There’s nothing wrong with all-star casts in and of themselves, but like anything their worth depends on how they are used.  In 1974, Sidney Lumet directed Murder on the Orient Express, which came earlier on my list.  That worked because the actors although stars were right for their parts and served the story.  However, there were other films in that era, such as The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, and other disaster movies, where as you noted the all-star cats didn’t really add much and were more of a marketing gimmick.  Some later Woody Allen films, such as To Rome with Love, felt the same way.   It can be used to mask a mediocre story or production.

By contrast, filling the screen with unknown actors, especially if they are indigenous to that area, can lend a film authenticity.  For example, I recently saw Tanna, set on the remote Pacific Coast Island of that name, where the roles were played by members of a local tribe.  That may be an extreme example, but for Matewan, also earlier on my list, John Sayles said that he cast many actors from areas of West Virginia similar to where the film was set.      

That brings us to Prince of the City, on which we will likely never agree. Lumet cast many unknown New York theater actors.  Many of them were not heard from again in any major way, but I don’t think that takes away from their performances.  For that movie and for those roles they succeeded.   Together, they all successfully portrayed an insular world gradually closing in.    Treat Williams didn’t become the major star he seemed destined to be at one point.   Still here he has both the cockiness and vulnerability to be the tragic hero the film needs.    And the film was not without standouts, including Orbach who fit as a tough sarcastic New York cop so well he would return to it often for the rest of his life, Lindsay Crouse, and the aforementioned James Tolkan.

So let me move to where we do agree.  The Coen Brothers are masters at finding the right actors to bring color to supporting roles.  It started with their first film, Blood Simple, with M. Emmet Walsh as the greedy private eye.    They worked with Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, John Carroll Lynch, Peter Stomare, Ben Gazzara, Jon Polito, Tim Blake Nelson, and so many other That Guy actors.  You could argue that they cast their films like no one else.  Charles Durning in O, Brother Where Art Thou?, as you noted, has fun with Southern archetypes.  He did the same thing in The Muppet Movie as the villain, Doc Hopper.   

Source: HelensDelicious.Blogspot.com

The truth is that Durning is a true supporting actor who made the leading men, and the films, better, whether it was George Clooney in O, Brother Where Art Thou?, Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, or even the Muppets.  I am glad that he led you to The Sting, which was his big break.   Ironically, The Sting is often grouped together with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as both were directed by Gorge Roy Hill, and of course featured Paul Newman and Robert Redford.  But those two films are very different.  Butch Cassidy is a true buddy movie centering on the two title characters.  The Sting, as you noted, has so much more than the two stars.  Someday I need to go back and see more of Robert Shaw’s films, as I have only seen him in four.  The physical embodiment you speak of is both Shaw’s talent and a happy accident.  Shortly before filming Shaw hurt his knee playing tennis.  With little alternative, Shaw made the limp part of the character, which somehow added to the menace.  Besides the actors you note, there’s also Harold Gould, who steals every scene as the elegant Kid Twist, and Ray Walston who performs verbal gymnastics as the fake race announcer.     You had an insightful take on Redford, projecting confidence but with anxiety layered underneath.  He did the same in The Candidate and All the President’s Men.  

John Sayles excelled at ensemble casting, and I could have included much more of his films than I did.  Eight Men Out was such a nuanced, complex take on the Black Sox scandal that it could have only worked with a wide range of talented actors.  Sayles has never relied on star power, and it’s no accident that he relegated Sheen to the background while Sweeney and Cusack did more of the heavy lifting. Before this Cusack had been doing mostly teen films.  Clearly Sayles saw something in him that others missed.  Cusack’s final monologue perfectly captures Buck Weaver’s love for the game and the bitterness at the way he was treated.  Sayles discovered Strathairn and cast him several times.  It looked like Strathairn might become a leading man after Good Night and Good Luck but you get the sense that he prefers to let others have the spotlight.  

Source: AMC.com

 

Let’s close with your two questions (we need two more to fully merit your Ma Nishtana reference, but there’s one more entry left).  Short Cuts certainly shared the ensemble DNA of many of Altman’s signature films, Nashville in particular.   I included this because each smaller story could have worked as its own film, largely on the strength of the acting.  Altman combines stars such as Jack Lemmon, some of his usual suspects, such as Lily Tomlin and Lyle Lovett, with character actors. Jennifer Jason Leigh pulls off playing a phone sex line worker getting a caller off while simultaneously taking care of her young kids which such aplomb that it should have gotten her an Oscar nomination 22 years before she finally got one.  

Finally, while Richard Linklater directed both Slacker and Dazed and Confused, both are set in the Austin era, and both feature excellent ensembles, they are not very similar. The former, as noted earlier, goes from one set of characters to the next, never to return.  The latter is more of an American Graffiti type ensemble film, where the characters have their own adventures but they all connect.  Dazed and Confused created the Matthew McConaughey persona while also providing an early showcase for Ben Affleck and Parker Posey.   Linklater filled out the cast with up-and-coming character actors, including Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Joey Lauren Adams, Rory Cochrane and Wiley Wiggins.    Give it a chance.

 

If the AFI 100 Greatest Films series added 18 new entries

In 1997, the American Film Institute released a landmark list of the 100 greatest English-language films in the history of cinema. This was what single-handedly turned me on to classic films. Before that point, I had no idea how any of the few older films I had seen were considered against the greats. If you had asked me to guess the top 100 before seeing the list, I might have guessed films like the Vincente Minnelli film Kismet (which is, in fact, considered one of his worst but I liked it plenty), The Pink Panther, Lion King, Back to the Future (which DOES deserve to be on the list), An American Tail, or Cool Runnings.

My own personal experiences aside, the AFI's list deserves acclaim for being balanced, comprehensive, and very much in line with popular opinion, cultural impact and critical standing. In 2007, the AFI rereleased their list with members revoting. Although ten years and a whole batch of new films had passed between lists, only four films released since 1997 made the new cut: Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Sixth Sense, and Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. Instead of adding new entries, the AFI spent most of their energy amending the catalogue of films from the original time period, 1996-1996, to correct oversights such as the General, Do the Right Thing, Cabaret, Shawshank Redemption, 12 Angry Men, Blade Runner and 12 others.

So the scenario I'm exploring today is what if the AFI voted to add 18 new films to the original 122 that have been included in either of the lists. This way, no classic films have to be bumped out. I'm only interested in films that overlap with the most recent film to be featured so far which was Lord of the Rings, so no films after 2001 will be considered and since 18 films were added from the existing time period, I'm picking that number.

Here would be my predictions in order of likelihood.

1. The Conversation (1974) dir. Frances Ford Copolla-Starring Gene Hackman as a secretive surveillance official with a crisis of conscience, the film is timeless and especially thematically relevant. It was a Best Picture nominee (competing against Copolla's other masterpiece Godfather II) and widely considered to be on par with Copolla's other films that have landed on the AFI list.

2. Back to the Future (1985) dir. Rob Zemeckis- It's a favorite of mine, but it's very clearly a favorite of a generation and a venerable time capsule of film making in the 80's. The AV Club's Inventory named it the film that defined the 80's in their list of twelve films that defined their decades. Beyond that, it combines the best of several 80's genres (teen movie, scifi, comedy of misadventures) and hits that sweet spot between audience favorite and respectable classic. It's one of the first blockbusters to expand into a trilogy and simultaneously enjoys the status of a cult film today: Something that's endlessly rewatched, celebrated, and dissected.

3. Touch of Evil (1958) dir. Orson Welles-After making Citizen Kane at the ripe age of 26, widely considered to be the best film of all-time, Welles saw his career get severely roadblocked by Hollywood and the bitter vendetta of the Hearst empire and as such, must of his talent as a director was severely dampened by studio influence. Towards the end of his career he made one of his best works: A riff on Othello that was adapted from the short story "Badge of Courage." The film was heavily tampered with by the studio (Universal) and buried in the back half of a double feature with no promotion. In the last few years of the 20th Century as the best of the century lists rolled out Touch of Evil gained popularity just as the director's cut was released. It made lists by Entertainment Weekly, Guinness book of Films, the National Society of Film Critic's A-List and Tim Dirks' website filmsite.org. Beyond that, its a stunning film that I'd count as two or three of my favorites.

4. Alien (1979) dir. Ridley Scott- Like Back to the Future, Alien hits the sweet spot between audience favorite and critical darling and transcends the genre trap of sci-fi. That Sigourney Weaver earned an Oscar nomination for a genre part is a testament of how iconic that character became. It's also fair to say Alien was boundary-pushing. It also ranks #36 on the greatest films of all-time by Time Out Magazine.

5. His Girl Friday (1940) dir. Howard Hawks- Cited by both Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper as one of the ten most glaring omissions of the 1997 list, His Girl Friday is the quintessential screwball comedy that many other romcoms consciously or unconsciously borrowed from. Although another of Hawk's screwball comedies, "Bringing Up Baby", made the list, "His Girl Friday" is a sharper work that showcases Cary Grant as a strong character who can match wits with the best of them which is how he deserves to be remembered. The film might owe its effectiveness to the fact that it was adapted from a film ("The Front Page") in which both leads were men. How's that for gender equality.

6. Big Sleep (1946) dir. Howard Hawks- If I'm not mistaken, Hawks only has one film in the AFI top 122 and if that's the case, that's downright baffling when one considers the sheer contribution of landmark films he made in nearly every genre. Big Sleep, for example, is one of the earliest trailblazers of film noir in its American form which is even more impressive when considered that few other films pushed the form's boundaries as far in terms of a labryrinthine story, an unapolagetically raw hero and risque dialogue.

7. Badlands (1973) dir. Terrence Malick- Malick made two films in the 1970's that grew his legend as he went into reclusion for 20 years before he made another pair of films that were both hailed as masterpieces. Malick is a director who has a unique style with incomparable cinematography that would make any comprehensive list of American films incomplete without his name on it. Badlands was the film which introduced his style to the world and its antiheroes- a pair of lovebirds on a killing spree- helped define the counterculture of the 70's.

8. The Awful Truth (1937) dir. Leo McCarey- A screwball comedy and melodrama that that won Best Director for Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth is an unconventional love story in that its about divorce. Time Magazine said it was "possibly the greatest love story ever made."

9. LA Confidential (1997) dir. Curtis Hanson -The star-studded modern-day noir stands the test of time as a relatively pure recreation of a genre that's near-dead. It was ranked among the top-rated films of the 90's when I conducted a poll of over 100 people and it seems to be reserved with classic status.

10. How the West was Won (1963) dir. John Ford-The film was the last of John Ford's Best Picture nominees and it could be argued that, in terms of scope, it was his ultimate masterpiece. The film was a grandiose spectacle on the level of David Lean and Cecille B. DeMille, and it borrowed a page from D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" in the way it intertwined stories from different time periods.  It had the appeal of Best Picture winners "Around the World in 80 Days" or "Greatest Show on Earth" but unlike those two, it could actually be considered a work of art.

8 more
11. Being There  (1979), directed by Hal Ashby, starring Peter Sellers, starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melyn Douglas, Jack Warden
12. The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin, starring Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Lee J Cobb, Linda Blair, Jason Miller
13. Almost Famous (2000), directed by Cameron Crowe, starring Patrick Fugit, Frances McDormand, Jason Lee, Kate Hudson, Zooey Deschanel, Philip Seymour Hoffman
14. Night of the Hunter (1955), directed by Charles Laughton, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Peter Graves, Lillian Gish, James Gleason
15. The Matrix (1999), directed by Andrew and Lana Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Hugo Weaving, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Gloria Foster
16. Terms of Endearment (1983) directed by James L Brooks, starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, John Lithgow, Danny DeVito
17. East of Eden (1955), directed by Elia Kazan, starring James Dean, Raymond Massey, Julie Harris, Burl Ives, Jo Van Fleet
18. Blue Velvet (1986)-directed by David Lynch, starring Isabella Rossellini, Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Hope Lange

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Do please click on this link to this article about how movies seem to be culturally 25 years behind pop music. It's how I earn my revenue: https://bitly.com/jHuiX0


"Do the Right Thing" was a film that I was so interested in a couple years ago that I read about it in my textbooks and from Roger Ebert. When the film finally became available on netflix, the problem with watching it was that I already knew all the plot details.

For those of you lucky enough to not make that mistake: "Do the Right Thing" takes place over the course of a summer day on a primarily African-American occupied street in Brooklyn that's experiencing a heat wave. Spike Lee said that he researched that studies show there's a lot more crime during heat waves. So both metaphorically and literally, simmering tensions escalate over the course of the day. Much of the action happens in an Italian-owned pizzeria where Spike Lee's character Mookie tries to keep the peace and remain the voice of reason among conflicts that brew in the neighborhood and the owners' two sons. Mookie's role as peace maker is doubled by an older drunkard out in the street (Ossie Davis) known as Da Mayor.

Da Mayor gives advice when no one asks for it and fancies himself a wise sage although he isn't respected as such. He tells Mookie to always do the right thing, but Mookie's too pragmatic to bother with such advice. He has to safeguard his younger sister from wandering eyes, provide for his son, keep the mentally challenged guy in his apartment along with his trouble-making friend (Giancarlo Esposito) from getting themselves in trouble.

Later in the film's climactic riot, Da Mayor does the right thing by trying to break up the ensuing fight. He accomplishes nothing, so does it matter? Afterward, Mookie takes the situation into his own hands to do something. Is Mookie's action (won't spoil it) the right thing? The title seems to suggest as much by virtue of the fact that it's the pivotal action in a movie called "Do the Right Thing."

The movie is not only open-ended on whether Mookie did the right thing, it doesn't clue us in on whether Mookie was attempting to do the right thing. He could have just reacted irrationally in the moment.

Whatever the case, the film leaves a lot of questions which I believe is what Spike Lee was going for. Lee is a very intelligent and well-spoken man who has practically carried the weight of the black community on his back for twenty years. He also gets a lot of crap from everyone (recently Clint Eastwood).

When this premiered, Lee was thoroughly sliced and diced by the critics. One criticism that stuck out to me was that he didn't offer any answers to racism. I imagine that if Lee went any further and had been so arrogant as to even suggest a solution, then he would have suffered even worse backlash. He served the material best by creating a piece of work that throws out more questions than it answers.

It's a movie that's almost impossible to watch and not be drawn into asking questions and reconsidering your point of view. The fact that people were so enraged and continue to be enraged at Spike Lee, shows that in this film and his career, he's doing the job he set out to do by opening up dialogue. Although it's a shame people don't choose to engage in civil dialogue (i.e. Eastwood's "He can shit his face" comment).

For example, I entered into a message board discussion about Radio Raheem where a poster was virulent that Raheem was nothing more than a disrespectful bum who didn't deserve to be saved and that because Lee expected us to sympathize with him, he was promoting reverse racism and therefore an idiot. There's a lot I could say in response to that, but the point is that Lee's intelligence and technical mastery shouldn't be so quickly dismissed and that knowing Spike's attention to detail when it comes to stereotypical images, Raheem's on-screen image might be more than meets the eye.




It's simply unfortunate that people on the other end aren't always willin