Ron Moody to Robert De Niro: Brian Viner’s top 100 films (part 8)
ANOTHER week, another ten entries in the countdown of my 100 favourite English language films. Feel free to comment on my choices at features@dailymail.ie, and do remember that all these great movies can be accessed in one way or another for viewing at home. 30 Under The Skin (2013)
YOU may have noticed there isn’t much sci-fi on my list, but here’s an absolute belter — Jonathan Glazer’s brilliantly conceived thriller starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien femme fatale preying on men on the streets of Glasgow, of all unlikely places to find a) aliens and b) Miss Johansson. 29 Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960)
I WAS tempted to include more ‘kitchensink’ realism but, as it is, there’s just Kes and this Karel Reisz classic, starring Albert Finney as the definitive ‘angry young man’. The Kinks, Madness, The Smiths and Arctic Monkeys have all referenced it in their music . . . a cracking quiz question for when pubs re-open. 28 Notorious (1946)
ALFRED HITCHCOCK wasn’t known for romance but, just four years after she’d starred in Casablanca, he gave Ingrid Bergman another love story for the ages. Notorious pulsates with suspense, too, and in featuring the Nazi death camps and the atomic bomb, it was daringly topical. All that, and Cary Grant, too. 27 Oliver! (1968)
CAROL REED’S masterly adaptation of Lionel Bart’s stage musical. Just one treat after another. Though if you had to pick (a pocket or two), Ron Moody’s Fagin is probably the arch scene-stealer. Dickens, I like to think, would have loved it. 26 All About Eve (1950)
I RE-WATCHED this on a long-haul flight pre-lockdown and was dazzled anew.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz wrote and directed other great movies, but this is his masterpiece and, as a fading Broadway star, Bette Davis is simply magnificent. 25 Raging Bull (1980)
BOXING has long been a gift to the cinema, from Rocky to a spellbinding but littleknown 2017 British film called Jawbone. But Martin Scorsese’s biopic of the middleweight brawler Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) is surely the genre’s undisputed champ. 24 No Country For Old Men (2007)
IF I were naming my top screen baddies, Javier Bardem’s villainous hitman in the
Coen brothers’ swaggering adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel would make the top five. But there’s so much else to cherish in this glorious crime thriller. 23 The Searchers (1956)
ARGUABLY the greatest Western ever made, and unarguably the most influential. No one evoked the old West better than director John Ford, and John Wayne was never better than he is as an embittered Civil War veteran searching for his niece (Natalie Wood), abducted by Comanches. 22 Taxi Driver (1976)
THE enduring influence of The Searchers is evident in this intense psychological thriller, another triumph for that Scorsese/De Niro double act, and superbly written by Paul Schrader. The score is the last by the great film composer Bernard Herrmann. He died before the movie came out. 21 Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)
THE greatest British film of all time? Perhaps. Albert Finney was cast to play T.E. Lawrence, then fired. Next, Marlon Brando was offered the part. But it’s simply impossible now to imagine anyone but Peter O’Toole in the title role, in David Lean’s incomparable epic.