While looking for something completely different at my local library, I came across a book I couldn’t resist. It was written by journalist Robert K. Elder, as a follow-up to his 2011 volume, The Film that Changed My Life. For that book, which garnered respectful reviews from film geeks like Leonard Maltin, Elder interviewed working directors about the films that had helped mold their own aesthetic. In 2013, Elder was back with a sequel of sorts, The Best Film You’ve Never Seen. Talking mostly to those directors he had featured in his previous book, Elder here sussed out a list of obscure films that (for whatever reason) we movie lovers should know better.
Part of the fun of The Best Film You’ve Never Seen is discovering movies about which we have little or no prior knowledge. The always perverse Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) makes a good case for an obscure indie called The Honeymoon Killers. And John Waters, the celebrated purveyor of deliberately skanky films like Pink Flamingos, argues persuasively that the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton misfire known as Boom! can be a source of viewer delight. The book has also alerted me to the dubious joys of Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
Some of the directors’ choices are surprising. Several selected big studio productions from bygone eras. The late Peter Bogdanovich, who always had a passion for the stylistics of long ago, endorsed a 1932 Ernst Lubitsch gem, Trouble in Paradise. I’ve seen this frothy film about con artists and thieves, and can vouch for its charm. (Notably, it was selected in 1991 for inclusion in the National Film Registry.) I guess its age makes it obscure to most of today’s moviegoers, but what about Richard Curtis’s selection, Breaking Away? This amiable coming-of-age comedy about bicycle racing in Bloomington, Indiana, won an Academy Award for its Steve Tesich screenplay, and was nominated for four other Oscars, including Best Picture. I enjoy realizing that Curtis, known for such very English romantic farces as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, is enamored of Tesich and Peter Yates’ cozy slice of Americana.
It's fitting, I guess, that Bill Condon—best recalled for splashy Hollywood musicals like Chicago and Dreamgirls—would endorse Bob Fosse’s first screen directorial effort, Sweet Charity. But who would have guessed that Kevin Smith, the outrageous indie director of Clerks, would have a thing for Fred Zinnemann’s (and Paul Scofield’s) 1966 Best-Picture winner, A Man for All Seasons? It seems that Smith’s Catholic school education, and the efforts of one particular nun, have made him passionate about Sir Thomas More’s doomed efforts to save the One True Church back during the reign of Henry VIII. Smith has high praise for the filmmaking as well as the subject matter, which he expresses in very Kevin Smith fashion. Book author Elder asks the question; “You’ve said that A Man for All Seasons is ‘porn for somebody who loves language.’ How does it differ from regular, missionary-position dialogue in other movies?” And here is Smith’s reply: “Because every line of dialogue is a close-up jizz shot to some degree or a really great close-up on double penetration.” (You can’t get much more eloquent than that.)
Reading this book has made me eager to check out some films I’ve only heard of, like Frank Perry’s The Swimmer and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (produced in the same year as his great triumph, Gigi). And I’ll be pondering Henry Jaglom’s take on his friend and mentor Orson Welles’ F for Fake, which Jaglom tantalizingly calls “the most autobiographical of Orson’s films.”
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