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Too much Zinfandel (3 glasses), but I promised, the dishes are done the guests are gone, so here it is.TOP TEN BRITISH DIRECTORS
The first six were easy:
Charles Chaplin
Alfred Hitchcock
Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger
Carol Reed
David Lean
Nic RoegChaplin made almost all his films in the US but I still think he retained an essentially English sensibiity at core. In addition to the usual suspects like Modern Times, City Lights and The Gold Rush, I'm especially fond of the shorter films like The Rink, The Pilgrim, The Circus, The Immigrant, Shoulder Arms, Easy Street et all. Hitchcock is self recommending. From the The 39 Steps to Notorious to Rear Window to Vertigo to Frenzy - wicked fun.
Powell/Pressberger have the highest percentage rate of great films to output: The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life & Death, A Canterbury Tale, I know Where I'm Going, The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp. Carol Reed's The Third Man is one of the all-time greats IMO. David Lean is another obvious choice. Roeg is a personal favorite: not a lot of output but a brilliant, unique and influential director (also a cameraman on Lawrence of Arabia). Performance & Don't Look Now are must see films. I even like The Man Who Fell To Earth. (The coke bills during the making of that film must have been enormous.)
Directors seven and eight display a preoccupation with social realism and stories of the common people:
Ken Loach, still going strong (anyone remember Poor Cow?), who wears his political conscience on his sleeve. An honorable output - Kes, Ladybug Ladybug, Raining Stones, Riff Raff, Hidden Agenda, Bread & Roses among others. Thatcher gave him and other filmmakers lots of material.
Mike Leigh, equally committed but perhaps a bit more versatile, whose collaboration with his casts in shaping a film is legendary. His most successful film was Secrets & Lies, but he was also on a roll with Naked and last year's Topsy Turvy.
Slot number 9:
Peter Greenaway. (I can hear the howls.) Yes. I love him, the snotty p***k. He's totally uninterested in traditional film and storytelling. You have to admit he follows his personal vision, and his films are visually stunning: The Draughtsman's Contract, Drowning By Numbers, The Belly of an Architect, A Zed & Two Noughts, The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, Prospero's Books, The Pillow Book. I have a tape of The Baby of Macon on the way. I have seen about half a dozen of Greenaways shorts, some of which are available on VHS.
Slot number 10?????
John Boorman ??? Oooo I dunno...Excaliber is interesting (love Nicol Williamson spouting spells with Helen Mirren) but Zardoz is...beyond preposteous. Hope and Glory is excellent. The General is wonderful.
Maybe Stephen Frears - for The Grifters, Sammy & Rosie Get Laid, Prick Up Your Ears, The Snapper, My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liasons. Nice try with High Fidelity. His misses miss by a wide mark though...Hero, Mary Reilly, The Hi-Lo Country.
James Whale - Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, Invisible Man...and the wickedly funny Remember Last Night, a wonderful version of Showboat, a heart rending anti-war film Journey's End...and the superior version of Waterloo Bridge. Plus, he inspired a wonderful film, Gods and Monsters.
So who?
I think for number 10...Joseph Losey (hah!) American expat director I inadvertantly left out of the American list 'cuz I intended to put him in this list. At least, all his great films were made and produced in Old Blighty.
Honarable mentions to Frears and Boorman, and a special achievement for making camp so elegant to Whale.
What's that you say? No Ridley Scott??? Nope. The Duellists and Blade Runner are not enough to get him into this list.
Any other suggestions???
Follow Ups:
for the number 10 slot - although I have a weak spot for Excalibur (the first DVD I purchased), and 15 years ago, James Whale would have been my pick (admittedly for nostalgia reasons).
Sure, his great films are few and far between, but Get Carter (the original) and Croupier are both fine films.
British films is not my forte, not because I don't love them, but somehow I need to strain more to pull the great ones out of my memory. British cinema can be extremely proud of their achievemnts.Your list is excellent, and I just have a couple of things that should get perhaps honorable mention.
But David Hugh Johns should be there for his Betrayal.
How about Jonathan Glazer? His first film Sexy Beast was tremendous.
I think Lynne Ramsay also deserves credit for her Ratcatcher.
I would keep Greenaway - it is your list and you love him... Yes, he lacks some good taste in the sense of not knowing where to stop, but some of his images simply stick in one's mind forever. He is not a great director per se, but tremendous image maker.
And thanks for Losey!!!
How about Ken Russell? I think we are already off the Ten Best list, but so what, som many great ones there!
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Peeping Tom is another very good one. But I already had him in the list with Pressburger.
Your analysis is pretty thorough, but you have missed some strong films that Ridley Scott made which include:Alien - One of the best horror/science fiction films of all time
Black Rain - very powerful film, well done
Thelma & Louise
Gladiator - super movie which I thought was fantastic from start to finish, have watched it several times. Like the sound bite used at the beginning from "Zulu" during opening battle scene, nice "tip-of-the-hat" to a great British film.
Black Hawk Down - incredible realismTo list only "The Duellists" & "Blade Runner" is not giving Ridley Scott the full credit he deserves.
I've seen them all. I didn't list them on purpose. Mentioning The Duellists and Blade Runner amongst the other director's films was praise indeed, and giving Scott more credit than many others here would.Ridley Scott makes very well crafted, highly popular commercial films. He has a strong visual style, acquired from his days as a commercial director/art director. Perhaps dues to this background, Scott tends to make glossy, good looking films, that are visually arresting and about as seep as a dime. The two I listed above are the closest he has gotten to "great" or "art" IMO.
I enjoyed Thelma and Louise a lot, Alien too (scared the heck outa me in theaters, a sci-fi classic fersher), even Gladiator (a one-time guilty pleasure). (I'm even looking forward, guardely, to Scott's new movie based on the Aubrey/Maturin series.) But "great", by any objective standard of film excellence, they are not. I love Blade Runner, but that doesn't put Scott into my list. It takes more than one or two films.
Black Rain, in fact, was dreadful. Black Hawk Down had me nearly leaving the theater.
I don't mind if you love Gladiator, we're all entitled to our own favorites. Just consider enlarging your horizons a bit if you're going to insist it's a "great" film.
"Entertaining" doesn't necessarily = "great". Some directors can do both, and more consistently. That's why they're in my list and Ridley Scott isn't.
He deserves complete oblivion... in my humble view, of course. :-)))))Of the bunch you mentined only the Duelists has some right for life, and even that due to two good performances, not directing.
Gladiator is at the TV soap level. To make such film in 2001 is travesty only justified by the desperate need to make money.
Unfortunately, most people can't stomach this self-obsessed stuff, what a director puts out when they think they're so good, everything they touch is gold. Same with most European movies, it's just not to North American taste. We need some action, we look to the future, don't wallow so much in our past personal experiences...sure it's trite, but at least it's not boring Euro-trite. [P.S. I'm not counting British directors as European...] I suppose this is obvious, since European films generally don't do well here. Deservedly so, IMO. Canadian films are too much like European films, as though it has to be weird to be "good". But then, I have never regarded film as art, strictly entertainment. It might have been art up until the '20's, but has been propaganda and entertainment ever since.
Those are all great movies, certainly IMO better than The Duellist (which I rate as about equal with Legend, the disc I just got to complete my RS collection). Talk about a versatile director re genres, much more so than some on "the list".
nt
The only film of hers I've seen is Orlando - missed The Tango Dancer and The Man Who Cried (?title). I'm not familiar with her TV and very ealry work.When compiling ten top lists, I consider a director's whole body of work, films that has withstood the test of time and have some longevity.
I've been contemplating a list of younger filmmakers that have produced interesting films, sort of a "directors to watch" list. Sally would assuredly be in that group.
Perhaps if you had seen Gumshoe you might rate Stephen Frears more highly?
...very highly. If I had had one less glass of Zinfandel on Thanksgiving, I'd have probably put him in at #10. The Grifters is one of my all-time favorite films. I actually enjoy his best films more than those of say...Ken Loach. If the list had been a list of "favorites" instead of "greatest", Frears would have been right up there.But in considering his output as a whole, after that astonishing run of good films from the eighties to the early nineties, his unevenness from then til now is a bit troubling, the misses are so unwatchable. Takes down the overall ranking, perhaps.
In truth, however, he probably ranks with Losey, and like him, is very uneven and does his best work outside Hollywood - Dangerous Liasons, the Scorsese produced The Grifters, and the John Cusack produced High Fidelity being the exceptions. Who knows what Losey might have achieved had he not been Blacklisted? (But I already goofed with Losey, putting him with Brits instead of Yanks.) Lists are really just a platform for discussion anyway. ;-)
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