- Godfather I & II
- Good Fellas
- The Graduate
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Amadeus
- On the waterfront
- A Streetcar Named Desire
- Chinatown
- It Happened One Night
- Lawrence of Arabia
- Casablanca
- Annie Hall
You will note every one of those movies was directed by a maverick: (1) Coppola almost didn’t get it off the ground because of all the opposition, (2) Scorsese was a totally new voice, as was Nichols, (3), Foreman (4 & 5), Kazan (6 & 7), Huston (8) – not exactly stock Hollywood, and It Happened One Night (9) happened because Gable stepped out of line and MGM decided to punish him by sending him off to Columbia for a sure loser with an unproven and pretty much unknown director name Frank Capra who with the most unlikely of scripts and orders to do a rush job created the first great “screw-ball comedy” that went on to win for the first time in film history – the all-time coup of Academy Awards – the big five! – only to be equaled 40 years later in Cuckoo’s Nest (4), directed by another virtual unknown, Milos Foreman (who also directed Amadeus (5).
So, no – it’s easy now, of course, to accept them all as part of the Canon of classics, but in most cases, true Classics were more often the dark horse – often totally unrecognized in their lifetime. Moby Dick sold less than 4000 copies in Melville’s lifetime, and now it’s usually ranked in the top 10 of the world’s greatest novels (6 on Burt’s list). Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime for $12, and now his most insignificant go for 50 million and up. Again, the question – were they ahead of their time? Or did they change their times? Regardless of which caused which, once they made it, the clones started to the point that even the originals became cliches. Like the lady who didn’t like Hamlet because it had too many quotes.
So the big question is: who will be the new voice of the 21st Century? It’ll be in the next few years, most likely (which is about the time Joyce, Eliot, Matisse, Picasso, etc., were noticed in the 20th Century), and I guess it’ll be so different as to be castigated by virtually all the literary establishment. Notice I use the word “establishment.” 100 years ago, they weren’t the establishment either, or they wouldn’t have recognized Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, and we wouldn’t even have gotten to the music! – JAZZ! – which perfectly coincided with the other arts – King Oliver, Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, Bessie Smith – all of whom emerged in the 20’s – the jazz era –
And why do I keep bringing up Paul Kael? Because she was not only one of the harshest critics out there, but she bucked the establishment by praising that quintessential maverick film, Bonnie and Clyde, thereby launching her career and finishing the career of that “venerable but stodgy New York critic” Bosley Crowther, who “made it his personal crusade to bury the film.”* (but instead, it buried him) and on Cuckoo’s Nest? – whose image of Will we’ve been flashing here for the last few posts who best epitomizes one of the major themes of Confessions, she said – “smashingly effective version of Ken Kesey’s novel about a rebel outcast…” *
*FOUR STAR MOVIES, The 101 Greatest Films of All Time, Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza