TCM Unveils Their List of Top 15 Most Influential Films of All-Time

How many of these 15 have you seen?

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Monday, April 13th 2009 at 12:08 PM

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has just released their official list of top 15 most influential classic films of all time, the latest element in the network's 15th anniversary celebration and the launching point for a new feature at TCM.com in which the network says it will post a fresh list of movie favorites each day (although it actually looks like it is only going to be a weekly feature). The feature will be called TCM Dailies and will usually highlight five films, with a constantly changing theme. The lists will run from serious to silly, such as TCM's favorite car-chase movies, best slap scenes and top sequels.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing is that TCM will just be listing the films and not necessarily showing them. This would have been even bigger news had I been able to tell you the 15 films featured will be shown on TCM over the course of the next 15 days, but since they won't I have included Buy Now links so you can get yourself a copy along with the short commentary on each film as provided by TCM.

Of the 15 films listed I have seen 12 of them having not yet caught The Birth of a Nation, 42nd Street or John Ford's Stagecoach. However, I just happened to have watch Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless this past Saturday and rushed out to Barnes and Noble on Sunday afternoon to pick up my very own version. I am going to watch it one more time and do a little write-up on it for you guys — it a matter of minutes it became an instant favorite I suggest everyone check out.

Other than that, of the other 12 movies I have seen I own many of them and will own a copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs once Disney releases the Blu-ray edition this coming October. Battleship Potemkin is one I plan on picking up and actually added to my Amazon cart while putting this piece together and I am going to wait on a new edition of Metropolis in hopes the newly found footage will soon make its way to a new DVD copy. It Happened One Night is another great film I hope to own for myself one day, but that too I am going to wait on until a better DVD edition is available.

In assembling the list, many films fell just short of making the cut. TCM looked at everything from silent pictures to modern movies. "There was only a little shouting involved in our debates," Charlie Tabesh, senior vice president of programming for TCM, said. "For example, we talked about including Pulp Fiction, a hugely influential independent film." TCM also considered choices like Goldfinger, a 1964 movie that helped cement James Bond as film franchise that has endured for nearly 50 years.

So, without further delay, here are TCM's 15 most influential classic films, listed in chronological order:

The Birth of a Nation (1915)
	During a time when Europe seemed to have a monopoly on feature films, D.W. Griffith struck out to make an epic that would help define American cinema. The Birth of a Nation also became one of the greatest outrages in film history, introducing destructive stereotypes of black men and women and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.

Battleship Potemkin (1925)
	The "Odessa Steps" sequence in Battleship Potemkin may be the most influential scene in film history. Drawing on montages in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Sergei Eisenstein used mini-stories and repeated shots of specific characters and groups to humanize his story.

Metropolis (1927)
	Arguably the most influential science fiction film ever made, Metropolis has inspired everything from video games to rock videos to comic books. The film's futuristic sets helped spread the popularity of art deco, while the gadget-filled lab of mad scientist Rotwang became a sci-fi staple.

42nd Street (1933)
	Although musicals helped launch talkies, the genre was box office poison by 1933. Visionary producer Darryl F. Zanuck had the idea for a backstage story that would capture the effect of the Depression on hard-working chorus girls. He was smart enough to put Busby Berkeley in charge of the dance routines, and his geometric patterns and dazzling camera movements both revitalized musicals and saved Warner Bros. from bankruptcy.

It Happened One Night (1934)
	The surprise success of It Happened One Night made Frank Capra one of the screen's top directors and provided the prototype for a decade of screwball comedies. Romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally and The Sure Thing draw on the rapid banter, outrageous comic situations and sexy road trip of It Happened One Night. The movie even provided inspiration for one of the screen's most enduring characters, Bugs Bunny.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
	"Disney's Folly" was the name most Hollywood insiders gave to the dream of producing the nation's first animated feature. But Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs didn't just look better than any previous Disney film. It looked better than most major studio productions. For better or worse, Snow White set U.S. animation in pursuit of a more realistic look for decades to come.

Gone with the Wind (1939)
	If one film epitomizes the Hollywood blockbuster, it is Gone with the Wind. Scarlett O'Hara has inspired a legion fiery females caught in the sweep of history, most notably Kate Winslet in Titanic. For decades, filmmakers have drawn on David O. Selznick's work to create and sell romantic dreams writ large on the screen.

Stagecoach (1939)
	John Ford's mixture of character depth and hard-riding action reminded audiences that the winning of the West was more than just popcorn fodder. Ford's work inspired Orson Welles, who screened the film 40 times while shooting Citizen Kane.

Citizen Kane (1941)
	Working with a level of control rare in Hollywood, Orson Welles paved the way for director-centric cinema that has produced some of the screen's greatest achievements and worst excesses. By combining deep-focus photography, directional sound, overlapping dialogue and a fragmented narrative assembled from several different viewpoints, he created a film audiences experienced as they did the real world.

Bicycle Thieves (1947)
	Director Vittorio De Sica was part of a movement to take cinema back to the streets. Shot on real locations with a factory worker in the leading role, Bicycle Thieves (also widely known as The Bicycle Thief) was among several post-war Italian films that provided an alternative to Hollywood's big-budget studio productions.

Rashomon (1950)
	Akira Kurosawa's groundbreaking film put Japanese cinema on the international map. His editing techniques gave it a sensual power that attracted audiences to the emotionally charged story. Kurosawa transcended the challenges of a low budget and censorship to create a new cinematic world that would inspire filmmakers like George Lucas and Martin Scorsese.

The Searchers (1956)
	Almost 20 years after revitalizing Westerns with Stagecoach, director John Ford pointed the genre in a new direction. The Searchers offers one of the screen's first attempts to depict racism underlying U.S.-native relations. Ford views the problem from both sides, showing how John Wayne's obsessed Indian hunter Ethan Edwards and the equally obsessed Comanche chief, Scar, have been shaped by violent acts of the past.

Breathless (1959)
	With jarring cuts between scenes, jump cuts within them and long takes filled with dizzying camera movements, Breathless made the movies move as never before. Director Jean-Luc Godard created a cinema of reinvention, shooting as if the medium had only just popped into existence.

Psycho (1960)
	Following big-budget productions like North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock found inspiration in a low-budget, black-and-white horror. Psycho re-defined the genre with major surprises, like killing star Janet Leigh a third of the way into the movie. The crazed-killer character became a horror film staple, leading to slasher flicks like Halloween and Friday the 13th.

Star Wars (1977)
	With Star Wars, Hollywood discovered new markets for merchandising – not just toys, but novels, comics, television series and eventually video games. These constituted the "Star Wars Expanded Universe," which included a series of sequels unlike any ever seen. Lucas later re-titled the film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

If you want more on each film listed, TCM has longer commentary right here.