A Dozen Perfect Films

In my view, the very nature of movie-making belies the concept of perfection. At most, we get a perfect gesture, a perfect line of dialogue, a perfect piece of music, a perfect shot. maybe even a perfect scene or perfect ending. but a perfect movie? I have never seen one. On fact, I prefer the movies that don’t even aim for perfection, movies that are something of a mess that has exploded from the id. Movies like “The Birds.” Take the opening scene, it is written as a screwball comedy but Rod Taylor and ‘Tippi’ Hedren’ have little comedic skill and play the scene awkwardly, which sets the movie up almost perfectly. I think the best written and directed scene in all of sam peckinpah is the opening scene in the bar between “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” but for the movie to to be perfect, every scene would have had to sustain that perfection, and they dont, although several come close. “Children of Paradise” is as near to perfection as I have seen, but the first scene of the second half goes on too long, and by the time you have seen the film 30 times, you might just want to fast forward through some of it. And you dont do that to perfection. but here are some perfect moments: At the end of the opening scene of Once Upon a Tome in the West, the camera cranes above the stagecoach depot as Claudia Cardinale rides off to meet her destiny while Morricone’s music crescendos with the rising camera. Brando’s monologue to his dead wife in Last tango in Paris and his “The Horror” monologue in apocalypse Now. The slow build to the transcendant final close up of Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. And speaking of final shots, every final shot and.or scene in Antonioni’s films is perfection. Final lines” “I Steal” from I am a Fugitive from a chain Gang. “What did you expect from a whore?” in “An American Dream.” and the two punch knockout of peckinpah’s “Cross of iron, as the screaming and gunfire of Germany’s final defeat gives way first to laughter than to a series of atrocity photos underscored by a somber dirge, then pow!! the damning quotation from Brecht: Though the world stood up and defeated the bastard, dont rejoice in his defeat. the bitch that bore him is in heat again” I chke up just thinking of it and many was the time I fell to the floor crying in the movie theater in those moments. but the movie was far from perfect. A few that come close to perfection: Make Way for Tomorrow, It’s a Wonderful Life, Belle de Jour, Rio Bravo, Finally, if I had to define the perfect movie, it would be a movie in which every scene not only transfixes you, but keeps you anticipating the next scene ..and the next and the next…..like a series of impossible bulls-eyes that just keep amazing us,

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