Mike Treder

I came up with a list of 82 films that aren’t but should be in the canon. This is the distribution by decade:

20s - 5
30s - 12
40s - 10
50s - 9
60s - 11
70s - 7
80s - 12
90s - 12
00s - 4

Eleven directors showed up more than once. Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean-Pierre Melville, F.W. Murnau, Mira Nair, and Preston Sturges each made the list twice, while Michael Curtiz appeared three times and Akira Kurosawa topped them all with four selections. A strong argument can be made, obviously, for Kurosawa as the greatest filmmaker ever, but it’s interesting that Curtiz has three films on the list (which does not include, of course, Casablanca). Curtiz stands out as a truly superb studio director.

Out of the 82 films I chose, there are four in particular that rank, in my opinion, among the finest ever made: How Green Was My Valley, Last Tango in Paris, MASH, and The Big Parade. I was quite surprised to find that none of them were listed in the original canon.

Anyway, here is my full list:

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