The Book of Lists

14 MOVIE STARS WHO FELL IN LOVE ON THE SET

Cast as lovers in Fire over England (1937), Leigh and Olivier had little difficulty playing the parts convincingly. They were both married when they became powerfully infatuated with each other. Leigh was the opposite of Olivier’s cool, calm wife, and he was a contrast to her intelligent but rather dry and unromantic husband. The affair was ill-timed: Olivier’s wife was about to give birth and she guessed what was going on. At the christening party for his newborn son, Olivier stepped outside with Leigh and returned with lipstick on his cheek. On the set they were known as ‘the lovers’. This was all too true for Olivier, who complained to another actor that he was exhausted. ‘It’s not the stunts,’ he groaned. ‘It’s Vivien. It’s every day, two, three times. She’s bloody wearing me out.’ He also felt guilty, ‘a really wormlike adulterer, slipping in between another man’s sheets’. Eventually the two passionate actors divorced their respective spouses and married in 1940. Twenty years later they divorced, and Olivier married his third wife, actress Joan Plowright.

Jane Wyman had a hard time getting going with Ronnie, as he was known on the set of Brother Rat (1938). Even before they were cast as lovers she had noticed him around the studio and suggested, ‘Let’s have cocktails at my place.’ He innocently replied, ‘What for?’ Wyman didn’t realise how straightlaced Ronnie was — although she was divorcing her husband, she was still officially married. When they finally began dating, they discovered they had little in common. She liked night-clubbing; he jabbered away about sports. Wyman loathed athletics, but she took up golf, tennis and ice-skating to be near Ronnie. ‘She’s a good scout,’ Reagan told his mother after one date.

Reagan lived near his parents and visited them every day. Jane found his devotedness and general goodness intimidating. It wasn’t until the sequel to Brother Rat — Brother Rat and a Baby (1940) — that they began to date seriously. While their courtship was romantic, the proposal, Wyman recalled, ‘was about as unromantic as anything that ever happened. We were about to be called for a take. Ronnie simply turned to me as if the idea were brand-new and had just hit him and said, “Jane, why don’t we get married?”’ They were wed in 1940 and divorced in 1948.

Having seen Tracy’s work, Hepburn got him to act opposite her in MGM’s Woman of the Year (1942), in which they would play feuding columnists who fall in love. The first time they met she said, ‘I’m afraid I’m a little tall for you, Mr Tracy.’ Their producer, Joseph Mankiewicz, turned to Hepburn and said, ‘Don’t worry, Kate, he’ll soon cut you down to size.’

After a few days of sparring on the set — at first Tracy referred to his co-star as ‘Shorty’ or ‘that woman’ — an attraction began to develop between them. Tracy was married and, although he lived apart from his wife, was a Catholic who wouldn’t consider divorce. As the pair fell in love, their relationship was treated with unusual respect by the gossip columnists and was rarely referred to in print. One of the great Hollywood love affairs, their romance lasted 25 years, until Tracy’s death in 1967 from a heart attack.

Explaining the phenomenal success of their screen chemistry, Hepburn said, ‘Certainly the ideal American man is Spencer. Sport-loving, a man’s man… And I think I represent a woman. I needle him, I irritate him, and I try to get around him, yet if he put a big paw out, he could squash me. I think this is the sort of romantic ideal picture of the male and female in the United States.’

The furor that attended the Burton–Taylor affair during the making of Cleopatra (1962) in Rome was as bombastic as the film they were starring in. Newspapers all over the world carried photos of the courting couple. Taylor was married at the time to Eddie Fisher, her fourth husband; Burton was also married.

In her memoirs, Taylor recalled their first conversation on the set. After the usual small talk, ‘he sort of sidled over to me and said, “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” And I said to myself, Oy gevaldt, here’s the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that.’ Chemistry prevailed, however, and soon there was electricity on-screen and off between the two stars. There were breakups and reconciliations, stormy fights and passionate clinches, public denials and private declarations, Liz’s drug overdose and Richard’s brief affair with a model. ‘Le Scandale’, as Burton called it, grew so public that Liz was denounced by the Vatican and accused of ‘erotic vagrancy’. Liz wondered, ‘Could I sue the Vatican?’ During one love scene, director Joseph Mankiewicz yelled, ‘Cut! I feel as though I’m intruding.’

Burton and Taylor married for the first time in 1964, divorced, remarried, and finally redivorced in 1976. Taylor said of Cleopatra, ‘It was like a disease. An illness one had a very difficult time recuperating from.’

When Bacall was cast opposite Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944), she was disappointed. She was 19, and it was her first movie role. She said, ‘I had visions of playing opposite Charles Boyer and Tyrone Power… But when Hawks said it was to be Bogart, I thought, “How awful to be in a picture with that mug, that illiterate… He won’t be able to think or talk about anything.”’ Bacall soon learned that she was confusing Bogey with the characters he played. She was so nervous the first day of shooting that her hands were shaking; Bogart was kind and amusing and teased her through it. Soon they were falling in love. He was 25 years her senior, and unhappily married. Though the affair became serious, Bogart was reluctant to leave his wife. His friend Peter Lorre told him, ‘It’s better to have five good years than none at all.’ Meanwhile, the courtship grew intensely romantic. In honour of Bacall’s famous line in the movie, ‘If you want me, just whistle’, Bogart gave Betty a small gold whistle. ‘Bogey,’ she said, ‘is the kind of fellow who sends you flowers.’ They were married in 1945 — he cried profusely at the wedding — and had 12 happy years until Bogart’s death from cancer in 1957.

The elegant Bonham Carter, famous for, among others, her feminine period roles in E.M. Forster adaptations, met director/ actor Kenneth Branagh when he directed her in Frankenstein, a film in which they also played lovers. At the time, Branagh was married to the actress Emma Thompson — their marriage ended shortly after Frankenstein was released. Said Bonham Carter, ‘A third party doesn’t break up a relationship. It just means you weren’t meant to be.’ The British tabloid press made things ‘… very difficult for Ken and I at first’. When the pair went on to co-star in The Theory of Flight, the press let up. As for that film’s love scenes, Bonham Carter remarked, ‘… it doesn’t help to be emotionally involved with the person. It’s all acting. Your emotions are never present really.’ Said Branagh, ‘Nothing could be more embarrassing than somehow doing anything other than your job… for this to be an excuse to play out your relationship… That’s all bollocks!’

One of the twentieth century’s most talked about bad-boy cinema stars, director/writer/actor Billy Bob Thornton struggled from poverty to world-wide acclaim with Slingblade and a fast-and-furious series of roles and scripts. Equally fast-and-furious is Mr Thornton’s propensity for falling in and out of love. He was engaged to Laura Dern, and professed happiness with his calm-at-last domestic life — he was finally spending time with his children by earlier marriages. Then, according to Dern, ‘I left our home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend got married, and I’ve never heard from him again.’ Thornton and his bright, sexy co-star Angelina Jolie were playing marrieds in 1999’s Pushing Tin — in May 2000 they tied the knot in a quickie Las Vegas ceremony. The marriage was Thornton’s fifth, and was much-publicised: the pair got complementary tattoos, exchanged vials of blood, and were notorious for their ribald public displays of affection. They adopted a Cambodian-born baby in June, 2002, but 11 days after their son was brought to Los Angeles, Thornton abandoned his wife and child. Said Jolie, ‘It’s clear to me that our priorities shifted overnight.’ Jolie had her tattoo removed, Thornton kept his. Laura Dern remarked in an interview that being dumped by Billy Bob was the best thing that could have happened to her.

23 ACTORS AND ACTRESSES WHO TURNED DOWN GREAT ROLES

Turned down the role of Frankie, the musician-junkie, in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Frank Sinatra got the part and re-established his career with an electrifying performance.

Turned down the role of Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady (1964). The role went to Stanley Holloway. Cagney was offered $1 million but did not want to come out of retirement.

Expressed enthusiasm for the role of the young writer in Sunset Boulevard (1950), but later turned it down, claiming that his audience would not accept his playing love scenes with a woman who was 35 years older. William Holden starred with Gloria Swanson in the widely acclaimed film.

Long a fan-favourite to play Gandalf, the venerable wizard from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the star turned the role down because he did not want to spend 18 months filming in New Zealand. Sir Ian McKellan eventually played the role to wide acclaim in the film trilogy. After the massive success of the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, Connery said, ‘I had never read Tolkien, and the script when they sent it to me, I didn’t understand… bobbits, hobbits… I will see it.’

Turned down the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). The role went to Vivien Leigh. Davis thought that her co-star was going to be Errol Flynn, with whom she refused to work.

Turned down the role of Kid Shelleen in Cat Ballou (1965). The role won an Academy Award for Lee Marvin. Douglas’s agent convinced him not to accept the comedic role of the drunken gunfighter.

Could have played the title role in The Wizard of Oz (1939). The part was written for Fields, who would have played the wizard as a cynical con man. But he turned down the part, purportedly because he wanted $100,000 and MGM only offered him $75,000. However, a letter signed by Fields’s agent asserts that Fields rejected the offer in order to devote all his time to writing You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man. Frank Morgan ended up playing the wizard.

Turned down Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The role of Bonnie Parker went to Faye Dunaway. Fonda, living in France at the time, did not want to move to the United States for the role.

Producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, who had bought the film rights to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, originally approached Cary Grant about playing 007. Grant declined because he did not want to become involved in a film series. Instead, Sean Connery was cast as Bond, starting with Dr No (1962). Fleming’s comment on this casting choice: ‘He’s not exactly what I had in mind’.

Orion Pictures acquired the film rights to Silence of the Lambs in 1988 because Gene Hackman had expressed an interest in directing and writing the screenplay for it. He would also star as serial killer Hannibal Lecter. By mid-1989, Hackman had dropped out of the project. Jonathan Demme took over as director and offered the female lead of FBI agent-in-training Clarice Starling to Michelle Pfeiffer, with whom he had worked in Married to the Mob (1988). Pfeiffer felt the film was too dark and decided not to be in it. When Silence of the Lambs was made in 1990, the lead roles were played by Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. Both won Academy Awards for their performances.

Turned down the role of Jett Rink in Giant (1956). The role went to James Dean. Ladd felt he was too old for the part.

Turned down the role of Ilsa in Casablanca (1942). Ingrid Bergman took over and, with Bogart, made film history. Lamarr had not wanted to work with an unfinished script.

Turned down the lead in Ben-Hur (1959). The role of Judah Ben-Hur went to Charlton Heston, who won an Academy Award and added another hit to his career of spectacular blockbusters.

Turned down the lead (Ellie Andrews) opposite Clark Gable (Peter Warne) in It Happened One Night (1934). The role led to an Academy Award for Claudette Colbert. A previous film set on a bus had just failed, and Loy thought the film would not have a chance.

After his terrifyingly menacing performance in Reservoir Dogs (1992), Michael Madsen was offered the role of Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino’s next film as director, Pulp Fiction (1994). He turned it down because he was involved in the making of Wyatt Earp (1994) in which he plays Virgil Earp. Pulp Fiction was an enormous success with audiences and critics. Wyatt Earp wasn’t. John Travolta, who played Vincent Vega, found his career on the up and up while Madsen found himself playing parts in a series of B pictures. ‘I wanted to take a walk down to the OK Corral,’ Madsen has been quoted as saying. ‘If I’d known how long a walk it was gonna be, I’d have taken a cab.’

Both of these stars turned down the role of Neo in the blockbuster science fiction epic The Matrix, which eventually went to Keanu Reeves. McGregor starred as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace instead, while Smith — who went on to star in the film version of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot — admitted, ‘I watched Keanu’s performance — and very rarely do I say this — but I would have messed it up. I would have absolutely messed up The Matrix. At that point I wasn’t smart enough as an actor to let the movie be.’

When Paul Newman asked McQueen to star opposite him in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), McQueen insisted on top billing. When his demand was turned down, McQueen refused to appear in the film. Robert Redford played Sundance and became the most sought-after star of the 1970’s. McQueen turned down the lead role of Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971) because he felt the part was too similar to the tough cop he had played in Bullitt (1969). Gene Hackman got the part and won an Oscar for it. Finally, when director Francis Ford Coppola offered McQueen the starring role of Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now (1979), McQueen declined because he did not want to spend 16 weeks — Coppolla’s original shooting schedule — on location in the Philippine jungles, away from his new bride, Ali MacGraw. Martin Sheen, who accepted the role, ended up spending a year and a half on location and almost died from a massive heart attack during the filming. Nonetheless, he turned in an electrifying performance.

The producer of High Noon (1952), Stanley Kramer, originally offered the role of Will Kane, the retiring marshal who stays in town to confront the gunmen out to kill him, to Gregory Peck. Peck turned it down because he thought it was too similar to the part of Jimmy Ringo, an aging gunslinger haunted by his own reputation, which he had played in The Gunfighter (1950). Several other actors, including Montgomery Clift, Charlton Heston and Marlon Brando were approached before Gary Cooper was signed to play Kane. He went on to win an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance.

Turned down the main roles in High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Casablanca (1942), which became three of Humphrey Bogart’s most famous roles. Raft rejected the Sam Spade role in The Maltese Falcon because he did not want to work with director John Huston, an unknown at that time.

Turned down the role of Ben Braddock in The Graduate (1967). The role made an instant star of Dustin Hoffman. Redford thought he could not project the right amount of naiveté.

Known for her selectivity in choosing roles, she erred when she turned down the central role in The Three Faces of Eve (1957) after reading an early version of the script. Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her performance in the film.

15 FILM SCENES LEFT ON THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

In one scene, the monster (Boris Karloff) walks through a forest and comes upon a little girl, Maria, who is throwing flowers into a pond. The monster joins her in the activity but soon runs out of flowers. At a loss for something to throw into the water, he looks at Maria and moves towards her. In all American prints of the movie, the scene ends here. But as originally filmed, the action continues to show the monster grabbing Maria, hurling her into the lake, and then departing in confusion when Maria fails to float as the flowers did. This bit was deleted because Karloff, objecting to the director’s interpretation of the scene, felt that the monster should have gently put Maria into the lake. Though Karloff’s intentions were good, the scene’s omission suggests a crueller death for Maria, since a subsequent scene shows her bloodied corpse being carried through the village by her father.

The original King Kong was released four times between 1933 and 1952, and each release saw the cutting of additional scenes. Though many of the outtakes — including the censored sequence in which Kong peels off Fay Wray’s clothes — were restored in 1971, one cut scene has never been found. It is the clip in which Kong shakes four sailors off a log bridge, causing them to fall into a ravine where they are eaten alive by giant spiders. When the movie — with spider sequence intact — was previewed in San Bernardino, California, in late January, 1933, members of the audience screamed and either left the theatre or talked about the grisly sequence throughout the remainder of the film. Said the film’s producer, Merian C. Cooper, ‘It stopped the picture cold, so the next day back at the studio, I took it out myself.’

Considered by many to be the best of the Tarzan films, Tarzan and His Mate included a scene in which Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller), standing on a tree limb with Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan), pulls at Jane’s scanty outfit and persuades her to dive into a lake with him. The two swim for a while and eventually surface. When Jane rises out of the water, one of her breasts is fully exposed. Because various groups, including official censors of the Hays Office, criticised the scene for being too erotic, it was cut by MGM.

The Wizard of Oz originally contained an elaborate production number called ‘The Jitter Bug’, which cost $80,000 and took five weeks to shoot. In the scene, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodsman are on their way to the witch’s castle when they are attacked by ‘jitter bugs’ — furry pink and blue mosquito-like ‘rascals’ that give one ‘the jitters’ as they buzz about in the air. When, after its first preview, the movie was judged too long, MGM officials decided to sacrifice the ‘Jitter Bug’ scene. They reasoned that it added little to the plot and, because a dance by the same name had just become popular, they feared it might date the picture. (Another number was also cut for previews because some felt it slowed the pacing, but it was eventually restored. It’s title was… ‘Over the Rainbow’.)

This movie is famed as a classic despite its notoriously difficult-to-follow plot. As originally filmed, it included an aid for the viewer: Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and a DA meet and have a conversation that summarises the plot. The film was finished in 1945, but held back from release until the studio finished rolling out its backlog of World War II films. During the delay, the decision was made to re-shoot several scenes to play up the chemistry between Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Also, a scene was added in which Bogart and Bacall meet in a nightclub and flirt while ostensibly talking about horse racing. In order to keep the running-time of the film the same, the scene of Marlowe and the DA was cut.

Billy Wilder’s film classic about an aging Hollywood film queen and a down-on-his-luck screenwriter originally incorporated a framing sequence which opened and closed the story at the Los Angeles County Morgue. In a scene described by Wilder as one of the best he’d ever shot, the body of Joe Gillis (William Holden) is rolled into the morgue to join three dozen other corpses, some of whom — in voice-over — tell Gillis how they died. Eventually Gillis tells his story, which takes us to a flashback of his affair with Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). The movie was previewed with this opening in Illinois and Long Island. Because both audiences inappropriately found the morgue scene hilarious, the film’s release was delayed six months so that a new beginning could be shot in which police find Gillis’s corpse floating in Norma’s pool while Gillis’s voice narrates the events leading to his death.

Charlie Chaplin’s film about a vaudeville comic on the decline features a scene in which Chaplin, as the elderly Calvero, makes his comeback in a music hall sketch. The routine, which originally ran to 10 minutes, has Calvero performing onstage with an old colleague, played by Buster Keaton. It has been said that while Chaplin was good, Keaton was sensational. Consequently, Chaplin allowed only a small portion of the scene to remain in release prints.

Originally, the movie included a scene of Marilyn Monroe in the bathtub, getting her toe stuck in the faucet. Although Monroe remained covered by bubbles, the scene ran afoul of the Hollywood censors, so director Billy Wilder cut it.

Of the 167 days it took Stanley Kubrick to shoot Spartacus, six weeks were spent directing an elaborate battle sequence in which 8,500 extras dramatised the clash between Roman troops and Spartacus’s slave army. Several scenes in the battle drew the ire of the Legion of Decency and were therefore cut. These included shots of men being dismembered. (Dwarfs with false torsos and an armless man with a phony ‘breakaway’ limb were used to give authenticity.) Seven years later, when the Oscar-winning film was reissued, an additional 22 minutes were chopped out, including a scene in which Varinia (Jean Simmons) watches Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) writhe in agony on a cross. Her line ‘Oh, please die, my darling’ was excised, and the scene was cut to make it appear that Spartacus was already dead. These cuts were restored to the film in the early ’90s.

As filmed, Splendor in the Grass included a sequence in which Wilma Dean Loomis (Natalie Wood) takes a bath while arguing with her mother (Audrey Christie). The bickering finally becomes so intense that Wilma jumps out of the tub and runs nude down a hallway to her bedroom, where the camera cuts to a close-up of her bare legs kicking hysterically on the mattress. Both the Hollywood censors and the Catholic Legion of Decency objected to the hallway display. Consequently, director Elia Kazan dropped the piece, leaving an abrupt jump from tub to bed.

The first of the James Bond films ended with Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) being attacked by crabs when Bond (Sean Connery) rescues her. The crabs moved too slowly to look truly menacing, so the ending was re-shot without them.

‘What Makes a Man a Homosexual?’ was one of the many vignettes filmed for the Woody Allen movie using the title of Dr David Reuben’s bestselling book. The sequence stars Allen as a common spider anxious to court a black widow (Louise Lasser). After doing a mating dance on Lasser’s web, Allen makes love to the widow, only to be devoured by her afterwards. The scene was finally cut out of the film because Allen couldn’t come up with a suitable way to end the piece.

In this film, Tom Hanks plays Josh, a 12-year-old who becomes an adult literally overnight when he makes a wish on a machine at a carnival. While an adult, Josh falls in love with a woman named Susan (Elizabeth Perkins), but he has to leave her behind when he makes another wish to become 12 again. In the original version, there was an additional scene at the end, in which Josh is back at school and a new girl named Susan arrives. The implication is that Susan went back to the carnival machine to make herself Josh’s age. Due to negative audience feedback, the scene was cut from the movie.

Jerry Maguire originally included a fictional Reebok advertisement starring Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), which was cut from the film by director Cameron Crowe. However, when the movie was broadcast on the Showtime cable network, the commercial was restored, playing under the closing credits. Reportedly, the scene was put back in because of a lawsuit filed by Reebok against Columbia Pictures over the terms of product placement in the film.

The film ends with Rose (Gloria Stuart) going to the deck of the research ship investigating the Titanic wreck, leaning over the railing, and dropping a necklace with the valuable ‘Heart of the Ocean’ diamond into the ocean. As originally filmed, the crew members of the research ship see Rose, mistakenly believe that she is planning to jump overboard, and try to talk her out of committing suicide. When they realise what she is actually doing, they try to persuade her to preserve the necklace. Director James Cameron decided that he wanted the scene to focus on Rose, so he re-shot it with her alone.

37 FAMOUS WRITERS WHO WORKED FOR THE MOVIES

Films worked on include: The Quiet One (1948); The African Queen (1951); The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Georgia, Georgia (1972); Poetic Justice (1993)

Moby Dick (1956); Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

Hangmen Also Die (1943)

The Killers (1984); Barfly (1987); Lonely at the Top (1993)

Beat the Devil (1954); The Innocents (1961)

And Now Tomorrow (1944); Double Indemnity (1944); The Unseen (1945); The Blue Dahlia (1946); Strangers on a Train (1951)

Westworld (1973); Coma (1978); The Great Train Robbery (1979); Jurassic Park (1993); Rising Sun (1993)

You Only Live Twice (1967); Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968); Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Today We Live (1933); Road to Glory (1936); To Have and Have Not (1945); The Big Sleep (1946); Land of the Pharaohs (1955)

A Yank at Oxford (1938); Three Comrades (1938); Gone with the Wind (1939); The Women (1939); Madame Curie (1943)

Pedro Paramo (1967); Muneca Riera (1971)

The Green Cockatoo (1937); The Fallen Idol (1948); The Third Man (1950); Saint Joan (1957); Our Man in Havana (1960); The Comedians (1967)

City Streets (1931); Mister Dynamite (1935); After the Thin Man (1937); Another Thin Man (1939); Watch on the Rhine (1943)

The Spanish Earth (1937); The Old Man and the Sea (1956)

Pride and Prejudice (1940); Jane Eyre (1944); A Woman’s Vengeance (1948)

Rage in Heaven (1941); Forever and a Day (1944); The Loved One (1965); Frankenstein, the True Story (1973)

The Cotton Club (1984); Ironweed (1987)

Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987); King Lear (1987) 20.

The Last Picture Show (1971); Falling from Grace (1992)

Death of a Salesman (1951); Let’s Make Love (1960); The Misfits (1961); An Enemy of the People (1977); Everybody Wins (1990)

The Entertainer (1960); Tom Jones (1963); England, My England (1995)

Suzy (1936); A Star Is Born (1937); Weekend for Three (1941); Saboteur (1942); The Fan (1949)

Horse Feathers (1932); Sitting Pretty (1933); Florida Special (1936); Boy Trouble (1939); Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

The Birthday Party (1968); The Go-Between (1971); The Last Tycoon (1976); The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981); The Trial (1993)

Pygmalion (1938); Major Barbara (1941); Caesar and Cleopatra (1946)

Zabriske Point (1970); Paris, Texas (1984); Silent Tongue (1993)

Barefoot in the Park (1967); The Sunshine Boys (1975); The Goodbye Girl (1977); The Lonely Guy (1984); Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986); Lost in Yonkers (1993)

The Forgotten Village (1941); The Pearl (1948); The Red Pony (1949); Viva Zapata (1952)

Brazil (1985); Empire of the Sun (1987); The Russia House (1990); Shakespeare in Love (1998)

The Killing (1956); Paths of Glory (1957)

I Accuse (1958); Suddenly Last Summer (1959); Ben Hur (1959); The Best Man (1961); Caligula (1980)

King Kong (1933)

Ticket to Paradise (1936); It Could Happen to You (1937); Five Came Back (1939); I Stole a Million (1939); Let’s Make Music (1940)

The Dark Angel (1935); Our Town (1940); Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); Baby Doll (1956); Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)

Three Ways to Love (1969)

8 MEMORABLE LINES ERRONEOUSLY ATTRIBUTED TO FILM STARS

What Gary Cooper actually said to Walter Huston in The Virginian (1929) was, ‘If you want to call me that, smile.’

Johnny Weismuller’s first Tarzan role was in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932). He introduced himself to co-star Maureen O’Sullivan by thumping his chest and announcing, ‘Tarzan’. He then gingerly tapped her chest and said, ‘Jane’.

In fact, James Cagney never uttered this line in any of his roles as a hard-boiled gangster. It has often been used by impersonators, however, to typify Cagney’s tough-guy image.

Charles Boyer cast seductive glances at Hedy Lamarr throughout Algiers (1938), but he never did make this suggestion. Delivered with a French accent, the line appeals to many Boyer imitators who enjoy saying, ‘Come weez mee…’

Cary Grant found himself the recipient of Mae West’s lusty invitation, ‘Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?’ in She Done Him Wrong (1933).

In Casablanca (1942) Ingrid Bergman dropped in unexpectedly at old lover Humphrey Bogart’s nightclub, where she asked the piano player to ‘Play it, Sam’, referring to the song ‘As Time Goes By’. Although Bogart’s character was shocked at hearing the song that reminded him so painfully of his lost love, he also made Sam play it again — but the words he used were, ‘You played it for her, you can play it for me… play it.’

Cary Grant has never exclaimed this line in any film, but imitators often use it to display their Cary Grant-like accents.

In 1955, retired film star Greta Garbo — despairing of ever being free of publicity — said, ‘I want to be let alone.’ The melodramatic misinterpretation, however, is the way most people have heard and quoted it.

17 MOVIE STARS AND HOW THEY WERE DISCOVERED

The hefty comedian got his first break due to a blocked drain. Working as a plumber’s assistant, he was summoned to unclog Mack Sennett’s pipes in 1913 and the producer immediately offered Arbuckle a job in his Keystone Kops comedies.

He was working as a film lab runner at Paramount Studios in 1922 when he was struck by a company car and hospitalised with a broken leg. Studio executives took notice and offered him a chance to act.

He got his start in Hollywood in 1932 when he did a voice-over for a donkey. The actor volunteered to help a film director who was having difficulty getting the animal to bray on cue.

She was cast in her first major role in Tropic of Cancer (1969) on the basis of a political speech that director Joseph Strick heard her delivering.

Working as a stunt man, he was noticed by director Henry King on the set of The Winning of Barbara Worth at Samuel Goldwyn Studios in 1926.

He was discovered by Cinesound Studios casting director John Warwick in Sydney, Australia, in 1932. Warwick found some amateur footage of Flynn taken in 1930 by Dr Herman F. Erben, a filmmaker and tropical-disease specialist who had chartered navigator Flynn’s schooner for a tour of New Guinea headhunter territory.

Hudson, whose original name was Roy Fitzgerald, was working as a truck driver for the Budget Pack Company in 1954 when another driver offered to arrange a meeting between Fitzgerald and agent Henry Willson. In spite of Fitzgerald’s professed lack of faith in his acting abilities, Willson took the aspiring actor under his wing, changed his name to Rock Hudson, and launched his career.

She was a psychology student when MGM star Norma Shearer happened to see a photo of her at a ski lodge in northern California where her parents were employed. Shearer took it to the studio with the result that Leigh was given a role in The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947).

An art student in Rome, she was stopped on the street by director Mario Costa. She let loose a torrent of abuse about men who accost defenceless girls and only when she paused for breath was he able to explain that he wanted to screen-test her for Elisir d’Amore (1946). She won the part.

She met director Allan Dwan in Los Angeles in the spring of 1921. Dwan watched 12-year-old Carole — then tomboy Jane Alice Peters — playing baseball outside the home of his friends Al and Rita Kaufman.

She was introduced to director Allan Dwan in England in 1933, while Dwan was casting a film, Her First Affair. Forty-one-year-old Connie Emerald was trying out for a part, but Dwan found Connie’s 15-year-old daughter Ida better suited for the role.

One of the first actresses to achieve screen stardom without previous stage experience, Marsh was a 17-year-old salesgirl when she stopped by the Biograph Studios to see her sister, Marguerite Loveridge. She was spotted by director D.W. Griffith, who was having problems because none of his contract players was willing to play the lead in Man’s Genesis (1912) with bared legs. Marsh had no such inhibitions when Griffith offered her the part.

He was befriended by actor Richard Egan in 1962 at the gymnasium where both Egan and O’Neal worked out. ‘It was just a matter of Ryan himself being so impressive,’ said Egan.

He was teaching adult-education classes in Garden City, New Jersey, when an agent asked him if he knew an actor who could speak with a European accent. He tried out himself and landed a part in Armstrong Circle Theater on television.

The South African-born actress studied dance and modelled in Milan and New York before heading to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of acting. After several difficult months in LA, Theron’s discovery came in a Hollywood Boulevard bank. When a teller refused to cash an out-of-town check for her, she threw an enormous tantrum which caught the attention of veteran talent manager John Crosby, who happened to be standing nearby. Crosby handed her his business card as she was being thrown out of the bank. After signing with Crosby, Theron landed a star-making role as a sexy assassin in 1996’s 2 Days in the Valley. She ended her association with Crosby in 1997, and has starred in such films as The Cider House Rules, The Italian Job and Monster, which won Theron the Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar in 2004 for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

She was observed in Currie’s Ice Cream Parlor across the street from Hollywood High School in January 1936. Billy Wilkerson, editor of the Hollywood Reporter, approached her while she was drinking a Coke.

He was spotted by director Raoul Walsh at Hollywood’s Fox lot in 1928. Walsh was on his way to the administration building when he noticed Wayne — then Marion Morrison, a studio prop man — loading furniture from a warehouse onto a truck.

PATRICK ROBERTSON’S 10 TALES OF THE MOVIES

Patrick Robertson’s earlier selections of movie lore appeared in The Book of Lists #3 and The Book of Lists ’90s Edition. He is the author of The Book of Firsts and the continuously updated Guinness Movie Facts and Feats, both of which have appeared in many languages, and is currently engaged on The Book of American Firsts.

The rarest and most sought-after cartoon film of all time was rediscovered in 1998 when a 16mm print, bought in London for £2 from the disposal of the Wallace Heaton Film Library in the late 1970s, was identified as the only known copy of Walt Disney’s first-ever production, the seven-minute-long Little Red Riding Hood. It was made in 1922 at Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram Films, a small animation studio he established in Kansas City and which went bankrupt within a year. Little Red Riding Hood is particularly notable to Disney buffs because, unlike the later Hollywood cartoons such as Mickey Mouse, it was drawn by the 21-year-old fledgling film-maker himself. The reason that the unique print remained unidentified for so long was that the pirated copy bought by silent-movie collector David Wyatt had been retitled Grandma Steps Out. Only when he took it to the Disney company 20 years later was it finally revealed that the holy grail of animated films had been found at last.

Every movie buff knows that in the early days of cinema all films were one-reelers until D. W. Griffith came along and invented the full-length feature film with epics like Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Right? Wrong. The first full-length feature film was called The Story of the Kelly Gang, about desperado Ned Kelly, and it was made in Australia in 1906. And nor was this just a one-off. Other Australian features followed, with no fewer than 16 in 1911, the first year in which other countries began to make full-length movies, with France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia and Spain in the vanguard. In 1912 Hungary made more features than any other country and in 1913 it was Germany. With imports flooding in from France, Germany, Italy and Denmark, American producers were finally forced to accept what they had steadfastly refused to believe: that the kind of unsophisticated people who frequented movie houses were able to concentrate on a story lasting as much as an hour and a half. There was an explosion of production in 1914 with the US releasing no fewer than 212 features, of which one, Judith of Bethulia, was indeed by D. W. Griffith. But it is the long-forgotten name of Melbourne theatrical impresario Charles Tait, producer and director of The Story of the Kelly Gang, which should be honoured as that of the true father of the feature-length movie.

Not all actresses can cry to order and some directors have been known to resort to less than gentle measures to coax tears from the dry-eyed. Maureen O’Sullivan’s tear ducts failed to respond in her deathbed scene as Dora in David Copperfield (1935) until director George Cukor positioned himself out of camera range of the bed and twisted her feet sharply and painfully. Victor Fleming achieved the same effect with Lana Turner, never noted as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished thespians, by jerking her arm behind her back and giving it a vicious twist.

Kim Novak, unable to produce tears on demand in the waterfall scene with William Holden in Picnic (1955), asked director Joshua Logan to pinch her arms hard enough to make her cry. The scene took seven takes and after each one a make-up artist swabbed Novak’s arms to cover up the marks. Logan was so distressed by the need to inflict physical hurt on his star that he threw up afterwards. Later Ms Novak was to accuse him of unprompted physical abuse when she recalled the episode.

Gregory La Cava was able to obtain convincing tears from Ginger Rogers in response to Katharine Hepburn’s calla lilies speech in Stage Door (1937) only when he announced to her that a message had just come through to say that her home had been burned to the ground. Norman Tourog directed his own nephew, Jackie Cooper, in Skippy (1931). When he was unable to get the 10-year-old to cry on cue, he told him that he would have his dog shot. The ensuing waterworks helped young Cooper on his way to what would be the youngest Oscar nomination for the next 40 years.

Otto Preminger stooped even lower when he needed spontaneous tears from a dozen small Israeli children in a scene in Exodus (US 1960) to show fear at an imminent Arab attack. He told them that their mothers no longer wanted them and had gone away never to return.

Whatever the vicissitudes of Hollywood, things were worse for child stars in Hong Kong. Veteran actress Josephine Siao Fong-fond recalled her days as the colony’s most famous juvenile of the 1950s: ‘If you were shooting a scene where you had to cry, and they were afraid you wouldn’t be able to deliver, they simply beat you with a rattan cane till you did.’

Ireland had always been notorious for the vigilance of its censors. Surprisingly, though, Roman Polanski’s 1962 debut feature, Knife in the Water, a film with strong homosexual overtones, passed unscathed. It was argued that homosexuality was quite unknown to the Irish and what they did not understand could not harm them. An earlier generation of censors had been less tolerant. In 1932 the Marx Brothers’ slapstick comedy Monkey Business was banned lest it provoke the Irish to anarchy.

One of the most notorious examples of oppressive censorship occurred not at the hands of a censorship board but what might be loosely described as a ‘pressure group’. The picture was The Godfather; those who were affronted were the Mafia, and the pressure group was the Italian-American Civil Rights League, headed by Joseph Colombo. When the League attempted to halt production of the film, producer Albert S. Ruddy decided it would be in the interests of his personal wellbeing and prospects of longevity to meet Mr Colombo and others of its representatives for a full and frank exchange of views. After protracted negotiations, during which the League asserted that the Mafia did not exist and was a figment of collective hysteria, they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The film could go ahead with no fear of retribution from a non-existent underworld brotherhood provided the word ‘Mafia’ was wholly excised from the script. Ruddy declared that he had no wish to cast a slur on the blameless lives led by New York’s Italian-American community and agreed to the League’s suggestion. As it happened, Joseph Colombo was slain before the picture started, by persons alleged to belong to an organised crime syndicate comprised of citizens of the same national origin as himself.

The Godfather (US 1972) was a sensation and became the top-grossing film of 1972 even without mention of the Mafia. But those who decried what they believed was a craven compromise with the mob were mistaken in their criticism. Mario Puzo, author of the original novel and scriptwriter of the film, wryly observed: ‘I must say that Ruddy proved himself a hard bargainer, because the word “Mafia” was never in the script in the first place.’

Maybe you can’t measure talent in dollars, but the moolah does say something about box office appeal. While the second half of the 1990s saw a stable of male leads (Jim Carrey, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone) crashing the $20 million barrier, on the distaff side the upfront fees for A-list leading ladies seemed pegged at a miserly $10 million. (What other profession is allowed to pay women half the rate of men in this day and age?) Then Demi ‘Gimme’ Moore pushed the envelope with a $12.5 million pay-check for Striptease, but the picture bombed. Hard on her heels was Julia Roberts, who then established herself as the undisputed Number 1 female star with her hugely popular successes Notting Hill and The Runaway Bride. For her next picture, the even bigger Erin Brockovich, the flame-haired beauty with the letter-box mouth became the first actress to join the $20 million-up front club. It had taken her 14 years since her debut in a long forgotten 1986 flick called Blood Red and she now commanded a fee precisely 20,000 times the $1,000 she was paid on that one.

The 7,000 extras needed for the racetrack scenes in Universal’s Seabiscuit (2003) would have put the movie into a severe budget bust at the standard fee of $50-$60 per day. Saviour of the movie was one Joe Biggins, the assistant to the unit production manager — not a role that normally wins plaudits from anyone other than the incumbent’s mom. Biggins’ inspiration was lifesize inflatable dolls. Cheap to make and transport, they could be inflated three at a time with a portable pump in 12 seconds. Mixed in with a few live performers, the dolls could be computer activated in post-production to simulate crowd movement. With Seabiscuit in the can and on budget, a triumphant Biggins set up the Inflatable Crowd Co., offering 15,500 roll-up plastic ‘people’ at $15 per week compared with a $300 per week tab for humans.

Between 1923 and 1940 ex-Sergeant Carl Voss commanded a private army. With a strength of 2,112 former World War I servicemen, when it first appeared in the field of opposing American and German troops in The Big Parade (1925), the Voss Brigade took up arms again as Riff warriors, Hessians, Senegalese, Revolutionary Americans, Chinese, Romans, Maoris and Crusaders in the years that followed. They would not only fight on both sides, but were equally adept as foot soldiers and cavalry, and as artillerymen it was said that there was no piece of ordnance they could not handle from the Roman catapult to Big Bertha. Following a stint as Fascist troops in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), their last battle was fought in Four Sons (1940), some ending as they had begun as German soldiery, others as Czechs. On the eve of America’s entry into World War II, the band of veterans was finally routed by the forces of bureaucracy. The Screen Actors Guild decreed that no agent could accept commission from an extra and their commander Sergeant Voss was decreed to be acting as such. After 232 engagements without a serious casualty, the old soldiers faded away.

Two actors who had starred in silent movies — and only two — were still performing in the twenty-first century. But with the death of Sir John Gielgud, who made his debut in Who is the Man (1924) and his last screen appearance in David Mamet’s Catastrophe (2000), there is only one surviving. He is Mickey Rooney, who appeared at the age of five in Not to be Trusted (1926) as a cigar-smoking midget, giving rise to an ongoing belief that he was a vertically-challenged adult who played child roles. Starring as a teenaged, albeit diminutive, Andy Hardy with Judy Garland as his squeeze helped to lay the myth to rest, but MGM could not resist casting the 5ft 3in. Rooney opposite 6ft 6in. Dorothy Ford in Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (1947). These roles and the hundred or so that followed may not have had quite the gravitas of Sir John’s, but Mickey outlived him to become not only the silent screen’s last active survivor but one of twenty-first-century Hollywood’s few actors of such unremitting energy that he puts in as many as four performances a year.

The most married of many-times wedded Hollywood stars was B-movie luminary Al ‘Lash’ La Rue (1917–96), who went to the altar and the divorce court on 10 occasions, finally ending a turbulent life — in which he had been charged with vagrancy, drunkenness, possession of marijuana (while practising as an evangelist) and stealing candy from a baby in Florida, besides scripting porno movies — unmarried.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN’S 10 GRITTIEST, MOST UNCOMPROMISING CRIME FILMS

‘Extreme chef’ Anthony Bourdain, born in New York in 1956, rose from dishwasher to executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City via a stint with the CIA (Culinary Institute of America). He is the author of two novels, Gone Bamboo (1995) and Bone in the Throat (1997), as well as Kitchen Confidential (2000), ‘part autobiography, part restaurant-goer’s survival manual’.

‘Is it good? Is it realistic? (That leaves out The Godfather). Is it a timeless ‘how-to’? Those are the criteria here. No good guys or bad guys — just a moral quagmire of betrayal, lust, greed and crushing, grim inevitability. That’s my recipe for a good time at the movies!’

You can smell the beer on Robert Mitchum as aging hood/ part-time informer Eddie, running out one last scam in a swamp of atmospheric betrayal.

Maybe the most vicious, hardcore — and magnificent — revenge melodrama ever filmed. Accept no substitutes. (The Stallone remake was a sin against God.)

Elegant, beautiful, sad and wise caper movie. And the hero gets away!

The Citizen Kane of caper flicks.

Seedy, delicious — and with Sterling Hayden! Pure crack for film nerds.

The jumbo, king-Hell noir to beat all noirs. A crime masterpiece told from the criminals’ point of view.

Simply the best American movie ever made. Every word, every move, every inflection thoroughly believable. And funny — as only real mobsters can be.

Scorsese’s breathtaking low-budget portrait of small-time hoods in Little Italy. It changed everything.

An underrated classic. James Caan as a professional safecracker — just out of prison — trying to steal his way to a ‘normal’ life. Beautiful, grimly realistic, technically groundbreaking.

Bob Hoskins owned this part. And yet a shatteringly good Helen Mirren still steals the movie. Brit-crime at its very very best.

STEPHEN KING’S 6 SCARIEST SCENES EVER CAPTURED ON FILM

The author of such bestselling novels of terror as Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, The Stand, The Shining, The Dead Zone and Fire Starter, Stephen King is the modern master of the macabre. His style is highly visual, revealing an early and strong influence by film. Although he has probably instilled more fear in the hearts of readers than any other contemporary writer, he, too, has experienced chilling moments in the darkness of the cinema.

The moment near the conclusion, when [Alan] Arkin jumps out at Audrey Hepburn, is a real scare.

The dream sequence at the end, when Sissy Spacek thrusts her hand out of the ground and grabs Amy Irving. I knew it was coming and I still felt as if I’d swallowed a snowcone whole.

In this almost-forgotten movie, there is a chilling sequence when [Richard] Boone begins to maniacally remove the black pins in the filled graveyard plots and to replace them with white pins.

The moment when the corpse seems to leap out of the freezer like a hideous jack-in-the-box.

The scene where the little girl stabs her mother to death with a garden trowel in the cellar… ‘Mother, please, I can do it myself.’

The shower scene, of course.

10 MOVIES THAT WERE PART OF HISTORY

The film starred William Powell and Clark Gable as two street-wise city kids who grew up in opposite directions — one good, the other headed for the electric chair. The plot was old hat, even in 1934, but the film was enough to draw John Dillinger into the cinema with the ‘lady in red’. He had just left the cinema when the tipped-off G-men sprang their trap and killed him in the ensuing fight.

Directed by pacifist Jean Renoir and starring Erich Von Stroheim, this movie was being shown when the German army marched into Vienna in 1938. Not surprisingly, Nazi stormtroopers invaded the cinema and confiscated the WWI anti-war classic in mid-reel.

Produced by, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin in 1940, the movie was a brilliant political satire on Nazi Germany. Hitler ordered all prints of the film banned, but when curiosity got the better of him he had one brought in through Portugal and viewed it himself in complete privacy — not once, but twice. History does not record his views on the film.

This was a raucous celebration of rock’n’roll starring Bill Haley and his Comets. In London, its young audience took the message to heart in September of 1954. After seeing the film, more than 3,000 Teddy Boys left the cinema to stage one of the biggest riots in Britain up to that time.

Starring Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler, this film — a Universal production dealing with a dedicated mining engineer and his socialite wife — was playing in the tourist-section cinema of the Andrea Doria on the foggy night in July 1956 when the liner collided with the Stockholm. The film was in its last reel when the collision occurred. Fifty people lost their lives in the tragedy.

A 20th Century Fox production starring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine and Maurice Chevalier, it was just a little too lavish for the taste of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during his 1959 visit to the studio where it was being filmed. The Cold War heated up briefly when Khrushchev reacted with shocked indignation at the ‘perversity’ and ‘decadence’ of dancer MacLaine’s flamboyantly raised skirts.

A double bill featuring two B-style war movies was playing at the Texas Theatre in Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald was captured after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. War Is Hell, starring Tony Russell, had just begun when Oswald called attention to himself by ducking into the cinema without paying the 90¢ admission. He was apprehended by the police amid the sound of onscreen gunfire.

The Swedish film starring Lena Nyman as a sexually active political sociologist was a shocking sensation in 1969. On October 6, 1969, though, Jackie Onassis was the one making headlines after she allegedly gave a professional judo chop to a New York news photographer who took pictures of her leaving the cinema showing the film.

Directed by Moustapha Akkad, this picture, which purported to be an unbiased, authentic study, evoked the wrath of the Hanafi Muslim sect, which assumed that the film would depict the image of the Prophet, an act they consider blasphemous. Demanding that the film be withdrawn from the Washington, DC cinema where it was opening, small bands of Hanafi gunmen invaded the local city hall and two other buildings on March 10, 1977, killing one man and holding more than 100 hostages for two days before surrendering. Their protest turned out to be much ado about nothing. The Prophet was neither seen nor heard in the film; instead, actors addressed the camera as if it were the Prophet standing before them.

This Iranian film was being shown in the Cinema Rex cinema in Abadan, Iran, on August 19, 1977, when arsonists set fire to the building, killing at least 377 people (an additional 45 bodies were discovered later in the charred ruins, but these were not included in the official government totals). Police arrested 10 members of a Muslim extremist group that opposed the shah’s reforms and had been implicated in other cinema and restaurant fires. However, another version of this incident was sent to the authors by an eyewitness who claims that police chained shut the cinema doors and fended off the crowd outside with clubs and M16s. The fire department, only 10 minutes from the theatre, reportedly did not arrive until the fire had burned itself out. Surprisingly, this witness found most of the people had been burned to death in their seats.

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN’S 10 FAVOURITE MOVIES

Born August 29, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois, William Friedkin began his career in television and documentaries before moving to features. His early films include such diverse movies as Good Times (1967), starring Sonny and Cher, and The Birthday Party (1968), adapted from the Harold Pinter play. In 1971, Friedkin directed The French Connection, and became the youngest filmmaker in history to win the Best Director Oscar. In 1973, his adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s horror novel The Exorcist became one of the most successful and controversial films in the history of cinema. His other films include Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980), To Live and Die in L. A. (1985), and The Hunted (2003). Friedkin is also a passionate classical music and opera fan, and has directed productions of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in 1998 and Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 2004. He lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, producer Sherry Lansing.

• Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)

• All About Eve (Joseph C. Mankiewicz)

• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston)

• Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)

• The Band Wagon (Vincent Minnelli)

• Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder)

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)

• The Verdict (Sidney Lumet)

• Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne)

• Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick)

KEVIN MACDONALD’S 10 FAVOURITE DOCUMENTARIES OF ALL TIME

Born in Glasgow in 1967, Kevin Macdonald is a documentary film-maker whose films include Channel Four’s Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened To Britain (2000) and the Oscar-winning One Day in September (1999). He also wrote and directed the biography of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (1994), and his most recent documentary is a short film, Return to Siula Grande (2004), about how climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates revisited their experience for Macdonald’s film Touching the Void (2003), inspired by Simpson’s book of the same name.

Using pirated stills and archive footage, set to a song by Lena Horne that had been banned in the United States, Cuba’s pre-eminent film-maker fashioned a six-minute masterpiece which angrily, yet stylishly, denounces rascism. It inspired me to think that serious subjects need not be handled in an obviously serious way.

A film which contains not only the solution to a real life murder mystery but also a thesis on the nature of knowledge itself.

The evolution of cheap, high-quality home video cameras has radically altered the documentary over the last decade or so. Suddenly small, personal, domestic stories became easily filmable and the result was a rash of the freshest, most unpretentious films you are ever likely to see. This particular documentary was from the second series of BBC ‘Video Diaries’ and was made by (and about) an Albanian doctor who lives and works in the most appalling circumstances and who loves to listen to English football on the World Service. He hero-worships the Tottenham Hotspur and England player Gary Lineker. It makes you cry — and wonder why you complain so much about your life.

It’s five hours long, at times confusing and frustrating, but I don’t know of any other film with quite the intelligence and humanity of Ophuls’ masterwork about a small French town under Nazi occupation. All human life is here.

It could as easily be Listen to Britain or Fires Were Started — all of them show Jennings’ surrealist flair for the striking image that burrows deep into your subconscious. All are full of the epiphanies of everyday life. I understand perfectly why Lindsay Anderson called him the ‘only poet of British Cinema’.

A film filled with magic and wonder — it tells the story of a group of blind children at an institution in the Czech Republic who become obsessed with taking photographs.

The most painful, honest and moving film you are ever likely to see. Lanzmann’s sparse epic of the Holocaust is a life changing experience.

Not only does it capture the Rolling Stones at their bombastic, glorious best, but its elegant, complex structure means that it has the resonance and thematic depth of a great piece of literature — like some twentieth-century re-telling of Paradise Lost.

The most revealing ‘portrait film’ I know — about one of the most enigmatic public figures of her era: Marlene Dietrich. Overcoming the curmudgeonly exterior of the old battle-axe, Schell reveals the icon’s broken heart.

The first documentary I saw in the cinema, it made me realise that documentaries can be more dramatic, more moving, more surprising than any piece of fiction. I’ll never forget how the audience stood and cheered when one of the boys scores a decisive point.

WALTER MATTHAU’S 10 FAVOURITE COMEDIES OF ALL TIME

Born Walter Matthow on October 1, 1920, to Russian–Jewish immigrants in New York City, Matthau was an amazingly versatile actor who could ‘play anything from Scarlett O’Hara to Rhett Butler’. While best known for his comedic performances in such hits as The Odd Couple, The Bad News Bears and Grumpy Old Men, Matthau also played notable dramatic roles in a wide variety of films, including Fail-Safe, Charley Varrick and JFK. He received Best Actor Oscar nominations for his work in The Sunshine Boys and Kotch, and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in The Fortune Cookie. Matthau died of a heart attack on July 1, 2000, just a few months after the release of his final film, Hanging Up. He contributed this list to The Book of Lists in 1983.

• The Odd Couple

• The Producers

• A New Leaf

• Macbeth

• City Lights

• Wuthering Heights

• Death of Salesman

• A Streetcar Named Desire

• Horse Feathers

• Hamlet