Director Neil Jordan said he’d always turned down the chance to write about his favourite films, ‘Not because I can’t think of them, but because I can far more readily think of my favourite bits of movies than my favourite movies. Many dull movies are redeemed by unexpected, accidental bits of poetry,’ he said – and actual bits of poems, which brought a ‘smart but decidedly commercial film to a different kind of life’ in Four Weddings and a Funeral with that Auden recital.
Likewise, Rutger Hauer’s final speech in the rain in Blade Runner always seemed to Jordan ‘like a quote from Paradise Lost’.
The Observer Magazine of 6 February 2000 – then Life magazine – was devoted to these memorable moments as opposed to simply the best 100 films, as chosen by Observer readers.
Unsurprisingly, the directors most cited in the poll – Spielberg, Kubrick, Hitchcock, David Lean and Ridley Scott – were ‘storyboard directors noted for the time they spend in pre-production and their precision on set’. Unforgivably, there was just one female director – Jane Campion for The Piano.
Third in the list, appropriately, was the enigmatic appearance of racketeer and ‘charismatic baddie’ Harry Lime stepping out of the shadows in The Third Man, even though Orson Welles didn’t appear until an hour in. ‘Whether he is hiding in a doorway or philosophising on a ferris wheel, Welles is the film’s iconic motif.’
At No 2 was the 45-second shower scene in Psycho, shot in seven days using 70 separate camera set-ups and the plot pivot of the whole film, ‘the unexpected – and unexpectedly vicious – dispatch of Janet Leigh halfway through’.
The ending of The Usual Suspects with the police bulletin board when Officer Kujan realises he has been conned was at No 1. As its director said, it was ‘Testament to how much people like to be tricked: if you trick them the right way, they will love you forever.’
