40 Movies Before 40


Choosing the films for my 40 before 40 film list turned out to be an immensely difficult task. In the end the list is noticeable as much for the titles that were left off as those that were eventually chosen. In helping me to formulate the list, I came up with a set of rules which I forced myself to follow strictly:
  • I could not choose a film which I had already seen before 
  • I had to limit myself to only one film per director 
  • The films should have been filmed before I was born (in other words prior to 1982) except the last entry on the list which should be a film from 1982 itself  which I consider influential, that I hadn't yet seen.
Ultimately, the primary purpose of formulating this list was to broaden my cinematic education which made the first rule an obvious one to set. There were enormous gaping holes in this respect, notably silent film as well as the French New Wave (I have never seen a film made by Truffaunt or Godard or Antonioni). The whole point was to help fill these gaps and to watch new films.

Another obvious gap was having not seen any films by some of the great directors in cinema history, most notably Ingmar Bergman though you could add Renoir, Tarkovsky, Pasolini, Ozu to the list besides the aforementioned big three of the 1960s. To make sure I had as much breadth and scope as possible, I decided to put the second rule in place.

The third rule was related to broadening the range of movies I would see. Beyond the fact that most of the films I have seen and enjoyed date from the 1990s onwards, I find it easier to go back a decade at most barring a few exceptions (such as Film Noir). My birth year is an arbritary cut off point, but it does force me to largely consider films well outside my comfort zone.

The second rule in particular made formulating the list extremely difficult. I could only pick one film by Bergman - but how to choose between Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Fanny and Alexander and Persona just to name a few? Similarly, should I choose La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2 for my one Fellini film? Even though I have seen Rashomon and Ran, how to choose between the Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Hidden Fortress and Ikiru among the remaining Kurosawa films I had not seen? Needless to say, the choices were very difficult indeed.

For the silent era, I decided I had to pick F.W Mornau's acclaimed Sunrise, and I also had to pick a film each from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, silent cinema's two most influential film-makers. I chose The General and City Lights, generally considered to be their greatest films. Another extremely influential film-maker from the silent era was Fritz Lang, and Metropolis remains a quintessential Science Fiction film so I added that to the list, although that meant forgoing his equally famous M.

In terms of the silent film era, two films I neglected to choose stand out: The Battleship Potempkin and Nosferatu. I think there is a growing consensus for the former that as influential as it has been, it is overrated, and the latter was groundbreaking but mainly for its time. The last very influential silent film I didn't choose was Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, partly based on my decision to choose his late masterwork Ordet instead.

When forced to make a tough decision based on the one film per director rule, I decided I would choose that director's most famous work (if I had not already seen it). Thus, due to my complete lack of exposure to the French New Wave, I easily alighted on The 400 Blows, Breathless, L'Avventura as absolute foundational works for the era as a whole, and they were my choices for Godard, Truffaut and Antoninoni.

There were also some absolutely essential films which practically chose themselves, films that are practically written on every must-see-before-you-die list. Some of the absolutely essential films and very famous films that I still haven't seen include: The Bicycle Thieves, All About Eve, Tokyo Story, On the Waterfront, the Seven Samurai, Twelve Angry Men, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now. These practically chose themselves.

In the end, I was still left with some impossible choices. Both La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 are probably essential films. I chose the former as my only Fellini largely on weight of Roger Ebert listing it as one of his Top 10 choices in the Sight and Sound poll and my great respect for him as a film critic. Even leaving out Citizen Kane there were still several Orson Welles films to choose between, but I chose Touch of Evil because I love film noir, and that was one film noir classic I had not seen. 

In other cases, my choice was essentially a toss-up. Hiroshima Mon Amor or Last Year at Marienbad? I picked the former largely having greater affinity with and greater curiousity about an inter-racial relationship than the aristocracy. On the Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire, two of Elia Kazan's greatest films and Marlon Brando's greatest performances came down to that famous line. The Rules of the Game or The Grand Illusion for Renoir - in the end I really had no clue so I chose the one placed higher on the Sight and Sound critics list. 

As much as I wanted this to be a cinematic education, I also didn't want it to be completely stuffed full of foreign language art house films culled from the Sight and Sound list. I also wanted a wide range of genres (such is my cinematic ignorance that I could easily populate the list based on Italian/French/German/Spanish/Japanese/Eastern European art house directors). So I decided to choose a musical, and eventually settled for The Umbrellas of Cherborg (though I could have equally chosen Gigi, Oliver, An American in Paris or Fiddler on the Roof). I wanted a comedic film and All About Eve is the classic of that genre (though I Airplane! would have been an excellent left-field choice). One film I did include for the sake of variety, albeit reluctantly, was the holiday classic It's a Wonderful Life: it is a much loved film, and its sentimentality might be a good antidote to the stark, slightly depressing cast of rest of the list.

The final choice - the film from 1982 - was probably the most interesting and difficult to make. 1982 was not a great year for film. Gandhi won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year and I don't think it is a film that has withstood the test of time. Fitzcarraldo and Fanny and Alexander were ruled out because I had already chosen films by Herzog and Bergman respectively. Tootsie was a favourite of my parents who went to see it on a date, but was it really a defining film of the era? There was The Evil Dead and Poltergeist, two classic horror films, but I dislike horror in general (the one area I was unwilling to explore despite my intention to have as much diversity in the list as possible).

That left two Science Fiction films which were both very influential in rather different ways: Blade Runner and E.T respectively. That Blade Runner remains a highly influential Science Fiction and Noir classic made it the obvious choice. And E.T more than any other film, defined how Spielberg essentially dominated Hollywood in the 1980s. I love Noir and Science Fiction making Blade Runer an obvious choice (and yes, I have somehow only seen segments of it, never the full movie). But I also have sentimental reasons with regards to E.T (which I have also somehow also contrived not to have seen): when I was 6 years old, on a visit to Universal Studios, California with my family, I was chosen out of the audience to demostrate the special effects of the famous flying scene. I got to ride the bicycle and they superimposed it on a big screen so just like Elliot, I was flying. In the end, unable to decide between them I thought I would do them both as a rather unique double bill.

Here is the final list in full:
  1. Sunrise (1927)
  2. The General (1927)
  3. Metropolis (1927)
  4. City Lights (1931)
  5. L'Atalante (1934)
  6. The Rules of the Game (1939)
  7. The Children of Paradise (1945)
  8. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
  9. Brief Encounter (1946)
  10. The Bicycle Thief (1948)
  11. All About Eve (1950)
  12. Ugetsu (1953)
  13. Tokyo Story (1953)
  14. On the Waterfront (1954)
  15. The Seven Samurai (1954)
  16. Panther Panchali (1955)
  17. Ordet (Word) (1955)
  18. The Searchers (1956)
  19. 12 Angry Men (1957)
  20. The Seventh Seal (1957)
  21. Vertigo (1958) [Watched 15 November 2014]
  22. Touch of Evil (1958)
  23. The 400 Blows (1959)
  24. Breathless (1959)
  25. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
  26. L 'Avventura (1960)
  27. La Dolce Vita (1960)
  28. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
  29. The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) [Watched 28 Sept 2014]
  30. Andrei Rublev (1966)
  31. Au Hasard Balthasar (1966)
  32. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
  33. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
  34. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)
  35. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
  36. Chinatown (1974)
  37. Taxi Driver (1976)
  38. Days of Heaven (1978)
  39. Apocalypse Now (1979)
  40. Blade Runner/ E.T the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

40 Before 40 Book List [Fiction]


  1. The Iliad - Homer
  2. The Odyssey - Homer
  3. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
  4. The Dream of the Red Chamber
  5. The Tale of the Genji 
  6. The Divine Comedy - Dante 
  7. Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes
  8. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained - John Milton
  9. Emma - Jane Austen
  10. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
  11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
  12. Middlemarch - George Eliot
  13. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
  14. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
  15. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain [Completed July 2014]
  16. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  17. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
  18. Ulysses - James Joyce
  19. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton 
  20. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
  21. A Passage to India - E.M Forster 
  22. Women in Love - D.H Lawrence 
  23. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
  24. The Collected Stories - Ernest Hemingway
  25. Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable - Samuel Beckett
  26. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  27. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
  28. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
  29. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
  30. Dead Souls and Collected Stories - Nikolai Gogol 
  31. Collected Stories - Anton Chekhov
  32. Madame Bovary - Gustav Flaubert
  33. The Red and the Black - Stendhal
  34. Old Goriot - Honore de Balzac
  35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
  36. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
  37. The Trial/The Castle/Short Stories - Franz Kafka
  38. Collected Fiction - Jose Luis Borges
  39. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [Completed June 2014]
  40. The Tin Drum - Gunther Grass