Back when this site first went live, I put together my list of 200 favorite classic movies. This week I'd like to re-run the list (I haven't really changed my mind on any of them since then), and challenge visitors to this site to do something similar. Here's the offer:
If you're a huge enough classic movie fan to put together your list of 100 (or even 200) favorite films of all time, I'll post it on this site on a separate page (or link to your site, if you have one)! If you're able to put it in simple HTML format (line and paragraph breaks would be fine), that would be even better. How about it?
In addition to my list, there are a lot of others already on the Web, and several others submitted by our visitors over the past few years. Here's a list that you might like to check out.
Okay, here's my list, with the original explanation included. Hope you enjoy it!
Right off the bat, I will freely admit that putting together a list of your own 200 favorite movies is a supreme act of egotism -- especially when you put it on a Web site! But I will also hasten to add that I'm not presenting these as my picks for the 200 greatest movies of all time. In fact, these are all films that I love, and don't mind seeing over and over again. They're the kind of films that I'll stay up half the night to watch if they just happen to show up on Turner Classic Movies or the local Sunday night late late movie. I offer them to you as a clue to how your humble Guide thinks about movies, and as a discussion starter.
Why 200 movies? Well, I started out with 100, but kept coming across more films that I couldn't bear to leave off. Eventually I expanded it. I've divided the list into the first 100 and the second 100, but I'm not presenting it that way here. Instead, I've chosen to organize them in chronological order, for those of you who want to avoid certain decades, such as the 70s.
You'll also notice that there are no films on the list after 1995. This isn't merely because this is a "classic" movies Web site. It's also because I won't add a movie to my list unless I've seen it several times, and that's unlikely to happen until a movie begins appearing on cable or broadcast TV. If you decide to make your own list, avoid the temptation to fill your list with movies you just saw last month. Most of them won't hold up over time.
Some other guidelines: Just because you like Woody Allen, don't put every Woody Allen film on your list. Pick your favorites, and move on. Don't add a film just because everybody else thinks it's great. If Citizen Kane left you a little cold, leave it off. It's your list, after all. Finally, use some kind of resource. Nobody can do it from memory. Trust me.
Pick a decade:
The 1930s.
The 1940s.
The 1950s.
The 1960s.
The 1970s.
The 1980s-90s.
Other classic movie checklists that you'll enjoy.
