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TCM’s Most Influential Classic Movies

TCM logoTCM, which is 15 years old this month, have published a list of the Most Influential Classic Movies.

Normally I’m a little sceptical about these kinds of lists, but this one is pretty hard to argue with.

  1. The Birth of a Nation (1915)
  2. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
  3. Metropolis (1927)
  4. 42nd Street (1933)
  5. It Happened One Night (1934)
  6. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
  7. Gone with the Wind (1939)
  8. Stagecoach (1939)
  9. Citizen Kane (1941)
  10. The Bicycle Thief (1947)
  11. Rashomon (1950)
  12. The Searchers (1956)
  13. Breathless (1959)
  14. Psycho (1960)
  15. Star Wars (1977)

I think a more challenging exercise might be to list films over the last 30 years that will have a similar status in future.

Off the top of my head I’d go for: 

  • Halloween (helped kick start 80s boogeyman horror) 
  • Blade Runner (influenced the look of pop culture) 
  • Die Hard (the template for many action blockbusters) 
  • Sex Lies and Videotape (began the Sundance indie movement) 
  • Pulp Fiction (led to many, inferior, crime imitators) 
  • Toy Story (the dawn of CGI animation in the modern era) 
  • The Matrix (a massive influence on action films over the last decade, despite the inferior sequels)

But what about the last decade?

> Original post at TCM
> Total Film on influential movies 
> Wikipedia on film in the 2000s 

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Interesting News TV

Elvis Mitchell hosts new TCM interview series

A new interview series hosted by Elvis Mitchell is about to start airing on TCM in the US.

It is called Under the Influence and features Mitchell speaking to various luminaries from the film world about how classic film has influenced their lives.

Most notably it features the last interview Sydney Pollack gave before his untimely death in May.

Here is the schedule for July:

The series will return in November with guests featuring Joan Allen, Edward Norton, John Leguizamo and Richard Gere.

For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Elvis was a film critic at the New York Times for four years, served as Editor-at-large for Spin magazine and has also written for Esquire.

He also presents the weekly radio show The Treatment on KCRW (which you can download as a podcast here).

I’ll update this post if the series is scheduled to air on TCM’s UK channel.

UPDATE 08/07/08: TCM have been in touch to confirm that Under the Influence will screen on their UK channel in January.

> Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence at TCM
> KCRW’s The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell
> TCM in the UK