TCM's Essentials: 52 Must See Movies

“it is groundbreaking…. I think it is profound [and] has such a poetic message…. It keeps you thinking about the way that the world and life should function…. An original in every sense of the word.”
-Drew Barrymore

“This is an example of the great work being done by filmmakers in Europe before the Second World War. It’s so advanced for its time…, so imaginative.”
-Robert Osborne

“What I love is this is a movie. It was created on a soundstage, and in fields with trenches. This isn’t a documentary, and it almost has the look of [one]. The camera’s very low to the ground, so you’re where the soldiers were in the trenches…. It is a harrowing picture.”
-Robert Osborne

“For me this movie is an essential because the grittiness of these war sequences is really a model for other films that are to come, like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, [with its] fantastic tracking shots through the trenches, on to films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now.”
-Alec Baldwin

“Charlie Chaplin is film. He’s what film’s all about. He started out in the silent-screen era ad helped define it, helped create it, helped bring it into focus as an art form [and] an entertainment form. He was a genius… I do think City Lights is his best film.”
-Robert Osborne

“What I love…is Chaplin’s incredible use of his body as an actor…. He must have been a man of inexhaustible energy. He was like this nuclear reactor on film…kind of the opposite of a certain film technique you see years later when people are very still and kind of sedentary. Who was more alive physically, and who was more graceful and inventive, [then Chaplin]?”
-Alec Baldwin

“This movie fascinates me because it was the first all-star film…. It also started movies in which several different stories play out and are interlinked together…. It’s amazing to me how good Joan Crawford is in it. Better than Garbo, I think.”
-Robert Osborne

“[Joan Crawford] really steals the show. She is so strong yet she has this great sort of looseness, this freedom about her, this casual elegance that really blew me away…. She’s amazing.”
-Drew Barrymore

“Fay Wray, a brunette, is a blonde in this movie because they wanted to get Jean Harlow for the lead but MGM wouldn’t loan her, [and] they always envisioned Anne was to be a blonde like Harlow…. Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion animation…gives the whole thing a vitality and excitement that I don’t think any of the later versions have ever had.”
-Robert Osborne

“I always felt that there were really three love stories. There’s the love story between Kong and Fay Wray, there’s the love story between Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot, and there’s a love story between Robert Armstrong and his ambition.”
-Carrie Fisher

“No matter how many times you see it you always hear something new that you hadn’t heard before…. During the great war scene, every time you see Groucho, there’s a different uniform or outfit. In the middle of the war, he’s always changing clothes!”
-Robert Osborne

“This was still relatively early sound, and a lot of things were pretty stiff in a lot of movies, and [the Marx Brothers] were just so free-flowing and so vivid – the visual puns, the verbal puns. This wasn’t a hit…it was too chaotic for most people! But it…has grown and grown in estimation.”
-Molly Haskell

“A lot of scenes have these great, sort of breathable moments of the charm of the characters – Clark Gable describing the different mannerisms of hitchhiking, them on a bus together listening to music…. They feel very connected. They really earn it by the end.”
-Drew Barrymore

“This film really defines the term ‘sleeper.’ No one expected anything from this little movie, made at the little Columbia Pictures studio, directed by Frank Capra, who’d done some movies but wasn’t particularly esteemed…and it turns out to be this megahit that started the whole screwball comedy genre.”
-Robert Osborne

“They really play off each other beautifully…. You had this male-female screenwriting team [husband and wife Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich], and they really do give dual voices…. One of my favorite scenes is Myrna Loy’s great screwball entrance. For a beautiful lady, that just wasn’t done until screwball comedy.”
-Molly Haskell

“One of the great things about the Thin Man films, besides being so much fun to watch, is what a great training ground they were for young actors, like Maureen O’Sullivan in this film…. William Powell was great, but to me there was never anybody quite as good as Myrna Loy…. She always seemed so wise, so tolerant, and amused by everything.”
-Robert Osborne

“I was surprised when I saw it, expecting another Frankenstein, that it is less of a horror film…. He’s a very sympathetic character in this movie, and nobody understands him. I mean, he kills a few people along the way but that’s the nature of it – that’s show business! But you really feel sorry for the monster.”
-Robert Osborne

“It really does have amazing pace, this film. It flies by. It’s beautiful to look at, it’s entertaining, and I think the look of the bride is very cool and innovative for 1935.”
-Drew Barrymore

“Fred Astaire would rehearse for up to six months before they started filming. And relentlessly rehearse – not a few hours a day, but all day long. Fred and Ginger movies are magnets; you can’t walk past them. You have to watch…. It’s the degree of excellence.”
-Sally Field

“One reason I think this is such a good Fred and Ginger movie is they had a really good director, George Stevens. It’s such a joyful movie and it just makes you feel good, and anytime you’re down in the dumps all you have to do is put this movie on and you’ll feel better.”
-Robert Osborne

“To me, it’s the definitive Frank Capra film…back in the thirties, [if] you put his name on a marquee, it meant as much as Clark Gable…. People went to see a Capra film because he directed it. And he won three Academy Awards for Best Director in five years; nobody [else] has ever done something like that.”
-Robert Osborne

“The banquet scene is a beautiful job of cutting and exposition…. Suddenly you get this look across Claude Rains – it’s like the memory of himself as a younger, less corrupt person. It’s just beautiful how much information you get in that one scene.”
-Molly Haskell

“I don’t think it would be the classic today without Vivien Leigh in it. She’s the lynchpin that makes it all work and stay modern. Another reason it’s so enduring is that every emotion people can feel are covered in Gone with the Wind.”
-Robert Osborne

“The heart of it is the family, the loves of these people, the love of the land…. There’s a moment in the beginning when Scarlett [and] her father [are] looking at Tara, with this gnarled tree and this vivid sunset, and it somehow cements her tie to Tara even before she’s ready to acknowledge it.”
-Molly Haskell

“Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda later that same year…made a film at Columbia Pictures called You Belong to Me, and it went with a thud. It didn’t have any of the brightness or any of the charm [of The Lady Eve]. So even actors as good as Fonda and Stanwyck have to have someone like Preston Sturges and a great script to have the results you get in The Lady Eve.”
-Robert Osborne

“I love Henry Fonda in it…because he’s willing to really serve it up to Barbara Stanwyck and allow her to control the atmosphere. [He’s] wide-eyed in a sort of charmingly submissive way. That takes so much confidence and trust…. They’re so beautifully juxtaposed with each other.”
-Drew Barrymore

“It’s one movie that explored everything that came before it and influenced almost everything that came after it…. [Welles] told a story in a whole new way. Flashbacks inside of flashbacks, changing points of view, breaking all the rules. On top of that, this was an incredibly dangerous film to make. The character of Citizen Kane was based on William Randolph Hearst…and there were many powerful forces trying to stop this movie. But Welles…stuck to his vision. And movies have never been the same.”
-Rob Reiner

“I think it’s such an essential Bette Davis [film] because it shows all aspects of her – she can be the neurotic, overweight Aunt Charlotte, and then she’s the glamorous one, soft-spoken, tender. And she’s got these wonderful scenes with Gladys Cooper…were she’s very strong and forceful. You see all shades of her.”
-Robert Osborne

“It’s just one of the great romantic melodramas of all time…. What’s really fun about it on a girly level is one of the best makeovers in history. And how that is displayed is just amazing.”
-Rose McGowan

“For quotability, Casablanca is the hands-down winner. The fact that those lines are part of our everyday language, that people use them even if they haven’t seen the movie, shows you the powerful influence that movies have over our lives.”
-Rob Reiner

“The amazing thing is that writer-director Billy Wilder was allowed to make such a daring film with amoral characters in the midst of World War II, when most people went to the movies for escapism – not to see two unsavory people planning the murder of the woman’s husband. Once given the green light, Wilder not for a moment ever soft-peddled the characters or the story’s cynicism, and the end result not only found great favor with 1944 movie audiences, but still does today.”
-Robert Osborne

“I think this is one of the true jewels of the MGM library…. [But] one who never gets much credit for this movie is Mary Astor…. Three years earlier she’d played the femme fatale in The Maltese Falcon…and all of a sudden here she is at MGM playing a Mama and doing it very convincingly and very beautifully.”
-Robert Osborne

“These are movies that are tough to make. How do you make a story with music where one isn’t going to overwhelm the other? Minnelli was…a master at modulating all these things and putting them all together as a whole.”
-Alec Baldwin

“I think it’s one of the great films of the 1940s. It’s a perfect combination of entertainment, beauty on the screen, visuals on the screen, music score by Alfred Newman. The story is terrific…and it does stir up your emotions…. I have always been a sucker for Gene Tierney. She was one of the most fascinating people I’ve seen in my life onscreen.”
-Robert Osborne

“Tierney’s acting technique has this kind of narcotic effect on you when you watch her on film. She was one of the most placid people and one of the most inscrutable actresses.”
-Alec Baldwin

“This is a real Hollywood drama…. There are no effects, no action scenes, it’s a pure spoken-word drama. It’s set in a postwar period but I think speaks to a lot of issues beyond World War II, issues about human relationships.”
-Alec Baldwin

“It’s still very relevant today, [with] people coming back damaged from terrible fighting they’ve had to do somewhere…. This movie really does have a message, but it’s always entertaining…. One of the great, great films of all time, I think.”
-Robert Osborne

“Out of the Past is my favorite of all the film noir movies…. Jane Greer was about as good a film noir dame as you could get. She’s beautiful and totally untrustworthy. You would never be safe with her at any time whatsoever.”
-Robert Osborne

“I’m always taken with films which seem very accurate and smart about the geography of the sets and where you are at any given time. Out of the Past is one of the most artfully staged movies I’ve ever seen…. Mitchum [is] at his most voluptuous…, one of the most powerful film actors, the man who never lost his cool.”
-Alec Baldwin

“It’s one of the great films of all time on so many levels – just to look at if nothing else. It is so beautiful…. Moira Shearer with that red hair is spectacular in Technicolor…. I don’t think there’s a film that has ever influenced as many dancers as The Red Shoes.”
-Robert Osborne

“Never has a ballet been captured on film like this. You cannot take your eyes off it…. It isn’t only dancers [who have been influenced]. It’s anyone who has this dream to do something of the arts, because there is a tendency to become so obsessed with being better and working at it that you lose sight of yourself.”
-Sally Field

“The Bicycle Thief is such an important movie and such a devastatingly good movie, maybe the best foreign language film that I’ve seen…. Nonprofessional actors are not used to hitting marks or doing the kind of things that a pro actor would learn to do. So I think it’s all the more amazing that they were able to do it as quickly…and as well as they did.”
-Robert Osborne

“It is amazing how necessity is the mother of all this fantastic work they do…. I would love to have been on the set…to see the innovation,…the demands logistically of how to make a film when you have very little money…. You’re either the victim of bad luck or you turn it into lemonade somehow.”
-Alec Baldwin

“[It’s] one of the defining films now for Orson Welles, but at the time, he was really not on the A list anymore. Nobody was hiring him much so this was a fabulous film to have at that point in his career…. One of my favorite films of all time.”
-Robert Osborne

“The movie up until [Welles’ entrance] has been heavy and oppressive, and suddenly this sparkle happens. Welles is beautiful and young and mischievous…. It’s the most atmospheric movie ever made…. Cotten doesn’t get the credit he should.”
-Molly Haskell

“It’s the kind of like this was the role [Cagney] was waiting his whole life to play. All the other gangster roles were the lead-up to playing Cody…. I don’t think anyone played a gun moll better than [Virginia Mayo] did.”
-Robert Osborne

“I think this is a beautifully edited film. You and I have talked about the importance [of editing], especially in action films like this,… and that final sequence is remarkable.”
-Alec Baldwin

“By the conclusion, any number of archetypal male-female eruptions occur, and both Hepburn and Tracy are remarkably eloquent from their opposing viewpoints…. [Tracy] had a way of not quite learning his lines perfectly. He learned them, but just to the point where he wasn’t quite sure he knew them – so that he would sometimes seem to be searching for the word, as we do in life.”
-Peter Bogdanovich

“This movie started a whole new trend in Hollywood. It was the first in which an actor was not paid much money upfront but was given a percentage deal, and that’s because Universal couldn’t afford a big star like Jimmy Stewart…. It turned the whole industry around.”
-Robert Osborne

“The 50s are really the peak of these morally complex westerns…. The heroes are battle-weary, there’s an ambivalence about violence, [and] I think there’s more interest in male-female relationships because the whole idea is ‘maybe now’s the time to settle down.’”
-Molly Haskell

“It shows what Hollywood can do when everybody is putting their best foot forward. The perfect film because of the cast, certainly the direction…also the subject matter, which is particularly fascinating to me because I love the movie world. The music by Franz Waxman I think is absolutely appropriate. The gloomy set in the house is incredible…. It’s in my top one or two movies of all time.”
-Robert Osborne

“There’s such a central humanity underneath all of its wry humor and absurdity. What makes it a truly great film is that you believe Holden’s character does care for this woman, who’s the ultimate nut bag…in Hollywood history!”
-Alec Baldwin

“I found [John Dall] so appealing, very handsome but [with] this great attainability. He just had a wonderful sort of charm about him…. And I was so amazed by the acting [Peggy Cummins] does with her eyes.”
-Drew Barrymore

“It [was] an independent film, so I never expected it to have the studio look that it had. The great cinematography by Russell Harlan, who did To Kill a Mockingbird, the music by Victor Young, who was this great composer for Paramount for years…. [It’s] terrific.”
-Robert Osborne

“A lot of films that are about the stage or Hollywood don’t fly; they’re considered too insider…. The universality of theme of getting old, of a younger woman supplanting you,…saves it from people thinking it’s too much about that world.”
-Rose McGowan

“This movie changed my life. It really veered me toward wanting to have something to do in the theater or the movie business, and I’ve never regretted it…. It’s witty and funny and serious and says a lot – not only about the theater and about theater people, but about life in general, growing older, passion for your work, ambition, how you treat other people. It says so much on so many levels and yet it’s a comedy…. This is the perfect movie.”
-Robert Osborne

“Singin’ in the Rain is a perfect marriage of music and filmmaking. The songs and the numbers not only make sense but they advance the story. And the story itself is a wonderful look at Hollywood’s transition from silent movies to sound, replete with nervous studio bosses, emerging contract players, and established stars tripping over their own eyes. It’s as sharp and as fast as anything before or since.”
-Rob Reiner

“She’s just so mesmerizing…. She had an innate sense of simplicity about her. Her giggle, her charm, just radiated, and this is a film that would never have really been what it is if it hadn’t been for the charm of the actors.”
-Sally Field

“It’s not terribly plot-driven but it’s got this wonderfully romantic, light, airy feeling with two people who are perfect in it…. It’s also another example of location filming and what it can add to a film.”
-Robert Osborne

“I think Seven Samurai is an essential if, for no other reason than inspiring The Magnificent Seven, it also inspired so many different directors…. Many have said [it] got them into the business or taught them how to make a film…. Akira Kurosawa I think certainly does deserve his place in the sun as a great director.”
-Robert Osborne

“Brando makes choices in his performance that are the best…ever made on screen in their subtleties and internalizations…. I don’t think there’s a better example of chemistry in cinema history than Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando in this movie…, where he puts her glove on…or the kiss that they share in the apartment.”
-Drew Barrymore

“I don’t think anybody in film ever portrayed angst, confusion, and torment more honestly, without grandstanding, than Marlon Brando. You can just see the turmoil inside him…. It’s one of those movies that kind of goes beyond being a movie; it becomes a part of the culture, part of the literature of film.”
-Robert Osborne

“I think this movie more than any other shows the genius of Alfred Hitchcock. It’s not until the film is over that you realize the hero and the action never leave the living room of Stewart’s Greenwich Village apartment. Even when you’re seeing what he’s seeing through binoculars across the courtyard, the camera, Stewart, and the audience stay in that one cramped living room, but never is it claustrophobic, never do you want to go outside for some fresh air, and never are you less than riveted. I’m not sure any other director could make that work.”
-Robert Osborne

“When I talked with director, Don Siegel, about this picture, he spoke about his main point of departure. ‘There was a real effort to make it completely believable,’ he said. ‘That was the big chore, so that it wouldn’t be just another special effects picture.’ That utter sense of everyday reality is what makes this work so effective and memorable, a triumph of talent over financial limitations [and] of truly imaginative direction. The final scene with Dana Wynter, by itself, is one of the most subtly terrifying moments in picture history.”
-Peter Bogdanovich

“It’s a very exciting movie…, also one of the most beautiful. Nobody shot Monument Valley like John Ford…. One of the things I like is that it gives Jeffrey Hunter a really good role. He was such a good actor who never really got his due, except with John Ford.”
-Robert Osborne

“This is a quintessential John Wayne movie, and a very important John Ford film…. It’s like looking at profound art. I couldn’t believe my eyes…. It’s stunningly attractive.”
-Drew Barrymore

“It’s hard to do justice to the work that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis did. They do so much of the movie in drag, and they somehow do it without typical cross-dressing jokes that you might expect. There’s wonderful support from some great Hollywood old-timers – George Raft as the villain, Spats, and Joe E. Brown as the millionaire, Osgood Fielding…. Since 1959, the movie has gotten better every year.”
-Rob Reiner

“North by Northwest has a great example of what Alfred Hitchcock called ‘refrigerator logic’ – something that strikes you when you get up to go to the refrigerator at two o’clock in the morning and you suddenly realize that something you’ve seen in a movie made no sense at all, only you didn’t know it at the time. In North by Northwest, it’s the crop duster sequence…. Now there was no reason why a hit man would choose to kill his subject in this manner, but it doesn’t matter. It’s thrilling, it’s terrifying, and you get swept away…. As far as I’m concerned, this is Alfred Hitchcock’s best movie.”
-Rob Reiner

“Heston embodies what is truly the magic of movie stardom…. I don’t think a man alive could have asked for a better showcase…. You almost see in his eyes that Heston knew what he had, and he wasn’t going to let it go.”
-Alec Baldwin

“I don’t think there’s ever been a better spectacle. It’s also got a great story and intimate feeling to it because of William Wyler. I think it hits the mark on all points…. There’s something very majestic and kind of biblical about [Heston]. I think he fits this era better than modern [settings].”
-Robert Osborne

“I think it’s a knockout film on so many different levels…. Jean-Paul Belmondo is so charismatic and overwhelming…. It’s also a great tour of Paris.”
-Robert Osborne

“Jean-Luc Godard is such a massive influence on filmmakers today. There’s this amazing freedom about everything he does…. There are no rules in the way that this film was made…. It’s also the ultimate cool factor: the coolest people doing the coolest things, and none of it feels affected or fraudulent. Jean Seberg is painfully beautiful.”
-Drew Barrymore

“There are few, if any, film directors of any period who are as ambitious as Lean. And this is his most ambitious film…. Certainly one of the ten greatest films ever made, I think.”
-Alec Baldwin

“Epic filmmaking doesn’t get better than this…. You’ve got these great talents – Freddie Young, some of the most fabulous cinematography you’ll ever see. Direction by David Lean, none better. Wonderful music score by Maurice Jarre. Great script by Robert Bolt. These are really geniuses at work here.”
-Robert Osborne

“To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic movie and a classic book. Both are undeniably essentials of our culture…. When this movie came out in 1962, it was a minor miracle because nobody, including Harper Lee, was disappointed…. Atticus Finch defines what it means to be a person of good character…. Even if you’ve seen this before, it’s worth seeing again and again. It remains powerful upon each viewing.”
-Rob Reiner

“There’s a scene where Sterling Hayden…waxes poetically about water fluoridation being a Communist plot – it’s one of the best pieces of movie writing ever, and it remains permanently imprinted on my brain! Dr. Strangelove also contains one of the great virtuoso comic performances…. Nobody could have done what Peter Sellers did. Or what Stanley Kubrick did.”
-Rob Reiner

“I’ve come to appreciate it more and more through the years…. [It] was very much of a transition film…. I don’t think Hollywood was ever quite the same after The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde coming out in the same year.”
-Robert Osborne

“It introduced a new level of violence to American filmmaking, especially in the very notable ending…. Beatty is one of the great master film producers among actors, one of the riskiest.”
-Alec Baldwin

“I’m not sure that people today really understand how important Sidney Poitier was to our culture. He was like the Jackie Robinson of the movies. He was the first black leading man with genuine star power, the first African American whose name on the marquee brought people to the theater. And when they came to see this movie, they saw a tough, intense film that went straight to the core of racism.”
-Rob Reiner

“It’s a film with a message to it, a really strong message, but it’s told entertainingly. It’s not like a sobering message that you suffer through.”
-Robert Osborne

“Nichols had only made one full-length film before this, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)… [He] is a master at this kind of ironic drama.”
-Alec Baldwin

“[It] showed us Anne Bancroft in a light we’d never seen before because most people just knew her from The Miracle Worker at this point.”
-Robert Osborne

“It is Sergio Leone’s masterpiece, the one he was practicing for with those hard-edged Clint Eastwood Italian westerns Leone directed in the 1960s. More epic in scope and richer in storyline, Leone’s ace-card this time was his casting the all-American good fellow Henry Fonda as a vicious, evil, and morally corrupt killer. Fonda later said it was his favorite of all the screen roles he played.”
-Robert Osborne

“Nobody taps into human feelings better than Steven Spielberg…. One of the scenes that is so quintessentially him is…where Roy Scheider and his son start imitating each other…. It’s a familial, human behavior that’ so heartstring-pulling but so unmanipulative.”
-Drew Barrymore

“It’s the perfect summer movie. It’s fun to watch, exciting, entertaining, full of shockers, full of suspense, a lot of laughs…. Richard Dreyfuss is wonderful [as a] kind of everyman, and I don’t think he’s ever really gotten credit for that…. He’s so likable in his feistiness and just anchors the movie so well.”
-Robert Osborne

“That charming scene in the skating rink when he and Adrian are all alone – the reason they’re alone is…they couldn’t afford the extras! It actually made the scene work even better because it’s so sweet and tender that way.”
-Robert Osborne

“There is Stallone the actor and there’s Stallone the icon. And Stallone I thought was a very good actor. One of the best performances Stallone ever gave as a pure actor was in Rocky. He’s really wonderful, really truthful.”
-Alec Baldwin