Chris Csont

34. Targets

Peter Bogdanovich and Boris Karloff argue while seated in a hotel room.

Targets was made in part because Boris Karloff owed Roger Corman two days’ work. Corman gave Bogdanovich a chance to write and direct based on him burning off the rest of Karloff’s contract, and that he re-used some footage shot for another Karloff film. That gives us half the story, where aging horror icon Byron Orlok declares his retirement will start after a personal appearance at the drive-in premiere of his most recent film. Meanwhile, a fanboy director tries to convince him to make one more picture.

But if you only have two days of Karloff, how are you going to turn that into a full feature? That’s where you bring in a story about a mass shooter (inspired by the Tower shooting at the University of Texas), and send this killer on a cross-city rampage headed toward the very drive-in Orlok’s movie premieres at.

It’s a confrontation between an older, gothic horror and a modern, seemingly random violence erupting in everyday spaces. Karloff is a perfect embodiment of that creeping horror of cinema’s past where you never needed any clues as to who the monster was. His counterpart, gunman Bobby Thompson, is a clean-cut young man who could blend in just about anywhere. It’s his lack of defining physical characteristics that make his actions all the more frightening.

The final sequence at the drive-in is complex and layered, with moments of people isolated from one another in their cars, unable to realize that a man is picking them off from behind the screen. It’s the cultural equivalent of if someone in the present day was shown doomscrolling on their phone and missing out on the person next to them getting stabbed.

I saw this film for the first time in a class about Road Movies, and there’s plenty of driving even if they don’t cover much ground. The people in their cars at the drive-in. The drivers picked off from the tower overlooking the highway. People are constantly on the move and isolated from each other, but not insulated from the violence around them.

The thing that keeps me coming back is how deftly this film acts as a meta-commentary on what scares us as humans and as a moviegoing audience. When there are so many possible ways that real life horror could intrude on our lives, why do we seek out scares? What is it about witnessing fictional acts of violence and terror that gets us reaching for the popcorn?

There was also something about Peter Bogdanovich that was inspiring to me when I first saw it, as well. He was a student of film, and apprentice and acolyte of many iconic names of cinema. Like the Cahiers du Cinema to French New Wave director pipeline, I saw the potential for what I was interested in being something worth putting on screen because of how much I was pulled in by this film nerd B-movie. It gave me a feeling of permission to be as nerdy as I wanted to be.

33. The Seven Samurai

The titular seven samurai stand together on a hill, looking out into the distance with clouds behind them.

Rare is the three hour film that flies by and makes you wish for more.

It’s a film that inspired westerns, and with good reason. It’s an elegy for the time of samurai as the age of guns comes into focus. A technological shift in the weapons of war that disrupts society, giving a group of bandits an edge against the team of (mostly) battle hardened samurai hired by the village to defend it. Much like The Searchers, it ends on a note that some people are allowed to stay and live out their lives in peace, but others are warriors forced to wander until their help is asked for.

It’s a film with tremendous heart, and an electric performance by Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo. He begins as an annoying samurai wannabe, but develops over the course of the film into a trusted ally and protector of the oppressed.

The fight scenes are also staged to be as brutal as possible, in the sense that they avoid the balletic sword play of some samurai tales and feature swift, violent, scrambling combat. There’s one scene in particular with rain and mud and chaos that plays to the notion that these samurai are strong warriors, but they’re not superhuman.

They can bleed. They can fall. They can die. Their victories come at a cost. They don’t get shawarma—they stand over the graves of their comrades.

32. North by Northwest

Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, holding the knife used to murder a UN Ambassador after pulling it out of the ambassador's back. A crowd of people stares at him, convinced he's the killer. — “Would you believe it’s not what it looks like?”

I do enjoy a Wrong Man Thriller, but this one has that extra sauce on it because Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill is misidentified as a man who doesn’t even exist! Thornhill is confused for George Kaplan, an alias created by a US intelligence agency to frustrate and confuse a target of their investigation.

Now it suits them to let Thornhill run around, giving credence to their lie about Kaplan existing, and helping them draw their target out into the open. Oddly enough, I see connective tissue with Miracle on 34th Street and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where a primary character in the story is a pawn in other peoples’ game.

Whether or not people agree on if it’s the best Hitchcock thriller, it’s certainly the Most Hitchcock one. If you watched this playing Hitchcock Trope bingo, everyone would be a winner. And it’s not just ticking off boxes, but creating iconic moments:

The murder in the UN (see the photo above)
Thornhill waiting for a bus, then being chased by a low flying crop duster.
A final chase on top of Mount Rushmore.
The wholly unsubtle, single entendre final shot of a train entering a tunnel.

Another thing to think about: Even though his life is in danger throughout, Thornhill never becomes a nigh-indestructible action hero. He’s an advertising executive who you believe is in danger throughout. He’s not going to get out of this scrape by suddenly leveling up his physical stats, but by being just clever enough and just persistent enough to play the angles that get him to safety.

31. Rashoman

A woodcutter, priest, and commoner wait out the rain while discussing a murder trial.

I heard you like unreliable narrators, so we put some unreliable narrators in your unreliable narration.

The technique of showing us things we’ve already seen from a new vantage point likely didn’t originate with Kurosawa’s film, but Rashoman feels like a perfection of the concept.

I can also remember the moment when I first watched this film and realized that the next witness in the trial was going to be the murder victim himself, as told via medium. I’m pretty sure I paused for a moment to step back and soak that development in. It’s the compounding of unreliable narrators in that moment, where you have a medium (and the questionable trustworthiness of that profession) combined with the fact that the person they’re supposedly channeling would not provide an unbiased account of their own murder.

It’s not only a film that highlights the way that conflicting accounts from eyewitnesses can muddy the truth of an event, but a reminder that film is bent to the will of the filmmakers in what it shows us as true. The same characters in the same settings take on different actions and give different meaning to the moments on screen each time events play out.

Everything here is a lie, but what can looking at the lies tell us about the truth that lies beneath?

30. 12 Angry Men

Lee J. Cobb holds a switchblade up to Henry Fonda in front of the other jurors to try and demonstrate how the wounds on the murder victim would have been made.

#NotAllAngryMen

This fits in the same box as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. A single incorruptible man stands up for what’s morally right and is able to gradually turn the opinion of the other jurors and prevent a miscarriage of justice through a filibuster.

It’s the kind of story where the end upholds the idea that the system works, while also showing us how perilously close it came to condemning an innocent young man. At the same time, it’s a story about the importance of strength in the face of mob mentality, and how refusing to forget your convictions to smooth things over by going along with the group.

It’s a real powder keg of a film, too. Not a wasted moment, and a contained thriller that makes the most of every inch of that jury room.

Also, some context. This film was released in 1957, based on a teleplay written in 1954. Via the Associated Press, “The Civil Rights Act of 1957 gave women the right to serve on federal juries, but it wasn’t until 1973 that all 50 states passed similar legislation.” Court cases arguing the legality of impaneling an all-white jury have been tried as recently as 2016. When we consider writing off the makeup of the jury depicted here as “of its time,” it’s worth considering what that means, and if that time has truly ended.