Chris Csont

14. Double Indemnity

Scenes like this one show that connective tissue between screwball comedy and film noir. It’s banter. It’s flirtatious. But there’s a harder edge.

I could generalize it as screwball comedy is when neither side wants to admit there’s an attraction, but it ends up that love is the thing they want the most. Film noir is where there’s an obvious attraction but at least one side wants something else more than the relationship.

I have a deep appreciation for the aggressive use of subtext here. It dances around the real subject in a way that’s both obvious and offers deniability. And the way it extends the metaphor to the breaking point? Chef’s kiss.

13. Citizen Kane

Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, standing at the podium for a campaign rally in front of a giant poster of his own face.

Nobody could oversell this movie. There are plenty of reasons it stands the test of time and remains one of the greatest films ever made.

It’s overlapping narrative structure. The groundbreaking camerawork. The dialogue. It’s a work where everyone involved left nothing on the field.

It’s a story about the limits of power. Even a man with the ability to goad a nation to war or produce a media empire cannot convince people to love him. He moves fast and breaks things for his entire life, but in the end he’s left with nothing but broken pieces.

It’s A Christmas Carol without ghostly intervention.

12. The Third Man

The Third Man. A light illuminates Harry Lime's face, and Orson Welles's smug, villainous mug makes its first appearance in this film.

I’ve written before about this as a movie that lit my fuse for writing, but every aspect of this film is top notch and holds up.

It’s a story about profiteering in the shadow of chaos and bloodshed. About the myths we tell ourselves about heroism (brought into play by having the protagonist be an American writer of pulp Western novels and thinking like one of his own heroes until he realizes it’s not that kind of story). There’s a curdled friendship and the question of whether loyalty is stronger than morality.

Not only does it have Orson Welles putting on a lobster bib to chew the scenery every time he’s on camera, but you also get some of Joseph Cotton’s finest work as a man out of his depth, chasing shadows in a foreign country.

And the ferris wheel monologue still cuts as deep as the first time I saw it. An amoral capitalist literally looks down on the little people from up high and makes it clear that their suffering doesn’t matter if it helps him make a buck. Compare:

Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped – would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man…free of income tax.

with a modern equivalent:

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”
Hollywood Studios’ WGA Strike Endgame Is To Let Writers Go Broke Before Resuming Talks In Fall

11. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Huston sit around a campfire to eat.

That moment when a plan for collective enrichment pivots to personal greed. When possible riches turn into actual wealth, the change happens. One third of a fortune doesn’t look as good as a whole fortune.

Also worth considering: relationship triangles.¹ When you look at the dynamic between three characters, you can think about their relationship as forming a triangle based on how they feel about each other.

If all three characters have the same connection, it’s an equilateral triangle. If two are emotionally closer together (or their goals are more in sync) than the other one, it stretches that triangle with one point further away. And that distance can shift at any moment as you work with different pairings of characters and different interpersonal conflicts.

What shape is the triangle in now, and what shape will it be in after this scene? It’s a good mental visual for how character relationships motivate story choices (and vice versa).

I picked this up from a class taught by Kim Costello at Boston University. A real brainworm of an idea that’s stuck with me. ↩︎

10. His Girl Friday

Still from His Girl Friday. Cary Grant reads over Rosalind Russell’s shoulder as she reviews a page from her typewriter.

It’s a 1940s movie where a man works to convince a woman not to leave her career and become a suburban housewife. That stands out on its own.

There’s also the element of adapting an existing play, but changing the gender of one of the main characters to create a new sense of tension and different relationships. Layer on top of that the way the story also plays with the popular Screwball Comedy setup of divorce and re-marriage.

It makes for a great lesson in adaptation, and how a work can stand on its own from the source material.