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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 16, 2007

TT: Are they or aren’t they?

January 16, 2007 by Terry Teachout

I’ve received a fair amount of mail stirred up by the first sentence of my most recent essay
in Commentary: “Hollywood rarely makes artistically serious movies, save by inadvertence.” No need to supply details–you can imagine most of it for yourself–but one reader caught my attention by pointing to this paragraph:

Hollywood has always been a money-making enterprise, and it may well be that our latter-day Age of the Blockbuster is nothing more than a return to the historical norm from which the New Wave of the 70’s was a short-lived aberration. Thus, for all the nostalgia with which American films of the 30’s and 40’s are now recalled, the best of them were unpretentious genre movies–Westerns, musicals, “screwball” comedies, and the bleak, cynical crime stories now known as film noir–turned out by inspired craftsmen who succeeded in transcending the limitations imposed on them by the studios at which they worked. It is these films, and not such nominally “serious” efforts as The Grapes of Wrath (1939) or The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), for which the studio system will be justly remembered.

The reader in question invited to put my money where my mouth was by naming what I thought were the best sound films made in Hollywood prior to the coming of the New Wave. That’s a good question, and an impossible one, but I decided to try to answer it anyway.


Bearing in mind that I could change my mind later today, here are my fifteen picks, one to a director:


– It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)

– The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938)

– The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)

– Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

– Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1941)

– The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

– To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1943)

– Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)

– Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

– All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

– Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)

– The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

– The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

– Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

– North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)


Art, or not? You decide.

TT: Almanac

January 16, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.”


Harry S. Truman (quoted in Merle Miller, Plain Speaking)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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