Great Movies You Might Not Have Seen

We showed them all at Google.

I wrote a piece a couple years ago about the Cinema Club at Google, which I started in 2007 and ran for 10 years. It’s still going on, I’m told, although now they show the movies on the corporate intranet. We only showed DVD’s in person, but that was in the Before Times when people actually came to work.

Nowadays you can stream almost any movie ever made, except for the ones still in theaters, so what should you watch? I’m here to tell you. This will be a random selection of films that, possibly, you never thought of, but you should. If they’re available free on YouTube or Kanopy, I’ll note that. This will be the first of several posts.

Kanopy is basically your public library’s movie collection. You join it with your library card. It’s like going to the library to borrow the DVD, except you can stream it at home. I don’t include links because you can only get what’s in your own library.

Since I started the club and I was the one who actually got us the funding for legal Public Performance Rights, I had a veto, although I rarely exercised it. My philosophy was, “I’d rather show a great movie that no one comes to than crap that draws a crowd. Furthermore, there’s nothing stopping you from starting your own movie club to show what you like.” So I really didn’t care what the great mass of Googlers wanted to see (Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, The Matrix … you get the idea).

People were invited to join the club if they came to a lot of movies and participated in the after-film discussions. My greeting to a new member (we’ll call him “Francois”) at our regular meetings was, “Welcome, Francois! Give us a movie.”

So that’s how it went. We’d get anywhere from 15 to 40 attendees, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. I very quickly ran through all of my favorites, so I really wanted to hear other people’s ideas. We scheduled ten at a time, because that's what fit on an 11x17 piece of paper, like this

and it was very rare that I’d seen all ten films in a series. Part of the duties of a Cinema Club member was taping these posters up at critical locations around campus. You’d think Google would use all-electronic information, but people tend to ignore that stuff, since there’s so much of it. A poster that you walk past a lot is more effective at getting your attention.

I’m picking only movies that you might not have heard of. Classics like It Happened One Night or Chinatown, you’ve probably already seen. Usually the movie is available free, at least if your public library is like mine.

Tokyo Story

Free on Kanopy, available to rent on YouTube.

This is hardly “unknown” since it’s often listed as one of the 50 greatest movies ever made, but I’ve noticed a deplorable number of people haven’t seen it. All I can say about Tokyo Story is, if it doesn’t move you to tears, you might have a stone where your heart should be.

Roger Ebert says it so much better than I possibly could that I’ll just leave you a link.

No story could be simpler. An old couple come to the city to visit their children and grandchildren. Their children are busy, and the old people upset their routines. In a quiet way, without anyone admitting it, the visit goes badly. The parents return home. A few days later, the grandmother dies. Now it is the turn of the children to make a journey.

From these few elements Yasujiro Ozu made one of the greatest films of all time. “Tokyo Story” (1953) lacks sentimental triggers and contrived emotion; it looks away from moments a lesser movie would have exploited. It doesn’t want to force our emotions, but to share its understanding. It does this so well that I am near tears in the last 30 minutes. It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections.

It’s interesting that the Japanese, for a long time, didn’t make much effort to export Ozu’s work, because they didn’t think Westerners would relate to it.

Ikiru

Free on Kanopy, rent on Amazon or YouTube.

This is an early Kurosawa movie, and Kurosawa is someone who’s almost more popular outside of Japan than at home (I don’t list his The Seven Samurai only because you’ve probably heard of that one).

In Ikiru, a boring mid-level civil servant learns he has terminal cancer, and he breaks good. I used that phrase deliberately because Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad actually cited Ikiru as an inspiration. Obviously Walt White broke the other way.

He knows bureaucracy better than anyone, since he’s part of it. But he makes it his life’s work, literally, to get a little park built on a tiny patch of Tokyo land. Naturally, every department of the government says it’s not their responsibility and tells him to go somewhere else. They really just want him to give up and go away, but instead he actually goes to the “somewhere else.” Over and over. No one will actually say “no,” but he wouldn’t listen if they did. He just waits. Patiently. He won’t go away.

Kiss Me Deadly

Now this is noir like they don’t make anymore. A really fun movie.

That detective Mike Hammer is one nasty piece of work! What I recall from this (remember, we showed it in 2008, so it’s been a while) is his “answering machine” on the wall: a reel-to-reel tape deck. This was 1955, 25 years before the general public got answering machines.

The Rules of the Game

Free on Kanopy, rent on YouTube or Amazon.

The director of this 1939 film, Jean Renoir, is the son of another Renoir you might have heard of, Pierre-Auguste.

Most people have heard of or even seen Citizen Kane, but not nearly as many have seen this one. As always, Roger Ebert has the best review.

The movie takes the superficial form of a country house farce, at which wives and husbands, lovers and adulterers, masters and servants, sneak down hallways, pop up in each other’s bedrooms and pretend that they are all proper representatives of a well-ordered society. Robert Altman, who once said “I learned the rules of the game from ‘The Rules of the Game,'” was not a million miles off from this plot with his “Gosford Park” — right down to the murder.

But there is a subterranean level in Renoir’s film that was risky and relevant when it was made and released in 1939. It was clear that Europe was going to war. In France, left-wing Popular Front members like Renoir were clashing with Nazi sympathizers. Renoir’s portrait of the French ruling class shows them as silly adulterous twits, with the working classes emulating them within their more limited means.

Man on Wire

There are a few really great documentaries, and this is one.

Free on Kanopy and Amazon, rent on YouTube

In August 1974, Phillippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers. People down in the street looked up in awe, as he seemed to be in no hurry at all, and they knew a slip or a sudden gust of wind would send him to his death.

Most of the people who pulled this off, including Petit, were still around and appear in the movie. The thing I really liked is that the director reenacted many of the critical scenes, and it unfolds as if it’s a fiction movie. The crew talk about their nervousness as they’re executing it: maybe Phillippe will get killed, but almost certainly they’ll all get arrested. They disguise themselves as workmen, and sneak up to the roof where they spend the night, always fearful that they’ll be discovered.

We see the actual details of how they got the wire between the Towers (shooting an arrow across with a thin wire, then attaching progressively heavier wires until they could pull over the wire rope that he actually walked on). Phillippe also talks about how he knew he had to walk between the Towers before they were even built.

We’re so used to seeing the Twin Towers wreckage after 9/11 that it’s a treat to see them being built. Petit had the misfortune of timing his walk for the day before Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the Presidency, so his turn in the news cycle was short.