The 100 Greatest Movies: Part 1

When I look back at 2016, one of the milestones I'm most proud of is seeing all of the movies on the "Entertainment Weekly Guide to the 100 Greatest Movies."

I came across this guide several years ago while browsing the Half Price Books used bookstore in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. The 100 Greatest Movies guide is from 1990, but the films on the list are classics - and many are still shockingly relevant nearly 30 years later.

One is example is the 1983 immigration drama "El Norte," which tells the story of a brother and sister from Guatemala who flee violence in their small village and venture to the U.S. to make a better life. This movie shows that American society is no closer to solving the immigration debate than we were more than 30 years ago.

A movie that is perhaps the mirror image of "El Norte" is 1948's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," about a group of Americans led by Humphrey Bogart who try to strike it rich by searching for gold in Mexico. The moral of the story about the dangers of being consumed with greed is timeless. 

But what really stood about about "Sierra Madre" is the score. The first few notes of the musical theme remind me of "A Spoonful of Sugar" from "Mary Poppins," and "Sierra Madre" is certainly not a lighthearted children's movie!

The plight of youth is a recurring theme in several of the 100 Greatest Movies. Young people going astray into lives of crime is central to the plot of "Gun Crazy," "Detour," "Pretty Poison," "Badlands" and "Sugarland Express." It makes me wonder if there was once some sort of cinematic movement aimed at deterring the nation's suburban and rural youth from the glamorous allure of crime. 

This "scared straight" movement is an interesting contradiction, since many of the 100 Greatest Movies arguably glorify crime, especially mob dramas like "The Godfather" trilogy and "Goodfellas."

Crime dramas like "The Godfather" tend to be extraordinarily lengthy. Fortunately, modern technology enabled me to break up these gangster sagas into several sittings like a miniseries. I'd check out DVDs from the library and watch part on my television and the rest on a portable DVD player while washing dishes or doing other chores around the house. Sometimes I'd rent the movies on Amazon and stream them on my iPad over a couple of days.

Since some of the 100 Greatest Movies are so long, with complex plots, it often helped to look up the trailer on YouTube before watching the movie. It also helped to read the Wikipedia entry to get the background about the production. 

Even after reading the movies' plot summaries, some were a bit confusing and hard to follow, especially if I was multitasking while watching and not paying close attention. I found certain movies particularly confusing when they featured two or more actors who closely resemble each other. This was the case with two blond male supporting actors in 1992's costume drama "Howards End" (Joseph Bennett and James Wilby)  and the two dark-haired male leads in 1949's thriller "Caught" (James Mason and Robert Ryan).

Also in "Caught," it was interesting seeing Barbara Bel Geddes, who went on to play the matriarch Miss Ellie Ewing in the prime time soap "Dallas," as a fresh-faced ingenue. Bel Geddes was one of several actors I recognized who went on to play character roles in movies and television later in life. Sometimes an actor would seem vaguely familiar and I would have to "IMDB" or "Wikipedia" their names to find out where I recognized them from.

The experience of watching the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time was so epic that I can't capture it all in one blog post - it requires a sequel, if you will. So in the second part of this blog, which I'll post tomorrow, I'll reveal my pick for my personal No. 1 choice of all 100 movies.

(Chris Bournea is the writer and director of the forthcoming documentary "Lady Wrestler: The Amazing, Untold Story of African-American Women in the Ring.")