Forget Me Nots

21. CLIVE BARKER (Hellraiser, Lord of Illusions). "Not every underrated movie is obscure. Sometimes an underrated movie can be hiding in plain sight, I would pick Cleopatra. Because of all the notoriety surrounding the production, the film itself was overshadowed. My dad took me to see it when it first came out. I go back to it annually, and it's still magnificent. It represents world-making on a level that Hollywood can never achieve again. The movie has wild physical pizzazz and kitsch and grandeur. The further we get from historical movies, the more they seem like wonderful mechanisms. Nobody talks about Queen Christina or The Scarlet Empress as historical realism. I think we're now far enough from Cleopatra to see it as a beautiful artifact--a completely entered-into fantasy. It's about spectacle and breasts, the massage scene, the battle at sea. What's not to like?"

22. PEN DENSHAM (The Kiss, Moll Flanders). "Things to Come is one of the first science-fiction films. I'm a fan of the producer, Alexander Korda; he was the Selznick of the British film industry, a man of great intelligence. It was directed by William Cameron Menzies. It has a wonderful pacifist story by H.G, Wells; it predicted the coming of World War II. Because it came out of England, it didn't get the attention of American science-fiction films. But it has all epic scope and daring. It's a totally visionary work that had an influence on all the Lucases and Spielbergs who came later."

23. DAVID O. RUSSELL (Flirting With Disaster, Spanking the Monkey), "The Heartbreak Kid may have been well received when it first came out, but I never hear people talk about it anymore. It has great acting, unpretentious direction, and it's darker than anything else Neil Simon ever wrote. I think the reason it's been forgotten is that people focus so much on directors today, whereas I feel all directors are very hot and cold. It's not that I love Elaine May's work in general. I just love this movie. Shampoo is another movie from the same period that people have forgotten. Both of those movies had classically '70s unsettling endings. Nobody does dark endings in comedy anymore."

24. PHILIP HAAS (The Music of Chance, Angels & Insects). "Oedipus Rex by Pasolini is a movie I first saw as a teenager, and it has stayed with me. I think Pasolini is as seminal a figure in cinema history as the other Italian directors, like Fellini and Visconti, who are much better known. Franco Citti, who was in a number of Pasolini's other movies, played Oedipus, and Silvana Mangano played Jocasta. It looked like they had lifted the rest of the cast from the North African desert. Parr of it is set in ancient times, and part of it is set in the 20th century, so it's very Freudian. It suggested to me there was a way to re-create the past and not make it look like a museum piece. It felt absolutely authentic."

25. ANDY WACHOWSKI (codirector, with his brother Larry, of Bound). "My brother and I both love John Milius's Conan the Barbarian. I think it was underrated because it had two things working against it--the sword-and-sorcery genre and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But this movie has his best and most natural acting--before he started acting. The whole movie follows Conan from the time he's a child: he grows up wanting to kill this one guy. At the end he finally meets up with his enemy, played by James Earl Jones, who has this great speech trying to persuade Conan not to kill him, Jones basically says to him, 'Where would you be without me? I made you into the great warrior you are today.' Conan thinks about that for a minute, then chops his head off. That was a really cool ending."

26. SIMON WINCER (Free Willy, The Phantom). "I would pick The Wind and the Lion, written and directed by John Milius. The film is based on a true incident which took place at the turn of the century. Sean Connery gives a lowering performance as a Moroccan sheik, and Candice Bergen is exquisite as a kidnapped American. It is a great character study of two men--Connery as the sheik and Brian Keith as Teddy Roosevelt--the wind and the lion."

27. HENRY JAGLOM (Eating, Last Summer in the Hamptons). "John Cassavetes's first film, Shadows, forever changed the face of U.S. cinema in ways that have never been acknowledged. Shadows is hardly ever mentioned, but this small, personal, grainy, entirely improvised movie, shot on the streets and alleys of New York City, was the very first 'independent' film. Brave and daring and entirely without precedent, Shadows hit aspiring filmmakers like a stroke of lightning, freeing us at last from all the rigid rules and restraints that Hollywood had imposed. Anyone who has been seriously committed to making truly independent films over the last three decades since Shadows first appeared, owes this amazing film--and John Cassavetes--an eternal debt of gratitude."

28. RICHARD PEARCE (Country, A Family Thing). "D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, a documentary on Bob Dylan, deserves to be rediscovered. It's an amazing document of the '60s. It had a sense of authenticity at the time, but if you see it now, it has a different quality. It looks aesthetically beautiful. The primitive quality of it epitomizes a particular style of filmmaking. Every gob of grain looks like an aesthetic decision."

29. TIM HUNTER (River's Edge, The Saint of Fort Washington). "I would pick Mandingo. Relentlessly lurid and positively reveling in stereotypes, this epic potboiler of interracial lust on a Southern plantation probably sheds more light on the roots of racial hatred in this country than any dozen more politically correct films on the subject. In fact, to see this late hot-house flowering of director Richard Fleischer's checkered career, with its utterly demented, go-for-the-jugular script by Norman Wexler, is an experience that leaves one gasping with the question, 'How the hell did this picture ever get made?!' They certainly couldn't do it now."

30. KEVIN REYNOLDS (The Beast, Waterworld). "Terrence Malick's Badlands is an amazing film, definitely underrated at the time. Very few people went to see it. I feel it was Martin Sheen's best work. He had a certain detached absurdity that hasn't been duplicated in any other film."

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Stephen Farber wrote about favorite female stars' costumes in the September '95 issue of Movieline.

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