David Thomson recounts the 20 best films directed by a woman, despite advice from his wife suggesting that he shouldn't get into it.
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"Don't get into it," my wife told me. "That's a mug's game."
I had just been asked by Movieline to offer a list of the 20 best movies ever directed by a woman. It seemed like an interesting sport. After all, it was all plainly a matter of opinion; if I ended up omitting Nora Ephron, Kathryn Bigelow, Martha Coolidge and Jodie Foster, I could still have Nancy Savoca, Elaine May and Larissa Shepitko.
"Larissa who?" asked my wife.
"There's a big part of the question," I said. "Larissa Shepitko was something, even if she is dead and Russian, and even if it is probably impossible for readers to see any of her films. After all, in other countries than America, women have done a lot better."
"Well," she said. "The real question is: how good are whatever 20 films you choose going to be?"
She had a point. I'm not saying my 20 are 20 great films. I'm not even sure there's one great film in the list--not at the level of Renoir, Welles, Hawks, Ozu, Bunuel or Bresson. Maybe picking 20 just draws attention to the problem--face it, do women really get movies? I know, I know, women write scripts, they edit pictures, they do costumes and design, and all of that. They produce. And, naturally, they are one of the eternal subjects of movies. But do women look and see in the way men do?
"You mean look with their pricks?" said my wife.
"Well," I sighed.
This is the crux of it all. Do women depend on being in the dark, watching this magical thing, for their very being?
"You mean, are we voyeurs?" said my wife.
"Exactly," I said. "Because, you know, while there are plenty of women directing--even in Hollywood--there are hardly any women directors of photography anywhere. Men don't like to trust women to look into the eyepiece--it's something primitive and proprietary."
My wife nodded and thought for a while. "What is a movie director?" she asked. "In general, I mean. Describe the type."
"Insecure, arrogant, boastful asshole," I suggested. "Manipulative. Devious. Lying. Conceited. Destructive. Self-aggrandizing. Sell their mother and children for a job."
"Yeah?"
"Unfit for society?"
"There you are," she said. "No woman with a life is getting into that."
So, for better or worse, in alphabetical order, here are my 20, some of which you'll never find on video. Next month: the 20 best by left-handed people. ("Don't get me started on that," said my wife. "I have never met a leftie I'd trust.")
__Big_ (1988)_ was big--it grossed $115 million at the box office and got Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Actor. So what, you say? It's all due to a great performance by Tom Hanks? Sure, Big hinges upon Hanks's outstanding performance as the 12-year-old who wakes up looking like a 30-year-old man. But then we might say that the power of Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box or Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce means that the actresses made those films. What's more important is that Hanks had never been as good before as he was doing Big with Penny Marshall. Give her credit for getting at the child in him. After all, in most families, aren't women expected to deal with and "understand" the children?
The Bigamist. Ida Lupino was an actress dose to rawness (witness They Drive by Night, The Hard Way and Road House), but in the late '40s and '50s she had her own production company for which she directed half a dozen movies. The one I like best is The Bigamist (1953), in which Edmond O'Brien plays a traveling salesman who has two wives and two homes--and is in love with both. At that time, a B movie with that title should have been a piece of sensationalism. But Lupino brings rare compassion to the situation, to the two women (played by herself and Joan Fontaine), and even to the man. Above all, within the confines of a genre movie. Lupino showed she could get the job done while bringing the quiet awareness of ordinary frailty to an area normally made lurid and melodramatic.
Children of a Lesser God. We all love Marlee Matlin, don't we? But is that a deep respect or just the sentimental response to someone being so beautiful, so handicapped and so brave? What I mean to say is that Children of a Lesser God (1986) would be more compelling still if the deaf woman Matlin plays were not so lovely. Still, Randa Haines's debut film is a fine treatment of isolation, talking, stubbornness, trust and the ways in which love does and does not rely on the conventional dynamic of "attractiveness." Yes, Matlin, is impressive in the film (though she hasn't really worked much since), but so is William Hurt, not the easiest actor in the world to direct. Look at the film again today, and you have to wonder if Haines wasn't quietly, inappropriately slotted into place as someone who did teary stories about handicaps--when this is actually a movie about outcast strength.
Clueless. Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995) doesn't just vindicate the buzz of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), it will endure as one of the best portraits of young women in the '90s. That it is based on Jane Austen's Emma is just a tribute to Heckerling's casual brilliance. Between Fast Times and Clueless, Heckerling may have drifted a little; the Look Who's Talking movies are wrapped in cute attitudes, whereas Fast Times and Clueless have a rare appetite for true freshness in people. Whereas the "gift" that Hollywood is most likely to impose on good young directors (of any sex) is prepackaged, prethought, predead product, Heckerling should be trusted to generate her own material.
Daisies. I don't know how or where one might see it now, but in the mid '60s, Vera Chytilova's Daisies (1966) was as important to the Czech new wave as anything by Milos Foreman or Ivan Passer. Chytilova had been a model in the '50s, and her film school graduation work was a study of how men exploit that profession. Daisies is a surreal, anarchistic celebration of the havoc two young women, Marie I and Marie II, make in an orderly, materialistic society. It's very funny, surprisingly violent, and it climaxes at a great banquet. It has that female awareness that the world is actually absurd, a stale process of male rituals, and that what really matters is being alive and disorderly.
Dance, Girl, Dance. Dorothy Arzner was the real thing--even if she dressed like a man and looked like William S. Hart. From the late '20s to the early '40s, she functioned steadily in Hollywood as a director, trusted by the system to handle important pictures with strong feminist themes. For example, in Craig's Wife (1936), Rosalind Russell plays a wife who is a control freak and who becomes the slave to her compulsive materialism. But Arzner's most entertaining picture is Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), about the working life of women in burlesque. Lucille Ball is outstanding as the pro who does what she can to help newcomer Maureen O'Hara. Arzner retired from moviemaking, but she became a fixture in the film studies program at UCLA, where her students included Francis Ford Coppola.
Europa, Europa. Agnieszka Holland has not been comfortable lately--_The Secret Garden misses the mysterious formality of that great book; _Total Eclipse seems to describe what had happened to its maker's talent; and her version of Washington Square is so much less credible than The Heiress, made dose to 50 years earlier. This may mean that Holland has been uneasy making pictures with American money and attitudes. After all, she is the child of postwar Poland, and of the urge to treat totalitarian control subversively. Europa, Europa (1991), her most impressive film, is the story of a German Jewish boy who covers up his identity so well that he finds himself in the German army. There's a mix of drama and humor in the film that has deserted Holland subsequently. But then, irony stirs European audiences and produces yawns in America.
Household Saints. Nancy Savoca isn't 40 yet, and she's as tough, passionate and edgy as early Scorsese. Indeed, she has done movies that treat young women the way he does the "guys." To that extent, Savoca asks for no concessions to the fact that she's a woman. You can take your pick out of True Love (1989), Dogfight (1991), Household Saints (1993) and even her two episodes of the HBO movie If These Walls Could Talk (1996). All too often, woman directors are encouraged to be ladylike. Savoca knows how lower-class women think and talk, and she has gotten terrific performances out of Annabella Sciorra, Lili Taylor and even Demi Moore. The best? I think I'd go for Household Saints, if only because of its view of several generations in family life, the great American subject--and the one so many male directors are afraid of. Men make films to escape their families, don't they?
Love Letters. Amy Jones is 45 this year, and I'm not sure what she's doing, or why she's not making more films as good as Love Letters (1983), which involves a young woman (very well played by Jamie Lee Curtis) whose mother has just died. As she sorts through her mother's things, she finds letters from a love affair of which she had no knowledge. This awakening realization coincides with a dawning love affair in the young woman's own life--with a volatile, unsettling married man played by James Keach. I'm not sure that Curtis has ever been better than she is here, and I know this movie showed exceptional promise. In the years since, Jones helped write Mystic Pizza, and she directed the Ally Sheedy picture Maid to Order and The Rich Man's Wife. All of which only shows how hard it is for anyone to pursue a Hollywood career if they believe in stories as small, commonplace and burningly real as that of Love Letters.
Mikey and Nickey. Elaine May is a legend--from her early cabaret and recording partnership with Mike Nichols, from her steadfast resistance to personal publicity, from the fact that she has had a doctoring hand on the scripts of so many worthy films (like Tootsie), and from the blunt truth that she did direct the disastrous Ishtar. She is 66 this year, and probably as unresolved as she was 40 years ago. It is clear that Hollywood fears her as a director, while craving her touch as a writer. But Mikey and Nickey, the film she wrote and directed in 1976 (a box-office failure) may be the best and most unsettling American film made by a woman. Peter Falk and John Cassavetes play long-term pals and small-time crooks who have reached the point where they can't quite trust what they feel.
Mrs. Soffel. Gillian Armstrong is an established international director and she could have several films on this list if I weren't applying a one-each rule. It isn't a question of which are her good films; rather, it's has she ever made a bad one? I'm thinking of My Brilliant Career, High Tide, Little Women and Oscar & Lucinda. But my pick for her work is Mrs. Soffel (1984) for these reasons: it gets period detail so well; it is a haunting evocation of prison life that fixes on doors, cells, locks, keys and bars; it uses Mel Gibson's wicked charm properly; it lets us discover depths in Diane Keaton that she is sometimes too shy to disclose; and it has the crazy bliss of a love affair as well as the certainty of disaster.
Night Games. Mai Zetterling had a fascinating career: she acted in Torment (1944), the first film written by Ingmar Bergman; she was the female lead opposite Danny Kaye in Knock on Wood (1954) and opposite Peter Sellers in _Only Two Can Play (1962); she made documentaries about Eskimos and Gypsies; and, in the 1960s, she directed some of the most erotic and pretentious movies ever made by a feminist--_Loving Couples, Night Games and The Girls. I'll opt for Night Games (1966), if only because it was taken from Zetterling's own novel. It's about a "mature" man who is so repressed that he fails at sex and adult life until he is forced into his own childhood, where we find an overwhelming mother. (Women have as mixed feelings about that role as any men.) All of Zetterling's films are sexy, pungent and dogmatic, and this is no exception--but it so angered male viewers that it was banned from the Venice Film Festival. Made in Sweden, Night Games has fine performances from Ingrid Thulin and Keve Hjelm.
The Night Porter. Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) has been attacked as creepy, pornographic and sadomasochistic. What else do people want from movies? It's set in Vienna in the late '50s with Dirk Bogarde as the night porter at a small hotel that is a secret haven to ex-Nazis. An innocent visitor to the hotel is Charlotte Rampling, who was once Bogarde's prisoner and lover in a concentration camp. Their erotic past begins to repeat itself. Some people were dismayed at a woman making a film in which feminine passivity was so tied up in sexual ecstasy. But, once seen, The Night Porter is never forgotten. Its mood gets under your skin and settles there, like poison, and all because of the morbid erotics of Bogarde and Rampling.
The Piano. Jane Campion has an eye to match Leni Riefenstahl's. Just look at The Portrait of a Lady--by no means a successful film artistically--to see how majestic she can be in set sequences, in the way the camera moves, feels textures, rhythm, hesitation and psychological angling--the things that are so vital in film. For her best film, I'd pick the most obvious, The Piano (1993), just because its story is the most suited to Campion's brainy romanticism, and because the three people--Hunter, Keitel and Neill--are so uninhibitedly quirky, animal-like. Women are the ones in our world who dean up the shit and vomit and who nurse the dying. As such, they've seen for centuries how pretension, cant and talk fall aside, leaving the "naked, forked animal." You feel that in Campion all the time.
Swept Away. In the late '60s and early 70s, Lina Wertmuller was the epitome of the woman director of art house movies. She was a festival favorite; huge articles were written discussing her; and courses were taught on her nearly diagrammatic movies. For, in truth, she was a political or social scientist illustrating her ideas with films. Talent was not really an issue--and so the pictures have dated badly. Swept Away (1975) is interesting because it's a diagram turned inside out; it's the story of a smart woman and a brutish man who happened to be shipwrecked together. Once on their island, her intelligence falls away while his macho swagger comes to the fore. Wertmuller means it ironically, but irony without talent is a play without character--and today Swept Away looks like the inadvertent dream of a politically correct woman.
Triumph of the Will. People still ask whether Leni Riefenstahl had an affair with Adolf Hitler at the time she made Triumph of the Will (1934). Well, maybe; directors have been known to fuck and be fucked by studio heads. But that's not the point. Far more important, Riefenstahl loved, revered, worshiped Hitler--she believed in him. And that's what shows in the notorious "documentary" rendering of the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Worse, as you watch the movie, you feel the same urge lifting you. That's how talented Riefenstahl was and how deeply she understood the way all films adore power, form, order, movement and authority. She was a true filmmaker, and an empty head, and her masterpiece demonstrates the possibility of making something intensely beautiful, and mindlessly dangerous. That's what so many men have gotten away with for years.
Vagabond. Agnes Varda was married to Jacques Demy--yet her artistic personality is as cool as his was warm. She has always been drawn to documentaries and the real, and she has worked slowly over the years. But at least three of her pictures are special--_Cleo From 5 to 7_ (1962), about a young woman waiting to get a doctor's report; Le Bonheur _(1965), a strange celebration of extramarital love; and--her best, I think--_Vagabond (1985), in which Sandrine Bonnaire plays an intransigent young wanderer who takes to the life of the road and suffers all the consequences of being free. By instinct, Varda always stays very detached from her characters, observing them like a documentarian; and sometimes that scans like coldness. But here the method only inspires the ferocious commitment of Bonnaire.
Wanda. Barbara Loden was the second wife of director Elia Kazan. She was an actress (she plays Warren Beatty's wild sister in Splendor in the Grass, and she created the lead role in Arthur Miller's After the Fall--a part based on Marilyn Monroe). In 1971, she directed her one and only film, Wanda, about a divorced woman in a Pennsylvania mining town who becomes the inept companion to a petty crook. Loden played the central part, without glamour or any need to be loved by audiences. It's unlikely that any man (Kazan included) could have presented a woman who is so unremarkable, so slow on the uptake, such a drab loser. But, of course, the attitude that gives us women as sweethearts or whores (and always lovely) is a projection of the male romanticism that has always dominated moviemaking.
Yentl. I hope never to have to see The Prince of Tides or The Mirror Has Two Faces again. They show the marvelous Barbra Streisand at her worst--solemn and sated with humorless self-regard; fatuously confident that her therapy is art for the rest of us. But a thin line may separate the grotesque and the beautiful. Her first film, Yentl (1983) is, it seems to me, a piece of magic. How can that be? Well, the Isaac Bashevis Singer story is strong enough to contain her narcissism without making it hysterical. The period setting is attractive and funny. And the circumstances of a musical--plus the lush, long lines of the songs by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand--allow Barbra to be a good actress. Just like Frank Sinatra, her acting needs song. Talking and thinking are Barbra's weak points. Yentl's camera soars and swoops, like the songs, and the star's sense of self is effortlessly merged with the self-discovery of her character.
You and I. Larissa Shepitko was a beautiful young woman--people were always supposing she wanted to be an actress instead of a director. A student of Alexander Dovzhenko, one of the giants of Soviet silent film, she helped his widow complete his last movie. She made her own name with Heat (1963), filmed in the hottest parts of Central Asia. You and I _(1971) is the film I'd pick. Shot in Siberia, it's about a brain surgeon's crisis of faith, constructed in a series of flashbacks. Like Dovzhenko, Shepitko had a lyrical eye for peasant faces and nature. But she was a modern woman, too. You and I shows the intelligence of her social criticism. She might have flowered in the age of glasnost, but in 1979, while she was considering an offer to work in the U.S., she was killed in a car crash (she was only 40). Her husband, Elem Klimov, completed her last film, _Farewell (1981).
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David Thomson is the author of Rosebud; the Story of Orson Welles and Beneath Mullholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.