Movie Reviews: AFI’s 10 of 10, Part Two

And here we are with part two of my AFI’s 10 of 10 write-up (read part one here)—the five remaining genres, which are the decidedly darker ones: Gangster, Western, Courtroom Drama, Mystery and Epic.

Mystery

The ten: Vertigo, Chinatown, Rear Window, Laura, The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon, North By Northwest, Blue Velvet, Dial M for Murder, The Usual Suspects

Mystery Films I had seen nine out of ten prior to the Summer Movie Watch.  Four of them are Hitchcocks, and you can’t watch TCM for a day without tripping over a Hitchcock.  The AFI put Vertigo at the top (#1), although I would put Rear Window there for being pure unadulterated entertainment (they put it at #3).  North by Northwest is also more unabashed fun than it is mind-bending or thrilling—which is not a failing, just an observation.  If you’re looking for the best mystery on the list—the twistiest, cleverest, etc.—I might go Dial M for Murder (#9) or maybe Carol Reed’s The Third Man (#4).  The Usual Suspects—I like it, don’t get me wrong—but it’s really a pretty standard crime film until the twist ending.  I don’t feel like it has a ton of repeatability—you watch it once and are shocked, then you watch it a second time to see it in the context of knowing who Keyser Soze is.  And then…you’re done.  (I probably would have gone for L.A. Confidential at #10 myself.)

I don’t remember much about Laura, which I saw quite a long time ago.  There was a murder, and a mistaken-identity plot, isn’t that right?  I don’t remember.  Chinatown was great, and I love that the mystery and murders all sort of boil down to civic disputes over water.  Blue Velvet, which was the one of the ten that I watched as part of the Summer Movie Watch, was dumb.  I’m not a Lynch fan anyway, but I thought that because that movie was on this list, the actual mystery would be prioritized over the weirdness.  It wasn’t.  I adore an investigation in a movie, and I hate when there is one, but it’s mostly ignored.  The 70s were notorious for this, too, setting up a good mystery and then just cutting it off at the knees without resolving anything.

The Maltese Falcon is a bona-fide classic.  Humphrey Bogart is The Man, and this is maybe his Bogartiest performance ever.  (Or maybe The Big Sleep is—which also should have been on this list, by the way.)  He’s a hard-boiled detective; he doesn’t laugh at danger, he just sneers and snickers at it.  His partner gets shot and he shrugs, all, “I didn’t like him anyway.”  He plays everybody off one another and even when he isn’t two steps ahead, he’s back on track in minutes with a rueful shake of his head.  BOGEY!  My favorite moment is in The Big Sleep: he’s got his gun trained on a suspect, but the suspect manages to knock it out of Bogey’s hands.  It falls to the ground.  Both men pause and deliberate for a split second, and then Bogey says, “Go get it.”  The suspect bends down to pick up the gun and Bogey KICKS HIM IN THE HEAD.  I can’t even describe how this moment fills me with delight.  But again, that movie didn’t even make this list.