I love this series...and although the Balrog-Gandalf thing was explained in the Two Towers, the more emotional scene (and the first occurrence) is definitely in the Fellowship.
Well, as I frequently lament, how can North by Northwest and Citizen Kane be two of the three lowest scores? Who has time to watch the greatest movies of all time when there's Harry Potter VIII and Lord of the Rings XVI out?
North by Northwest is the only one I missed. Never seen it. I've also never seen the last Harry Potter film, or LotR 16 (though 1 was extremely good, you didn't like it?), nor have I seen Rocky II, Ben-Hur, or past the first 20 minutes or so of the Exorcist. But I got all of those right because the scenes mentioned are all so extremely famous. You see them in montages, they get spoofed and referenced constantly... the attacked by crop duster thing I don't recall seeing before.
Very famous scene. I'm with rgc1600, really surprised actually that more people knew the American Beauty scene than the North By Northwest and Citizen Kane scenes.
North by Northwest is my favorite Hitchcock movie. He was such a master at suspense, and it slowly builds in this movie. Deserves its iconic status IMO. On the other hand, so many lists have Citizen Kane as the greatest movie of all time that I had to watch it. I somehow missed the giant impact of it all. Perhaps a film expert can enlighten me. Casablanca and GWTW are at the top of my list.
Citizen Kane had a lot of "firsts" in it. Before then, most directors were studio men who used the same aesthetic conventions to tell a story efficiently and easily. Many people think of Citizen Kane as the first true auteur movie. Orson Welles was a major commodity that Hollywood had been unsuccessfully courting for years. He finally signed under condition that he could write, direct, produce, and star in his own movie with little oversight, which was unheard of at the time. So he was able to do things most movies wouldn't allow -- things that are taken for granted now. He used offbeat camera angles to play with perspective, used music to augment scenes rather than just fill space, and finally tightened the absolutely dreadful pacing of early Hollywood editing. The movie, viewed just for enjoyment, is not so great. But if you appreciate how innovative it was when it happened, its significance is clearer.
Well said, @jmellor13. I adore Citizen Kane and agree with its high ranking on movie lists, but I admit that it can be a little disappointing on first view, after all the praise. Familiarity with other movies of its time helps (like GWTW, in fact). Its lightness and irreverence is part of its greatness: when others were making straightforward narratives, comic or serious as the case might be, Orson Welles filmed a life story seen in retrospect, from a series of reports from different people, filmed in a new style and presented in an almost offhand way that we don't expect from "masterpieces." Nobody's required to like anything, but my experience is that it keeps looking better as I get older.
i got North by Northwest correct though i've never seen it, its a fairly famous scene. I recognized the Citizen Kane scene and know that he says "rosebud" in the movie and i guessed that, but had no idea what the movie was actually called.
Maybe, and hear me out, maybe it's because those movies were released 60-70 years ago and people are more likely to remember the ones that came out in the last decade or so? Or maybe because Harry Potter and LOTR are also book series that are insanely famous? I doubt their percentages will be as high when JetPunk does another similar quiz in 2078... The obsession the QM has with plugging The Princess Bride in every single movie quiz, though, I will never understand.
The older movies (especially Hitchcock's) remain with us because of their unique plots. To me, almost all modern movies are just rehashing of old movie plots and the actors themselves don't impress me at all. Some exceptions: Bullitt, Ghost, Pretty Woman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Sting.
I actually think the best modern film actors are a lot better than the older ones. Most "Golden Age" actors were really hammy over-actors that relied on good looks and charisma for their greatness, but they weren't very realistic. Brando, Bogart, Welles, Katharine Hepburn, and Bette Davis are the major exceptions I can think of. Modern "movie stars" like Will Smith, Scarlett Johanssen, the Rock, etc. definitely rely on their star power rather than acting, but there are also lots of really great modern actors who are masters of their craft, like Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sam Rockwell, Glenn Close, Viola Davis, Robert De Niro, Gary Oldman, Bryan Cranston, Laura Linney, and so on. I always think the facile comparison between Tom Hanks and Jimmy Stewart exemplifies the distinction. People talk about them like they're the same. Tom Hanks is ten times the actor Jimmy Stewart ever was.
I don't think it's really the plots that make Hitchcock so unique, perhaps except for Psycho and a few others. Hitchcock usually worked with clichéd plot elements and subverted them with expressive camera angles, montages, use of color, music, and silence, etc. He went so far as to coin the term MacGuffin, which is an object that drives the story but has no significance in itself, and even consciously deprived his MacGuffins of their significance over the years. In North by Northwest, when Cary Grant finally learns what's behind all those secret service shenanigans, all we hear is the noise coming from a starting aiprlane. Hitch tells us to stop caring about the corny plot and makes us aware of HOW he tells it.
I don’t think Tom Hanks is who you want to use as an example of how acting is better today than when Jimmy Stewart acted. Also, you can’t really blame actors who were forced by the industry, and the available technology, to use the “trans-Atlantic” accent.
Of course "North by Northwest" itself is a rehash by Hitchcock of lots of bits and pieces from his earlier movies. The matronly wife of the archspy (first seen in "The 39 Steps"), the scary drive by the edge of the cliff ("Suspicion"), the fugitive who ducks into a lady's compartment on a train (also borrowed from "The 39 Steps"), the escape by crawling out one window and into another ("Foreign Correspondent"), the bad guy dropped from a national monument (the Statue of Liberty in "Saboteur"), and the faceless intelligence service manipulating our two lovers ("Notorious") all get reused with a little twist in NxNW.
Annoys me when I knew Ghost, I could see the scene, but I had no idea of the name of the movie. And could've guessed the Maguire one, only thought it was Toby (why?), not Jerry :)
Although I am a huge fan of Hitchcock movies, reason I got North by Northwest was because of Psych the tv show. I actually have a quiz about Hitchcock references in Psych and one of them is literally the plane flying over Lassiter
I hate to be pernickety but "Jews are being taken from their homes" is not the focus of that movie. It would be a good description for The Pianist, a holocaust movie that isn't set in the camps.
Just "Everything is black and white except for a little girl's red coat" would be adequate description. I remember how big an impression that exact thing made on me when I saw the movie for the first time.
It's one of the small handful on this list that I've actually seen and I still didn't get it... I don't remember the whip for some reason and Indiana Jones being next to it in the quiz was distracting me.
North by Northwest was so brilliant because of its amazing camera shots, its mounting suspense, and then the humor Hitchcock managed to sneak in. What other movie director has gone six minutes without lines or background music and still managed to make it thrilling? He really knew how to get into our minds.
The opening to There Will Be Blood also has no music or dialogue and runs for six minutes. I wouldn't call it "thrilling" only because it's the opening of the movie so there is a lot of groundwork to lay and we don't really know what's going on yet, but it is a very effective and memorable opening that really accomplishes a lot for the movie.
I would put North by Northwest and Benhur above any modern movies (with the possible exceptions of Ghost and Titanic), old movies have a level of suspense and sophistication that most modern movies fail to achieve.
There is a Japanese movie called The Princess Blade(not bride) with some of the most insane sword fighting scenes ever. Not as good as the Lone Wolf and Cub movies, but still good.