National Film Registry adds 25 movies

[riverplate]

The National Film Registry has announced 25 more movies which will be preserved for posterity:

Baby Face (1933)
The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man (1975)
The Cameraman (1928)
Commandment Keeper Church, Beauford, S.C. (1940)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
The French Connection (1972)
Giant (1956)
H2O (1929)
Hands Up (1926)
Hoop Dreams (1994)
House of Usher (1960)
Imitation of Life (1934)
Jeffries-Johnson World's Championship Boxing Contest (1910)
Making of an American (1920)
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Mom and Dad (1944)
The Music Man (1962)
Power of the Press (1928)
A Raisin in the Sun (1961)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, April 18, 1906 (1906)
The Sting (1973)
A Time for Burning (1966)
Toy Story (1995)

[chapulincolorado]

The National Film Registry has announced 25 more movies which will be preserved for posterity:

The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man (1975)

Which one is that movie? Is it a doc? I did a IMDB search and it didn't come up.

[GringoTex]

The National Film Registry has announced 25 more movies which will be preserved for posterity:

The Sting (1973)


Worst selection ever.

[GringoTex]

Which one is that movie? Is it a doc? I did a IMDB search and it didn't come up.

One of the first "environmental activist" docs.

[chapulincolorado]

One of the first "environmental activist" docs.

Ah....but...man...it must be a very obscure doc. I couldn't locate a reference in IMDB. I did a google and could only find a decent description of it at the UNC University Libraries search engine.

[Ghost]

So Toy Story is now on it, but, say, Barry Lyndon isn't?

[riverplate]

I haven't even heard of some of this stuff. But I'd like to talk about a couple of items. Two musicals and one horror picture:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: I was dragged to a movie theater by a neighbor to see this over 20 years ago. Fortunately, the audience was sedate that night, so there wasn't a lot of "participation" going on. I was actually able to watch the it in peace, which I didn't think would be possible. Overall, it's a fairly entertaining oddity, helped a great deal by its successful casting. Tim Curry and Barry Bostwick both knew there way around a musical--this was originally a stage piece--and Susan Sarandon was fine. I won't comment about the people who went to see this hundreds of times. I don't have any version of this score on CD.

The Music Man: It is almost impossible to overstate what a smash this musical was when it opened on Broadway back in 1957. It received unanimous raves from the critics and slaughtered West Side Story at the Tony Awards--only Jerome Robbins and set designer Oliver Smith won anything at all for West Side. The Music Man movie is very faithful to the show. They kept Meredith Willson's score practically intact, only getting rid of the wonderful "My White Knight," no doubt because it was actually ghost-written by Willson's mentor, Frank Loesser. Willson replaced it with an inferior song of his own.

The biggest reason this film is terrific is because Robert Preston was cast to repeat his stage role. He's sensational. Unfortunately, the role of Marian the librarian was re-cast. Barbara Cook was out, but Shirley Jones was an excellent replacement.
__________

House of Usher: Here's where I get into trouble with some of you. I don't talk about horror films much around here, since almost everybody seems interested only with slasher or zombie stuff from the 80s to the present. It was great to find this as the horror representative on the list. House of Usher was the first of the Roger Corman/American International Pictures series based on Edgar Allen Poe stories. Vincent Price was in almost all of them.

House of Usher shows how even films made on a crappy budget can look classy and be literate. They were made in sumptuous color and in widescreen. Corman borrowed sets from big budget pictures and utilized them well. He hired real actors like Price and, later, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. He had screenplays written by Richard Matheson, who produced some of the best Twilight Zone episodes. He obviously was taking a cue from the great Hammer films from England, another series of quality horror movies made on limited budgets.

I'm bringing this up because there are those obsessed with half-assed stuff like Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead. People extol those pictures as some kind of pinnacle in horror movie making. Sure they were influential, but in my opinion they were TOO influential. Corman at AIP and Hammer in Britain approached the making of horror pictures as a craft, not as glorified home movies starring people who couldn't act their way out of wet paper bags. Trashy looking horror movies with lousy acting and an amateur feel to them became some kind of standard and the genre degenerated badly. The Europeans were still able to put some artistic dash into their horror movies during the 70s and early 80s, but the genre has never really recovered over here.

That's why I'm happy to see House of Usher finally recognized. I haven't looked at the full registry of selected films from the past years, but I'll bet anything Living Dead and Carnival were put on the list quite a while ago. It's about time something truly worth restoring was brought to everyone's attention.

[GringoTex]

So Toy Story is now on it, but, say, Barry Lyndon isn't?

Actually, I think Barry Lyndon is ineligible because it's considered a film from the UK.

[Ghost]

Actually, I think Barry Lyndon is ineligible because it's considered a film from the UK.

How about Days of Heaven then?

Just as long as Robert Zemekis is eligible, that's all that really matters.

[afgrijselijkheid]

Worst selection ever.
not to start a debate, but could you elaborate for me

i am interested to hear your reasoning

[Haole]

"Toy Story" - I don't know all the criteria for selection to this registry but, would have to imagine that 'TS' goes in for innovations in animation etc. Standing on it's own, as an entertainment, well, it's fluff.

"Giant" - Interesting choice. Sum of it's actors talents exceeding the movie's depth. I'm no Rock Hudson fan and, his mawkish attempts at acting seem to drag a lot of his supporting actors down with him. James Dean and E. Taylor are ok in this but, I think this flick has aged badly. It's kind of corny.

"The Sting" - first saw this a few yrs. back and, think it's another 'aging badly' candidate. Redford and Newman were two of H'woods biggest and bankable at the time this came out and, the word 'vehicle' comes to mind when I think of this effort now. Marvin Hamlisch bugs me to no end too. Scott Joplin meet Mr.Commercial. Blah.

"House of Usher" - can't say it any better than Riverplate. Those were the horror films of my young days and, a Vincent Price and/or Peter Cushing flick was a big, big event. Classics for a Saturday at the old theater. Crimson blood, big sets, acting!...what fun!

[scaryice]

So Toy Story is now on it, but, say, Barry Lyndon isn't?

These are for historically significant movies. Toy Story was the first CGI movie, so it definitely belongs on the list.