The Artist (2011)

Jean Dujardin makes a great Douglas Fairbanks, with his slicked-back hair and pencil mustache and swagger. He plays a silent star about to face the onslaught of Sound--a showdown that will cost the star his career. Dujardin isn't Fairbanks, though; he's George Valentin: a man who never was, but could have been, and represents many who were.

Aside from one archival clip, Fairbanks doesn’t appear in The Artist; he's not even mentioned in passing. Neither are Clara Bow, Greta Garbo or Norma Shearer, the three women I believe were sampled to make Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), Valentin’s love interest. The Artist does not recreate the time in which it is set, so much as create the look and feel of a movie from that time. And kudos to director Michel Hazanavicius for taking this to its logical—and bold—extreme: a 100-minute, modern silent film.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914)

I love, love, love His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, because it creates a world I cannot pull back from or forget. That world is cheap, corny, and shoddily made; but so what? Better that a film glory in what it is than strive and fail to be something else.

The Kiss (1929)

The Kiss opens with an art gallery tour guide running comically fast past a row of paintings while the camera pans right to keep pace—then slows, and dips down, to Greta Garbo.

And Conrad Nagel, but who cares?

Garbo. Revealed in the opening minute of a film. Not for us, this time, the glory of a Garbo reveal, such as the one in Flesh and the Devil (1926) that shuddered my breastbone. Here we have the Sphinx from the start, upfront and kind of stressed, once again the object of a man’s obsession, but, in this case, well along in a sexless tryst behind the back of her older husband. Garbo is Irene Guarry, a French woman of means; Nagel is Ardré, a notable defense lawyer. Their love is real. This gallery is where they rendezvous, but now, Irene feels, they must stop.

Umberto D. (1952)

Umberto D. is about suicide.

Maybe you disagree. Or if you agree, perhaps you’d qualify it: pointing out that Umberto D. is about a great many other things too. Poverty, for example; the dismissal of the elderly before their time; the callowness of modern life; the value of a loyal dog. I admit my view is minimalist. Umberto D., to me, is about a man on a path to personal extinguishment, and everything in the film either propels him toward that end or slows him down. It is their purpose. Even the director’s an accomplice.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

For whom do you have more sympathy: the born fool, or the capable man reduced to foolishness? The first is to be pitied, for he was given no chance to be great; while the latter, you might say, squandered his. And yet, there’s something more pitiable about a man whose dignity is stripped from him. If we’re honest, we’ll admit it could happen to us too, no matter the strength of our character.

Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is an average man in post-war Rome; a married father of two small children, one a baby, the other, a boy under ten. He aspires to no more than his family’s comfort, it seems: like many Roman tradesmen, he’s struggling to keep his loved ones fed, and so, when he wins a job placing posters—beating out dozens and dozens of other desperate men—he’s ecstatic. It’s a lousy job, really; you ride from corner to corner through busy streets, a ladder slung over your arm and a paste bucket in-hand, and you have to provide your own bicycle. But it’s a job, and Antonio needs a job more than anything.