New on DVD

Though they may be listed among the greatest films of all time, these 10 movies deserve to be downgraded

By David Fear
Special to MSN Movies

Like the accepted canon of English Lit 101 touchstones, there's an unofficial list of classic American movies that gets passed down to each new generation of film lovers. "Citizen Kane," "Casablanca," "The Wizard of Oz," "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Singin' in the Rain" -- these are rightfully considered the high points of Hollywood's output. But if you revisit that roll call of yesterday's greats on a regular basis, you're likely to run across a few flicks that don't stand up to the test of time. There are true landmarks, and then there's the stuff that's been dubbed "classic" yet leaves you scratching your head as the credits roll. Wow, you think: So this is what I'm supposed to think of as "the best"?

We call the members of this latter category the "Unclassics": movies that have been crowned as the crème de la crème over the years but, frankly, no longer cut the mustard. The following 10 titles are all commonly name-checked as films of high quality and lasting value; we'll respectfully suggest that their status may need to be re-evaluated.

After polling a number of critics, colleagues and fellow cinegeeks, we've determined that 1970 is the cutoff point, and everything after that falls under the heading of "modern classics." If you've got suggestions for a list of "modern unclassics" -- and there are more than a few -- send 'em on in.

10. "Love Story" (1970)
"What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?" asks the opening line of this sudsy, sentimental melodrama. We wonder: What can you say about a 38-year-old movie that's so badly made, yet is still so beloved? It's a simple narrative -- boy meets girl, boy and girl get married, girl contracts a terminal disease and boy becomes very, very sad -- told in the sappiest manner possible, and many refer to this Oscar-nominated romance as the last great old-school Hollywood weepie. But this blockbuster boasts some seriously stilted performances (Ryan O'Neal's moody Oliver is merely wooden, whereas Ali MacGraw's doomed Jenny is downright oaken), a tinkling-piano score by Francis Lai that will give you diabetes, and truly wretched dialogue. That includes the line that the AFI listed as one of its top 20 quotes of all time: "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Maybe not, but after rewatching this inexplicably popular tearjerker recently, we feel filmmaker Arthur Hiller still owes us an apology.

9. "Arsenic and Old Lace" (1944)
On paper, the combination sounds fantastic: Frank Capra directing Joseph Kesselring's Broadway hit about two murderous old biddies, with a script by Julius and Philip Epstein and starring Cary Grant. But, though Capra had no problem delving into the darker side of humanity (see the last half-hour of "It's a Wonderful Life"), gallows humor was not his strong point. His handling of Kesselring's play turns the macabre farce into a stagy, broadly rendered mess. The first time John Alexander's deranged Teddy Roosevelt-wannabe yells, "Charge!" and flies up the stairs, it's amusing; by the 110th time, you want to scream. Though Grant's fans have a soft spot for his performance, the star's prodigious talents are squandered here. An actor with impeccable comic timing, he's forced to resort to the sort of shameless mugging that would give the cast of "Three's Company" pause, which only gets worse once Peter Lorre and Raymond Massey show up. There are at least a dozen major works that the director and the star made during the period known as Hollywood's Golden Age; why people insist on including this misjudged collaboration among them is a mystery.

8. "All the King's Men" (1949)
Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winning novel about a fat-cat governor is arguably the great political parable of contemporary literature, and Robert Rossen's adaptation was a prestigious enough production to walk away with the Best Picture Oscar. But not only does the movie feel remarkably rigid and far too pedantic for its own good now, it also features one of the most deadening performances ever committed to celluloid. We don't mean Broderick Crawford, whose overacting at least complements his corrupt character, nor are we referring to Mercedes McCambridge's masculine girl Friday. No, we mean John Ireland, who was roughly as expressive as a stone monument even on his best days. Whenever this human black hole appears on-screen, you can feel the life drain out of the drama; since Ireland was inexplicably cast as the movie's idealistic hero Jack Burden, we're talking roughly three-quarters of the picture. After watching this leaden lead flatline one scene after another, whatever resonant qualities Rossen's movie might have had are royally flushed away.

7. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967)
Here's the answer: black people! (Gasp!) OK, maybe it's a bit much to think that a Hollywood studio would turn a gentle comedy-drama starring two old-school legends -- Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, making their final screen appearance together -- into a no-holds-barred discussion on race in America. But considering that Stanley Kramer's tale of two upper-class white liberals dealing with their daughter's interracial relationship hit theaters while the struggle for civil rights was raging on (and was released the same year as co-star Sidney Poitier's "In the Heat of the Night"), it's timidity toward its subject registers as a toothless bite. But the movie still treats its endless, repetitive scenes of people discussing "the situation" as if they were the equivalent to the march on Alabama. Not to mention that Poitier's doctor is beyond reproach to a ridiculous degree and the film's attempts at hipness are embarrassingly flat-footed. (A delivery boy and a teen girl do the Watusi! In Hepburn and Tracy's driveway!) Dinner is served, and you're left with nothing to chew on but a four-course meal of middlebrow, feel-good bunk.

6. "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947)
Elia Kazan's Oscar winner about a journalist (Gregory Peck) who's writing an exposé about anti-Semitism was certainly a bold move given the times (and indeed, listening to Peck's recital of the racial epithets he finds offensive is still shocking). But if you were looking for an example of message moviemaking at its most didactic, you could do no better than this. Every line feels like it's been plucked from a middle-school civics lesson, and once Peck delivers what is easily one of cinema's hokiest "eureka!" moments ("Why, that's it ... I'll pretend that I'm a Jew!"), the film sets up a number of situations designed to make audience members feel superior. Somebody makes a bigoted remark; our gentile hero asks, with Peck's characteristic stiffness, "Is it because I'm JEW-ISH!?!"; rinse; repeat. Nobody would deny that Kazan & Co.'s intentions were honorable, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Gold statuettes or not, this isn't a classic. It's a tableau of artists brusquely waving their fingers and patting themselves on the back for two hours.

5. "The Seven Year Itch" (1955)
Forget, for one second, the scene in which Marilyn Monroe has her skirt blown above her waist while standing over a subway grate. It's an iconic moment, to be sure, and the main reason that the Cult of Marilyn has enshrined the movie as a keeper. Once you take that sequence out, all you're left with is nothing but a smirking sex farce that stretches its one-joke premise past the breaking point. Though Marilyn does look gorgeous doing her patented ditzy-blonde act, she's essentially reduced to being eye candy while Tom Ewell -- a poor man's Jack Lemmon who couldn't act his way out of a sack with a map -- frets about cheating on his wife and fantasizes about being a Lothario. It's like watching an endless episode of "The Mind of the Married Man" as filtered through smutty Playboy cartoons and dated Madison Avenue jabs. You'd never believe that screenwriter George Axelrod and director Billy Wilder were capable of such a painfully unfunny work; we'd gladly trade this entire chauvinistic debacle for any seven minutes of "Lord Love a Duck" or "Kiss Me, Stupid."

4. "The Ten Commandments" (1956)
Cecil B. DeMille spared no expense with this remake of his 1923 take on the Old Testament, adding in even more spectacular set pieces and state-of-the-art special effects (part that Red Sea, Moses!). Once the movie was restored and rereleased in 1989, the notion that DeMille's final movie belonged in the pantheon might as well have been written in stone. But the combination of pulpy performances and all-consuming pretentiousness is hard to take seriously, especially when you've got Edward G. Robinson in brown-face screaming, "Where's your messiah neee-yeow?" The late, great Charlton Heston was certainly a better actor than many people credit him for, except his Moses never rises above a caricature of lock-jawed, leading-man beefcake. Perhaps an 11th commandment is in order: Thou shalt not dub Velveeta of biblical proportions a work of genius.

3. "Easy Rider" (1969)
The effect that Dennis Hopper's arty biker flick had on the history of American cinema is undeniable and well-documented; simply put, we wouldn't have been blessed with movies like "Nashville," "Badlands" or "Two-Lane Blacktop" had this groovy film not provided the final chink in the Hollywood system's armor. But let's face the facts: Its reputation as a classic movie starts to fall apart once Hopper and Peter Fonda pick up the hippie hitchhiker and hit up that commune, and the ride only gets rougher from there. The actor-director's penchant for arbitrary zooms can be attributed less to aesthetics than certain recreational activities, while the dialogue features a slew of pseudo-profundities ("I'm hip about time, man") that even a stoned Woodstock concertgoer would find ludicrous. Jack Nicholson's turn as a freak-flag-flying lawyer offers a momentary respite from the drivel , but then comes the Mardi Gras acid-trip sequence ... and every '60s drug-culture cliché calcifies right before your dilated eyes. It may be a cultural landmark, but, quality-wise, everything about the movie is two tokes over the line.

2. "Giant" (1956)
James Dean only starred in three films -- two of which were released posthumously -- and we can assume that it's the demand for seeing this moody actor in midpout (along with the scarcity of product) that has somehow elevated George Stevens' mediocre epic to masterpiece status. Granted, Dean steals every one of his scenes in the film's first half, as his rough-trade Jett Rink sexily slouches around the Riata ranch and strikes numerous Christ-like poses. But his Method vulnerability is a bad match for Rock Hudson's stone-face emoting and Elizabeth Taylor's Southern-fried histrionics; you'd think each performance is being beamed in from another movie. And once this Texas-sized portrait of a love triangle in the Lone Star State forces Dean to pretend he's a middle-aged drunk (complete with gray spray paint in his hair), "Giant" officially loses its one saving grace. We won't even mention the last act's sermonizing about racism (the moral: it's bad) and the overall molasses-slow pacing. The loss of such a talent at so early an age is a tragedy; that this overrated megillah was Dean's swan song is a mammoth shame.

1. "Gone With the Wind" (1939)
Go ahead, say it: The idea that this towering totem of Hollywood's Golden Age may not deserve the praise it's received over the decades is downright sacrilegious, and we should be strung up for saying so. To which we reply: When was the last time you actually watched this marathon paean to the Old South? We can appreciate what producer David O. Selznick accomplished -- after hearing the film's backstory, it's a miracle the movie even managed to get made -- but this template for every bloated spectacle made since is one creaky melodrama. Vivien Leigh's touted performance now seems drastically mannered and camp ("I'll never go hungry again!"), set pieces such as Scarlett O'Hara's tour of the Civil War battlefield stick out like sore thumbs amidst the overwrought "intimate" moments, and Victor Fleming's direction never rises above journeyman level. Even Clark Gable's charismatic Rhett Butler feels less like an actual character and more like a star simply savoring the taste of the scenery between his teeth. You can chalk up the retrograde politics to the times -- still, we dare you to sit through Butterfly McQueen's and Hattie McDaniel's scenes without wincing -- but the sheen of this capo di tutti capi of movies has worn off once and for all. For all its pomp, "Gone With the Wind" no longer blows us away.

What classic deserves to lose its status and be downgraded to "unclassic"? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com.

Sound off: Comment on this story | Read more: Features archive

David Fear is a film critic for Time Out New York. He's also written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Filter and MovieMaker magazine.