20- Peeping Tom (1960)
Dir- Michael Powell
This was the reportedly infamous (at the time) film that destroyed the career of one of Britain's true filmmaking legends. And this is a travesty since Peeping Tom, released in the same year as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, is a stealthy, superbly crafted slasher in its own right. Both films also feature compellingly socially awkward male protagonists who are grappling with demons that stem from their childhood; in case of Powell's suitably sordid and grimy tale, filmed also in the choicest of seedy streets of Soho, it is a superbly stifled and tormented Carl Boehm as Mark Lewis, a secretive shutterbug who lurks around corners stealthily and arouses the curiosity of his demure-faced neighbour Helen (Anna Massey). Meanwhile, two women have already been murdered with fear frozen literally on their faces. Powell's gripping gritty visual style might have put off conservative viewers and critics back then but it serves the morbid premise perfectly. Ultimately, Peeping Tom has more questions than answers and is a bit unwieldy towards the climax. But with spine-chilling effect, it proves that we love to stare at fear and sleaze like the titular voyeur himself.
19- The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Dir- Alfred Hitchcock
Almost all Hitchcock fanatics and even Francois Truffaut swore that his 1956 Hollywood remake of this early British thriller is a classier job, what with the touristy Moroccan locales and the more sensational stunner in the Royal Albert Hall. So, what makes me prefer the 1934 film, with its gritty, improvised flavour, over that more lavish film? There is a good reason for that: the original version is not only leaner and meaner but also laced with a disarming sense of goofball humour that undercuts the simmering menace very effectively. With a running time of less than 90 minutes, Hitch dispenses with the buildup arc that would be a signature in his subsequent works and instead cuts right away to the meat. Instead of the deceptively leisurely buildup of the remake (Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera, anyone?), this one is a pure white-knuckle entertainer with a brisk, businesslike air and the director even strips the reveals of melodrama. There are none of Day's hysterics to be found here. Shorn of all the flab that makes the later film occasionally weary, this is just more thrilling overall.
18- Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)
Dir- David Lean
One David Lean is who made Brief Encounter, the magnificent Dickens adaptations in the 1940s and also one of the most intelligent World War II films of all time. The other is the man who preferred an epic and lavish scale to balanced storytelling. Lawrence Of Arabia falls somewhere between these two distinct filmmaking styles; it is as staggeringly spectacular a period epic and costume drama as Doctor Zhivago and A Passage To India and yet it has none of the silly bombast of Ryan’s Daughter. And let’s be even more generous: this immaculately crafted desert war adventure has lost none of its dazzling visual beauty, its flashes of poetic profundity and its irresistible old-school charm as exuded by its extraordinary cast. Leading an ensemble of greats like Sir Alec Guinness as a silky Prince Feisal and Anthony Quinn as the boisterous Auda abu Tayi is Peter O’Toole’s charismatic yet compellingly vulnerable Lawrence, both a rousing, rallying hero and a man confronting his inner demons. It is also shot with a transcendent beauty by Freddie Young and scored with mesmerising, almost romantic fervour by Maurice Jarre.
17- The Ladykillers (1955)
Dir- Alexander Mackendrick
Like The Italian Job, you can forget safely the redundant Hollywood remake (so what if it was directed by the Coen Brothers?) and settle down to the loony and deliciously dotty pleasures of this timeless Ealing comic caper. Scripted ingeniously by American writer William Rose, the nutty and naughty The Ladykillers is one of those wacky comedies that you wonder why didn’t anybody else think of before. The gentle, If sometimes overwhelmingly earnest, Mrs. Wilberforce (a delightful Katie Johnson) allows the cunning and grinning Professor Marcus (a devilishly brilliant Sir Alec Guinness) and his motley crew of fellow heist artists to lodge in her jaunty little house, thinking them as musicians. When the gang botches up the robbery, the truth is soon revealed and soon, each of them decide to take turns to dispose of the dowager to darkly hilarious results. Director Alexander Mackendrick orchestrates the shenanigans with a smooth, silken touch punctuated by Rose’ split-second repartee. And meanwhile, the film also takes us back to a quaint old post-war London of bumbling bobbies and wizened ladies that feels like an altogether different world today.
16- Sabotage (1936)
Dir- Alfred Hitchcock
More than The 39 Steps, Sabotage reveals Hitchcock laying down his trademark template for his more introspective thrillers firmly in place: an infuriating moral conundrum, sweltering tension in the space of slightest movements and split-seconds and compellingly crafted set-pieces that grip the viewer without relenting. Set in a London teeming with literal chaos, the film is an ingenious spin on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Suspicious-looking cinema owner Mr. Verloc (Oskar Homolka) is nudged into a dastardly anarchist conspiracy intended to make the loudest noise. Unknown to him, a diligent plainclothesman from Scotland Yard has his eyes and ears open but is it already too late to prevent the upcoming disaster? What follows is a tightly written and compellingly shot yarn that unfolds with an authentic urban flavour. The suspense is sombre, the signature Hitchcock characters are hilarious (watch out for a seedy pet store owner and a toothpaste pedlar in particular) and somewhere in the middle of it is a deliciously protracted scene of nerve-wracking, ticking bomb dread that pulls us right into the suffocating hold of city traffic.
15- Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949)
Dir- Robert Hamer
Of all the Ealing comedies, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts And Coronets is the one that is laced with the most acidic of laughs, aimed with cold-blooded perfection at the snobbish and stiff upper-lipped pecking order of England and how it deems only the rich and affluent as worthy of greatness. Dennis Price plays Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini, the erstwhile scion of the Dukes of Chalfont who is denied his legitimate claim to the title because of his parentage: his father was a mere Italian opera singer. Not to be put off by this cold-blooded snobbery, Mazzini swears revenge served cold and cynical as he sets out to despatch, one by one, all the potential successors that stand in his way. All of them are played, in a phenomenal stroke that would make Peter Sellers fume with envy, by the chameleonic and charismatic Sir Alec Guinness, who breathes quirk, gruff indifference and even welcome warmth in these hapless victims. But there is more. As Mazzini himself comes closer to his coveted goal, Hamer paints a brilliant portrait of selfish arrogance akin to the aristocracy that he detested.
14- Victim (1961)
Dir- Basil Dearden
As of now, Basil Dearden’s Victim is just the barnstorming cry of protest against homophobia and prejudice that we need with urgent immediacy. In our own India, as pig-headed attitudes are being obliterated and our own hypocrisies are being re-examined, we need a film this stirring and powerful, about an upper-crust London lawyer tugged into a vicious scandal of blackmail targeted at homosexual gentlemen, more than ever. But even beyond its undeniable resonance, this is also a taut, terse drama that unravels like a ticking time bomb of nervous emotion. Dirk Bogarde is indelible as the suave lawyer Melville Farr who, after a shocking incident, decides to stand up for the right thing regardless of the consequences. Filmed across the city buzzing with malice and paranoia by London-veteran cinematographer Otto Heller, the film is an edge-of-the-seat thriller that reveals our hideous demons of loathing and prejudice, all the while demanding that a country or culture can never be progressive and free if people are victimised for their differences rather than their failings. As it happened, the message got through and Britain legalised homosexuality in 1963.
13- The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
Dir- David Lean
Like the Pierre Boulle novel on which it is based, The Bridge On The River Kwai is both a rattling men-on-a-mission yarn and an intelligent examination of military pride and racial ego and a man hell-bent on preserving them against all odds. That man is the infectiously affable Colonel Nicholson, played with fastidious, almost manically delusional brilliance by the incredible Sir Alec Guinness. When ordered by his steely Japanese captor Colonel Saito (a wonderfully well-rounded Sessue Hayakawa) to allow his officers to aid his war-worn soldiers in building a bridge from Thailand to Burma, Nicholson refuses obstinately to give in; when he does relent, it is only to take over the whole project and get the bridge made with maddening perfection in a bid to prove the might of English resilience and craftsmanship in face of adversity. Parallel to this engaging battle of wits and personalities is the second narrative of a ragtag British commando unit dispatched into the jungles to blow the bridge up. The visual and verbal pyrotechnics explode in the film’s anarchic climax, where Lean demonstrates his flair at both drama and scale.
12- Barry Lyndon (1975)
Dir- Stanley Kubrick
Was it a fortune to Britain and a matter of regret to America that Stanley Kubrick migrated to the former, leaving behind Hollywood? Indeed, only there the auteur was able to do his unforgettable work without big-studio interference. Of them all, his magisterial, meticulously crafted adaptation of Thackeray’s novel ranks as an extraordinary achievement. No other modern epic has boasted of such jaw-dropping grandeur, not merely indulgent but rather authentic, but crystallised like a tableau of life of that era. The director with cinematographer John Alcott created marvels of staggering beauty, vistas of the idyllic English countryside that resembled the ethereal works of Joseph Turner, marching columns of Redcoats, deliberate duels in glinting sunlight and candle-lit interiors that were shorn of the merest trace of electric illumination. And art directors Ken Adam and Roy Walker captured the wistful social serenade of the milieu from the pastoral farms and gritty battlefields to the opulent castles and svelte boudoirs. Yes, you can argue that the film is as cold-blooded as its American critics perceived it but that is the point of it all: the diminished place of empathy and agony in face of the larger-than-life facades of stiff-lipped orthodoxy that England was all about in those days.
11- Brazil (1985)
Dir- Terry Gilliam
It is oddly bittersweet to know that more than 3 decades after its release, Brazil refuses to age even a day, not only as a brilliant satire on the manipulative evil of bureaucracy in urban society but also as an acerbic portrait of an alternative dystopia that feels so starkly believable. The passage of time has made us viewers only more aware of the disturbing vision that it presents; the outrageous hilarity of Gilliam’s trademark oddball, Python-esque kitsch is offset by his more resonant understanding of human predicament and despair when faced with an infuriatingly apathetic system of paperwork and numbers. That said, it is also typically English in mood and milieu, populated by devilish dowagers and bumbling cops, dotty old-timers and paper-pushing stiff clerks and mashed together with the disillusionment of Orwell with the urbane cynicism of Huxley. In the heart-pounding and ultimately shattering climax, when Jonathan Pryce’s hapless Sam Lowry croons the eponymous song as a haunting echo of blissful escape, we know why Brazil is still timely: ordinary life is cold and cruel but a song can still take you to a warmer, jollier place.
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