This Ain’t Reality TV: Greed, Paranoia and the American Dream

In this edition of The Martell 100, we discuss some of my favorite movies about the Red Scare, class struggle and gnawing, teething rats.

Dec 01, 2023

Hello and welcome to the first edition of The Martell 100, a monthly newsletter in which I rank and discuss my 100 favorite movies.

Think of it as my personal movie recommendations list for you. My hope is that you’ll find something on this list that you’ve never seen before and give it a shot, or decide to rewatch a movie and see it in a new light.

The basic elements of The Martell 100 started when I was in college as a fun way to think and talk about movies with my friends. More recently, they encouraged me to turn it into a newsletter so I could share it with more people. This is the result. Also, I want to shout out my pal Sarah Vasile for designing the two Martell 100 logos.

In future newsletters, I will track the changes on the list, make note of the first-time entries, commemorate the films that fell out of the top 100 and mention the ones that just missed the cut.

OK, that’s enough of an introduction. As Cliff Booth would say in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “And away we go…”

100. Witness (1985)

Director: Peter Weir

Cast: Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Lukas Haas

99. Metropolis (1927)

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel

The oldest movie on the list, I saw Metropolis at a special screening at the Metrograph in June. It is a haunting vision of a dystopian future, and its setting of urban decay was a major influence on the world Ridley Scott built in Blade Runner. I kept wondering how director Fritz Lang pulled it off. His depiction of class struggle—the lack of understanding and trust between the workers and the ruling class—is sophisticated for a film of its time and place. (The film was released in Wiemar Republic-era Germany.) How well this film holds up today probably depends on how you respond to the optimistic ending. It works for me.

98. Yojimbo (1961)

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Eijirô Tôno, Tatsuya Nakadai

97. Inside Man (2006)

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster

96. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen

95. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1973)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Alfred Lutter III

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is so many things. It’s a road-trip movie, a family dramedy, a love story and a tale of grief. It’s also about the push-pull of security and independence, practicality and dreams, responsibility and freedom. And, what does personal liberation really mean? This movie has so much heart. It is sweet, sad, scary, lovely, violent, hilarious and, as Jodie Foster’s Audrey would say, “weird.”

94. Vertigo (1958)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes

I don’t remember the first time I saw Vertigo, though it was no earlier than 2012, when it was voted the No. 1 movie of all time in the British Film Institute’s prestigious Sight and Sound poll. What I do remember is that it was late at night and I didn’t quite follow along with all that was going on.

I rewatched it last week for the first time and was enthralled by the suddenness that the story unfolds in the second half of the movie, especially after the relatively slow pace of the first hour. The first half lulled me out of it—quite possibly I fell asleep—when I saw it 8–10 years ago. (Remember, it was late at night.) On second viewing, the first hour gave me a false sense of security only to overwhelm me completely when the movie finally turns.

This is one of the best films I’ve ever seen about obsession, but it is more than just that. Like In a Lonely Place (No. 33), it is also a raw depiction of toxic masculinity and infatuation.

93. Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

Director: Carl Franklin

Cast: Denzel Washington, Tom Sizemore, Jennifer Beals

92. Bridge of Spies (2015)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Alan Alda

91. No Country for Old Men (2007)

Director: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Cast: Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones

90. Spirited Away (2001)

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast (English Voices): Daveigh Chase, Suzanne Pleshette, Jason Marsden

89. Django Unchained (2012)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio

88. Wedding Crashers (2005)

Director: David Dobkin

Cast: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams

87. Frances Ha (2012)

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver

I’m an unemployed 28-year-old who is single, living in Brooklyn and trying to figure out what the heck I’m going to do with my life. No wonder I relate to Frances Ha. I haven’t revisited it since I got laid off, but I’ve thought about it every day.

86. Up (2009)

Director: Pete Doctor

Cast: Edward Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer

85. The Age of Innocence (1993)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder

On National Cinema Day, I saw The Age of Innocence at the IFC theater in Greenwich Village before going to see Lady Bird, at the Angelika on Houston Street, with a break for dinner between the two films. In doing so, I checked off a major hole in my film-watching résumé: I had never before seen Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s breakout directorial hit from 2017.

Really, you could say Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film set in high-society New York City during the 1870s was also a blind spot. I had seen it before, probably four or five years ago, but it was late at night in the basement at my parents’ house, and I didn’t remember much of it. I certainly didn’t enjoy it as much as I did at the IFC.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer give excellent performances, and with a vibrant camera that contrasts effectively with the stuffy culture of the characters’ world, Scorsese captures their feelings of class suffocation and repressed love. This is a damning portrayal of the 1% and, beyond that, it’s gorgeous to look at. The set designs and costumes are exquisite; I am particularly envious of the hats Day-Lewis wears! This is a much funnier film than I remembered. It’s also the most sensual movie without sex that I’ve ever seen.

84. Seven Samurai (1954)

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima

83. Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Director: Sergio Leone

Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern

82. The Right Stuff (1983)

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris

81. The Color of Money (1986)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Paul Newman, Tom Cruise, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

This summer I played in a baseball league for the first time since I was in college. I mention this because when I was standing on second base after hitting a double in my last game of the season, I thought of the final line in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 film, The Color of Money, the sequel to The Hustler, from 1961. Just before cracking a shot to begin a game of nine-ball against Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise), Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson looks into the camera with his aviators on and says, “I’m back.”

There are parallels between the two movies in structure and theme. Eddie is the hot shot kid who learns to hustle in the first film, and he teaches Vincent to do the same in the second. Both movies are about aspiration, greed and the fraught relationship between talent and success. The vibes, though, are pretty different. The Hustler is a tragedy, captivatingly cold, while The Color of Money is a great hang, intoxicatingly warm. Shot in black and white, The Hustler’s outcomes are binary. Either Eddie has love but no money or money but no love. That’s the tradeoff, though he is unaware of the stakes until it is too late. The Color of Money is more subtle in its portrayal of what it means to be on top and what it takes to get there. Scorsese, as he would later do on a much larger scale in The Wolf of Wall Street (No. 15), is condemning the ways in which capitalism breeds and exploitation. Just listen to the Don Henley song, “Who Owns This Place?” that plays in the scene where Eddie tells Carmen to go out and buy some cigarettes, just so he can manipulate Vincent into going on the road with him.

You know there ain't no end to man's desire
To steal your water, steal your fire
Snakes in the garden, apples on the tree
All of this looks easy, none of this is free

While The Hustler is a cautionary tale about the damaging consequences of such exploitation, The Color of Money is a depiction of what happens when society encourages it.

80. Michael Clayton (2007)

Director: Tony Gilroy

Cast: George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson

79. Phantom Thread (2017)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville

78. High Noon (1952)

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Thomas Mitchell

I hadn’t seen High Noon until this past August, but I had been aware of it for a long time. John Wayne and John Ford both hated it, with Wayne going so far as to call it “the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life.” The two of them teamed up to make Rio Bravo (No. 16) in response to High Noon.

I also knew that High Noon served as an allegory for the Hollywood Blacklist going on at the time. During production of the film, in 1951, screenwriter Carl Foreman, who years earlier had been a member of the Communist Party, was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee as part of its investigation into Communist influence in the movie industry. He refused to identify anyone who he knew or suspected to be former or current party members. As a result of his not cooperating, he and producer Stanley Kramer had a falling out. Foreman stayed on for the remainder of filming, but sold his stake in his production partnership to Kramer and moved to England before the film’s release. They each cited different reasons for the dissolving of their partnership: Kramer said Foreman threatened to name him in front of HUAC (which sounds dubious because Foreman refused to name names), while Foreman said Kramer worried that his reputation would be damaged because of his association with Foreman, deciding that a clear and public split would be his best defense.

Either way, just as fear was at the center of the conflict between Foreman and Kramer, and more broadly throughout Hollywood, it was also the emotion driving the characters in High Noon.

Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, a U.S. Marshal in a small town in the New Mexico Territory in the late 1800s, who plans to retire following his marriage to Amy (Grace Kelly), so they can raise a family and run a store together in another town. Those plans are quickly disrupted. Just after they get married on a Sunday morning, Kane learns that Frank Miller, an outlaw whom he had previously put behind bars, and his gang are on their way back to town on the noon train to get revenge on him. He has a choice to make: leave town with his new wife before the gang arrives or stay one more day to fight. He chooses the latter — it wouldn’t be much of a movie if he decided to leave — and tries to recruit the townspeople to help.

This is where the plot diverges from other Westerns. All of Kane’s old friends refuse to fight with him, and his wife, a Quaker, says she is leaving on the noon train with or without him. Kane stays, despite knowing that he is outnumbered, because defending the town from a band of outlaws is the right thing to do.

It seems clear that Wayne disliked this movie not because it is “un-American,” but rather because it represented the very heart of Americanism. Standing up for what is right in the face of likely destruction is exactly what prompted the Founding Fathers to declare independence from Great Britain. And, when viewed through the lens of the Hollywood Blacklist, Wayne was worse than the townsfolk who refused to help. His role in Hollywood at the time was akin to Lee Van Cleef’s character Jack Colby, a member of Miller’s gang. Wayne wasn’t the driving force behind blacklisting, but he actively supported it, to the point of helping to run Foreman out of the country.

77. To Live and Die in L.A (1985)

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: William Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Turturro

76. Toy Story 3 (2010)

Director: Lee Unkrich

Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack

75. Silence (2016)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson

74. A Few Good Men (1992)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore

73. Babylon (2022)

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Brad Pitt

Margot Robbie has sex with an ice sculpture during a party, and that might not be one of the five most unhinged scenes of this movie. Among many other deprave moments, Babylon features an elephant taking a giant dump on the main character, a golden shower and Tobey Maguire yelling “Eat another rat!” at an underground dungeon party. Yet even as it depicts the truly awful things that went into building Hollywood, it is also earnest about the wonder of the movies.

72. North By Northwest (1959)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason

71. City of God (2002)

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Cast: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino, Douglas Silva

70. Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi

Director: Richard Marquand

Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher

69. There’s Something About Mary (1998)

Director: Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly

Cast: Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, Matt Dillon

68. Road to Perdition (2002)

Director: Sam Mendes

Cast: Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Tyler Hoechlin

67. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

Director: Martin McDonagh

Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon

66. 12 Angry Men (1957)

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam

65. JFK (1991)

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones

Earlier this year, I read Don Delillo’s novel Libra, a fictionalized account of the JFK assassination that doubles as a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. Delillo writes from the perspectives of real people and imaginary characters to tell the story of how a conspiracy to murder the president could have happened. It’s eerily convincing, and as I read, I found myself considering the mechanics of how conspiracy theories are born and how they are spread.

It is with this perspective that I re-watched Oliver Stone’s JFK in July. Stone has called his film a “counter myth,” an alternative history to the “fictional myth” presented by the Warren Commission. Surely, Stone didn’t just say this for the sake of selling his movie. He truly believes this. The same feelings of anger and betrayal that are conveyed in his two excellent Vietnam War films, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, are what led him to writing and directing JFK. The events of the 1960s left him disillusioned, and his search for answers broke him. In that sense, he is the very person who would be susceptible to such a conspiracy theory, more lost soul than malicious perpetrator.

As is the case with Libra, the greatness of JFK lies in the fact that it makes a conspiracy theory seem plausible, and in doing so, it reveals the ways in which one takes hold. Is that irresponsible? Perhaps. Dangerous? Maybe. But, interestingly, because Stone presents his film as something other than fiction, he challenges us to untangle the complex web of rumors, partial truths and coincidences as we watch. As each layer of the story is peeled back, we begin to doubt what we thought we knew, and because of this film’s frenetic pace, we never have the luxury to take a step back and consider the merits of what Stone is arguing with his movie. If we try, we are met with more details, more characters, more quick cuts, more everything—until our minds adapt to the chaos and this becomes our film-watching reality.

64. Thief (1981)

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky

In Michael Mann’s debut feature, James Caan plays Frank, a professional thief in Chicago. An expert at breaking into safes, Frank leads a small, trusted crew. He has vowed not to work for a larger crime organization because he isn’t in this for the long haul. Instead, he plans to take scores only until he gets enough money to build the life he always wanted, with a home, a family and his incarcerated mentor Okla, played by Willie Nelson. When he falls in love with Jessie, who works at a diner he frequents, Frank makes an exception and agrees to do a major heist for a big-time gangster to expedite his going straight.

What starts as a fun “Dudes Rock” flick turns into a damning indictment of the American Dream. I won’t go into specifics for those of you who have not seen it. The only thing I’ll say is that the pacing here is brilliant. It rocks you into a false sense of security and then hits you hard.