My 100 Favorite Films Of All Time: Stats And Observations

It was last year that I started listing my 100 favorite films of all time in increments of 10. I finally finished the list in the last couple months. I have to admit that towards the end it was becoming somewhat of a crapshoot. I know there's some movies I forgot to put on the list, and there are some movies on the list that might be ranked too high.

One thing I tried to do is not load up the list with classic horror and science-fiction films. Despite that I'm sure a few people will still say there's too many monster movies on it. I also tried to spread out certain types of films throughout the list, and I also tried to make sure that certain directors and stars didn't have their movies bunched up together--for example, I wanted to avoid having two or three John Ford titles in one of the segments.

I hope readers realize that just because a movie is not on the list does not mean I don't like it. I could have made a list with 200, or even 300 films....but you have to stop sometime, and how the heck would you judge the difference between entry #213 and entry #214?

Here's a breakdown of the list by the decade in which the films were released:

1920s.......8
1930s.....12
1940s.......6
1950s.....14
1960s.....21
1970s.....19
1980s.......7
1990s.......4
2000s.......9

I always though of the 1930s as my favorite movie decade, but the decade of the Sixties contains the most titles, closely followed by the Seventies. I'm surprised that the Sixties has more titles than the 80s 90s, and the 21st Century put together. Maybe I'm not such a black & white old movie wierdo after all...but to a lot of folks movies from the 1960s are positively ancient.

Here's the directors whose titles appeared the most on the list:

John Ford..............6
Buster Keaton........4
Alfred Hitchcock.....4
Frank Capra...........4
Sergio Leone..........4
Fritz Lang...............3
Peter Jackson.........3
Martin Scorsese......3
John Sturges...........3
Terence Fisher........3
Michael Curtiz.........3
Francis Coppola......3

A lot of great filmmakers here. The big surprise would be John Sturges, a director who gets almost no type of recognition from film buffs these days. Another surprise would be that Norman McLeod directed two films on my list (IT'S A GIFT and HORSE FEATHERS), although considering those films starred W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, one has to wonder how much "directing" he actually did.

Here's the stars who appeared in the most films on the list:

Peter Cushing..........6
Christopher Lee........6
John Wayne.............6
Clint Eastwood.........6
James Stewart.........6
Harrison Ford...........5
Alec Guinness.........5
Buster Keaton..........5

This compilation is hardly scientific....I just picked the biggest and easiest names to remember. I'm sure there's some character actors who have more appearances that I just didn't notice (Ward Bond, maybe?).

Random thoughts:

-Eight silent movies made the list. I bet most Americans haven't seen eight silent movies in their entire lives.

-The earliest-released film on the list is NOSFERATU (1922). The latest-released film is CASINO ROYALE (2006)

-Speaking of CASINO ROYALE, it is one of three James Bond movies on the list. The others are FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE and ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.

-15 Westerns made the list.

-74 films on the list are in color opposed to 26 in black & white.

-How many Woody Allen or Julia Roberts movies appear on the list? Absolutely zero.