Once a week for two years, until earlier this year, The Guardian newspaper, in a millennial celebration of serious cinephilia, ran a column by its erstwhile film critic Derek Malcolm headed 'The 100 Best'. Towards the end of the run letters started to appear in the paper questioning Malcolm's choices, not on grounds of taste or judgement, but their perceived wilfully arcane nature. One letter, printed well into the column's life, claimed not to have heard of a single one of the films so far featured. At the end of the series a longer article in which Malcolm, one of Fleet Street's longest serving critics, reflected on his choices was accompanied by other reviewers' comments on it - some thoughtful, others hilarious (The Sun's critic bemoaning the exclusion of Men in Black springs to mind).
Now these columns have been collected and published under the title Derek Malcolm's Personal Best, and the editor of kamera.co.uk can exclusively reveal that he has (a) heard of around 75% of them and (b), rather less impressively, seen about 25%. This is the stock reaction to 'list' books (and this is nothing if not such a book, albeit a slightly more sophisticated one than the norm); we compare ourselves against an authority's idea of the cannon - be it films, books, music, whatever - in order to rate our own cultural competence. If you come off well, you can close the book smugly, warm in the knowledge that the £5.99 a month FilmFour subscription is paying off. If you don't, well, you write letters to The Guardian.
Malcolm's tastes are very much those of the classic cinephile formed by the post-war explosion in distribution of foreign language cinema (so far as I can tell nearly half of the selection is not in English), and with a fondness for European émigré directors who found favour in the Hollywood studio system (Wilder, Lang, Ophuls). In his introduction he outlines his selection criteria and claims that he set only one golden rule - that a director could only appear once in the list, thus, he cheerfully admits, leaving himself open to those unsympathetic to the auteurist approach. So what we really have here is less a selection of films than one of directors (or, very occasionally, performers, Malcolm admitting an enduring soft spot for Laurel and Hardy), from which he has chosen what he perceives to be their most 'important', representative or, yes, on occasion, 'best' picture.
This approach is double-edged. At it's best it puts the spotlight on directors generally neglected in the West in anything other than academic discussion of film, and makes a good case for their better exposure. Included here are Hou Hsiao-hsien (recently the subject of a National Film Theatre season), Santiago Alvarez (Cuban documentarist) and Dusan Makavejev (whose once notorious WR: Mysteries of the Organism has now faded almost entirely from view).
However, it also runs the risk of tokenism and contrariness and, a typical trait of Malcolm's writing this, judgements qualified to such an extreme that the reader can't actually ascertain whether he rates the work or not. In his piece on Last Tango in Paris, he queries critic Pauline Kael's assertion that Bertolucci's film is 'morally serious and a work of art' by replying 'there's such a thing as a morally serious bad work of art too' (my italics). He later admits that he think The Spider's Stratagem is the director's best film - so what is Last Tango doing here? Because 'it takes the most risks and thus causes most entirely legitimate argument', apparently. And I don't care whether it's obvious or boring, but it seems to me unarguable that Citizen Kane just is a worthier candidate for such a list than the hugely entertaining but, in the very final analysis, lesser Touch of Evil, which Malcolm prefers.
Another niggle is the rather arbitrary order in which the pieces are presented here (it could be the same order in which they appeared in The Guardian, but this isn't made clear). Overall though, this collection is to be welcomed, rather than sneered at, for it's insistence in film as, at its best, an art form of unparalleled influence, and in the depth of knowledge on display, the likes of which has now all but disappeared from today's increasingly celebrity-driven newspaper coverage of film.
Reviewed by John Atkinson
