Better than BFI’s Top 100: 2019 Edition

Francois Truffaut said once that British cinema was a contradiction in terms, which is a fabulous take and exactly the kind of thing that keeps Anglo-French relations spicy since Joan of Arc was lit up. History has proved him wrong, but there’s a reason that when people think of national cinemas Britain tends to lag behind France or Japan or Italy or, ahem, America. George C. Perry’s The Great British Picture Show, among others, hypothesizes that the mere existence of Hollywood, which produced films in the same language, set back Britain’s film industry by decades. Not only did Hollywood flood the British market with American films which were generally of higher quality, but by and large Britain has lost more of its great filmmakers, performers, and technicians to America than the other way around. The question of what British film actually is is more interesting than the question of what makes a film American or Italian or Japanese, then. Can the Yanks really claim Lawrence of Arabia, as the American Film Institute does? Can the Brits have The English Patient, which was made with dollars but made by people from the Commonwealth? More seriously: do we include Irish movies or not? (No—probably—yes, but only with the right naming conventions.)

As British cinema continues to expand and improve, I think people are more and more interested in qualifying some list of the great movies of the British Isles. In 2016, Empire put out a Top 100 British films list, where #1 is Lawrence of Arabia. In 2011, Time Out published their Top 100, which favors Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. All the way back in 1999, the British Film Institute’s Top 100 chose The Third Man for the top spot. In honor of the twentieth anniversary of the BFI list, which is fairly good but badly outdated, I present my own take on the matter in the spirit of another anniversary project I did two years ago for the AFI Top 100. The trouble is that defining what an American movie is is far less difficult than defining what a British/Irish movie is. A British/Irish director, a primarily British/Irish cast and crew, production in Britain or Ireland, production by a quintessentially British/Irish company (i.e. Ealing, Elstree, Hammer Films) and the like help. So do too stories which are primarily about people of Britain and Ireland and their place in the world.

If push came to shove I have excluded co-productions between the United States and United Kingdom which I feel are much more Uncle Sam than John Bull. It’s made me reevaluate my previous American movie list. If I ever returned to it, movies like The Third Man, Barry Lyndon, and Alien would not be eligible; movies like Dr. Strangelove, United 93, and 2001: A Space Odyssey would remain. That’s why you will, spoilers, see the former three on this list and not the latter three. Part of it is historical bias. I bent over backwards to make The Third Man American enough for inclusion two summers ago, and I still kind of believe what I said (i.e., a movie set in Vienna whose most important characters are a pair of Yanks has limits on its Britishness), but that’s a movie which is frequently referred back to as a landmark British film. Then there’s 2001, a movie which is arguably more British than American, but if that’s the case why isn’t categorized that way by conventional wisdom? Dr. Strangelove stays where it does because it is primarily about Americans on screen engaging with American foreign policy that only the Americans could have put in place and the way that Americans will cause the end of the world. (Perhaps more importantly, it’s not Dr Strangelove.) Barry Lyndon will leave the American list and join the British one because it is a British story about Brits which just happens to star Ryan O’Neal instead of Malcolm McDowell. All in all this is mostly an inconvenience to the work and not an impediment, but I think it deserves mentioning at the outset.