Tonight on TCM, A Star is Born airs, the 1954 Judy Garland version. It’s highly acclaimed, did well at the box office, and will probably be a hailed as a masterpiece for years to come. Eventually, its star will dim and, as with all things in the arts, it will recede even further into the background. For now, we’re keeping it alive, but for how long? How much room do we have for 1954 movies in the canon now? How about in 20 years? 50 years? 100? 500? As we keep adding more and more titles to the list, and each new generation discovers the biggest movies from the past while creating new canon entries each year, surely the list of films remembered as a part of the cultural consciousness will dwindle evermore.
It’s a subject I’ve written about before and it always fascinates me. Years ago I purchased Classics of the Silent Screen, by Joe Franklin and William K. Everson, from the store at the local library where they sell off the older books that haven’t been checked out in years as well as other books people from the community have donated. I get almost all of my movie books this way and I have built up an admirable collection of books published circa 1960 and before. This particular book was published in 1959. As a result, the stars it listed were a mere thirty to fifty years removed from the present day, like someone writing a book today about stars of the sixties through the eighties. A section of the book lists 75 great stars of the silent screen and while I knew most of the names, their movies were, admittedly, unfamiliar to me. Some of the names, however, I didn’t know at all.
I have another book on the stars of the silent era written in the eighties. I know pretty much everyone in it. They list Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Bara, Gish, Negri, Valentino, Fairbanks, Pickford, and so on. The handful I didn’t know from the earlier book were left out completely from the later book. Time had weeded them out.
But I’m not writing this to rehash these same ideas again, the ones I’ve talked about before, about how time selects only a few names for posterity. No, this time, I’m just trying to figure out what in the hell the criteria is. Here: this is a list of the top 20 box office winners of 1954, compiled from information from The Numbers, where you can find tons of data on movies from all eras, which can also be found on Wikipedia.
White Christmas
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Rear Window
Demetrius and the Gladiators
The Caine Mutiny
Vera Cruz
Carmen Jones
The Country Girl
The Barefoot Contessa
A Star Is Born
The High and the Mighty
River of No Return
Magnificent Obsession
The Long, Long Trailer
On the Waterfront
Desirée
Sabrina
The Last Time I Saw Paris
Dial M for Murder
Living It Up
Here’s another 20 movies from 1954 that didn’t make the top 20 box office winners for that year:
Godzilla
The Seven Samurai
La Strada
Creature from the Black Lagoon
Them!
Three Coins in a Fountain
Executive Suite
Sansho the Bailiff
Brigadoon
The Naked Jungle
Suddenly
Phffft
Bridges at Toko-Ri
Animal Farm
There’s No Business Like Show Business
Susan Slept Here
Robinson Crusoe
Genevieve
Hobson’s Choice
Senso
Each list has big movies in film history and ones that aren’t so big. Godzilla is certainly far more remembered than Living it Up, a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy. At the time, Martin and Lewis were huge and so its box office numbers are understandable but history kept Godzilla in the spotlight and selected Martin and Lewis’ Living it Up out. And how about the Oscar winning The Country Girl? Could anyone in 1954 have predicted that The Creature from the Black Lagoon would have far more cultural cachet in 60 years than the movie that won Grace Kelly her Oscar and saw Bing Crosby’s greatest screen performance?
And this isn’t about quality, either. One list has On the Waterfront, the other has The Seven Samurai. One has Rear Window, the other has Sansho the Bailiff. And The Creature from the Black Lagoon may be better known to the general public at large than any of them, outside of Godzilla, truly the King of all Monsters. And that’s further not to say that either The Creature or Godzilla are bad, because they’re not, just that their pedigree is of a considerably different kind, more attuned to the Saturday matinee than the art house.
The Seven Samurai, certainly better than Demetrius and the Gladiators, is also better remembered. So there are great movies remembered, good ones remembered, bad ones remembered, and downright ugly ones remembered. The same goes for the movies that are forgotten. So what is it, then? What is the thing that keeps one movie alive and another not? Is it simply a cultural difference? Does a monster movie like Creature from the Black Lagoon have the advantage because monsters will always be a popular cultural entity while sword and sandal epics ebb and flow with the times? Possibly, but then why is Spartacus still so well known while Tarantula is not? And, so we’re all clear on this, I mean to the general public. I realize everyone reading is going to be familiar with pretty much all of these movies.
If quality isn’t the criteria (Plan 9 from Outer Space is more well known than A Man Escaped but not nearly as well known as Jaws), original box office isn’t the criteria (The Shocking Miss Pilgrim performed well in 1947, Blade Runner, in 1982, did not, yet it is far better known), and cultural popularity isn’t the criteria (i.e., monster movies vs gladiator movies), then what on earth is?! Why do some movies make the cut and others don’t? I have no idea. Better put: I have many ideas, all of which can be immediately challenged by bringing up a movie that defeats the argument. So I don’t know. And that’s what bothers me. I want to know that certain movies I love are going to be remembered by everyone, forever, and the fact is, they’re not. For all we know, in two hundred years, people might not remember 99 percent of the classic movies we hold dear. If we could travel forward in time, we would probably find a maddeningly random selection of remembered movies. We would wonder why and then start showing people what they had forgotten. Or maybe, if we keep the discussion going, they never will. We should at least try. For now, it’s the best we can do.