But I had fun doing it, so here we are. I've not saying that these are objectively the best movies from each year. Lord knows I haven't seen enough movies to make an informed statement about that. These are simply my personal favorites out of the films I've seen so far. Regardless of quality, these are my favorite. I thought about putting A Clockwork Orange for 1971, for example, but my heart wouldn't let me put anything other than Willy Wonka. Some years, obviously, were harder to choose than others. Some of them would likely be different if I sat down to do this on a different day. But for right now, here they are:
1922 - Grandma’s Boy (Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor)
1923 - Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton)
1924 - Girl Shy (Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor)
1925 - The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin)
1926 - Metropolis (Fritz Lang)
1927 - The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman)
1928 - I HAVE APPARENTLY SEEN NO MOVIE FROM 1928
1929 - The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch)
1930 - Animal Crackers (Victor Heerman)
1931 - Frankenstein (James Whale)
1932 - Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
1933 - Duck Soup (Leo McCarey)
1934 - The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke)
1935 - Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale)
1936 - My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava)
1937 - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand)
1938 - The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz & William Keighley)
1939 - The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming)
1940 - His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)
1941 - The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges)
1942 - To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch)
1943 - Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
1944 - Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra)
1945 - Christmas in Connecticut (Peter Godfrey)
1946 - It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra)
1947 - Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
1948 - Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston)
1949 - Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer)
1950 - Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder)
1951 - Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock)
1952 - Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen)
1953 - Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder)
1954 - The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
1955 - Marty (Delbert Mann)
1956 - Giant (George Stevens)
1957 - 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet)
1958 - The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa)
1959 - North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock)
1960 - The Apartment (Billy Wilder)
1961 - One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder)
1962 - To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan)
1963 - From Russia With Love (Terence Young)
1964 - Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)
1965 - Help! (Richard Lester)
1966 - The Fortune Cookie (Billy Wilder)
1967 - The Firemen’s Ball (Milos Forman)
1968 - The Producers (Mel Brooks)
1969 - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill)
1970 - Patton (Franklin Schaffner)
1971 - Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart)
1972 - The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)
1973 - American Graffiti (George Lucas)
1974 - Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks)
1975 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman)
1976 - Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
1977 - Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
1978 - Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner)
1979 - The Muppet Movie (James Frawley)
1980 - Airplane! (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams & Jerry Zucker)
1981 - Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg)
1982 - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer)
1983 - A Christmas Story (Bob Clark)
1984 - Amadeus (Milos Forman)
1985 - Brazil (Terry Gilliam)
1986 - Little Shop of Horrors (Frank Oz)
1987 - The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner)
1988 - My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki)
1989 - Say Anything (Cameron Crowe)
1990 - Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton)
1991 - Beauty & the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise)
1992 - The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson)
1993 - Army of Darkness (Sam Raimi)
1994 - The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen)
1995 - Toy Story (John Lasseter)
1996 - That Thing You Do! (Tom Hanks)
1997 - Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino)
1998 - Rushmore (Wes Anderson)
1999 - The Iron Giant (Brad Bird)
2000 - Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe)
2001 - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings (Peter Jackson)
2002 - In America (Jim Sheridan)
2003 - Big Fish (Tim Burton)
2004 - The Incredibles (Brad Bird)
2005 - Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman)
2006 - The Prestige (Christopher Nolan)
2007 - Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright)
2008 - The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)
2009 - Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
2010 - Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
2011 - Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman)
2012 - Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow)
2013 - Wadjda (Haifaa al-Mansour)
The Fortune Cookie was I had seen, and it's still great. One of Billy Wilder's most underrated movies. Walter Matthau won his only Oscar for it, which I think is all kinds of delightful. It's a very comedic performance - not at all typical Oscar bait, certainly not in the year that A Man For All Seasons won Best Picture - so it's nice that the Academy could recognize how stellar it is.
The Odd Couple is easily one of the weirdest experiences I've ever had watching a movie. I love the sitcom a lot - I own the first two seasons on DVD, and I've been meaning to buy the others - so it was strange to see the film after all these years. And on the same set as the first season of the TV show, I think. (Does anyone know if that's accurate? It sure looked the same to me.) That said, the character Lemmon's playing isn't quite the same one Tony Randall played. He's newly divorced, so he's a lot sadder and more conflicted. Still, not bad if you like Neil Simon. I do, most of the time. And it's always nice to see the Pigeon Sisters!
In a strange way, the movie The Odd Couple reminded me of most was Buffy the Vampire Slayer - I have an enormous amount of affection for the TV show, and I viewed it as something of a not-quite-in-continuity origin story.
Billy Wilder's The Front Page from 1974 isn't as good as Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (based on the same play by Ben Hecht, but in a vacuum it's pretty terrific. It moves like lightning, the performances are all strong, and it has a wonderful period flavor. The update of the script mostly involved adding a lot of profanity, which was par for the course in 1974, I guess. I didn't think it was too distracting, in any case. My wife has never seen His Girl Friday, and she thought Front Page was "such a great movie," and I had to agree. I'd always dismissed it, but that was silly of me. It's definitely worth watching if you're a fan of either Hecht or Wilder.
Also, it features maybe the funniest epilogue text I've ever seen. Every single character's fate is revealed in a different, funny joke. And it has both Austin Pendleton and Charles Durning in it, five years before The Muppet Movie! You can't beat that!
Finally, the best word I can think of to describe Grumpy Old Men is "cute." It's probably the worst of these four, but I enjoyed it. It helped to watch it right after those others, because the age on Matthau & Lemmon's faces really jumped out at me. They're supposed to have a history going back decades, and I believed it more because I'd just watched them age 27 years in an afternoon. I've never seen any of the three movies they did together after this one, but I imagine that "It's Jack Lemmon & Walter Matthau together! But they're old!" was probably fun exactly once.
A nice touch for us Northerners: Lemmon's character has a "Legalize Lutefisk" magnet on his fridge.
One thing I noticed that all four of those movies have in common - they're billed pretty much equally, but Jack Lemmon is always the actual lead. His characters drive the story and show actual growth, while Matthau is always the colorful support. Even The Odd Couple is the story of Felix learning to be okay with his divorce. Oscar's growth consists entirely of learning to be okay with picking cigarette butts up off the carpet.
I'm not complaining - that Matthau character would get awfully tiresome in a lead role, whereas he's used very well in all four of these movies - but it seems like no one ever really talks about that dynamic between the two of them, so I thought it was worth noting.