Adam's Top 100 ballot (sort of)

Jonathan Burdick at Cinema Fusion has quite a project going that I was more than happy to participate in. In forming the Online Film Community's Top 100, Jonathan accepted nominations from many film writers, bloggers and editors to form a list of 502 nominees, which voters will narrow to their top 100, ranked from top to bottom.

It's hard enough to assign a number to anything you love, and this was no easy task -- but it was also a lot of fun. Cinema Fusion's end product doesn't have a release date as of yet, but the deadline for voters is July 15, and in a rare showing of professionalism I actually finished my work quite early. Instead of publishing my official ballot, I'm going to show you what my list would have looked like if all my nominations had made it in. Entries in red represent films that were not included in the list of nominees.

To me this is a pretty good amalgam of what is essential to me as a film watcher and what are the truly best films ever made. By no means is it unbiased, as there is a general lack of classic romances, dramas and comedies, as well as films made in the last 15 years. Foreign-made movies are included in Cinema Fusion's list, and I was somewhat disappointed that my ballot didn't include more. There were a lot of hard decisions with this list, and admittedly a few of the exclusions were made because I have not seen them.

1. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
   
2. Bicycle Thief, The (De Sica, 1948)
   
3. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
   
4. Third Man, The (Reed, 1949)
   
5. Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
   
6. Searchers, The (Ford, 1956)
   
7. Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah, 1969)
   
8. Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946)
   
9. Night of the Hunter, The (Laughton, 1955)
   
10. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick, 1964)
11. Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, 1968)
12. Godfather, The (Coppola, 1972)
13. King Kong (Cooper/Shoedsack, 1933)
14. Big Sleep, The (Hawks, 1946)
15. M (Lang, 1931)
16. Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990)
17. Passion of Joan of Arc, The (Dreyer, 1928)
18. Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)
    
19. Pinocchio (Luske/Sharpsteen, 1940)
20. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981)
21. Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)
22. Battle of Algiers,The (Pontecorvo, 1966)
23. Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
24. Fort Apache (Ford, 1948)
    
25. Wizard of Oz, The (Fleming, 1939)
26. E.T. (Spielberg, 1982)
27. Bridge on River Kwai, The (Lean, 1957)
28. 400 Blows, The (Truffaut, 1959)
29. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
30. Sunset Blvd. (Wilder, 1950)
31. Red River (Hawks/Rosson, 1948)
32. Laura (Preminger, 1944)
33. Ox-Bow Incident, The (Wellman, 1943)
34. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
35. Ride the High Country (Peckinpah, 1967)
    
36. Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges, 1941)
37. Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
38. Point Blank (Boorman, 1967)
    
39. Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)
40. Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
41. Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
42. Alien (R. Scott, 1979)
43. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)
44. Dracula (1931, Browning)
    
45. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (Lucas, 1977)
46. Godfather Part II, The (Coppola, 1974)
47. Hoop Dreams (S James, 1994)
48. Cutter's Way (Passer, 1981)
    
49. Badlands (Malick, 1973)
50. Heat (Mann, 1995)
51. Treasure of Sierra Madre, The (Huston, 1948)
52. Last Picture Show, The (Bogdanovich, 1971)
53. Robocop (Verhoeven, 1987)
54. 3 Women (Altman, 1977)
    
55. Birds, The (Hitchcock, 1963)
56. Rules of the Game, The (Renoir, 1939)
57. Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986)
58. Thin Man, The (Van Dyke, 1934)
59. Sting, The (Hill, 1973)
60. Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993)
61. Scarface (Hawkes, 1932)
62. Forbidden Planet (Wilcox, 1956)
    
63. Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997)
64. Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947)
65. Nashville (Altman, 1975)
66. Annie Hall (W. Allen, 1977)
67. Apollo 13 (Howard, 1995)
68. Miller’s Crossing (Coen, 1990)
69. Day the Earth Stood Still,The (Wise, 1951)
70. Aguirre: Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
71. Big Lebowski, The (J. Coen, 1998)
72. Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)
73. Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982)
    
74. Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960)
75. Young Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974)
76. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956)
77. Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
78. Blade Runner (R. Scott, 1982)
79. Targets (Bogdanovich, 1968)
    
80. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975)
81. This is Spinal Tap (Reiner, 1984)
82. Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961)
83. Dazed and Confused (Linklater, 1993)
84. Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996)
85. White Heat (Walsh, 1949)
    
86. Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The (Leone, 1966)
87. General, The (Keaton/Bruckman, 1927)
88. Dark City (Proyas, 1998)
89. Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962)
90. Manchurian Candidate, The (Frankenheimer, 1962)
91. Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)
92. Duck Soup (McCarey, 1933)
93. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971)
94. Network (Lumet, 1976)
95. THX 1138 (Lucas, 1971)
    
96. Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
97. Sisters (DePalma, 1973)
    
98. Royal Tenenbaums, The (Anderson, 2001)
99. Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971)
100. The Holy Mountain (Jodorowsky, 1973)
     

Painfully missed the cut: Ghostbusters, Freaks, Die Hard, In the Heat of the Night, Ed Wood, The 39 Steps, Brokeback Mountain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, L.A. Confidential, El Norte, Cat People, The Bank Dick, The Battle of Algiers and The Narrow Margin.