The 10 best movies of all time - Films on Friday

BRITAIN, basketball and It's a Wonderful Life, in our list of the finest movies known to (a) man.

***

Pre-amble

Hello! Yes, it's upon us at last, the conclusion of a list that you probably weren't aware was going on (you big glory fan, just coming in for the Top 10). Welcome.

Since October, I've been counting down my favourite movies of all time on the site. I make no excuses for the content of the list (I was unloved as a teenager, my DVD player is broken, I've lost my pen) - these are just the 100 movies that mean the most to me. Except Up is missing. That came out after we'd started. And Whistle Down the Wind - can you believe I only just got around to seeing that?

Below there's a list of all the films up to this point, with links to the reviews, and on the next two pages you'll be able to find the top 10.

I hope you enjoy the list. This is the last Films on Friday for the foreseeable future, so treasure it. Bye now.

***

The Top 100

100. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

99. I Know Where I'm Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945)

98. Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)

97. Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)

96. Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

95. Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)

94. The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956)

93. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949)

92. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

91. Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)

90. Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

89. Confessions of Boston Blackie (Edward Dmytryk, 1941)

88. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

87. La Terra trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948)

86. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

85. if…. (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)

84. The Edge of the World (Michael Powell, 1937)

83. Judge Priest (John Ford, 1935)

82. Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

81. A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965)

80. The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1984)

79. The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975)

78. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)

77. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

76. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950

75. Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)

74. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

73. Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, 1953)

72. After the Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke II, 1936)

71. Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936)

70. Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)

69. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

68. The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969)

67. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

66. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

65. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

64. Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944)

63. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

62. Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)

61. La Grande illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

60. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

59. Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1981)

58. Young Mr Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

57. Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

56. A Star Is Born (Vincente Minnelli, 1954)

55. Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)

54. The Killer (John Woo, 1989)

53. The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935)

52. The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970)

51. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)

50. One Foot in Heaven (Irving Rapper, 1941)

49. Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996)

48. Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962)

47. Charlie Chan at the Olympics (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1937)

46. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)

45. A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1986)

44. Becket (Peter Glenville, 1964)

43. Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)

42. One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992)

41. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)

40. Three Men on a Horse (Mervyn LeRoy, 1936)

39. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

38. Les Quatre cents coups (Francois Truffaut, 1959)

37. The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)

36. Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)

35. The Iceman Cometh (John Frankenheimer, 1973)

34. Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950)

33. The Wind (Victor Sjostrom, 1928)

32. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)

31. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1947)

30. The Silent Village (Humphrey Jennings, 1943)

29. I Love You Again (W.S. Van Dyke II, 1940)

28. In My Father's Den (Brad McGann, 2004)

27. A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. 1944)

26. Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)

25. Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1990)

24. Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty, 1948)

23. Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings, 1942)

22. The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)

21. The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)

20. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)

19. How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1940)

18. The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)

17. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927)

16. The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke II, 1934)

15. Blessed Event (Roy Del Ruth, 1932)

14. The Dead (John Huston, 1987)

13. My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

12. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

11. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

For #s 10 to 6, please click on the link below right.10. Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960) – Luchino Visconti was a Marxist aristocrat whose body of work oscillated between the extremes of his character. Having essentially invented the socially-conscious "neorealist" movement with his adaptation of the noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ossessione, he went on location to Sicily to shoot La terra trema (see #87), a tale of impoverished fishing families robbed blind by capitalism. In radicalising cinema, neorealism influenced the French New Wave; in starkly presenting the choices facing ordinary people it informed the British "kitchen sink" revolution and without the abrasively naturalistic style of photography and production of Visconti and his neorealist contemporaries, there could have been no Dogme 95. What next then. Luchino? First: Bellissima, a satire about fame, self-delusion and the superficiality of the arts. Then Senso, a literate, lushly-photographed drama of romance and betrayal filmed on a vast soundstage. And next White Nights, a chunk of poetic realism set in a mythic neverworld of love and loneliness. It was after that he embarked on his three-hour masterwork: Rocco and His Brothers, an emotionally-draining collision of '40s-style Hollywood melodrama and postwar realism that compels and repels in equal measure. Tracing the story of five brothers – "like five fingers on a hand" – torn apart by poverty and one another's actions, it's a shattering story of self-sacrifice without a single false note in performance, dialogue, story or score. Like our #8 film, it follows a penniless family who travel across the country only to find there is no respite, but at least that film offered a sense of communality and solidarity. Here there's nothing but misplaced loyalty and a misery and nausea akin to being kneed in the stomach. Alain Delon is the saintly Rocco, who can't forsake his sadistic brother (Renato Salvatori) even when he brutalises the girl he loves (Annie Girardot). Nina Rota's majestic score has seen this epic tale of moral corruption draw comparisons with The Godfather – Rocco is one film that can stand it.

Favourite bit: Bruised and battered after a night in hell, Delon meets Girardot on a bridge. "Simone needs you... We must stop," he says, tears rolling down his face.

See also: White Nights, based on a Dostoyevsky short story, in which a woman waits by a bridge for her lover to return, finding solace in another. The Leopard, an aristocratic epic starring Burt Lancaster, Delon and Claudia Cardinale is big on spectacle, backing up that sprawl with personal drama.

9. Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourneur, 1950) is pure Americana: a gentle fable that recalls the best of Mark Twain in its lyricism and quiet empathy. Joel McCrea is a gun-toting preacher who arrives in a Western town and encounters a succession of crises, from stifling bigotry to a typhoid epidemic. He faces each with wisdom and a cool head, until he thinks that he's responsible for the illness outbreak, and retreats into himself. Tourneur, known for a handful of expressionistic horrors and one superlative noir (Out of the Past, our #74) shows an unexpected flair for the material: a series of emotionally draining, sometimes self-contained episodes that play like the finest short stories you've ever read. The vastly underrated McCrea is superb in his greatest role, with Ellen Drew perfect as his stern but loving wife and Dean Stockwell completely winning in the role of his surrogate son. An eclectic, persuasive supporting cast also includes Alan Hale as an inveterate church-dodger, doctor Lewis Stone and James Mitchell as a doctor and his atheist son, and Juano Hernandez, playing a kind-hearted black worker brutalised by Klan members. There isn't a single false note in this spellbinding, richly-rewarding film, its unique feel augmented by a song score drawn from 19th Century hymns.

Favourite bit: McCrea's minister takes on a gang of Klan members, armed only with two sheets of paper. The pay off sends a shiver down the spine – and a stream of salty tears down the face.

See also: Tourneur's horror classics are about as far removed from Stars in My Crown as it's possible to be, but they're essential. Produced under the guidance of genre legend Val Lewton at RKO, Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man transcended the prescribed titles (approved by audiences prior to filming), with an unexpected believability alongside the requisite thrills. As the Fred and Ginger films (also at RKO) contained passages of transcendent wonder, their feet seeming to grow wings, so Lewton's movies boast stretches of pure poetry: heightened, superbly constructed set pieces where everything is that bit sharper, slicker and more inventive. Tourneur's later Night of the Demon shouldn't have shown the monster, but in all other ways it's exceptional genre fare. I like just about everything McCrea ever did; he's just a very special actor. He's already appeared twice in this list, at #48 and #36. Of his other stuff: for romantic comedy, go for Adventure in Manhattan, The More the Merrier or The Palm Beach Story, for drama These Three, for thriller Foreign Correspondent, or for Westerns try just about anything he made after 1946.

8. The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) casts Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, the reluctant hero of John Steinbeck's great American novel: a farm boy brutalised by the Great Depression who becomes a symbol of resistance and hope for others. In the hands of the great American director, it's a painterly study of humanity and grace in the face of impossible odds that packs a devastating punch. We begin in Oklahoma. Tom is fresh out of prison, returning to an unrecognisable homestead, where the wind is merciless, the crops are dead and weathered old friends speak in whispers as they squat in blacked-out buildings. Casy (John Carradine) has lost his faith, Muley (John Qualen) has been displaced and now the entire Joad clan is being forced to vacate, after the bank foreclosed on the farm. The 12-strong family pack up what belongings they can and head for the promised land – California – only to find that life's no easier out there. Film historians will tell you that John Ford was a brilliant storyteller, with an unmatched visual sense – and that's a point hammered home by his evocation of Dust Bowl desolation here (aided by the greatest cinematographer of all time, Gregg Toland). But little is said about the superb work he coaxed from actors, thanks to the utter devotion he inspired in his stock company. After acting for him in Stagecoach, Thomas Mitchell called Ford: "the meanest s.o.b. on location I ever saw. He chews up actors and spits them out. He brutalizes the crew. He's a tyrant. And I'd crawl over those damned rocks at high noon to work with him again." No-one else could have drawn the performances from this cast that Ford does. I don't think there's a turn in all of cinema that can top Fonda's Joad – so simple, instinctive and moving. Jane Darwell, too often poorly used by studios who didn't know what to do with a fat, middle-aged woman, is definitive as the selfless Ma Joad. The cast, littered with familiar faces, is also littered with career-best performances – from Qualen, Carradine, Charles Grapewin and Russell Simpson. Elements of the source book were changed to make the film more palatable for audiences (and satiate censors), but it remains a bleak, harrowing, authentic and avowedly left-wing film with a timeless message about communality and the strength of the people.

Favourite bit: Fonda's unforgettable climactic monologue, socialist rhetoric as poetry: "I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build, I'll be there, too."

See also: Henry Fonda's remarkable performances in The Ox-Bow Incident and On Golden Pond: the first a brilliant anti-lynching polemic, the second a slightly trite family drama lifted by Fonda and the great Katharine Hepburn.

7. It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) is a film for anyone who's ever thought their life has made no difference. Capra's eternal classic follows the supposedly "meaningless" life of everyman George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), showing how his existence has touched those around him, from wife Donna Reed and his war-hero brother (Todd Karns) to the druggist down the street. It's Christmas Eve, and after a financial calamity caused by devious capitalist Mr Potter (Lionel Barrymore, playing at odds with his mock-curmudgeonly loveable gramps figure), George is on the brink of suicide. Enter slightly befuddled angel Clarence (Henry Travers), who takes him through a nightmarish parallel world in which he never existed: where his brother is dead, his wife is an unhappy, bookish spinster and his hometown is a crime-ridden hellhole where local flirt Gloria Grahame has become a booze-addled hooker. Capra's masterpiece is perilously dark, but peerlessly uplifting, its timeless message articulated with utter conviction.

Favourite bit: There are two bits that choke me up every time. The first is the scene in the druggist's, where the young George prevents his boss from taking an overdose. The second is George's visit to his brother's grave, and the dawning realisation of what he's seeing.

See also: Fancy another helping of Capracorn? There's so much goodness to choose from, it's difficult to know where to start. Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Mr Deeds Goes to Town are Robert Riskin-scripted fables so ingrained in the vernacular that it's hard to believe there was a time before they existed. It Happened One Night is a brilliant romantic comedy pairing Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable – it was the first movie to win the five main Oscars, and has a great story behind it (both stars had been sent to lowly Columbia by their respective studios to teach them a lesson!). If you fancy a more left-field outing, try the socially-conscious horse-racing drama Broadway Bill, featuring a fresh-faced Myrna Loy. I've got a real soft spot for Platinum Blonde as well, featuring the tragic Robert Williams, whose star shone all too briefly.

6. Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940) is the ultimate holiday film: a pitch-perfect romantic comedy in which a public prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) spends Christmas and New Year with the female shoplifter (Barbara Stanwyck) he's just been trying to get jailed. Relaxing in rural Indiana with MacMurray's loving family – mother Beulah Bondi, fond aunt Elizabeth Patterson and their charge Sterling Holloway – the pair fall for one another, but the spectre of the trial hangs over them... Written by the legendary Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, it's a glorious marriage of their styles, with Sturges' penchant for offbeat humour and well-phrased sentiment and Leisen's eye for a spellbinding image (Niagara Falls at night) and a dialogue-light set-piece. And then there are the performances. Stanwyck is one of the most fascinating and baffling of all movie stars: sometimes grating, at other times achieving an emotional attractiveness no other performer on earth could match. Here she maintains that elevated magnetism from start to finish, matched by MacMurray – his inherent affability weighted by a complexity and inner conflict his earlier, simpler characterisations lacked. The three key supporting players are flawless, each given one unforgettable scene. For Holloway it's his take on 'When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day', for Bondi it's her pained conversation with the soon-to-depart Stanwyck, and for the incomparable Patterson it's the unwrapping of the wedding dress she never used. Tom Kennedy, Paul Guilfoyle and Snowflake benefit from Sturges' familiar habit of bestowing some of his greatest lines on a movie's bit players. Remember the Night is something very special indeed: a mesmerising, magical movie with a feel that's all its own.

Favourite bit: "Pretty lucky, huh?" asks MacMurray, as his family shower festive affection upon him. "You bet," says Stanwyck, with that glorious broken lilt in her voice.

See also: Sturges and Leisen's previous collaboration: Easy Living, with Jean Arthur as an office worker whose life turns upside down when she unwittingly inherits a fur coat. Includes the most ridiculous old movie bathroom of all time. Double Indemnity, with stars MacMurray and Stanwyck unrecognisable (she's got a stupid wig, he's just being mean) as a fall guy and a femme fatale plotting a murder.

For the top five, click on the link below right.5. Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carne, 1945) is often billed as the French "Gone With the Wind", but it's much better than that. It's not an apologia for the Klan either, so we're laughing really. This staggering film, shot during the Occupation and populated by Resistance fighters using the filming as daytime cover, draws on half-imagined events in 1830s Paris, weaving a tale of courtesans, lovestruck mime artists and arch criminals across 190 mesmerising minutes. Jean-Louis Barrault stars as Baptiste, a brilliant mime who rises to fame at the Thtre des Funambules but is tormented by his deep, unrequited love for flighty carnival-worker-cum-socialite Garance (Arletty). Even after he's married, he pines for Garance, while she hops from caddish actor Pierre Brasseur to rakish thief Marcel Herrand and aristocrat Louis Salou. Arletty, of course, represents France, a free spirit untained by her travails. Made by the Jacques Prevert-Marcel Carne team responsible for those twin peaks of poetic realism - Le quai des brumes and Le jour se leve - Les enfants du paradis is a triumph of epic-scale storytelling. Prevert's script, elegant and witty but positively dripping with anguish, is full of deftly-etched characters. Barrault's conflicted artist is just something else (the star was not only a brilliant actor, but also a phenomenal mime), though from Maria Casares (playing his wife) and Pierre Renoir (as a rag-and-bone man) to Arletty and Brasseur, the ensemble is startlingly good. It's a tremendously watchable film, and an intensely moving one. The three hours just fly by, whacking you in the solar plexus as they pass.

Favourite bit: The first meeting: Baptiste, cast as a fool in a roadside show, comes to Arletty's rescue with a mimed reconstruction of a theft.

See also: Le quai des brumes, Prevert and Carne's nihilistic classic, with Jean Gabin as a deserter who falls in with a heap of pessimists in a riverside dive. "If we have lost the war," a Vichy spokesman said, "it is because of Quai des brumes." That's some criticism. A Walk to Remember (which I am NOT recommending) might be terrible, but it didn't make anyone nearly lose to the Nazis. Le jour se leve sees Gabin kill a man and barricade himself in a room. In flashback, we find out what he was up to.

4. Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1945) is the highest of the three Jennings entries in the Top 100 - something like a summation of his wartime films, albeit with a bit more commentary than usual. Scripted by E.M. Forster and narrated by Michael Redgrave, it's a portrait of Britain in 1944-5, made for a newborn child. It explains the world he has been brought into and challenges his generation to forge a better one. The country is as you've never seen: suffering and hardening, bogged down in a seemingly endless war of attrition as its people struggle to maintain business as usual for a fifth, ravaged year. As he would in his 1949 classic, The Dim Little Island, Jennings focuses on four diverse Britons: in this case a miner, a farmer, a train driver and a wounded pilot undergoing rehabilitation. Theoretically, anyway. In typical fashion, his scope encompasses not just normal propagandist fodder, but also culture (Shakespeare, Beethoven), homelife and the contrast between the industrial heartlands and the tranquil countryside a stone's throw away. It's at once realistic and poetic. The fellow who edited the chaptering on the film's first DVD release said it was impossible to do it satisfactorily, because its themes are so interlocked. But while you could study it for weeks and still draw more from its immaculate construction, Diary for Timothy really works because it speaks not to the head but to the heart, and the part of all of us that will remain forever England.

Favourite bit: Pilot Peter returns to his feet on cumbersome crutches, his plight and his stoicism made all the more affecting by the footage of dancing servicemen and home front girls that surrounds it.

See also: Fictional flyer pic The Way to the Stars, starring Johnny Mills and Michael Redgrave, or nigh-on anything from Jennings' remarkable body of work. For a couple of little-heralded, if imperfect films from the director, check out The Cumberland Story - a docu-drama about the modernisation of coal mining - or his straightforward First Days. I'm pretty sure they used bits of the latter when we learned about WWII at school.

*SOME SPOILERS*

3. Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994) – You won't forget this film in a hurry: four years (and three hours) in the company of two teenage basketball players who dream of the big-time, seeing the NBA as their ticket out of poverty. Over that time, their fortunes ebb and flow, encompassing drama you'd dismiss as ridiculous – or melodramatic – were this not documentary. We meet them in their early teens. William Gates is grown-up, measured and driven. The younger Arthur Agee is prodigously talented but scrawny, and hamstrung by immaturity. They've both secured sporting scholarships at the prestigious private school where NBA star Isiah Thomas once played, but only one of them will stay the course. Arthur will be thrown out on his ear when his father - a crack user - fails to meet the payments. That's just the beginning of the tale, though, as the pair battle injury, poor grades and disillusionment, along with the breaks you get growing up in inner-city Illinois. Even for those not predisposed to like the sport, the game footage is often exhilarating, but this is ultimately a film about dreams and the small victories you revel in when the larger ones are out of reach. James' virtuoso handling of the material isn't for show, it's just to serve the story, which is by turn shocking, uplifting and heartbreaking.

Favourite bit: "All my dreams are in him now," says William's brother Curtis - once a promising player himself, now laid low by arrogance and injury. "I want it so bad I don't know what to do."

See also: A couple of favourite documentaries: The Fog of War, an in-depth look at former US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, from director Errol Morris, and Etre et avoir, a charming movie about a provincial French schoolteacher and his charges, including the film-stealing Jojo.

2. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943) - What does it mean to be British? That's the question posed by Powell and Pressburger in their greatest film, a three-hour meander through the life of a colonial soldier turned Home Guard instructor, played by Roger Livesey – giving the performance of a lifetime. The film begins with a 1943 "war game", as a group of cocky young recruits make their stout, ruddy, aged adversary look thoroughly ridiculous, surprising him ahead of schedule in a Turkish bath. "What do you know about me?" the old man asks in response to their mockery. "You laugh at my big belly, but you don't know how I got it! You laugh at my moustache, but you don't know why I grew it! How do you know what sort of man I was; when I was as young as you?" Flashing back, we learn his story, from Boer War gallantry to utter redundancy, until he finally realises that his ideals of chivalry and honesty are outmoded in the face of Nazism, and finds a new lease of life. This is also the story of Wynn-Candy's love for three women - all played by Deborah Kerr, who leaves an indelible impression. Colonel Blimp is not only the most moving film I've ever seen, it's also the most British, with a subtle, intelligent patriotism rooted in tolerance and humanity that permeates every frame. Witty, good humoured and with a deep-rooted faith in the redemptive power of tea, it crystallises the national character. Not that everyone saw it that way. Winston Churchill may have been a great wartime leader, but he was a lousy film critic, encouraging the Ministry of Information to obstruct the movie's production, and then its release.The root of Churchill's ire is thought to have been the distinction the film draws between Nazis and ordinary Germans, the "caricaturing" of certain military types and the sympathetic German character portrayed by Anton Walbrook. The film was also "defeatist", his office said. In a memo to Churchill, MoI officer Brendan Brackton looked on the bright side: "We have not had an official letter from Mr Rank, the producer of the film, informing us that he would like to show it in America and in the Empire. As the film is so boring, I cannot believe that it will do any harm abroad to anyone except the country which made it." But without the Government's intervention, the film may not have been the masterpiece that it is. They prevented Powell and Pressburger from casting Laurence Olivier in the lead and thus softened the central character, who's about as far removed from the boor of the comic strip as it's possible to be. Working from a script of unparalleled lyricism from regular collaborator Pressburger, Powell created a Technicolor wonder that mixes character study, history lesson and state-of-the-nation address to create something truly unique.

Favourite bit: There are so many wondrous scenes in Colonel Blimp that it seems unjust to single out one, but Wynn-Candy's furious, heartbroken reaction to finding that his speech at the BBC has been scrapped is one of the great monologues. "What was your position before this (war), sir?" he asks. "Lawyer," the director murmurs. "What? A lawyer! Well, I was a soldier," Wynn-Candy replies. "And before that, I suppose you were at college. And I was a soldier. And I was a soldier when you were a baby, and before you were born, sir, when you were nothing but a toss-up between a girl's and a boy's name - I was a soldier then!" He stops. "I'm deeply sorry, sir. I know it's not you." I'm welling up just writing it.

See also: Churchill's favourite film: 100 Men and a Girl - a vehicle for Canadian child star Deanna Durbin, which he supposedly viewed as a treat following military victories. He was also a big fan of That Hamilton Woman (he wrote some of the dialogue) and reserved special praise for Mrs Miniver, saying it was "more powerful to the war effort than the combined work of six military divisions".

... and our favourite movie of all time is:

1. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) - Around the time he made Citizen Kane, Orson Welles was asked which directors had most influenced him. "The old masters," he replied. "By which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." He later expanded on the statement, explaining that his preparation for The Greatest Film Ever Made (y'know, according to Sight & Sound and that) had been to watch Ford's Stagecoach. Ten times. If you see a John Ford movie - ten times or otherwise - you know about it. The great American director's movies were nostalgic, patriotic and brimful of honest sentiment. As he was given a freer reign, they were also increasingly characterised by a knockabout, Irish-American sensibility that leaned heavily towards boozing, bawling and brawling. And throughout it all - from his first feature in 1917 to his swansong 49 years later - Ford was singular, bold and brilliant. For his part, the great self-mythologist (who claimed to have been born Sean Aloysius O'Fearna, rather than plain old John Feeney) enjoyed presenting himself as an inarticulate country boy. "My name's John Ford. I make Westerns," he liked to say. But while such evasive, anti-intellectual modesty plays down both Ford's versatility (none of his four Oscars were for Westerns) and his supreme talent, it contains an essential truth. He made the modern Western, and it made him. The Searchers, a breathtaking odyssey of revenge and redemption, is his most complete, conflicted and downright audacious film.

The opening still sends shivers down the spine. A black screen. A door opens and we're back in Monument Valley: more overpowering, homely and deadly than ever. The wind whips rust-coloured sand across the vast, sprawling canvas as a lone figure rides towards the camera: Ethan Edwards (John Wayne). The returning anti-hero. The eternal outsider. A homicidal racist crippled by hatred, still fighting a war that ended three years ago, carrying a mercenary's medal, two bags on newly-minted gold and a crush on his brother's wife. When the family's homestead is razed to the ground by Comanches and Ethan's niece is kidnapped, he sets out in pursuit. The plan? To put a bullet between her ears. She's been defiled, he says. Wayne's performance is something far beyond a revelation. Tortured and tormented, he's like a shattered looking glass - a hideously warped version of a Western hero, the lives of loved ones long lost playing out behind his hate-filled eyes. Harry Carey, Jr. recalled shooting the scene in which a prize bull is slaughtered. "When I looked up at (Wayne) in rehearsal, it was into the meanest, coldest eyes I had ever seen," he said. "I don't know how he moulded that character ... He didn't kid around on The Searchers like he had done on other shows. Ethan was always in his eyes."

It's a towering performance, backed by one of the finest ensembles ever assembled, Jeffrey Hunter and Natalie Wood as good as they'd ever be, alongside a host of performers from Ford's legendary stock company: John Qualen, Vera Miles, Olive Carey, Ward Bond and Ken Curtis. Max Steiner's score, alternately glorious and ominous, perfectly complements Winton C. Hoch's mesmerising cinematography. The script's a gem too, passages of poetry thrown in alongside lamentations and shreds of love and patriotism. It's 50 years of Westerns boiled down to a few choice phrases. "It seems like (the Indian)'ll never learn there's such a thing as a critter who'll just keep comin' on, so we'll find him in the end," Wayne says. "I promise you, we'll find him just as sure as the turnin' of the earth."

Ford gives the blockbuster crowd what they want with a stunning action climax, but it's the film's heartbreaking coda that is his masterstroke – the fate of its outsider hero drifting across in breathtaking fashion. The Searchers is a shattering experience: the strong, simple, narrative dressed in the complexity of America's birth, drenched in the mythology of its creation myth. It's still the greatest film ever made.

Favourite bit: The opening, my favourite 30 seconds in cinema.

See also: This is the eighth Ford film on the list (yeah, I know), but I still haven't plugged Stagecoach, the 1939 Western that essentially revived the genre and My Darling Clementine, one of the director's most romanticised visions. Watch Up too, because it came out too late for the list, and it's astonishingly good.

Thanks for reading.

• Email to a friend
• Print this page