The greatest American films

The Gold Rush

Set in a simple world where every man is out for himself, The Gold Rush remains one of Charlie
Chaplin's most heart-breaking yet funny romantic comedies. As a characteristically innocent
prospector in the far northern expanse of North America, Chaplin struggles to reconcile the
difference between life as it should be, and how it often really is. The film's sense of "dramatic-
comedy", to use Chaplin's phrase, is a rejection of selfishness and cynicism, and it makes
Chaplin's unabashed optimism all the more bittersweet. Generosity is fleeting, love is fantasy
and charity is wishful thinking – but all three virtues persist in an environment as harsh as the
Alaskan tundra. The Gold Rush is a sentimental film for anyone who generally abhors
sentimentality. – Simon Abrams (Credit: Criterion Collection) meanings and gestures. –
Jonathan Rosenbaum (Credit: Criterion Collection).

McCabe & Mrs Miller

Several levels of beauty distinguish Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller, a Western so fine
that it simultaneously revives and concludes the genre. Altman distills the classical Western
motif of civilisation versus nature into a vision of American character – its history and ambition
as embodied by a mine-owner and whorehouse madam made fascinating and credible by
Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Behold Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography: atmospheric,
textured and delicately toned. The look of nature, of weather, conveys a sense of life. Though
set in the past, McCabe & Mrs Miller feels as immediate as the present, full of uncertainty and
longing. Leonard Cohen’s folksongs are not anachronistic but authentic, soulful. Altman was
the first to deliver a colour equivalent to Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, making it
one of the most glorious films ever. – Armond White, National Review; Out (Credit: Warner
Bros).

The Best Years of Our Lives

William Wyler’s acclaimed Mrs Miniver was really just a run along the tarmac for the
masterwork he would make in 1946, a picture that captured, with subtle but searing emotional
frankness, the experience of men returning from war. Wyler knew just what to do with a cast
that included Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright and Harold Russell, a
veteran and nonprofessional actor who had lost both of his hands during the war: together,
they play a kind of bittersweet symphony, built from the jarring emotions involved in yearning
to be home, only to find that things there are hardly the way you left them. The Best Years of
Our Lives is the kind of movie you make when your eyes have been fully opened to the worst.
Only then can you know what the “best” really means, and appreciate it in all its tattered,
careworn glory. – Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice (Credit: Warner Bros)