Cult comedies Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Big Lebowski will join horror masterpieces House of Wax and Rosemary’s Baby in the US National Film Registry after being named in the 2014 intake of 25 films.
The movies, all released between 1913 and 2004, will be preserved for posterity at the US Library of Congress in Washington, DC, The Hollywood Reporter said. To qualify, films must be at least 10 years old and be deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant.
Better-known movies to make this year’s list include Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book, starring Gene Wilder, and 1998 Steven Spielberg war weepie Saving Private Ryan, the director’s fifth film to make the registry.
John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, from 1986, stars Matthew Broderick as a charismatic teenager who decides to skive off school with two friends. The Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, from 1998, is the offbeat take of slacker icon The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and his journey into the more bizarre corners of the LA criminal underworld. Rosemary’s Baby is Roman Polanski’s devilish 1968 chiller, while The House of Wax is a pioneering 3D colour cult-classic starring Vincent Price as an insane sculptor.
More obscure entries include Pixar’s 1986 short Luxo Jr, one of the first CGI-animated movies, and one that helped lend the Disney-owned studio its famous hopping desk-lamp logo, and 1917 adventure film Unmasked, starring and directed by an all-action Grace Cunard. Howard Hawks 1959 western Rio Bravo and Arthur Penn’s 1970 tale Little Big Man, featuring Dustin Hoffman as a 121-year-old man looking back at his life, both riff off the US old-west period.
The new additions bring the number of films in the registry to 650.
Library of Congress National Film Registry entries 2014
Bert Williams Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Down Argentine Way (1940)
The Dragon Painter (1919)
Felicia (1965)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
The Gang’s All Here (1943)
House of Wax (1953)
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000)
Little Big Man (1970)
Luxo Jr. (1986)
Moon Breath Beat (1980)
Please Don’t Bury Me Alive! (1976)
The Power and the Glory (1933)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Shoes (1916)
State Fair (1933)
13 Lakes (2004)
Unmasked (1917)
V-E +1 (1945)
The Way of Peace (1947)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
