As screenwriter William Goldman famously said of film-making, "nobody knows anything". The art of cinema is, by definition, a cocktail of disciplines: writing, acting, shooting, scoring. But on top of that, there is that indefinable, intangible something that makes a movie special. It's not about budget, or James Cameron's Avatar would be everyone's favourite. It's about much more than that: a classic movie is quite simply a phenomenon, a lightning bolt trapped in a bottle, a colossus to be aped but never equalled, no matter how hard its rivals try. So how can we define a classic? We've chosen the key elements we believe a memorable movie needs …
Revolutionary innovation in technique
Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
In Godard's jazzy, loose, laconic film, his pug-nosed hero Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) scorns the newspaper being hawked by his US girlfriend, because it doesn't contain horoscopes. "I wanna know the future," he drawls. "Don't you?" Ironically, this film was the future. Dedicated to the unsung American B-movies of the 30s and 40s, Godard's defiantly modern thriller invigorated classic pulp fiction with vibrant postwar energy and beatnik devilry. Shooting on the hoof with a just a press clipping and a rough outline by fellow critic François Truffaut for a script, Godard advertised his self-awareness with handheld camerawork, speeches to the viewer and pop-culture flourishes (one of Michel's girlfriends even has the word "why?" written in cigarette packets on her bedroom wall). There was no attempt at realism here: Godard was aiming for raw, modern cinema – and he got it.
An epic sense of scale
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
Before he almost bankrupted United Artists, the all-star studio founded in 1919, with his 1980 epic Heaven's Gate, director Michael Cimino proved he had ambition with this three-hour study of the effect of the Vietnam war on America. It starts, with startling similarity to Terrence Malick's Depression-era drama Days of Heaven (released the same year), in a fiery steel mill, but Cimino is not looking back to the 30s. The year is 1966, and three friends – played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage – are about to abandon their semi-rural existence to join the fight against the Vietcong. Cimino spared no expense recreating the horrors they face there, spending the then-vast sum of $15m and shooting for six months entirely on location, substituting Thailand for Vietnam. Cimino's thirst for authenticity was intense, forcing the actors to carry never-seen props such as ID and medical cards, but none carried it further than De Niro, who, legend has it, insisted on having a live round in the chamber for the film's harrowing Russian roulette scene.
Complete sensory overload
Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)
The Coen brothers had elevated screwball comedy to a fine art with 1987's Raising Arizona, but the French team of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet took it to a new level with this, their exhaustively inventive debut. Set in a frayed, post-apocalyptic future where meat is a scarce commodity, cannibalism has gone underground and militant vegetarians wage a war of terror, this surprisingly sweet-natured black comedy lays out its stall in the opening sequence. After the film's grotesque anti-hero butcher brings down his meat cleaver on his whimpering victim, a real-time tracking shot weaves through a pile of junk featuring the film's exquisitely hand-crafted credits. And the pace never lets up; Jeunet and Caro send their camera whirling and diving into their stylised universe: eyes bulge in fish-eye lens close-ups, creating a genuine, if cartoonish, sense of unease in a film dripping with surreal sounds and sights, including an almost biblical plague of snails.
Click here to view an exclusive extract from the Delicatessen extra features
Tearing up the rulebook
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
You might say that films are a fake form of life, a communal dream, but few film-makers are willing to embrace this freedom. Except David Lynch. Having established his surreal, mischievous aesthetic with the dark 1976 fantasy Eraserhead and his controversial breakthrough drama Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch excelled himself with this twisted, hallucinatory fantasy. At first the sparkly eyed tale of a smalltown girl (Naomi Watts) coming to LA to make it as an actress, Mulholland Drive, with a bizarre but unnervingly comprehensible nightmare logic, soon reveals itself to be something quite different. Lynch runs in zigzags, introduces characters, plot points and even creatures that never, in the usual way, pay off, but his ruthless mash-up of the real and the unreal create the clearest, most grotesque depiction of the Hollywood rat race imaginable.
Click here to view an exclusive extract from the Mulholland Drive extra features
Never afraid to tackle the issues
The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
Although it finally lost out to Chicago for best picture, Roman Polanski's Holocaust drama proved so impressive that it won three Oscars, out of seven nominations (including best director), even though its auteur remains a fugitive from American justice. The reason Polanski's film struck a chord, so soon after 9/11, was its unusual depiction of the second world war through an outsider's eyes. In a film based on his autobiography, Wladyslaw Szpilman (played by Adrien Brody) is a witness to history, hiding from the Germans in the squalor of the Warsaw ghetto. There is no mission, as in Saving Private Ryan or even Schindler's List, rather The Pianist simply shows one man's survival in the face of incredible odds. Szpilman's fate is thrown to the wind: he is helped by Jews and non-Jews, including an SS officer who gives him a parting gift of bread and clothing. And this is Polanski's very point: in war, life as well as death is arbitrary.
Standalone memorable speeches
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
Appropriately enough, this British film noir was dominated by its third man: not Joseph Cotten, who stars as pulp novelist Holly Martins, nor Carol Reed, its director. Instead, the film belongs to Orson Welles as Harry Lime, the schoolfriend Martins looks up in postwar Vienna, only to find that rumours of his death have been somewhat exaggerated. Although the script was written by writer Graham Greene, the speech everyone remembers is not one of his, it is ad-libbed by Welles – a riff on an 1885 speech given by the artist Whistler – in which Lime tries to convince Martins that his underworld activities are all above board. "Y'know what the fellow said," he muses. "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." The result was an instant, quotable classic, such that, even today, the Swiss government is still honour- bound to tell anyone who will listen that their country has never, ever made cuckoo clocks.
Click here to view an exclusive extract from the Third Man extra features
All of the above movies are available now on Blu-ray in exclusive new Studio Canal Collection editions. Each film comes in a deluxe case with extensive bonus content including interviews with directors and actors, documentaries, photo galleries, plus a unique booklet with technical notes and an essay about the movie.
All the Studio Canal Collection titles are available from Amazon now.
