The 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time

[EndtheMadnessNow]

We wanted to do something special for this double July-August issue of The New Republic, but we weren’t sure what; then it hit us that summer is movie season, so why not combine that fact with this magazine’s great passion and come up with a list of history’s best political movies? (TNR, by the way, is no stranger to motion pictures. For decades, the magazine published the work of famed twentieth-century critic Stanley Kauffmann, and we continue to run trenchant film analysis today.)

It was that germ of an idea that led us to reach out to J. Hoberman, one of the leading film critics of the last half-century, to curate this project. Hoberman changed it from “best” to “most significant” and led us in assembling a list of around 130 critics to whom we wrote, asking them to participate. We were pleased that 79 wrote back with their lists. On the following pages, see what they came up with, as well as Hoberman’s overview essay, and some movies that we at TNR thought deserved a mention. Discuss away—and cast your own votes at our readers’ poll here.

The 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time

Coming in at...

#1: The Battle of Algiers (Algeria-Italy, 1966)
#2: The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
#3: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
#4: All the President’s Men (1976)
#5: The Birth of a Nation (1915)
#6: Triumph of the Will (Germany, 1935)
#7: Battleship Potemkin (USSR, 1925)
#8: Do the Right Thing (1989)
#9: Shoah (France, 1985)
#10: A Face in the Crowd (1957) - In the midst of the Cold War, Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg collaborated on a warning—not about alien invaders or the threat of nuclear war, but about the dangers posed by the American media.

#33: Citizen Kane (1941) I thought this would be in top 10.


#47: The Parallax View (1974)

#54: Wag the Dog (1997)
#61: Earth  (1930) In a Ukrainian village, peasant farmers begin collectivizing with the help of a tractor in the final film of Dovzhenko’s “Ukraine Trilogy.” Certainly relevant right now.

#72: Three Days of the Condor (1975)
#75: Starship Troopers (1997)
#76: They Live (1988)
#99: Fail Safe (1964) The president attempts to contact the Soviet prime minister and prevent a nuclear catastrophe after a fleet of bombers is accidentally sent to destroy Moscow. A classic Cold War thriller.

[Ninurta]

I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to see that D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" made the cut at all, much less at #5! Most folks see that as a "Racist" film, not a "political" film at all. It deals with the Civil War, the aftermath of that called "Reconstruction", and the rise of the first version of the KKK.

Whenever you mention it, anyone that has ever heard of it immediately thinks "isn't that the Stormfront's favorite movie?"... but it was here long before Stormfront was even a wet spot on their daddy's jeans.

It does have a peculiar and unconventional viewpoint, but that viewpoint was borne of having been originally written by a man who lived through Reconstruction, and remembered the abuses perpetrated therein. The original novel it is based upon is "The Clansman" by Thomas Dixon, which was itself the middle novel of his "Reconstruction Trilogy". Dixon was raised in North Carolina, and was a product of his times. Born near the end of the war in 1864, he saw first-hand the ravages of "Radical Reconstruction", and the destructive results brought about by it until it was ended by President Grant, and the reverberating echoes of that lawless time that rang out through the next several decades.

That experience made him a bitter man, but most folks these days just hang their hats on the "racist" trope, and leave it at that, never digging any deeper to find out the why of things.

So, while it IS a political film, it is mostly decried as a racist film nowadays with the revisionist history we are all being subjected to, and the politics of the matter are generally swept under the rug to hide them beneath a veneer being applied of racism.

So I am simply shocked, shocked I tell you, that it was included in a list of "political" films.

To add to it's disability, it is a silent film, and folks nowadays purely do hate having to read their films, so there is that to consider as well. Both the film, and all 3 of the novels it is based upon, can be - or at least could be at one time - found at the Internet Archive. I don't know if they still can be found there or not, given the radical changes the Archive have undergone of late.

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[BIAD]

Coming in at...

#33: Citizen Kane (1941) I thought this would be in top 10.

I agree, but it was a major attempt to purvey yellow Journalism and that may've been a factor.

[Ninurta]

Coming in at...

#33: Citizen Kane (1941) I thought this would be in top 10.

I agree, but it was a major attempt to purvey yellow Journalism and that may've been a factor.

I think the fact that William Randolph Hearst conducted a fairly successful campaign against that film due to it's unflattering and thinly-veiled portrayal of him may have had some affect on the ranking of the movie in this listing. I believe most folks familiar with it would rank it higher than 33rd.

Hearst fairly successfully derailed it's box office success at the time of it's release, and that probably continues to affect it's ranking to this day.


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[Infolurker]

Obviously this is not a complete list as IDIOCRACY should be in the top 10. We will be there very soon.