Earlier this year, when the British Film Institute’s monthly magazine Sight & Sound announced the results of its most recent “greatest films of all time” poll — a once-every-decade exercise that Roger Ebert has called the only poll taken seriously by anyone who works in the film business — cinephiles were astounded to learn that Citizen Kane had been toppled from its perennial perch atop the list. The greatest film of all time, according to hundreds of critics, festival programmers and others around the world was not Orson Welles’ 1941 drama, but Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece of unease and obsession, Vertigo.
While the rest of BFI’s 2012 list is comprised of standard film-geek fare — Renoir’s Rules of the Game, John Fords’ The Searchers and so on — the excellence and legitimacy of the winners is hardly up for debate. They’re all powerful exemplars of the art of cinema.
But what about the greatest movie of all time? What about the best, most thoroughly enjoyable, most enduringly, rightfully beloved movie ever made? A film, after all, is generally understood to be a creation that aspires to the status of art; a work of import, depth and vision brought to the screen almost solely through the passion and drive of its director — its auteur.
A movie, on the other hand, is an unabashedly pop-culture creation whose purpose is to entertain — and, of course, make money. While the director, screenwriter, producer, cast and crew working on a movie might very well strive for real quality, most everyone involved knows and accepts that if it doesn’t put people in the seats, it can hardly be judged a success.
With that distinction in mind, now is as fine a time as any to celebrate the best movie ever made: Casablanca.
By Ben Cosgrove/ Time /more
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