Dracula Presents: The Top 100 Movies of All Time (2015 List)

18. The Bridge on the River Kwai

Year: 1957

Director: David Lean

Writer(s): Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson

Based on: The novel "The Bridge Over the River Kwai" by Pierre Boulle

Starring: William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald, and André Morell

Studio: Columbia

Country of Origin: USA/UK

Language: English

Running Time: 161 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
The Bridge on the River Kwai is, in addition to being a great film on most objective levels, a movie that means a lot to me personally. This was the first movie I went out and rented after having been intrigued by a number of movies featured on one of those AFI “Best of” specials and that viewing was, for all intents and purposes, the viewing that sent me down the rabbit hole of being a connoisseur of classic cinema. This was the first of David Lean’s trilogy of classic epics and the one that really cracked the code for how a movie could be both big and bombastic while also being intelligent and human. The film is set in World War II but it’s a movie about battles of will rather than battles with firearms and explosives (well, maybe there are a few explosives). There are side stories but at its core it’s about the conflict (of sorts) between Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson as played by Alec Guinness and Colonel Saito as played by Sessue Hayakawa who have different if oddly complementary opinions about how a bridge that the prisoners are being forced to construct should be built and their respective senses of honor take them in unexpected directions. The movie has as very conflicted view of these antiquated senses of honor as it sees them as noble while also viewing them as a sort of madness that ultimately hurts more than it helps. Also, the movie has a really cool explosion at the end.

One of my favourites. Bridge too.

15. The General

Year: 1927

Director: Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman

Writer(s): Buster Keaton, Al Boasberg, and Clyde Bruckman

Based on: The book "The Great Locomotive Chase" by William Pittenger

Starring: Buster Keaton and Marion Mack

Studio: United Artists

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 75 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
As long as there is cinema there will be cinephilles arguing about whether Chaplin or Keaton was the best of the silent clowns. I’d argue that it’s mostly a matter of quantity vs. quality. Chaplin has at least two movies that I consider stone cold masterpieces as well as a number of slightly lesser classics and his very best work probably comes close to eclipsing anything Keaton ever made. Keaton by contrast was more prolific and a bit more consistent in his extremely high standard of quality. As such there’s only one Keaton movie on this list but it kind of stands in for his broader body of work. The one thing that Keaton almost certainly has going for him over Chaplin is that he’s clearly the bigger daredevil of the two and his dangerous slapstick stuntwork was rarely better than it was in his 1927 masterpiece The General in which he does all manner of death-defying feats on top of a moving train. These stunts are made all the more interesting by Keaton’s trademark stone faced reactions which give the gags a sense of absurdity without giving them comically exaggerated reactions. I suppose at the end of the day I’m on Team Chaplin in the great battle of the clowns, but Keaton was damn awesome too and The General is a testament to it.

The Top 10 is all silent movies.

Depends on your definition...

It is when you mute the TV.

We've seen Platoon.

Yeah wouldn't be surprised at two thinking about it.

I love The Seventh Seal. I've grown to find Persona to be Bergman's best work, but this is the film that challenged me to start viewing film on more than just a surface level back in high school so I'll always love the film on a personal level beyond it's absolute greatness. Awesome film and a great first entry into Bergman for people who haven't gotten into it yet.

11. Modern Times

Year: 1936

Director: Charles Chaplin

Writer(s): Charles Chaplin

Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Stanley Sandford, and Chester Conklin

Studio: United Artists

Country of Origin: USA

Language: Englsih

Running Time: 87 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
The silent era was already pretty much ancient history by 1936 even if it had been less than a decade since The Jazz Singer had first brought talking pictures to the masses. Just about all of the stars of the silent era had either adjusted to the new technology or been disposed of by Hollywood… with one exception. Charlie Chaplin remained the one lone holdout still beloved enough to get away with releasing a silent film this late into the sound era. He didn’t do this because he was a luddite (although he most probably was), he did it because he didn’t want to see a great thing (pantomime comedy) lost simply because of the march of time. With Modern Times he showed that this world-view extended far beyond cinema and into a larger indictment of a world that was increasingly becoming dehumanized by industrialization and machinery.



The film “drew from the headlines” of a Great Depression filled with labor unrest and exploitation by those in power. It opens with a truly famous first act in which Chaplin is a factory worker slowly being driven mad by the repetitive work he’s forced to do which is being made worse and worse by the various corners that his bosses are trying to cut. When he finally breaks down he’s treated with no understanding and is cast out. Now, that description doesn’t exactly make this sound like a laugh riot, but Chaplin constructs all sorts of wonderful gags that bring this material to life. From there we get what is ironically a sort of origin story for Chaplin’s famous Tramp character even though this is the last film he’ll be officially featured in. The second half of the film is, in its own silly way, a story of a man trying to find a simpler and happier life outside of the constricting confines of modernity. The is the kind of brilliant era-defining masterpiece that very few comedies aspire to be and even fewer actually manage to become; it’s funny, touching, visually enchanting, and a worthy sendoff for Chaplin’s career as a silent comedian.

10. M

Year: 1931

Director: Fritz Lang

Writer(s): Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou, Paul Falkenberg, Adolf Jansen, and Karl Vash

Based on: A newspaper article by Egon Jacobson

Starring: Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, and Gustaf Gründgens

Studio: Nero Film

Country of Origin: Germany

Language: German

Running Time: 111 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.19:1
The usual log-line about M is that it gave us cinema’s first serial killer, which I suspect isn’t exactly true but even if it was that would be a rather shallow description. As serial killer movies go this is closer to something like Zodiac than Psycho. The story was “ripped from the headlines” of a real life serial killer who terrorized the city of Düsseldorf, which caused a mass panic across Germany which generated a great deal of worry about how a society should protect its children. The killer himself is brought to life in a chilling fashion by Peter Lorre and seems like a true monster in the opening scene where he’s introduced as a shadow stalking a young girl while whistling Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” but as the film goes on it curiously shifts your allegiances slightly as it becomes clear that this man isn’t a cruel monster so much as a mentally disturbed individual acting on impulses he can’t control and as the movie goes on he almost becomes a protagonist of sorts as he maneuvers to escape vigilante violence. Really though, this isn’t so much a movie about a serial killer as it is a film about how the city reacts to him. The film provides a rather sophisticated look at the ways that various institutions including the police, the politicians, the media, as well as the criminal underground react to the murders and about the terror it reeks on common mothers across Berlin. It’s an astonishingly sophisticated piece of sociology, especially for its time. It’s almost like “The Wire” but made some seventy years before that show.



The film was made by Fritz Lang and was the second from last film that he made in Germany before fleeing to France and then the United States fearing the rise of Nazism. The movie doesn’t intentionally comment directly or indirectly on the rise of Hitler that was slowly going on at the time but there are definitely a lot of interesting things to be gleamed about the Berlin of the time from the film. The Great Depression had hit and the decadent Weimar era clubs and riches we saw in other Lang film like Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler were gone and he’d also abandoned the expensive expressionist fantasies of films like Metropolis and Die Nibelungen. In their place were a lot of dirty streets, run down tenements, and smoke filled rooms where power brokers plot the city’s fate. Lang drew from the street scenes from Bertolt Brecht’s work on the stage to bring to life a seedy underworld. This was Lang’s first “talkie” and I might argue was also the first great film of the sound era. The technology was just starting to get past its early growing pains and filmmakers had finally somewhat adjusted to what the new format was capable of. You can’t help but wonder what German cinema would have been like if it hadn’t been disrupted by other events. Rather than building on what he did here for long Lang was swept away to Hollywood. There he certainly made some good movies but he would never really be the same.