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Lost American Movie Classics  
FAVORITES 

Tags: favorites, classic, movies

As americans many of us share in the entertainment of watching movies and classics are those that we americans love to watch over and over again, here is a list of some forgotten favorites:

	Salt Of The Earth
	Herbert Biberman, 1953
	Made at the height of McCarthyism by blacklisted left-wing artists (the director was jailed as one of the Hollywood Ten; screenwriter Michael Wilson's name was kept off Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia), this politically committed movie recreates a strike by Mexican-American zinc workers against the appalling conditions at their new Mexican mine. A marvellous mixture of naivety, passion, agitprop and forceful feminism, it was the subject of official harassment during production and banned from US screens for a decade but became a cult movie for young radicals in the 1960s.
	See this if you liked ... Strike, Silver City
	Petulia
	Richard Lester, 1968
	Richard Lester may be better known as the director of the Beatles movies A Hard Day's Night and Help! but he made Petulia in 1968 and it remains his masterpiece - bursting with the experimentation that typified his early career, but allied with a more adult sense of malaise and pessimism. Set against the backdrop of swinging Sixties San Francisco, Lester senses the darkness that would soon overwhelm the peace and love generation in the tale of the midlife crisis of George C Scott's doctor and his doomed romance with the much younger Julie Christie, playing it determinedly kooky. Edited in a bold, fragmented style, the story loops backwards and forwards to stunning effect. It's no surprise to discover that Nic Roeg was the film's cinematographer - he later employed not only the editing style but also Julie Christie for his own masterwork Don't Look Now.
	Peter Webber; also nominated by Philip French
	See this if you liked ... Point Blank, Don't Look Now
	The State Of Things
	Wim Wenders, 1982
	This is the film to show to all budding directors and producers as a warning of the calamities that can unfold. When production on his first US film, Hammett, started going awry, Wenders took time out to style this ultimate B-movie about a film crew attempting to make a sci-fi flick out on the Portuguese coast. They find themselves beached in more ways than one as one of the producers absconds with the money to America. When the unsurprisingly irked director tracks him down to LA, he meets his match in the Mob. Featuring a cameo from the great maverick director Sam Fuller, this is Wenders's wry meditation on an artform that asks the greatest sacrifices of its brethren.
	See this if you liked ... Lost in La Mancha, The Big Knife
	Newsfront
	Phillip Noyce, 1978
	Many of the early movies of the Australian new wave turned their attentions to the formative years of the new nation. This one looked at the crucial decade after the Second World War as reported on by rival teams of newsreel cameramen and it made a star of Bill Hunter as a photojournalist of Orwellian integrity, who actually looks like Orwell. Rarely seen nowadays but one of the finest Australian pictures and among the sharpest ever about postwar changes in the media.
	See this if you liked ... Picnic at Hanging Rock, Robert Spottiswoode's Under Fire
	Fat City
	John Huston, 1972
	In the early Seventies my local cinema was the Screen on the Green in Islington. During the week they screened low-budget American gems and I would go to these movies pretty much on my own until one day I plucked up the courage to ask a classmate, Jackie Littleton, to come with me to see Fat City. I was 16, on my first real date, and John Huston's elegiac tender boxing meditation really affected me. From the opening lyrics 'Take the ribbon from your hair', sung by Kris Kristofferson, I was hooked. And of course it starred probably the greatest unsung actor in cinema history, Jeff Bridges. I haven't seen Fat City since but I was too enthralled to make a play for Jackie, which I regret to this day, and although she did let me walk her home silently, I will never know what she thought of this American masterpiece.
	Stephen Woolley
	See this if you liked ... Harold and Maude
	I Wanna Hold Your Hand
	Robert Zemeckis, 1978
	Produced by Spielberg, this directorial debut by his star protege takes a delightfully affectionate comic look at a party of New Jersey high school kids invading Manhattan in February 1964 to catch a glimpse of the Beatles, in town to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. It's like A Hard Day's Night seen from the fans' point of view and looks back nostalgically to a turning point in popular culture, with a cast of then unknowns, Nancy Allen among them.
	See this if you liked ... Back to the Future

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