Well, except that it was a ripoff of The Return of the Secaucus Seven.
It would have been greater except for its other area of greatest influence: the subject matter greatly strained the tolerance levels of the Hollywood censor; it was one of the first really “grown up” movies of its era. Too bad the censors ultimately won out; the film suffers for it.
Also was a major influence on the “noir” look: Orson Welles credited it as major influence.
He said the only thing he did to prepare for Kane was watch Stagecoach about 40 times in a row. Said at least partially in jest I’m sure, though still a huge statement.
Neither one can claim these gags as originals. The Big Chill was pretty clearly a higher budget ripoff of John Sayles Return of the Secaucus Seven, and Pulp Fiction’s nonlinearity schtick was drawn straight from Kubrick’s The Killing.
Nope, Fellini is widely credited with inventing the mockumentary with 8-1/2.
Hmmm…this one would be a possible–it’s certainly unique–but what did it influence? I can think of a handful of movies that make direct allusions to it (Themla & Louise. For Westerns, I’d have to cite *High Noon*, Shane, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Wild Bunch as being the significant influences, in terms of bringing issues of moral ambiguity and mortality into the genre. Sergio Leone also deserves credit, particularly his magnum opus Once Upon A Time In The West as having inspired many non-genre films.
My picks? In no particular order or exclusivity:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Metropollis
Blade Runner
Brazil
The Hidden Fortress
Rashomon
Psycho
The Birds
North By Northwest
Vertigo
Goldfinger
The Maltese Falcon
Medium Cool
Goodfellas (even more than The Godfather)
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Jaws
Star Wars
Triumph of Will
Olympiad
The Battle of Algiers
Rififi
Bob le flambeur
Salesman
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
Grand Prix
The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer version, of course)
Some Like It Hot
Chinatown
Night Of The Living Dead
Die Hard
There are certainly more, but these are the ones that come to mind. There are probably a significant number of Asian cinema films that I’m not familiar with and thus haven’t listed. Curiously, I can’t think of many films in the last couple of decades that could be consindered influential, perhaps because there hasn’t been much in the way of groundbreaking technique or storytelling, or because the impact just hasn’t become known yet. I couple point to Charlie Kaufman and his self-referential moking, but there are a sparse handful of films that could in any way be considered to be influenced or inspired by it. Mind you, these aren’t necessarialy the most important or greatest films, but the ones that influenced future movies or filmmakers.
Stranger
Well, *The Killing * circled back and told the same story from different perspectives, but each version pretty much began and ended at the same points. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino pretty much throws logical chronology out the window; the end of the movie takes place, chronologically, *before * a good deal of the middle of the movie. No question that *The Killing * was just as influential, but Memento, for example, is more closely descended from Pulp Fiction * than from The Killing. IMO, Pulp Fiction * has been (for better or worse) probably the single most influential movie of the last 15 years, though no one would argue that it’s without influences itself.
Since I’m pretty sure that whatever movies I offered as either “firsts” or “most copied or referenced” would quickly be shown to be derivative themselves, would more avid film buffs offer suggestions for the earliest or most widely regarded as biggest example of:
- the musical extravaganza – Busby Berkely (sp?) comes to my mind
- the biblical epic – I’m having trouble choosing between The Robe, Samson and Delilah, The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Story Ever Told and Quo Vadis
- the psychodrama or psychological thriller – Three Faces of Eve or The Snake Pit or one of the earliest Hitchcocks
- the animal story – Lassie (which version?) or National Velvet or something still earlier
- the underwater thriller – Underwater or one of the Cousteau things
- the stop-action nature study – The Living Desert was my first
- Native Americans as human beings – what precedes Dances With Wolves?
- the triumphant athlete – Jim Thorpe, All American or something before that?
I’ll likely think of other categories as soon as I hit Submit…
The Wizard of Oz was the gold standard for special-effects blockbusters for nearly forty years. It belongs on the list.
Whoah. In almost all of John Ford’s movies–back to the silent era–the Indians are always the noble, honorable people; the bad guys are almost always the white guys. The more Ford you watch, the more you realize how much he respected Native Americans.
That’s fine, but I’ve never seen a Ford film that I know of, and there’s nothing wrong with my answer, so you can drop the “Whoah”. I never claimed Man Called Horse was the first. Only that it precedes DWW, which it does.
Not everything on CS is a one-upmanship contest, you know.
I caught a few minutes of the recent remake of King Kong last night before deciding to watch something else. The original was the first example I can think of with “taming the giant beast” or even “beauty and the beast” themes. I’m willing to allow the Tarzan movies into this genre, too, since Tarzan was basically a beast before being discovered by “civilized” types.
Are there other predecessors to this genre? Is it too big a stretch to include the lovable space alien in this genre? Maybe even the kid in the Cher movie Mask fits the basic theme. And I suppose the Frankenstein monster is somewhat like the beast in KK.