Lack of Direction

I visit The Internet Movie Database often (at least once a day, but usually more than once) because I love movies and love learning about them--not just new and upcoming releases, but films released long before I was even a concept in either of my parents' heads.

Every day, IMDB has a poll. Sometimes, the polls, usually suggested by IMDB readers, are odd yet intriguing (example: "Which animated film deserves to be in IMDB's Top 250 Films of All Time?") because they make you think at least a little bit about your cinematic likes and dislikes. (In that particular poll, I chose The Nightmare Before Christmas--it didn't come in first, but was somewhere in the top five, which is cool.)

Today's poll question was very much to my liking: "Of MovieMaker.com's Top 25 Most Influential Directors of All Time, who really deserves the top spot?" Hmm. I hadn't seen MovieMaker.com's list, but I scanned it and found it hard to argue with any of their choices. Just about every one--from Alfred Hitchcock to Howard Hawks, Steven Spielberg to Jean Renoir, Orson Welles to Francois Truffaut--each colored the visions of the generations of directors that followed.

Such lists are subject to the quibbles or prejudices of the individual, and I, of course, had to apply mine, wish for other directors to be included. Like Frank Capra, a three-time Oscar winner whose socially conscious, emotionally sentimental style gave the word "Capraesque" to the cinematic and political lexicons. Or Quentin Tarantino, whose Pulp Fiction affected movies for the next decade (and not in a good way). Or Wes Anderson, whose distictive style made movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Juno (both recent Academy Award winners for Best Original Screenplay) possible.

But, hey, they didn't ask me--no reason for them to--so I looked over their choices and made my own for most influential: John Ford, the four-time winner of the Oscar for Best Director (more than any other individual in Academy history, I think) best known for his epic westerns starring John Wayne (Stagecoach, The Searchers and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, among others). I clicked the button, submitted my vote and waited to see how my opinion matched up with my fellow cinephiles.

Not very well, it turns out.

Both the IMDB users and the panel at MovieMaker.com selected Hitchcock as the most influential, and it's hard to argue with their choice--his control over nearly every aspect of his productions made each of his movies a personal statement as well as a popular entertainment. But whereas MovieMaker had Ford in fifth place (behind Hitchcock, D.W. Griffith, Welles and Jean-Luc Godard), IMDB voters ranked him 11th. That's not bad--he's still in the upper half of the survey--but it's ironic not only that directors he influenced, like Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola, are all ranked above him, but that he won more Academy Awards for his work than all of the top 10 combined. (Some, like Hitchcock, Griffith, Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman received honorary Oscars, while others, like Welles, Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick, won in categories other than Best Director--that none of them won an Oscar outright for direction is head-rattlingly awful.)

Maybe I'm being too much of a film snob here. Maybe it's better to recognize that all such surveys are arbitrary and that no two voters would select the same 25 directors and let it go. But if I did that, I wouldn't ramble on about such things over here, now would I?