The four movies Dustin Hoffman couldn’t live without: “There’s this brilliance”
His personal reputation might have taken a battering over the past few years, but Dustin Hoffman, from his early, groundbreaking outings in the 1960s to his many great performances as an elder statesman, has shaped Hollywood in more ways than we mere mortals can count.
Having been a part of some of the greatest films ever made, such as The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, and All the President’s Men, it makes one curious about what the screen legend enjoys watching in his rare moments of downtime, and this is where the fine folks over at Letterboxd come into play. At the premiere of Tuner, the iconic social platform cornered the stars of the movie with their patented ‘Four Favourites’ question.
Hoffman was no exception, and he gave some excellent answers, beginning with, “Well, you can’t beat Citizen Kane. You can’t beat [Charlie] Chaplin. You can’t beat [Akira] Kurosawa’s films. [François] Truffaut, [The] 400 Blows. I guess in the ’60s, where we first realised there’s this brilliance coming from abroad.”
Where else to begin but the film that has become a byword for greatness in the cinematic space? Citizen Kane is one of those films that can feel quite daunting at first, coming with such a strong reputation, to the point where you’d feel like a fraud if you didn’t like it. Luckily, it also holds up extremely well. It might have recently celebrated its 85th birthday, but many aspects of Orson Welles’ magnum opus still feel remarkably modern and definitely worth your time.
Hoffman didn’t specify which Charlie Chaplin film was his favourite, but the one Letterboxd opted to display in their video was City Lights. Released in 1931, the film centres on the comedy legend’s most famous character, The Tramp, as he attempts to win the love of a blind flower girl.
There’s a reason why Letterboxd chose to highlight it as it’s widely regarded as Chaplin’s greatest movie, as well as one of the finest examples from the early days of synchronised sound at the pictures.
As they did with Chaplin, Letterboxd chose a film from Akira Kurosawa’s filmography at random, again opting for arguably his most famous work, Seven Samurai, the 1954 epic spanning 207 minutes (with an interval) that follows the plight of a humble farming village that hires seven nomadic warriors to defend them from a group of bandits. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the movie was remade in a western setting as The Magnificent Seven, and the original also inspired George Lucas while he was making Star Wars.
Finally, we have a film that Hoffman was kind enough to refer to by name. The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups in its original French) was Truffaut’s first film and a prime example of the French New Wave movement.
This story of a young man rebelling against the norms of society in Paris inspired everyone from Steven Spielberg to Wes Anderson to the aforementioned Kurosawa. In short, Hoffman knocked it out of the park with this and all his other picks.
Dustin Hoffman’s four all-time favourite films:
- Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
- City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
- Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
- The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
