Martin Scorsese names the “top 10 widescreen films” of all time
With a resumé like the one Martin Scorsese has, it’s hard to dispute the claims of fans who consider him to be the greatest living filmmaker. Ranging from New Hollywood gems like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to contemporary epics such as The Irish and Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese has maintained his unbelievably high standards throughout his trailblazing journey as a pioneering director.
During the promotional campaign for his new feature, Scorsese made serious waves in the online cinephile community by making a Letterboxd account. In addition to citing his influences for all of his major projects, the American auteur compiled a list of cinematic masterpieces that are perfectly suited for the big-screen theatre experience.
The first entry on Scorsese’s list is probably the most obvious one: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “It takes extraordinary audacity and power and guts to say, ‘Let’s just screech everything to a halt and take everybody back to prehistoric times,’” Scorsese said of the film’s opening. “Kubrick was saying, ‘I want you to see something. I’m going to take you through something you never thought you’d experience.’”
Scorsese also paid tribute to Elia Kazan, one of his cinematic heroes. The filmmaker once explained his love for East of Eden: “If you see it on the big screen, it looks like photographs of the period. He had an eye — the way Robert Frank’s book The Americans had an eye — for Americana. Whether it’s On the Waterfront, Boomerang!, Panic in the Streets, East of Eden and Splendor in the Grass – if you look at that again on the big screen, it’s a beautiful film.”
Although Scorsese included Lola Montès, his favourite Ophüls will always be another film. “I adore Ophüls, and we looked at the new print of Lola Montès,” Scorsese commented. “But for me, the major Ophüls film was Letter from an Unknown Woman. By a happy accident, it seemed to be on television practically every afternoon when I was a child – that’s the wonderful thing about Ophüls having made four American films – so when I was at home sick from school, there would be Letter from an Unknown Woman. I couldn’t tell at the time about camera moves, but I loved the romance and tragedy of it.”
Full of well-known works by Alain Resnais, David Lean and Sergio Leone, Scorsese’s list is unimpeachable in many ways. At a time when theatres are being threatened by the proliferation of streaming services, watching any of these works on the big screen will restore anyone’s faith in the magic of the moviegoing experience.
Scorsese also included Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant 1963 thriller High and Low, expressing his love for one of his masters who gave him life-changing advice: “Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George Lucas and Steven Spielberg gave it to him, he said, ‘I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.’”
Check out the whole list below.
Martin Scorsese’s favourite widescreen movies:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955)
- High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
- Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
- Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
- Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955)
- Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
- The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966)
- Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
- Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964)
