The one and only movie Roger Ebert would bring to a desert island: “It has been a touchstone”
Despite dedicating his professional life to analysing, criticising, and passing judgment on, by his estimation, around 10,000 movies, there was always one thing that Roger Ebert refused to do.
Some of his most scathing assessments were compiled into books, making it easy to figure out which films he disliked the most, but he’d never rank them in order of disdain. He treated each one of them individually, which is why there’s no such thing as a definitive ranked list of Ebert’s loves and hates.
That said, he did have an all-time favourite movie, and it was Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The critic estimated that he’d seen the stone-cold masterpiece upwards of 75 times, which would reasonably lead you to believe that the 1941 classic would be the one and only picture he’d bring to a desert island.
However, it wasn’t. It did get a mention, though, but Ebert instead reserved that special place for another timeless cinema great that may not have been able to dislodge Welles’ jaw-dropping feature-length debut from its place at the top of the mountain, but meant more to him on a personal level.
When asked by The Guardian to name the eight titles he’d want to have with him were he ever to find himself stranded on an isolated outpost with nothing and nobody for company beyond eight movies he couldn’t do without, Ebert reluctantly played ball.
“I have a lifelong refusal to make lists of movies,” he prefaced. “But I enjoy that programme, so I will play. Citizen Kane, The Third Man, La Dolce Vita, 2001, Vertigo, The General, Ozu’s Floating Weeds, and Kurosawa’s Ikiru.” An octet of incredible works from some of the industry’s most stories auteurs, but there was one film he mentioned that got the special designation.
“The one I’d take to the island is La Dolce Vita, because it has been a touchstone since 1962 of my own developing maturity,” Ebert explained. “When I first saw it, Marcello Mastroianni was living a life I could only dream about. Later, it was the life I was living, then the life I had escaped, and now, he seems to me a touching and troubled young man.”
Little did he realise it at the time, but Mastroianni’s Marcello Rubini would follow him throughout his career in a number of different guises. Ebert was still a teenager when Federico Fellini’s Palme d’Or winner was first released in 1960, and by the time he saw it for himself, he dreamed of being a restless journalist like the protagonist.
As the years went on, he experienced many of the same things as his own career went from strength to strength, with that one character continuing to resonate throughout the decades, no matter where Ebert found himself, personally or professionally. He’d leave the other eight behind, but La Dolce Vita was an essential part of his hypothetical desert island survival kit.
