Roger Corman names the 10 greatest movies of all time
The ‘Pope of Pop Cinema’, Roger Corman, is not someone whose filmography you may have seen of late. With nearly 400 credits to his name, the impact he had on modern cinema is undisputed. Many of the hugely acclaimed and highly achieved directors of our time cite Corman as a major influence, and he is even someone who gave them a chance in an industry notoriously difficult to break into. While you may have come across only a few of his low-budget sci-fi and horror films that Corman made in the 1950s, they have no doubt paved the way for the blockbusters that you see today. What is Star Wars and Jaws if not just a big-budget Roger Corman movie?
Corman has worked with some of the most well-known directors and actors today, such as Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, Sylvester Stallone, Martin Scorsese and Jack Nicholson, to name a few, each claiming their breakout only came because of Corman and his producing company. Corman was famous for his penny-pinching ways and stretching the budget as far as it could go. The ability to do this seems lost in Hollywood today and is what allowed Corman to make so many films, shot over so few days, and almost always guaranteeing a profit.
Corman recently contributed to the BFI by naming some of the greatest films of all time. In his list of ten, he included some foreign classic movies, showing an appreciation for overseas films that you may not have expected from the director of Monster from the Ocean Floor. In the list, he includes Federico Fellini’s modern tale of excess and hedonism, La Dolce Vita. Is he hinting at inspiration for some of the more raunchy films he produced in his career? Along with this, he also includes Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece The Seventh Seal, a film about a knight who plays chess against death in hopes of buying himself more time. An introspective masterpiece that reflects on the brutality of mortality, all surrounded with apocalyptic imagery.
Corman also shows a strong passion for classic American cinema within his list: first citing Roman Polanski’s Chinatown – a film starring Jack Nicholson, who owes his first acting credit to Corman. Chinatown moves through the seedy side of LA in true noir fashion as he is tasked to follow Faye Dunaway’s husband before it all goes awry. He names Citizen Kane, a staple amongst these BFI lists, as another of his favourites. The Orson Welles tale of excess and greed fits nicely with Corman’s morals as he repeatedly refused calls on set for an influx of more cash and once said, “There are plenty of better things the world can better spend that money on than movies.”
The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb finish out the American classics on his list. Often these three movies are lauded as some of the greatest of all time, so for Corman to list these reflect a deep appreciation of cinema and that he values it as the highest art form.
You can find Roger Corman’s full list of films he believes are the greatest below.
Roger Corman’s 10 favourite movies:
- Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
- Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
- Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
- La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
- Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
- Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
- The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
- The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)
- War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1965)
