As each decade’s Sight and Sound film poll can attest, lists of favorite movies—whether classic movies, modern movies, or genre movies—will never go out of style. You may ask: Shouldn’t the very best films remain so, by definition? Well, not always. Films age uniquely, go in and out of vogue, surge and ebb in our collective memory based on the social mores and cultural obsessions of the present.
Regardless, the act of listing and debating films provides both writers and readers something undeniably delightful: a wistful nostalgia for pockets of the past that we ache to relive—or perhaps never knew—and which we are able to summon by a particular onscreen collage of faces, places, and encounters. If films are like memories, then lists are like the crumbs of tea-soaked madeleines that can easily transport us.
This is no more true than with so-called classic movies, a genre distinction that by its very name implies a burnished antiquity, a gilded bygone era of more flawless creations. In that spirit, Vogue has assembled a short list of classic films for your (re-)consideration, from mid-century melodramas to Technicolor musicals to atomic noirs and queer home movies. Focusing our efforts on the golden age of cinema—that is, roughly between the advent of talkies at the conclusion of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1960s, when filmmaking experienced a meteoric transformation in style, narrative, and production—the list purposely jettisons a few of the hoarier standard-bearers (i.e. no Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Singin’ in the Rain, or Gone With the Wind here, despite their ostensible deservedness) and instead mixes a few lesser-known, and more provocative, entries with perennial favorites that still retain their auras of timelessness.
How many of these classics have you seen?