Kirkham A Movie A Day: Top Ten List for My Birthday #3

I have been writing this blog for over ten years now, and I have resisted putting up a list of my favorite films for that whole time. As the Borg say "Resistance is Futile!"

This year I am marking another year in my sixth decade of life. I did several birthday posts in the past and enjoyed them immensely. The last two years my heart has just not been into it. This year however, I am trying to push my way back into normalcy, but I don't have the energy to generate 63 things for a list. So what I am going to do is a ten day countdown of my favorite films.

Every year when I have posted a top ten list, I always point out that it is a combination of quality and subjective enjoyment that creates that list. Those are the guiding principles here as well. I will not claim that these are the ten greatest movies ever made, although I know several of them would be deserving of a spot on such a list. Instead, these are my ten favorite films as it stands at the moment. In a month, I could reconsider or remember something that I have tragically left off the list, but for this moment here is how they rank.

#3 Lawrence of Arabia

Next to my Number Two choice, this may be the film I have written about the most on this site. I first saw it in a truncated form on an ABC Sunday Night Movie, at least I think I did. For me though, the film came to my consciousness in the 1989 restoration. I took my father to see it in the old Century City Mall, he was a big fan of Doctor Zhivago. We drove across the county in the middle of a weekday to get to a screening because it was not widely released. A couple of years later, I owned a beautiful Criterion Laserdisc of the restoration that I must have played a dozen times.

One of the reasons that this has become a top three film for me is that my youngest daughter has embraced it wholeheartedly. Her first viewing was in ideal circumstances at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. She has made me take her to see it whenever we have found it presented on a big screen in a theater. Those opportunities have continued even though we are now far away from Hollywood and the American Cinematique. Last October was our most recent theatrical visit.

I try to see something different in the film every time I watch it. That is not hard to do. There are so many interesting choices made by director David Lean. From the title sequence to the end, there are clever edits, sound design, action scenes and dialogue. The cast, all men in the speaking roles, is as deep as you could get. Newcomer Peter O'Toole is sharing screen time with Claude Rains. Alec Guinness would never be given the role today, the brown face casting could not fly in these times, but the performance that he gives in a supporting part is subtle and note perfect.