Teach Your Children: The Essential Films

It is incumbent upon parents to teach their children core values: love, kindness, self-respect and respect for others, fairness and justice, family culture/tradition and tolerance for those of others, appreciation of nature and the need to protect the planet, openness to the spiritual or magical, cultivation of healthful habits and self-sufficiency, the power of literature and music, the importance of baseball, and how to eat a slice of pizza.  

Then there are the movies -- those essential 20th Century American films that our kids should be familiar with before moving on into the world.  These are not necessarily the ones you would see in a film class (although several you might) but those iconic gems that say something fundamental about ourselves and our culture.  Here's my initial attempt at a list that probably says more about me:

1.  Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, Animal Crackers  

2.  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

3.  Sullivan's Travels

4.  The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Treasure of Sierra Madre 

5.  Double Indemnity

6.  Harvey

7.  Rear Window, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious

8.  The Searchers
9.  Bridge on the River Kwai

10. 12 Angry Men

11. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment

12. Lawrence of Arabia

13. The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, The Train   

14. To Kill A Mockingbird

15. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 

16. The Great Escape, The Guns of Navarone, Stalag 17, Von Ryan's Express

17. Dr. Strangelove  

18. The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark

19. The Graduate 

20. In The Heat of the Night

21. Planet of the Apes

22. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
23. Little Big Man
24. Harold and Maude

25. Fiddler on the Roof

26. The Godfather & The Godfather II 

27. Jeremiah Johnson

28. Young Frankenstein
29. Chinatown
30. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

31. Three Days of the Condor

32. The Outlaw Josey Wales

33. Annie Hall 

34. The Last Waltz

35. Apocalypse Now
36. Airplane

37. This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman

38. Stranger Than Paradise

39. Bull Durham, A League of Their Own, Eight Men Out

40. Midnight Run
41. Do The Right Thing

42. My Cousin Vinny

43. Groundhog Day

44. Pulp Fiction

45. The Big Lebowski, Fargo