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. Singin' in the Rain

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

9. On the Waterfront

10. The Searchers
11.  Bridge on the River Kwai

12. 12 Angry Men

13. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment

14. Lawrence of Arabia

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

16. To Kill A Mockingbird

17. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 

18. The Guns of Navarone

19. Stalag 17, The Great Escape, Von Ryan's Express

20. Dr. Strangelove  

21. The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark

22. The Graduate 

23. In The Heat of the Night

24. Planet of the Apes

25. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

26. Midnight Cowboy
27. Little Big Man
28. Harold and Maude

29. Fiddler on the Roof

30. The Godfather & The Godfather II 

31. Jeremiah Johnson

32. The Heartbreak Kid

33. Young Frankenstein
34. Chinatown
35. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

36. Three Days of the Condor

37. The Outlaw Josey Wales

38. Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters 

39. The Last Waltz

40. Apocalypse Now
41. Airplane

42. This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman

43. Stranger Than Paradise

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

45. Midnight Run
46. Do The Right Thing

47. My Cousin Vinny

48. Groundhog Day

49. Pulp Fiction

50. The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Miller's Crossing