Max Scharnberg

I am assistant professor of education, but was a musician for half my life. As regards movies I am an amateur, but have been an intense movie lover since pre-school age.

I grew up in Denmark, and from I was 8-13 I spent my summer vacations at the cinema owner in a small village where there was no police. Hence, at the age of 8 I saw all movies which according to the law were forbidden for children under 18.

It is not a trivial fact that I was born in 1933, because our taste is highly influenced by the consummation situation. I was well over 25 when I watched TV for the first time, and nearly 50 when I saw a video. During my “formative years” people would watch movies in silence in a dark saloon. And around 1950 people from all social classes and with all degrees of education would love emotional films.

Today several people may watch a DVD at home. Some of them may come in a highly emotional state. And then one of the others suddenly catches the remote control, winds the movie back and makes an awkward remark. – When you have been torn out of an emotional state in this brutal fashion sufficiently many times, you will loose the capacity for becoming highly emotionally aroused by any movie.

The production companies must take this loss into account. Few contemporary movies are as emotional as many were half a century ago.

To me the single most crucial factor when evaluating a movie is its capacity for emotional arousing. Most people will probably agree that the films on my list are unusually emotional.

I shall first present my five best movies in the order of my appreciation. There is a long step from no. 1 to no. 2. I saw “Children of Paradise” for the first time in 1954, and have never changed my view about its paramount quality.

But the other movies will merely be presented, first, in the chronological order, and second, in the alphabetic order according to the original title. Sometimes I am unable to write a comment that is both brief and does justice to the movie. And sometimes I prefer to comment on aspects which not everybody would consider most central. Hence, sometimes I will supply no private comment.

  • Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) .. Marcel Carné
    Many people, including me, think that this is the best movie ever made in any country. It is a Gesamtkunstwerk using a wealth of different styles. And whenever a scene is comical, the movie rests so completely in the comical mood that the spectator cannot imagine that the entire movie was not comical. And the same is true of tragic scenes.

  • A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) .. Elia Kazan
    An extremely competent adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s dramatic and tragic play. I do not hesitate to say that this is the best movie ever made in USA.

  • The Cranes Are Flying (1957) .. Mikhail Kalatozov
    Both a movie about war and about intensive love. It is very difficult to give a discription of the movie that is both brief and adequate. – But you should also note how the dramas are underlined by the music.

  • The Passenger (1975) .. Michelangelo Antonioni
    Two white men and no one else are living at a hotel in an almost deserted place of Africa. Eventually the reporter finds the other person dead, a heart attack. The reporter decides to exchange their identity, although he knew nothing about the other. We will later learn that the other had sold weapon to the guerrilla, and had been murdered by the dictator’s police. It is not because of love that the reporter’s wife (who is also a reporter) tries to get into contact with the last man who saw her husband him alive. What she tells the embassy of the dictatorship makes them conclude that they had murdered the wrong man. But now the police need only follow this woman: she will lead them to the real prey.

    But what makes this movie so excellent is not merely the plot but even more the way in which it is told.

  • The Lace-maker (1977) .. Claude Goretta
    A student from a family that (though not exactly rich) never was in need of money meets a poor girl, and a love story begins. According to one Stockholmian reviewer things go bad when the boy lets the girl remain at her level, and they go bad when he tries to bring her up to his level. Both ideas are nonsense. Things go excellent when she remains at her level. And there are several key scenes illustrating that he never tries to help her up to his level. He only throws a lot of reproach against her because she is not at his level. – One of the most prominent features of this movie is the defencelessness of the girl. The boy just throws her out when he has become tired of her. She becomes mentally ill. But even when he a single time visits her at the hospital, SHE does her best to help HIM.

  • Brief Encounter (1945) .. David Lean
    During those few weeks when the love enfolds, and before one of them immigrates to a distant country, that couple did not even have a single sexual intercourse to recall; a double tragedy. – Another thing: we are strongly inclined to think that if one person is good then the other is bad (e.g. dull). For instance, if the blond girl in “The umbrellas of Cherbourg” is attractive, then the dark-haired nurse must be boring. I see no ground for this conclusion. – And in “Brief Encounter” I think that the woman’s husband is very sympathetic.

    In real life it happens very often that one close relation says: If you are sad you must tell me why, and then I shall comfort you. But if the sad person falls into the trap, the “comforter” may be aggressive and do the best to make the other more sad. Very often people do not know what they can stand.

    This husband is aware that something is wrong with his wife. Maybe he has an inkling about its nature. He has a genuine motivation to help her. And if the best help he can give is to do nothing, then he will accept that.

  • La Beaute du Diable (1950) .. René Clair
    This is a French version of the Faust legend. He sells he soul to the devil and receives in exchange youth and the ability to make gold.

  • Miss Julie (1951) .. Alf Sjöberg
    This adaptation of Strindberg’s play was the first Swedish movie to win the golden palm. At that time it was a world-wide artistic success and also a world-wide box office success.

  • Summer Interlude (1951) .. Ingmar Bergman
    You will hardly ever hear negative things about this movie, but neither the highest praise. Nevertheless, I think it is the best love movie Bergman has made. However, it is definitely not free from the Bergmanian dark elements and psychic dishonesty.

  • Ikiru (1952) .. Akira Kurosawa
    The mind of the chief of an administrative office died when his wife died 25 years earlier. He lived only for his son. But now his adult son only thinks of the money he will inherit – and also feels inclined to send away his father to an asylum and get the money right now. The father learns that has cancer and only a few months more to live. Nevertheless he succeeds in making these few months a worthwhile life and died in happiness. Against the strong resistance of many other offices he has a health-threatening swamp in a street cleaned and a playground for children built there.

  • Wild Strawberries (1957) .. Ingmar Bergman
    This might be the movie by IB that is most difficult to describe. A 78-year-old doctor looks back on his life. It is a very typical Bergman-movie. Nevertheless, few of his movies are so free from dark shadows.

  • Ashes and Diamonds (1958) .. Andrzej Wajda
    During the German occupation all partisan groups (workers, bourgeois, noble) lived in peace with each other. But on the first day of freedom for Poland they start to fight each other. Into this murder plot is weaved a really beautiful love story.

  • Les Misérables (1958) .. Jean-Paul Le Chanois
    You all know something about Victor Hugo’s novel. Among all adaptations of it this is the one I prefer.

  • The Lady with the Dog (1960) .. Yossif Kheifits
    Like “The Cranes Are Flying” this movie is evidence that Stalin had died. It is easy to understand that Stalin demanded movies to contain much communist propaganda. It is much more strange that he wanted the movies to be dull like a newspaper editorial. Both these movies (called “thug films”) may well be the most emotional ones ever made in Russia.

    In the late 19th century and while on vacation at Yalta a young woman and a middle-aged man fall in deep love. Both are married and live in very different towns. – Ingmar Bergman said that this movie has achieved the highest thing that a movie can achieve, viz. that the spectator forgets that what he is seeing is not real life but a movie.

  • Last Year in Marienbad (1961) .. Alain Resnais
    I feel myself unable to describe this movie in a way that is both brief and will do it justice. Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote the manus, and we can notice many of the special features found in his novels (not equally frequent when he is a director, except in his first film.

  • A Taste of Honey (1961) .. Tony Richardson
    One of the best British movies ever made. A girl, perhaps still teenager, gets pregnant with a black sailor with whom she sleeps only once, and who will never come back. Soon afterwards she shares her apartment with a young homosexual man. He takes eminent care of her. Nevertheless she will repeatedly insult him, often calling him “big sister” and scorn him for his weak self-confidence.

  • Through a Glass Darkly (1961) .. Ingmar Bergman
    A chamber play of a schizophrenic girl, her brother, her father, and her husband who is a doctor. At the beginning she seems to be in a normal state except that she want no sex. She will eventually become psychotic. In my mind the best Swedish movie ever made.

  • The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) .. Vincente Minnelli
    Based on a novel, where the plot takes place at a castle far from Paris during WWI. Here the setting is Paris occupied by the Germans during WWII. Two families are closely related in blood and both have a strong family feeling. But one family is German. The other has Argentine citizenship. One cousin is working for Gestapo, the other for the resistance. But this is not much of an explanation. It would be a matter of routine to produce a thousand poor movies satisfying this plot. Then why is this movie excellent? One reason is its complete absorption of the moods. When the movie is happy, it rests so completely in the happy mood that the spectator cannot imagine that it was not happy from the very beginning, and will continue to be happy to the last scene. And the same it true when the movie is tragic. – I said almost the same thing about “Children of Paradise”. And no doubt this is a construction I value very high.

  • Harakiri (1962) .. Masaki Kobayashi

  • Sundays and Cybele (1962) .. Serge Bourgignon
    One of the best movies ever made on children as real human beings with real human emotions. 12-year-old Cybèle is nearly an orphan. Her father left her to a cloister school before he immigrated to South America. By accident she meets a 30-year-old man who, as a pilot in French Indochina had crashed and lost his memory. Every Sunday he will take out Cybèle. The cloister and all ordinary people think he is her father and note that they are like turtle-doves. – But unexpected things will eventually happen.

  • The Trial (1962) .. Orson Welles
    An adaptation of Kafka’s novel. But the strongest stress much be laid on the word “adaptation”, because Welles is much more concerned with what makes an excellent film, than with what is in agreement with Kafka’s philosophy. A real master work. An incredible cinematography.

  • L'Immortelle (1963) .. Alain Robbe-Grillet
    When this movie was new it looked to many spectators as if ARG had first made the movie, and then cut it to pieces, and then pasted the pieces together in a random order. Many spectators were confused. Others, including me, were fascinated. – At the same time as the movie something else was published: NOT the movie manuscript, but a fully independent artwork called “a ciné-roman”. It was aimed at being read, even by people who had never seen the movie and were not interested in films. I own this ciné-roman in French, German and English. Because of deficient capacity I have not read all of the French version, but I have read the German version many times. This is important, because I cannot perceive a sign of what some movie expert claims, viz. that Laila is involved in a criminal gang whose business is to kidnap young girls for prostitution.

    A French teacher in Istanbul meets Laila, an enigmatic woman. To be with him she must escape people trying to watch her. Suddenly she will disappear. He will make the most desperate attempts to trace her, all in vain. And then when he has totally given up, she is there again. This pattern will be repeated.

  • Muriel ou Le Temps d'un Retour (1963) .. Alain Resnais
    This is a chamber play in which great and much smaller problems and disasters are contrasted. During the colonial war in Algeria Bernard and three other young soldiers had tortured an Arabian girl (Muriel) to death. Two are now civilians in the same town. Their reactions on the torture are very different. – At the same time Bernard’s stepmother meets first one and then also the other of two brothers with whom she had some strange relations in their youth. Apparently all three threw away genuine options for happiness by not committing themselves enough. – We might give a moral interpretation of the movie: how can we have the right to have such minor problems, when abysmal disasters are lying right outside our front door? But this dimension is intersected with another: our minor problems are no less real. In turn there is a third dimension. The stepmother is an addicted gambler. What if she had devoted as much zeal and energy to make her love-like relations work, as she devotes to find new money to gamble away? Almost the same could be said about one of the brothers, although gambling is not what is wrong with him.

  • The Servant (1963) .. Joseph Losey

  • King and Country (1964) .. Joseph Losey
    In a room at the front (WWI) a soldier is tried for dissertation and then executed. The front is full of rain and lice. – These sentences tell nothing about why this is a great master work. – Losey has recounted that everybody hated each other during the months when the movie was shot in this stanching hole.

  • The Red Desert (1964) .. Michelangelo Antonioni

  • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) .. Jacques Demy
    Today it is difficult to perceive that this movie created an entirely new genre: the film musical. For a long time there had been movies containing many songs, and adaptation of musical written for live theatre. It is not the most important aspect that all lines are sung. But the composer and the director must have agreed from the beginning that it must not the opera music, not operetta, not live theatre musical, but 100% film music. – The difficulty arises from the fact that meanwhile film musicals and live theatre musicals have learned from each other.

    The music is by no means the only merit of the movie, but I have much to say about this aspect. In my view there is only one movie that could be a rival about the best film music ever composed, viz. Phaedra by Jules Dassin, music by Mikis Theodorakis. But there is an important difference. The music of “The Umbrellas” is of the highest quality from the first to the last note. In “Phaedra” hardly more than the theme accompanying the sexual intercourse is at the highest level.

  • Mickey One (1965) .. Arthur Penn
    The young boy lives on continuous escape. It will never be clear if his belief of being hunted is imaginary or real.

    Many Penn enthusiasts complain that Penn has tried to make a movie in European symbolic style – in this respect, but only in this respect, somewhat related to Fellini’s “8½”. But they go on to say that it is impossible to give adequate translations of Penn’s symbols. Therefore this is Penn’s worst movie. – I disagree about this criticism.

  • Repulsion (1965) .. Roman Polanski
    I do not feel happy when some people watch this film as a horror movie. In my view it is a psychological drama. Neither before nor later has a better description been made of how it may be felt to have a schizophrenic psychosis.

  • With Beauty and Sorrow (1965) .. Masahiro Shinoda
    I saw this movie for the first time in December 1966 and still think it is the best Japanese movie ever made. Ôki who was approaching middle-age had a relation to 15-year-old Otoko. She became pregnant but the child was stillborn, and the relation ended. 24 years later Ôki and Otoko met again. He had meanwhile become a famous writer and she had become a famous painter. But she had also become Lesbian. Her favourite student, the extremely beautiful Keiko, invented a strategy that might release her beloved from the double trauma of her youth, and would also mean revenge against the man who had harmed her.

    Since the movie was adapted from a novel by Nobèl Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata I devoted much labour to finding a translation into a language I could read. But not until 1975 was a translation into English published. – I also searched German catalogues, in vain. But not until a few months ago (yes, in this year: 2009) did I discover that a translation into German was published in 1961 in the East German State.

  • The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) .. Jacques Demy
    If “The Umbrellas” is a realistic movie about the love of one couple, this film, made by the same director/writer and composer is a fairy tale about many couples, consisting of people who were aimed for each other, but very nearly never met or never met more than once.

  • Hour of the Wolf (1968) .. Ingmar Bergman
    This is one of the darkest movies by Bergman.

  • The Night Porter (1974) .. Liliana Cavani
    In a concentration camp an SS officer had a sexual relation with a female prisoner. For both it was real love. She was one of the few who survived, and she married an American conductor. After the war the officer had to hide. Under an assumed name he took a job as a night porter at a hotel. When the conductor 12 years later was invited for a guest performance at the Vienna opera they arrive to the same hotel. The girl and the officer immediately recognise each other.

  • All That Jazz (1979) .. Bob Fosse
    It has been said that Bob Fosse exposes his own life and personality. Not only has his alter ego a lot of girls. Even when he is in a hospital because of a serious heart attack, his room is a feast of people, liquor and dancing. And he will eventually die. The dying scene is so grandiose that you may want to die yourself.

  • J'Embrasse Pas (1991) .. André Téchiné
    A heterosexual young boy makes his living as a homosexual prostitute. I may well be unjust when I primarily focus on one section. But a third of the movie is devoted to an unusual love story with a girl who is also a prostitute.

  • Baltic Love (1992) .. Peeter Urbla
    There is an episode from each Baltic nation. In Lithuania a priest student and an Estonian stripper fall in deep love. His uncle is an enlightened priest who says: I bless you whichever road you choose to go. – There is no other movie I have devoted so much labour to obtain, and I was finally successful.

  • Savage Nights (1992) .. Cyril Collard
    No doubt the best movie about aids. The director, who also had the main and bisexual part, was dying while he made this movie. He survived only four hours after the movie has received a great award. – One (only one) of the themes is the dying boy’s attempt to having a normal life with normal relations, while horrible anxiety for dying sometimes break through.

  • The Stolen Children (1992) .. Gianni Amelio
    A mother had for two years hired out her 11-13-year-old daughter as a prostitute. When she was arrested her daughter and younger son shall be taken to a children’s home in another town by two carabineers. One of them is Antonio. The other takes “French leave”. But when children’s homes refuse to take these children, Antonio cannot call his boss without exposing his colleague. While the relation was tense in the beginning, real friendship emerges between all three. But other events eventually emerge.

  • Priest (1994) .. Antonia Bird
    A young homosexual Catholic priest who does not entirely keep his promise of celibacy. At confession a 14-year-old girl tells that she is sexually abused by her father. The priest cannot break the seal of confession.

    Today, when we are accustomed to see a sexual abuser under every bush, and equally accustomed to perceive sexual abuse as a much more serious crime than murder, most people will spontaneously say that of course the priest should have spoken up. In actual fact I know of crimes – even murder – that were prevented because the potential murderer had the opportunity to talk with a person who could be trusted to keep it secret. There is no such thing as 99% secrecy. Either it is 100% or 0%.

    I think the movie is excellent, although it contains much disgusting propaganda. In prisons you will not encounter real child abusers that are akin to Lisa’s father.

    The DVD is 6 minutes shorter than the video and the version shown in the theatres, and this is a great flaw.

  • Great Expectations (1998) .. Alfonso Cuarón
    I absolutely prefer this version to all others. First of all I admire the careful decision on what aspects of Dickens’s novel should be retained or removed. Second I admire the music, and think we cannot find any other film music of a comparable quality after the 1960s. But the movie has many other merits: manus, mise-en-scene, photo, narration, over-all-plot etc.

  • Jeanne et le Garçon Formidable (1998) .. Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau
    This is a musical about aids, and with very beautiful music. The boy was gay, but became straight when he met this girl. Everything is fine, except that he would like to live with her for 10 or 20 years – and he knows that he may die after less than a year.

  • Seul Contre Tous (1998) .. Gaspar Noé
    The French title means “Alone Against All Others”. There is only one real part in the movie, the butcher who had gone bankrupt and now can find no other living. More than anything else, this is a story of the disintegration of a human being into an abysmal level we would not even have guessed.

  • The End of the Affair (1999) .. Neil Jordan
    The story takes place during and shortly after WWII, hence when Catholic and other moral rules were much more strict. Not the man but the woman of the couple is married. While they are together a bomb hits the house, and the man apparently died. Then the woman intensively prays, “God, let him live, then I shall abstain from him.” And when he turns out to have hardly been harmed she understands what a dreadful pledge she has made to God.

    The man cannot understand why he is suddenly avoided. He finds out that she visit another man – not another lover, as he thinks, but a priest who may help her keeping her pledge to God.

    This is a tear-jerker. – Among the actors no one touched me as much as Stephen Rea as the husband who, apart from in the beginning, is not jealous.

  • Les Diables (2002) .. Christophe Ruggia
    In my view the very best movie made in the present century. Two 12-year-old siblings (Joseph and Chloé) are sometimes on the same and sometimes on different children’s homes and sometimes on the run together. Chloé is an autist. She will panic when touched and will only eat when told to. This is the setting, and it opens numerous possibilities for excellent scenes and sub-plots.

  • Stormy Weather (2003) .. Sólveig Anspach
    There are many movies about a young idealistic doctor fighting against the conservative views of his or her colleagues at a mental hospital. In most of these movies the view of the “idealistic” doctor (which is more often than not Freudian in nature) is known to be harmful to the patients. This is not something I fabricate out of thin air. The late chairman of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Association Nils Haak has in print explained that patients should not have from the treatment what he or she wants (MS: for instance, removal of paedophile desire.) Instead he shall have something he is not in the least interested in. (MS: It is obvious that such a strategy could only be applied if the patient were deceived about the treatment goals.) Dr. Haak goes on to say that the treatment will often, as an entirely normal outcome, led to nervous breakdown and suicide attempts.

    What is excellent about this movie is that no theories are propagated or attacked. The young doctor (Élodie Bouchez) is simply a genuine altruist.

  • Barefoot (2005) .. Til Schweiger
    The couple consists of a man from a rich family, who will never keep a job for a long time. He gets a job as a cleaner at a mental hospital. One hour later he is thrown out. He had not guarded his tools, and one of the patients had drunk a bottle of soap. But before that he had prevented a girl from suicide. When he leaves, she follows him, undetected by him or the guard. This is among other things a romantic love movie of a kind that has hardly been produced after the 1960s. As I understand the movie the couple does not have sex. The girl is too childish for such things, and the boy does not wish to complicate his life even more. But the movie is also full of humour and some action.

  • Live and Become (2005) .. Radu Mihaileanu
    In 1980 Israel recognised the black fallashas in Ethiopia as genuine Jews. They were secretly carried to Israel. A Jewish mother whose son had just died takes a Christian boy in his place and with his name. On arrival the Jewish mother dies, and the boy has no one to teach him Jewish ideas and behaviour. We will follow his fate from 9 to 25, played by three actors. The director’s capacity for person instruction is incredible. Possibly the best movie ever made in Israel.

  • La Petite Chartreuse (2005) .. Jean-Pierre Denis
    It is not his fault that a second-hand bookseller (Etienne) collides with a girl. The child will be in coma for some time, but it is very important that she is much talked to. Her mother is incapable of mature action when that needed, so Etienne takes upon himself the task. He visits her every day and tells her Jack London’s snow stories which he knows by heart.

  • A Quite Ordinary Jew (2005) .. Oliver Hirschbiegel
    This movie is only for those who understand German. It is of some help that the language is the clear Hamburg dialect. Except in movies for children I am against dubbing and prefer subtitles. But here is an exception. Spectators cannot read as speedily as they can listen. Subtitles always delete something of the text. But all text of this movie is too important to be deleted. I think that dubbed versions of this movie should at the very least be released into English, French and Spanish.

    You will learn numerous surprising facts, which you cannot find elsewhere, about how it feels to be a Jew in German today.

  • The Edge of Heaven (2007) .. Fatih Akin
    This is a movie that can be enjoyed by the most different circles: young, old, highbrow, lowbrow, learned, unlearned, with or without preference for action, emotion, politics, philosophy. A Turkish father (Ali) and son (Nejat) living together, one retired, the other a professor at a German university. The father pays a Turkish prostitute (Yeter) as much as she would usually earn, to live with him and only sleeping with him. Yeter was a prostitute to make possible for her daughter Ayten in Turkey to study medicine. Ayten knows nothing about her mother’s profession. Soon Ali gives Yeter a single stroke that kills her. Nejat decides to find her daughter to continue to pay for her studies. In Turkey he buys a bookshop for German books. But at the same time Ayten escapes to Germany when sought by the political police. She meets Lotte, a student. Both are lesbian and Ayten lives as an illegal fugitive in her house for a year. When found by the police she is expelled, and harbour directly in a Turkish prison. Lotte follows her, finds a lawyer for her and meets her i the prison. A few hours later Lotte is murdered, and her mother comes to Turkey. – Although this is only a part of the movie, its complexity is apparent from these details. But it is not a complexity that is difficult for the spectator to follow.

Note how many love movies there are in this list.

Note also the prominent number of movies about children.

1 comment:

Doctor Singularis et Invincibilis said...

A soldier tried for a dissertation sounds like the Inquisition or early Calvinism; is Losey ’64 flick about the Inquisition trials?
What M. Scharnberg calls ‘emotional’ in the movies he has chosen, others would call ‘melodramatic’.
I presume ‘intensive love’ means many intercourses; I have spotted none in Kalatozov’s elegy.
I have found merit in one synopsis provided here—‘Two white men and no one else are living …’—an apposite introduction to Antonioni’s sparse surrealism.
The ‘Bergmanian psychic dishonesty’ is a catchphrase to be cherished.
The shorter DVD being ‘a great flaw’ is a compliment?
It’s nice to know Iain Stott picked up his team of reviewers so attentively, but I wonder whether Dr. Scharnberg, Freud’s nemesis, really assumes these are the 50 greatest movies made till that year?! The thought itself proves a bit creepy. Anyway, he has a knack for making even worthy movies seem dumb.
Kazan’s ‘Streetcar’ as the best American movie sounds either as a bad joke, or an extremely dismissive and caustic one. Have mercy on USA’s movie industry!

But do not assume I blame someone for his bad taste—when in fact only his bad faith is involved —I would almost certainly list movies such as ‘Guys and Dolls’, ‘Sayonara’, ‘One-Eyed Jacks’, ‘La Chiave’ by Brass, ‘Divina creatura’, or ‘Desiderando Giulia’, among my 50 favorite movies—but not among the … 50 greatest ever. I guess Scharnberg misinterpreted the poll’s bent and gave us a list of his 50 favorite movies, which is fine—but not what requested or expected. One’s favorite movies may not be among the ones he believes are the 50 best (--a hierarchy quickly saturated by the output of Antonioni, Welles, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Tarkovski, Rohmer, Buñuel, Bresson, Angelopoulos, S. Ray, and a few others …)—and vice versa—many of the movies he would judge as being in the 50 best are missing, however, from his list of favorites—i.e., those he enjoys most.