Noah Wyle

“And… with Face in the Crowd. It’s the most wonderfully insightful insight on celebrity and the cult of celebrity and Andy Griffith, who you’d probably only know from The Andy Griffith Show, playing small-town sheriff of Mayberry, you have no idea the depth and breadth of this man’s talent, and he puts it all on display in this movie. His character of Lonesome Rhodes is one of the great film characters of all time. Absolutely love this movie. Going in the bag.”

“Forty Guns, Sam Fuller, starring Barbara Stanwyck at her most ferocious. Sam Fuller, for those of you who don’t know, is one of the most resourceful filmmakers. This guy could stretch a dollar farther than anybody. There’s a great story I heard from an actor named Perry Lang once, who was in a movie of his called The Big Red One, and he said to Sam Fuller, “Sam, I saw Steel Helmet the other day and it still holds up.” And Sam Fuller said, “Griffith Park, eight days,” which is how long it took him to shoot it and where he shot it. Forty Guns has got a great opening shot of literally these 40 gunmen riding past the camera on their way to do Barbara Stanwyck’s bidding.”

“Repo Man, Alex Cox. This made a huge impression on me when it came out, like it did a lot of young men. I saw Emilio Estevez in this movie and I saw the sort of irreverence of the humor and the punk-rock vibe to it and just thought, aesthetically, this is so me. Love this movie.”

“Eating Raoul, directed by the great late Paul Bartel, also a dear family friend. Wonderful black comedy, highly recommended. Almost got me suspended from high school when I accidentally had the misfortune of recommending that they show it during Arts Week at my high school.”

“Speaking of people that I knew, my stepmother’s father was John Sturges, the great film director, and this is one of his great movies. If you haven’t seen The Great Escape, John Sturges was one of the great directors of male ensemble movies. He did The Magnificent Seven and he did The Eagle Has Landed and he did Ice Station Zebra and he did The Great Escape. True story about a POW escape from World War Two. Highly recommend it. And has that famous motorcycle jump that Steve McQueen does over the barbed-wire fence, which was really Bud Ekins, terrific stunt driver.”

“’Round Midnight. Dexter Gordon, and takes place in Paris at the end of this fictitious musician’s life and it’s about a young Frenchman and his daughter who befriend him and have a real appreciation for his life and music. Just a really wonderful movie.”

“Seconds. This is sort of a science-fiction movie. It’s really– I think it’s John Randolph who wants to get remade over and he becomes Rock Hudson. So it’s an older man going through a procedure to become a younger man, and it was shot by James Wong Howe, who is one of the great cinematographers of all time, so the photography’s really excellent. And it includes this really crazy scene where he’s out stomping grapes and sort of discovering his youth and sexuality again. It’s really quite wonderful. James Wong Howe, also the DP of Sweet Smell of Success and Hud, I believe.”

“These two are really great. Which one do we start with? Let’s start with Trouble in Paradise. For those of you that don’t know the great Ernst Lubitsch, this is one of his most sophisticated comedies. This stars the great Herbert Marshall, who is so dryly wonderful in this movie, and Miriam Hopkins, and they both are competing pickpockets who meet trying to basically con the other, and it turns into a great love story. And then the two of them go off and try to enter into the big con. But the dialogue is so witty, as is all Lubitsch dialogue. And the Lubitsch touch, how do you describe it? There’s an opening shot in this movie that takes place in Venice, Italy, and you could open a movie in Venice, Italy, anywhere. You could open it on the Grand Canal. You could open it on the end of a gondola. You could open it anywhere to recognize it. He opens it with garbage being dumped into a garbage scow in the back side of a hotel. So he takes you to the most unromantic place to enter into the most romantic of stories. That’s the Lubitsch touch.”

“Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. This is one of my favorite movies. I saw this movie not that long ago and I was so knocked out by how contemporary the cinematography felt, how sharp the dialogue felt. I just thought sometimes you come across an old movie that holds up so beautifully because it speaks to a contemporary rhythm, and I highly recommend this one, it really does.”

“Documentary. Or is it? F for Fake. This is Orson Welles’s break with traditional form, unabashedly taking an audience on quite an adventure. You go to Ibiza, Spain, you get to learn about art forgery, you get to learn about the guy that forged Hitler’s diaries, and you get this unbelievable story about Picasso, which I won’t ruin for you, but F for Fake is terrific.”

“As is Pickup on South Street. I love this movie. We’re back to Sam Fuller again. This stars Richard Widmark as a pickpocket. As you can tell, I like movies about pickpockets, I guess. This guy inadvertently picks the pocket of a woman who has some microfilm in it that is being sold to the Commies. This is high Red Scare, Cold War-era drama. Thelma Ritter. I don’t know if she was nominated for this or not, but she gives one of the most heartbreaking performances. She plays a woman who sort of gives information to the police, and her cover is that she’s a tie salesman. She sells neckties. And there’s the last scene in this movie where she… I’m not going to ruin it for you, but it’s her last scene and she will break your heart with that.”

“Medium Cool, speaking of documentaries that aren’t really documentaries. It’s a great time capsule of Chicago in 1968, and a wonderful sort of coincidence of events, where they’re making a movie about making a movie and then the events that they are depicting actually become more intense and more explosive than they anticipate. Riots are actually breaking out during the Democratic National Convention and they’re there filming it. And that great chant, “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching,” comes from the end of this movie, as this is all being put on display for the world to see.”

“This Sporting Life, Lindsay Anderson. It follows the rise and fall of a professional athlete, in this case a rugby player, and it’s just blistering. The performance is so raw. Richard Harris is so young and dangerous and unpredictable in this movie. And he had a really interesting relationship with Lindsay Anderson, and the two of them made some unbelievable things together, but this is my favorite by far.”

“Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Nagisa Oshima. This movie knocked me on my butt. It’s about British POW… prisoners of war in a Japanese prison camp. Came out in 1983, and the soundtrack is Ryuichi Sakamoto, who we just lost a couple of years ago, and I used to play that thing over and over and over and over again. I thought it was so beautiful. David Bowie gives a great performance in this. If you don’t know Tom Conti’s work from Reuben, Reuben or so many other great films, he’s just wonderful. This made a huge impression on me. Definitely worth watching.”

“This is a terrific documentary Terry Zwigoff made about the animator R. Crumb, Robert Crumb, who was extremely popular back in the ’60s. His cartoons made it into… You know, Fritz the Cat and his animation. He did the cover art for, I believe, Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills album. Fascinating guy from a fascinating family, and this is like Grey Gardens in a way. It’s a look into his upbringing and into what informed his art and his style, which is very specific, including his kinks and peccadilloes, and really a kind of honest look at an artist.”

“Last Picture Show. You almost have to watch this movie just to see Cloris Leachman’s performance and the performance of Ben Johnson and Ellen Burstyn. Those three in particular will kill you. Ben Johnson will kill you as Sam the Lion. I just love this movie, and I love that performance, almost– I’d put that up against just about anything.”

“I wasn’t going to talk about him because apparently everybody talks about him, but John Cassavetes’s Shadows. There’s a great story that I heard about this movie, that he shot in the location that was underneath Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio, and so the sound was terrible. It kept getting all this noise bleed, and he spent all this money trying to clean up those soundtracks and was ultimately unable to clean up the sound, and so they had to release it as was. And one of the earliest reviews praised it for having one of the most authentic sound designs in cinema history. So a good lesson to all you young filmmakers out there that sometimes the happy accident is the thing that makes it special.”

“For those of you that… that don’t mind a little glimpse into upper Manhattan, this trilogy – Metropolitan, Last Days of Disco, and Barcelona – I just find them to be like candy. The dialogue is so perfect. The characterizations are so specific. It’s such a razor-sharp look at a particular time and place, done with a really deft touch. It’s very elegantly done. It’s sort of… I don’t know how to describe it other than to say when I watch – especially Metropolitan and Barcelona – they just feel like… like home movies of a time that I wasn’t in and people that I didn’t know that I felt like I could have known. That says probably more about me than it will about you, but I hope you enjoy them nonetheless. I’m going to enjoy watching them again.”