'Tokyo Olympiad'

It’s a bit of poetry that the two state-sanctioned documentary films about the Olympics came with Leni Riefensthal’s bombastic Olympia chronicling the 1936 Berlin games and Kon Ichikawa’s film about the 1964 Tokyo games.

The former showed power and force: Germany on the brink of turning the world on its head. It’s manipulative and in concert with the Nazis’ ideas about pomp, circumstance and a good show.

The later caught back up with the Axis powers. Decimated by years of war, the sons and fathers in graves and countries on the brink, Tokyo, by 1964, was on its own brink: From being a financial and cultural stalwart of the east and certainly a world power under very different circumstances.

Japan had pegged famed director Akira Kurosawa for the task. He proved unamenable to suggestion and – being that he was undoubtedly popular – was his own power. So Japan sacked him and hired Kon Ichikawa. He does a beautiful job of focusing less on the medal stands and tote boards, and more on the triumph of the will (so to speak) of the athletes and the stories behind the world’s best.

'Me and My Girl'

One of the few films on the 1,001 list that unintentionally flopped at the box office. By the mid-30s, Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett were well into their acting careers, but neither had tipped the scales.

There’s no real gargantuan impact on the film industry here. Raoul Walsh directed and other than being prolific as a director, his greatest hits include portraying John Wilkes Booth in Birth of a Nation and discovering John Wayne.

The film is nice and easy, though. Just 79, it flies through witty dialogue and a pretty entertaining, but simple plot. If for no other reason, revel in the glory that is Spencer Tracy in a comedic role.

'Letter From an Unknown Woman'

Notable only because it was directed by Max Ophüls, a German Jew who fled his homeland in 1933 as the Nazis started rattling the cage. He fled again, this time from France, in 1938 and finally landing in the United States. Letter from an Unknown Woman was the second of Ophüls’ Hollywood productions, one of four he completed in the United States before going back to France to finish his life.

Before Letter from an Unknown Woman, Ophüls’ was fired from the film Vendetta by Howard Hughes for either being a foreigner in Hollywood or his slow shooting pace. Or both. This firing came after four years of waiting to get a shot in the United States.

After returning to France in 1950, he never did another Hollywood film. And after leaving, he never filmed in Germany.

'Cocaine Nights'

Part detective novel and part dystopian 1984, you keep waiting for Cocaine Nights to turn the corner. With all the secrets and all the mystery, the wizard is behind the curtain pulling all the levers. Then you get to the final 10 pages and realize there is no wizard, no curtain and no levers. There’s no resolution. There’s no real end. Characters and plots are interchangeable and the book could go on forever, but why tell the same story over again? It all sort of makes you depressed.

'The Cider House Rules'

A grand example of when the book is exponentially better than the film. Having seen the latter before the former, I thought it would carry the same emotional impact of a handshake, but instead it is a great story elevated by the flashbacks of Dr. Larch (you just don’t wake up and decide to become the leading abortion doctor in New England), the story of Melony and expanding the impact of the secondary characters (particularly Wally and the seasonal workers) makes it a very rich story.

Appropriate of nothing, author John Irving never met his father, who split with Irving’s mother in 1942 while in utero. Later, Irving’s father was shot down over Burma during World War II, a fact Irving did not discover until 1981 and a plot added into Wally’s story in The Cider House Rules.