'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.

'The Count Of Monte Cristo'

I thought it interesting if not odd that in his film Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino wrote in a line about Alexandre Dumas being of African descent (his paternal grandmother was an African slave in the French colony of Haiti). Odd because the film is set pre-Civil War in the Southern United States and the line is provided to somewhat show that someone famous was black. The character King Schulz thinks Dumas would not think kindly to the institution (Dumas died in 1870 so he probably had thoughts about the subject), not because he’s a “soft-hearted Frenchy” but because of his ethnicity.

The point of the line, though, is that Django Unchained mirrors the revenge plot of Dumas’ most famous work The Count of Monte Cristo. Although he probably thought poorly of slavery, but was probably a supporter of Django as he exacted his revenge on white culture and those that had tortured him and his wife.

Dumas probably also supported the wife. He not only married but had at least 40 affairs and a number of illegitimate children. We can’t all be so noble.