Comments

• • mrbong

    Mar 11th 2010, 10:22

    Quest For Fire was a staple of video collections in the 80s, are you sure it's only a minority that have seen it? as for The Year Of Living Dangerously, TCM seem to have had it on every week for the last 10 years. i seem to recall it had more than one screening on BBC during the 90s. it would be more work to avoid that film that it is to see it.

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  • sashurst

    Mar 11th 2010, 10:37

    @mrbong With regards to The Year Of Living Dangerously, yep, we acknowledge that most people will have seen it - before going to point out that it was banned in Indonesia until 1999... People from all over the world come to visit our website. :) People of all ages, too - including folk who are so young they think VHS is a vampire hospital.

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  • joshwinning

    Mar 11th 2010, 12:04

    What Sam said. What's VHS?

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  • mrbong

    Mar 12th 2010, 9:14

    sashurst, my qualified apologies for accidentally belittiling the number of people from Indonesia who visit your site to learn of obscure / banned films. be careful what you write, though, or they may block this site for revealing such knowledge! love the Vampire Hospital comment, but if a Vampire is (sort of) immortal, for what reason would they seek medical assistance?

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  • acuteringsting

    Mar 12th 2010, 17:01

    Sunburn.

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  • BabyDiego

    Mar 12th 2010, 17:20

    Insurance scams/theft of prescribed drugs

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  • Sonic

    Mar 14th 2010, 12:14

    well that sucks, ive seen ALL of them

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  • mrbong

    Mar 15th 2010, 7:13

    Sonic, what's your take on Marooned and where do you find it? looks like the most interesting unseen of the list

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  • DaisyAdair

    Mar 19th 2010, 12:20

    Ran (1985) is available as a Criterion Release. What do you mean no one's seen it? Ridiculous. Also? When I wrote a paper on Ran for my Critical theory class, the prof told me he'd already seen MANY MANY papers on Ran because it was a very popular topic and had been for years.

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  • Ricardo

    Mar 19th 2010, 16:45

    Kolya is a borefest, thoroughly predictable and liked only by those who know no-one else has seen it. I mean, we've seen this story a thousand times before, and the only thing that this adds to it is the subtitles, so some people will feel more intelligent for having seen it. To put it in this list just reveals a case of PC-itis ("It's Czech, so it must be good!"), when it's really only about as good as your average TV movie. At least About a Boy was funny and had great music.

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  • swellegant

    Mar 19th 2010, 19:21

    Marooned sounds interesting but it really isn't. Despite the well-deserving Academy Award for Special Visual Effects it is a rather slow movie. It is known in the U.S. for another distinction--being one of the best films to be made fun of on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I'd never really consider Marooned and Papa's Delicate Condition as great movies. If you're going to include Papa's Delicate Condition you might as well include Shaft (which won for Best Music: Original Song). Many people know of it or have heard the song but how many have seen the movie? Both Shaft and Papa's Delicate Condition are good movies but I'm not sure I'd consider them the greatest unseen Oscar winners (and I love Shaft and anything else written by Ernest Tidyman). Obscurity and greatness amongst Academy Award winners are not synonymous. Following your criteria, you neglected to include Bill and Coo (which received an Honorary Award from the Academy), Travels with My Aunt, or several other films that won an award and have been forgotten or neglected in the collective memory. The inclusion of Ran doesn't make much sense due to its general availability and the popularity of Kurosawa. It may have not received large distribution (it even opened with limited distribution in the US) but its reputation as a great movie and its study in surveys of cinema hardly makes it obscure. I can understand the inclusion of Quest for Fire. It was popular enough when it came out (in the US alone it grossed $67 mil on an estimated budget of $12.5 mil) but it isn't remembered as well nowadays by folks other than film fans. I think the problem with this article is the criteria for choosing entries. Your selection criteria wasn't very consistent and if you had chosen one particular criteria for your entries you would have had the material for several lists and some very excellent discussion. If you had chosen the greatest award winners with the most limited distribution Ran would most definitely be included as would most of the foreign choices (and others you don't mention) and been a great list to boot. You included age of film as a selection criteria which should have been a list of its own. Think of how many silent films you could have included that most folks haven't seen but are available.

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  • tbrittreid

    Mar 19th 2010, 19:24

    The absence of "Cavalcade," winner for Best Picture of 1933, flabbergasted me. I have seen "Ran," "Year of Living Dangerously" (shown maybe three times on TCM since I gained access to it in September 2005, not close to "every week") and "Marooned." This one I've watched several times since its original theatrical run, including on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 as "Space Travellers." Actually this was on the syndicated "Mystery Science Theater Hour" which says something about it, as most of the films in the 11 shows recut into two-parters (total of 22 one-hour episodes) in that repackaging were in the public domain! [at least under US law]). "Marooned" has been generally panned as a bomb rather than considered a "classic," too.

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  • NoirItAll

    Mar 20th 2010, 2:04

    My husband and I saw this movie at the Nineteenth Street Theater in Allentown, PA. We adored the film and bought the VHS. The only improvement I'd make is remove the bare breasts in one scene to make it G. Otherwise, it was impeccably acted and the screenplay focused on every character involved in the production in an innovative way.

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  • NoirItAll

    Mar 20th 2010, 2:08

    My husband and I saw Ran at the Ritz 5 in Philadelphia. My husband didn't like it but the costumes WERE fantastic. I thought the actress playing the character who was behind the drama was good.

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  • NoirItAll

    Mar 20th 2010, 2:11

    My brother took me to see the Year of Living Dangerously as a birthday present. I thought it was great. Linda Hunt who won an Oscar for playing Billy Kwan was from our area, the Delaware Valley.

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  • quentintarantado

    Mar 20th 2010, 2:49

    The Sound Barrier (1952) is based on Geoffrey de Havilland's attempt to break the sound barrier (the character's name here has been changed to John Ridgefield). Actually, the sound barrier was crossed by an American, Chuck Yeager, on October 14, 1947. When Yeager saw this movie, newsmen asked if that's really how the sound barrier was broken. Richardson "reversed the controls" when crossing the barrier and managed to live through it. Yeager said if he tried that, he'd crash. The Americans get their revenge 48 years later, when the movie U-571 shows the Americans capturing the Enigma machine (important for decoding Nazi secret messages) changing the fact that the British Royal Navy was the one to actually do it. Maybe both movies are "alternate history" or they're set in another dimension, like Inglorious Basterds.

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  • quentintarantado

    Mar 20th 2010, 2:51

    The incident about Yeager watching a movie of his achievement being credited to a Brit is recounted in the novel "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe.

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  • quentintarantado

    Mar 20th 2010, 7:50

    By the way, that photo for "Sound Barrier" is, I'm willing to bet, from "Ryan's Daughter", another David Lean movie. I mean the movie is about flying while Ryan's Daughter is set in Ireland with an amazing scene among some sea cliffs. Which do you think this photo's from?

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  • JNG33

    Mar 20th 2010, 12:51

    Quicker’n A Wink (1940) can be found as an extra feature on the A side of the Marx Brothers double feature DVD containing Go West(1940)and The Big Store (1941).

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  • lsmills

    Mar 20th 2010, 19:17

    I find it hard to believe that Topsy-Turvy showed on only 2 screens in the US, since I saw it in Champaign, IL, not a metropolis.

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