#61 ‘Sullivan’s Travels’

Privilege, Poverty, and the Redemption of a Man Who Thinks Suffering is a Vibe

Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is Preston Sturges’ clever, charming, and ultimately infuriating love letter to comedy and—unintentionally—to the male ego wrapped in social conscience drag. It’s often described as a satire of Hollywood, a meditation on class, and a defense of laughter as salvation. But really, it’s about a rich man cosplaying poverty until the experience makes him feel authentic enough to go back to being rich. You know, for the people.

Joel McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a pampered Hollywood director who’s grown weary of churning out silly comedies. He wants to make a serious film about the human condition—O Brother, Where Art Thou?—even though he doesn’t know a damn thing about hardship beyond bad coffee on studio lots. So naturally, he decides to become poor. Not help the poor. Not redistribute wealth. Just… wander the country in hobo drag like a method actor who thinks empathy is a weekend hobby.

What follows is a mix of slapstick misadventure and thudding irony, as Sullivan hitches rides, jumps freight trains, and learns Very Important Lessons about humanity. Along the way he picks up Veronica Lake, billed only as “The Girl,” because why give your only major female character a name when she can have legs instead? She’s a struggling actress, wisecracking but ultimately docile, whose entire function is to gaze at Sullivan with bemused affection while he indulges his faux-altruistic existential crisis. Her big dream is… to follow him. Great.

The film’s most lauded moment—Sullivan watching a group of Black churchgoers laugh at a Mickey Mouse cartoon—is meant to be revelatory. And yes, it’s moving. But it also reeks of projection: white liberal guilt soothed by the sight of joy in the marginalized. Sullivan’s epiphany isn’t that poverty is crushing—it’s that laughter matters more than justice. He returns to Hollywood not humbled, not transformed, but validated. The world is hard, sure—but his job making comedies? Turns out, it’s noble after all! Cut to credits before anyone asks him to donate a dime.

And let’s be clear: Sullivan’s Travels is technically excellent. Sturges directs with razor-sharp wit. The tonal shifts—from screwball to grim—are handled with rare precision. The dialogue snaps, the pacing glides. But it’s also a film that wants to critique privilege while wallowing in it. It tries to sympathize with the downtrodden while keeping them as background players in the main character’s spiritual glow-up.

Women? Decorative. Black people? Noble and silent. Poor people? Vessels for teaching the protagonist how to appreciate his own privilege. It’s a satire, yes—but only in the sense that it knows the system is broken and still wants you to root for the man who benefits from it.

3.5 out of 5 stolen shoes
(One for Sturges’ direction. One for Lake’s wit in spite of the script. One for the bold tonal gambit. Half a star for ambition. The missing stars? Last seen wandering the Depression-era landscape, wondering why they’re always there to teach lessons but never get to write the ending.)

#60 ‘Duck Soup’

Anarchy, Anthems, and the Birth of Weaponized Nonsense

Duck Soup (1933) is the Marx Brothers at their most distilled and deranged: 68 minutes of manic brilliance where logic is a casualty, war is a punchline, and governance is handed to a man with a painted-on mustache and a complete disregard for continuity. It’s anarchic, subversive, and still somehow more coherent than actual politics—a film that dresses fascism in a top hat and then hurls banana peels under it.

Groucho Marx stars as Rufus T. Firefly, the newly appointed dictator of Freedonia, a fictional nation whose only consistent trait is its incompetence. He insults everyone, fires his cabinet on a whim, and wages war because someone calls him an upstart. He’s the original political troll: brilliant, petty, and utterly uninterested in decorum. The film doesn’t ask you to sympathize with Firefly. It dares you not to cheer for him as he dismantles statehood with one-liners.

Then there’s Chico and Harpo, the agents of chaos. Chico speaks in accents that would get him canceled today, but with enough piano-playing charm to slide under the radar. Harpo, silent but deadly, honks and hammers his way through scenes like a court jester on bath salts. Zeppo is also there, technically. The film doesn’t need him, and neither do we.

Plot? Barely. Something about Freedonia being in debt, a wealthy widow funding the regime, a rival nation named Sylvania, and a war no one understands. But Duck Soup doesn’t care about plot. It cares about puncturing plot—stabbing it with puns, setting it on fire with slapstick, and feeding the ashes to a marching band.

The mirror scene is still one of the most precise comedic sequences ever filmed—two men, two Grouchos, one nonexistent reflection. No words. Just pure visual poetry in the language of absurdity. The film uses physical comedy like a scalpel, slicing away at the pretense of structure, diplomacy, and sanity itself.

And yet, for all its chaos, Duck Soup is pointed. It mocks nationalism, militarism, and the very idea that authority should be respected. Its musical numbers are militaristic parodies, its courtroom scenes are kangaroo circuses, and its final act—where the Marx Brothers literally launch food at the enemy—is both hilarious and uncomfortably prescient.

Women, of course, exist solely to be flirted with or funding the farce. Margaret Dumont once again plays the wealthy dowager with the patience of a saint and the reaction time of a taxidermy exhibit. Her character is the perfect foil: earnest, refined, and perpetually bewildered—exactly how the patriarchy likes its punchlines.

Yes, it’s a product of its time. Yes, some of the ethnic humor has aged like milk in a heatwave. But Duck Soup remains a rare beast: a comedy that’s both timeless and ruthless, refusing to pick a side except the one that laughs last, loudest, and with a banana peel in hand.

4 out of 5 shredded constitutions
(One for the mirror scene. One for Groucho’s verbal carnage. One for Harpo’s horn-based terror campaign. One for the political satire still relevant 90 years later. The missing star? Smuggled out of Freedonia by a duck in a trench coat.)

#59 ‘Nashville’

Country, Chaos, and the Long, Slow Smothering of the American Woman’s Voice

Nashville (1975) is Robert Altman’s sprawling, 160-minute fever dream of a nation imploding through its own self-mythology—wrapped in sequins, campaign buttons, and the sickly twang of country music. It’s a satire. It’s a tapestry. It’s a wandering, woozy vision of 24 characters circling each other in a slow collapse of fame, politics, and identity. It’s also a stunning portrait of a culture that asks women to sing, smile, and shut up—until someone decides they’re worth silencing more permanently.

Altman’s genius lies in orchestrating chaos. The camera roves, the dialogue overlaps, the storylines bleed into each other like spilled whiskey. It’s a film that feels both tightly choreographed and completely out of control—an echo of the country it critiques. But let’s not pretend this is a neutral portrait. Nashville is a film that holds a mirror up to America in the mid-70s and says: “Look what you’ve done to your women.”

Take Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the fragile songbird being paraded onstage despite her very public unraveling. She’s a human breakdown wrapped in a rhinestone gown, and everyone—her husband, her fans, her handlers—just wants her to keep singing. Her suffering is framed not as tragedy, but as spectacle. She’s broken, so naturally she must be exploited.

Then there’s Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles), the wide-eyed waitress who’s desperate to be a star despite having no discernible talent. Her “audition” ends in a humiliating striptease for a room full of leering men, and the film lingers there—refusing to comfort, refusing to intervene. Her degradation is not just expected—it’s built in. It’s what happens when female ambition meets a male-dominated industry that only values flesh over voice.

And let's not forget L.A. Joan (Shelley Duvall), the spacey groupie flitting from man to man, framed as comic relief but ultimately just another woman lost in the current, dismissed because she refuses to play by the rules of either sex or seriousness.

The men of Nashville? Oh, they’re everywhere. Charismatic, pitiful, manipulative, oblivious. They sing their songs, they chase their dreams, they dominate the airwaves and the narrative. Even the assassins come with male entitlement. And when the final shot rings out—when a woman’s body collapses to the stage—it is a literal silencing of female voice. A warning. A sacrifice. A finale.

Yes, the film is brilliant. Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” is still a dagger in soft focus. The cinematography is organic and immersive. The editing is nothing short of wizardry. But for all its political posturing and Americana deconstruction, Nashville is most powerful—and most painful—as a meditation on how a nation uses women as symbols, then discards them once they bleed.

4 out of 5 collapsing spotlights
(One for Blakley’s raw vulnerability. One for Altman’s orchestral direction. One for the truth-telling underneath the twang. One for the audacity to end on a lullaby sung by a child while the adults drown in their own rot. The missing star? Left under the stage with Barbara Jean, still waiting for someone to let her sing without breaking.)

#58 ‘The Gold Rush’

Bread Rolls, Hunger Gags, and the Tramp Who Mistook Poverty for Charm

The Gold Rush (1925) is Charlie Chaplin’s self-proclaimed masterpiece—his favorite child, his artistic calling card, his silent-era fable about desperation, hope, and the tragicomic elasticity of human dignity. And yes, it’s often brilliant: visually inventive, emotionally nimble, and surprisingly poignant for a film that includes cannibalism, cross-dressing, and a man hallucinating a chicken. But it’s also an old-school morality tale with a hard center—where the poor are made adorable, the rich are made desirable, and women are either distant prizes or props for pathos.

Chaplin plays his iconic Tramp, a little guy with big shoes and bigger delusions, who stumbles into the Klondike during the gold rush, looking for fortune, food, and love—not necessarily in that order. He’s cold, starving, and often one missed joke away from death. But because he twirls his cane and does a little jig, the film invites us to see his suffering as endearing. Poverty, under Chaplin’s gaze, becomes a lovable personality trait, not a structural failure. He doesn’t rage against injustice—he pirouettes around it.

And the film is funny—when it wants to be. The famous bread roll dance? Pure genius. The cabin teetering on a cliff? Visually stunning. The chicken hallucination? Sure, we’ll allow it. Chaplin was a master of physical comedy, and when he wants you to laugh, you do. But when he wants you to feel, that’s where things get murkier—especially when it comes to Georgia.

Georgia (Georgia Hale) is the saloon girl with the emotional complexity of a snow globe. She’s beautiful, unattainable, and barely written. The Tramp falls for her because she exists in his line of sight. She entertains his affections as a joke, then feels bad when she realizes he took her seriously. And the film treats this as romantic tension, not emotional manipulation. She’s not a character—she’s a mirror for the Tramp’s yearning. Her eventual affection isn’t earned, it’s gifted—because the man suffered enough to deserve it.

And speaking of suffering, The Gold Rush is full of it. Starvation, isolation, humiliation. Chaplin revels in it, because it lets him pivot from gag to pathos in a single tear-streaked look. He wants to make you laugh, then make you cry for laughing. It’s effective, sure—but it’s also manipulative. The Tramp is charming because the film tells you he is, not because he ever truly changes or challenges anything.

What’s missing, as always, is context. The Klondike is a frozen metaphor, not a real place with Indigenous people or historical consequence. The other miners are buffoons or brutes. The saloon is a stage. Poverty is a prop. And women? Still treated like prizes to be won by the most persistent man in oversized trousers.

3.5 out of 5 dancing dinner rolls
(One for the comedy. One for the craftsmanship. One for the Tramp’s emotional elasticity. Half a star for the iconic imagery. The missing stars melted in the snow, somewhere between sentimentality and the refusal to give Georgia a single interior thought.)

#57 ‘Rocky’

Grit, Glory, and the Great American Mansplanation

Rocky (1976) is the cinematic embodiment of the American dream as imagined by a man doing push-ups on a raw steak: if you get punched in the face often enough and grunt sincerely while doing it, the world owes you a shot at greatness. Written by and starring Sylvester Stallone as the ultimate underdog, Rocky isn’t just a boxing movie—it’s a sweaty parable about masculinity, redemption, and how a woman’s love can be won through sheer, unrelenting presence.

Rocky Balboa is a small-time boxer with big-time delusions and a heart of gold buried under layers of self-pity and literal bruises. He mumbles, shuffles, feeds turtles, and stalks a painfully shy pet store clerk named Adrian (Talia Shire) until she finally agrees to go out with him—less because of chemistry and more because the script decides she should. Their courtship? He takes her ice skating in a closed rink and talks at her until she stops saying no. Romantic!

Adrian is the classic ‘fix-him’ fantasy: a withdrawn, bespectacled woman whose entire arc involves removing her glasses, speaking above a whisper, and learning to support a man’s self-actualization at the expense of her own interiority. She doesn’t fall in love with Rocky. She surrenders to him, which the film treats as an emotional triumph rather than a case study in consent fatigue.

Meanwhile, Rocky trains for his once-in-a-lifetime shot at the heavyweight title against Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), a charismatic, brilliant, self-promoting Black champion who’s essentially the villain for being successful on purpose. The film never quite forgives Apollo for having confidence and a business plan. He’s the flashy foil to Rocky’s humble sincerity—a capitalist peacock to Rocky’s blue-collar Christ figure.

Yes, Rocky loses the fight. But that’s not the point. He lasts fifteen rounds. He bleeds. He suffers. He proves himself. The crowd loves him. Adrian loves him. America loves him. Because in the world of Rocky, you don’t need to win—just to endure and monologue your way into our hearts.

Technically, it’s well-crafted. The gritty Philadelphia streets feel lived-in. Bill Conti’s soaring score could make a ham sandwich feel inspirational. The final fight is tense and well-staged, and Stallone—credit where it’s due—commits to every emotional beat with the intensity of a man who wrote his own myth in real time.

But let’s not pretend Rocky is a revolutionary underdog story. It’s a film that says masculinity equals pain, romance equals persistence, and women exist to whisper your name after you’ve nearly died doing something violently poetic.

3 out of 5 raw eggs
(One for the score. One for the training montage. One for the sheer audacity of Stallone’s self-mythologizing. The missing stars? Still running up those museum steps, wondering why Adrian never got her own damn storyline.)

#56 ‘Jaws’

Blood, Beaches, and the Monster That Was Capitalism All Along

Jaws (1975) is the movie that taught America to fear the ocean, worship the white male savior complex, and internalize that every crisis can be solved by blowing something up. It’s often hailed as the first summer blockbuster, and fair enough—it’s tense, brilliantly paced, and built with Spielbergian precision. But under the salt spray and the John Williams hysteria is a deeply gendered, class-anxious morality play in which masculine authority is valorized, female voices are silenced, and nature exists solely to be conquered or killed.

Our story begins when a young woman is violently devoured by a shark—though don’t expect much of her beyond the screaming and flailing. Her death is the inciting incident, not a tragedy: she exists purely to justify the escalation of male action. Enter Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), a cop who hates water but loves order. He tries to close the beach, but is overruled by the town’s real villain: the mayor, a capitalist in a checkered blazer who cares more about tourist dollars than human lives. This is Jaws's real genius: the shark is terrifying, but it’s greed and denial that keep the blood flowing.

The three-man hunt that follows—Brody, oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw)—is framed as a last stand of rugged masculinity. They bicker, drink, and compare scars like war veterans in a Hemingway fever dream. It’s testosterone on the high seas. The problem? No one else in the film gets a word in. Women exist solely to worry, warn, and weep. Mrs. Brody is there to remind the audience that our hero has something to live for, but heaven forbid she actually go near the boat.

Hooper, the nerdy marine biologist, brings science to the table—but he’s treated as comic relief until he proves he’s man enough to hold his breath in a shark cage. Quint is the grizzled captain, obsessed with vengeance since surviving the USS Indianapolis—his monologue is iconic, yes, but it’s also the emotional high point of the film, centered squarely on his trauma, not the townspeople’s terror. Meanwhile, Brody is positioned as the “everyman” hero: hesitant, humble, ultimately heroic because he’s the one who pulls the trigger.

And the shark? A faceless, female-coded creature of appetite. She's not just a predator—she’s unnatural. Too large, too angry, too persistent. She terrorizes an entire community for daring to relax. And how is she dealt with? Not through understanding or respect for the ecosystem—she’s blown to hell in a fiery, phallic climax that’s less about survival than domination.

Yes, Jaws is expertly made. Spielberg turns the ocean into a haunted house. The mechanical shark’s refusal to work forced the film into suspenseful brilliance. But let’s not ignore the message riding beneath the waves: when the system fails, send in three men, one boat, and a rifle. Women stay home. Scientists shut up. And nature must be subdued, one explosion at a time.

4 out of 5 oxygen tanks
(One for the directing. One for the score. One for the slow-burn terror. One for Robert Shaw monologuing like a sea-soaked Macbeth. The missing star? Devoured along with the idea that maybe the real monster wasn’t the shark—it was the unchecked entitlement of men playing God with a harpoon and a hangover.)

#55 ‘North by Northwest’

Suave Men, Silent Women, and the Travelogue of a Narcissist in Peril

North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock at his slickest—an elegant, fast-paced thriller draped in grey flannel and Cold War paranoia, where the plot zigzags like a drunk on a sleeper train and the leading man escapes death with nothing but charm, cheekbones, and casual sexism. It’s gorgeous. It’s iconic. And it’s a masterclass in how to construct suspense around a protagonist who never stops mistaking his own charisma for character development.

Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a Madison Avenue ad man so deeply in love with himself he doesn’t notice he’s been mistaken for a spy until someone’s already tried to murder him over cocktails. He’s kidnapped, nearly killed, framed for murder, chased by a plane, and still finds time to flirt like he’s doing a spread for GQ: Fugitive Edition. His arc? Less about transformation than confirmation: the world keeps insisting he’s important, and by the end, he believes it.

The film’s real trick, of course, is convincing us to root for this walking embodiment of mid-century American ego. Thornhill is clever, yes, but also smug, oblivious, and about as emotionally available as a necktie. Every woman in his orbit is either decoration, danger, or doomed.

Enter Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), the icy blonde Hitchcock plucks from the factory of “cool girls who will risk their lives for men who treat them like crossword puzzles.” She’s beautiful, competent, sexually confident—and utterly written to serve Roger’s ego. A double agent? Maybe. A person? Barely. Their train flirtation is sleek, fast-talking innuendo at its best. But it’s also the blueprint for every rom-com that teaches women to fall in love with men who undermine them with a smirk.

Eve’s greatest betrayal isn’t of the spies or the state—it’s of herself, when she goes from playing both sides to swooning over a man who sees her as an accessory to his escape plan. She’s drugged, endangered, and repeatedly rescued, but the film treats her agency like a stylish trench coat: impressive, but ultimately meant to be removed by the man in charge.

And the villain? James Mason as the velvet-voiced mastermind, supported by Martin Landau’s barely-coded queer henchman who exists mostly to sneer and smirk. They’re delicious. They’re camp. They’re also punished by the narrative for their difference, because Hitchcock couldn’t imagine anything more menacing than elegance unmoored from heterosexual control.

Yes, the set pieces are legendary—the crop duster scene, Mount Rushmore, the auction house bluff. Bernard Herrmann’s score thrums with anxiety and irony. Hitchcock directs like a man who’s cracked the formula for sleek male fantasies of danger without consequence.

But North by Northwest isn’t really about espionage. It’s about how far a mediocre man can travel on charm alone—across states, across bodies, across plot holes—without ever having to reckon with himself. It’s glossy, thrilling, and more than a little smug.

3.5 out of 5 stolen identities
(One for Grant’s tailoring. One for the cinematography. One for that plane. Half a star for Eva Marie Saint trying to breathe life into a character written entirely in suggestive glances and cocktail napkins. The missing stars? Hanging off Mount Rushmore, waiting for a man to notice the world doesn’t actually revolve around his cufflinks.)

#54 ‘MAS*H’ (1970)

War, Wit, and the Weaponization of Misogyny Under the Laugh Track

Robert Altman’s MASH* (1970) is often hailed as an irreverent masterpiece—a dark anti-war comedy that gleefully dismembers the absurdity of military life in Korea (read: Vietnam) with scalpels of satire and a martini in each hand. And yes, it’s loose, chaotic, and formally groundbreaking. But beneath the freewheeling ensemble charm and overlapping dialogue is a film so deeply soaked in casual misogyny and smug self-satisfaction that it becomes hard to tell whether it’s critiquing power—or just laughing along with it.

Our “heroes” are Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Elliott Gould), two wisecracking surgeons who swagger through a mobile army surgical hospital with a steady stream of sexist jokes, pranks, and martinis. They’re brilliant at surgery and absolutely insufferable at everything else—especially when it comes to women, whom they treat like inconvenient background noise unless they’re objectifying them or actively trying to humiliate them.

Let’s talk about Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), the film’s designated female punching bag. A competent military professional? Sure. A human being? Not according to the script. The moment she tries to assert authority or, God forbid, enforce order in a war zone, she’s targeted for complete psychological demolition. Her sex life is broadcast over a PA system for a cheap laugh. She’s sexually harassed, mocked, and finally rendered ridiculous by a series of pranks that culminate in a scene where she’s exposed in the shower for the amusement of the men—a scene that would be called revenge porn today but was apparently hilarious in 1970.

The film frames her humiliation not as cruelty, but as liberation—as if being stripped of dignity by a bunch of boozed-up man-children is what it takes for a woman to finally loosen up and laugh. The male characters are allowed to be clever, conflicted, even heroic. The women? Props. Punchlines. Breasts with rank.

Yes, the film is making a point about the absurdity of war, about the breakdown of order in the face of trauma. But it’s also making excuses—giving the male characters a free pass to behave like frat boys because the system is broken and they’re “just blowing off steam.” Never mind who gets scorched in the process.

Altman’s direction is sharp and subversive. The overlapping dialogue, the unpolished rhythm, the refusal to stick to traditional structure—all revolutionary at the time. But innovation doesn’t equal integrity. MASH* punches up at military bureaucracy, yes—but it punches sideways and down at anyone who dares not laugh at the boys’ club while they play surgery between dick jokes.

3 out of 5 bloody scalpels
(One for Altman’s craft. One for the ensemble energy. One for daring to mock war during wartime. The missing stars are buried in the camp, somewhere between a shower tent, a misogynist punchline, and the collective denial that cruelty is still cruelty, even when it’s delivered with a wink and a martini.)

#53 ‘The Deer Hunter’

Brotherhood, Trauma, and the Great American Gaslight

The Deer Hunter (1978) wants to be a war epic. A meditation on friendship. A searing portrait of PTSD. What it actually is, though, is three hours of slow, masculine unraveling framed by a wedding, a war crime, and a lot of deer getting blamed for things they didn’t do. It’s a film that looks you dead in the eye and says: “War is hell. But you know what’s worse? Men crying in bars.”

Michael Cimino directs with the kind of reverence typically reserved for monuments and funerals. The first hour is a never-ending Russian Orthodox wedding sequence that could double as a hostage situation. We’re introduced to our central trio: Mike (Robert De Niro, brooding with patriotic pain), Nick (Christopher Walken, gentle and doomed), and Steven (John Savage, mostly there to suffer). They’re steelworkers, drinkers, and rugged archetypes of blue-collar America—salt-of-the-earth types whose emotional vocabulary doesn’t extend beyond shotguns and deer antlers.

The wedding drags on forever because Cimino wants you to feel the Americana. The flannel. The beer. The myth of noble masculinity before it’s ripped apart by Vietnam. But here’s the thing: these men were already broken. The war just gives them permission to stop pretending.

And when we do get to Vietnam? It’s chaos. Violence. Screaming. And the infamous Russian roulette scene, which became the film’s calling card—and its most morally incoherent flourish. There is zero historical evidence of Viet Cong forcing POWs to play Russian roulette. But Cimino stages it like a ritual, turning it into a metaphor for trauma, chance, and male martyrdom. It's powerful. It’s unforgettable. It’s also exploitative as hell.

Vietnamese characters? Barely people. Mostly shouting, sneering caricatures wielding guns and cigarettes. Women? Decoration or devastation. Back home, Meryl Streep plays the sole female character with a name and lines, and even she exists only to absorb the psychic fallout of the men’s pain. She whispers. She weeps. She waits. It's not a role—it's a shrine to patience.

Nick never returns, Mike comes back hollowed out, Steven loses his legs. And yet, the film closes not on revolution, not on justice, but on “God Bless America”, sung through tears and post-traumatic inertia. A moment meant to feel solemn. What it is is deranged. A jingoistic lullaby over the corpses of broken men, performed by a community still pretending it understands what any of it meant.

Yes, the performances are incredible. Walken in particular looks like he’s dying from the inside out. Yes, Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is bleakly gorgeous. But The Deer Hunter is less a critique of war than a melodrama of male suffering, sanctified by violence and wrapped in a flag. It doesn’t ask why America destroys its men. It just wants you to cry about it, and maybe buy a commemorative rifle on the way out.

3.5 out of 5 bullets in the chamber
(One for Walken. One for De Niro’s tortured stillness. One for the cinematography. Half a star for the audacity to end with a hymn instead of an answer. The missing stars? Blown away with nuance, accountability, and the possibility that women might be more than witnesses to masculine collapse.)

#52 ‘Taxi Driver’

The Gospel According to Travis: Isolation, Guns, and the Cult of the Male Martyr

Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is the patron saint of sad, lonely men who think being misunderstood is a personality trait and that salvation lies in a bullet. It’s a technical masterpiece, a psychological character study, and—let’s be honest—a dangerous little fever dream in which white male alienation is elevated to biblical significance while women, cities, and teenage girls are left to rot in the periphery.

Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam vet and cab driver with insomnia and a hero complex the size of Manhattan. He’s disconnected from society, women, and himself—but instead of, say, going to therapy, he buys a small arsenal, lifts weights in his filthy apartment, and shaves his head into the kind of haircut that screams “I have thoughts about purity.”

We are meant to pity him, to peer into his diary of existential despair and see a tortured soul adrift in a morally decaying world. But here’s the thing: Travis isn’t a victim of the world. He’s a product of it. The film lets him grow increasingly unhinged while pretending he’s gaining clarity. His solution to feeling invisible? Become a vigilante messiah, complete with bloodshed and a martyr complex. It’s not redemption. It’s narcissism with a kill count.

Then there’s Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), the cool, competent campaign worker who’s too put-together for Travis, which of course makes her his obsession. He takes her on a date to a porn theater—because he doesn’t understand women, or boundaries, or reality—and then punishes her for being offended. His emotional maturity is stuck somewhere between a tantrum and a manifesto, and the film lets him spiral without accountability.

And then we come to Iris (Jodie Foster), the underage sex worker Travis decides to “save.” She’s 12. He’s armed. And the film’s moral compass? Spinning wildly. Iris isn’t a character—she’s a concept. She doesn’t need rescuing so much as he needs to rescue her, to justify his rage, his loneliness, his fantasy of moral purpose. And when he guns down her pimps and clients in a bloodbath, the city calls him a hero.

That’s the twist of Taxi Driver—a twist too many miss: Travis is celebrated, not condemned. He is praised, not punished. He commits mass murder and is rewarded with headlines and a wink from the woman who once rejected him. It’s satire, yes, but it’s also prophecy: a blueprint for decades of pop culture antiheroes who walk the line between critique and glamorization—and usually fall on the wrong side.

Yes, the filmmaking is exquisite. Bernard Herrmann’s score curls around the film like a nervous breakdown. De Niro gives one of the most unsettling performances ever committed to film. But Taxi Driver is also a litmus test: it shows you the disease, then dares you to sympathize with it.

4 out of 5 rearview mirrors
(One for Scorsese’s direction. One for De Niro’s performance. One for the score. One for having the guts to let its protagonist remain a monster. The missing star? Lost in the smirk of every man who saw this film and thought, “Yeah. I am just like Travis.”)

#51 ‘West Side Story’ (1961)

Jazz Hands, Knife Fights, and the Musical Myth of Mutual Destruction

West Side Story (1961) is the film that dared to ask: what if Romeo and Juliet danced, snapped, and racially profiled each other to a Leonard Bernstein score? It’s a Technicolor fever dream of doomed love, flying fists, and cultural cringe—a movie that tries to sell gang warfare as ballet and prejudice as plot device, all while brownface blazes across the screen like a spray tan apocalypse.

Set in a stylized New York City where teenage boys settle turf wars with pliés and pirouettes, the film follows the Jets (white, angry, emotionally stunted) and the Sharks (Puerto Rican, passionate, and played by approximately two actual Latinos). These rival gangs fight over territory they neither own nor understand, but really, they’re just foils for the tragic romance between Tony (Richard Beymer, charisma of a damp sponge) and Maria (Natalie Wood, buried under an accent and more eyeliner than a drag queen on opening night).

Maria is innocence incarnate. She sings, she prays, she smiles like she’s never had a thought she didn’t ask permission for. Meanwhile, Tony is the reformed bad boy who now works at a drugstore and dreams of a better life—specifically, one where Maria stands quietly beside him while he monologues about feelings. Their chemistry is tepid, their relationship rushed, and yet we’re supposed to believe they’ve transcended centuries of racial tension with a single duet on a fire escape.

But the real star of West Side Story is Rita Moreno as Anita—sassy, sultry, and the only character with fire in her blood and complexity in her arc. She dances with rage, sings with defiance, and delivers the film’s only emotional gut punch. And for this, she’s assaulted, silenced, and pushed to the sidelines. Because in this world, passion from a woman of color is dangerous unless it ends in tears and character growth for white men.

Let’s also talk about the film’s casual colonialism. The Sharks are painted as “other” in every frame—exotic, loud, uncivilized—despite the fact that they’re just trying to exist in a city that treats them like pests. The Jets, meanwhile, are given backstories, trauma, and redemption arcs, even as they harass, attack, and—let’s be clear—attempt rape. But they’re white, so the film frames them as troubled, not dangerous.

And then there's the music—glorious, complicated, symphonic. Bernstein and Sondheim elevate every scene with wit and heartbreak. But no matter how lush the score, it can’t mask the fact that this story wants to be a tragedy about hate, but ends up being a tragedy about how women of color are always left to mourn the mess men make.

3 out of 5 snapped fingers
(One for Moreno’s rage-dance. One for “America,” the only song with teeth. One for the choreography, which somehow makes rage lyrical. The missing stars? Lost somewhere between the brownface, the white saviorism, and the idea that love conquers all—as long as the woman stays silent and the man dies first.)

#50 ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’

Brooding Men, Absent Women, and the Quest to Destroy One (1) Piece of Jewelry

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) is Peter Jackson’s sweeping, reverent adaptation of Tolkien’s opus about good versus evil, friendship, sacrifice, and the crippling effects of male emotional repression stretched over three volumes and approximately 73 endings. It’s a technical marvel. A fantasy epic. And also, let’s be honest, a high-budget walking tour of toxic responsibility and gender imbalance—featuring men who refuse therapy and one (1) woman who is allowed to speak in full sentences before vanishing into moonlight.

Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) is our soft-eyed ring-bearer: a hobbit so pure of heart, so filled with anxious trembling, you wonder if the real villain here isn’t Sauron but the societal pressure to bear everyone’s burdens with a smile. He inherits the One Ring, a seductive symbol of power that corrupts all who touch it—except, conveniently, the right kind of men with strong enough wills and tragic enough backstories. Frodo sets off on a journey to destroy it, accompanied by eight other men and one reluctant immortal with great hair.

Let’s talk about the Fellowship: Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf, Boromir, Sam, Merry, Pippin. All men. A full-blown fantasy sausage fest, where the closest thing to emotional intimacy is Sam weeping while packing potatoes. Their banter is noble, their loyalties fierce, and their inner turmoil drenched in mythic masculinity. Aragorn broods. Boromir breaks. Gandalf gaslights. And the hobbits? Mostly they suffer.

Meanwhile, the women—if you can find them—are ethereal set dressing. Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) glows and whispers. Arwen (Liv Tyler) rides a horse in slow motion and promptly disappears for two films. Éowyn hasn’t even shown up yet, because apparently the War of the Ring has a strict “men only” sign taped to its front gate.

The film romanticizes suffering in a way only fantasy can: if you’re in pain, you’re noble. If you isolate yourself, you’re wise. If you die dramatically, even better. There’s no room for softness unless it’s wrapped in duty. No room for women unless they speak in riddles or fall in love on sight. And the few female characters who do appear are coded as either dangerous (Galadriel’s momentary madness) or angelic (Arwen, the prize).

To be clear: the film is gorgeous. The landscapes are breathtaking, the effects hold up, and Howard Shore’s score is nothing short of divine. But all the lush visuals in Middle-earth can’t hide the fact that this is a deeply gendered tale where men are actors, women are oracles, and no one ever asks Frodo if he’s okay before handing him the apocalypse.

3.5 out of 5 Elvish brooches
(One for the production design. One for the score. One for the accidental homoeroticism of Sam and Frodo. Half a star for Cate Blanchett whispering like she’s trying to hex the audience. The rest drowned in Mount Doom alongside the notion that female characters are allowed to carry anything heavier than longing.)

#49 ‘Intolerance’

Four Timelines, Zero Self-Awareness, and a Giant Monument to Male Ego

Intolerance (1916) is D.W. Griffith’s wildly ambitious, wildly self-serving response to criticism of his previous film—you know, the one that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. This time, Griffith wants you to know he’s actually a misunderstood humanist, bravely using four sprawling storylines across centuries to denounce prejudice and injustice. How noble. How grand. How utterly exhausting.

Let’s be clear: Intolerance isn’t a film. It’s a three-hour apology tour disguised as a biblical epic, a medieval drama, a French Revolution romance, and a gritty industrial-age tragedy—all tied together with a woman rocking a cradle in what can only be described as cinema’s first overextended metaphor. And yes, it’s a technical marvel for its time. But innovation is no excuse for incoherence—or hypocrisy.

Griffith cuts between ancient Babylon, 16th-century France, 1st-century Judea, and turn-of-the-century America with the grace of a man juggling his guilt in public. The message? Intolerance ruins lives. But the deeper message? “Please stop calling me racist.”

The “Modern” story centers around a poor, innocent couple torn apart by meddling reformers and the criminal justice system. The woman is framed, the man is nearly hanged, and Griffith wrings every drop of sentimentality from their suffering to make sure you know he cares about injustice—as long as it’s set to an organ score and bathed in soft lighting.

The women in this film? They’re either maternal angels, tragic martyrs, or hysterical moralizers. No nuance. No agency. Just archetypes to be exalted or condemned depending on how well they support the men’s moral awakenings. And speaking of awakenings—Griffith seems to think that simply not liking intolerance absolves him of actively perpetuating it just one year earlier.

And then there’s the Babylonian sequence: a lavish fever dream of elephants, bare midriffs, and CGI-before-CGI decadence. It’s glorious, yes—but also the cinematic equivalent of waving a jeweled dagger around to distract from the fact that you don’t understand your own point. The fall of Babylon is treated like high tragedy, but we’re too busy being blinded by set pieces to notice that the politics are paper-thin and the Orientalism is in full swing.

Yes, the set design is astonishing. Yes, the cross-cutting was groundbreaking. But so what? Intolerance wants to be a monument to moral progress, but it’s built on a foundation of shallow symbolism and reactionary self-defense. It condemns bigotry while bathing in spectacle. It tells you to care about justice while framing women and minorities as tragic accessories to the white male narrative arc.

2.5 out of 5 cradles rocked
(One for the Babylon sets. One for technical innovation. Half a star for audacity. The rest lost in the whiplash of four timelines trying to atone for one massive, unacknowledged sin. History may forget, but the cradle keeps swinging.)

#48 ‘Rear Window’

Voyeurism, Gaslighting, and the Glamorous Woman Who Should’ve Let Him Rot

Rear Window (1954) is Alfred Hitchcock’s glossy little peep show about one man’s paranoia, one woman’s devotion, and a murder that somehow becomes the least troubling thing in the film. It’s hailed as a masterpiece of suspense—and it is, if by suspense you mean “watching a man in a wheelchair ignore his fabulous girlfriend while spying on his neighbors and blaming women for wanting commitment.”

James Stewart plays L.B. Jefferies, a photojournalist laid up with a broken leg, stuck in his apartment and bored out of his mind—so naturally, he points a telephoto lens out the window and starts assigning narratives to everyone in his courtyard like he’s running a one-man surveillance state. He doesn’t just watch—he judges. The lonely dancer is slutty. The composer is tragic. The spinster is desperate. The married couple? Well, one of them ends up dead, which conveniently gives Jeff something to do besides dismiss his girlfriend’s entire personality.

Enter Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont, walking Dior gown and embodiment of 1950s feminine perfection. She brings him dinner. She flirts. She tries to seduce him with poise and pastries. And what does Jeff do? He whines that she’s “too perfect,” too “upper-class,” too much woman. He calls her “not the girl for a hard-boiled guy with a suitcase.” Translation: she makes him feel emasculated, and therefore she must be punished by plot.

And punished she is. She risks her life sneaking into the suspected murderer’s apartment—wearing pearls, no less—while Jeff sits back in his wheelchair and plays general. Her bravery? Downplayed. Her style? Mocked. Her reward? A smile and the implication that maybe now, maybe, she’s earned the right to be considered “serious” enough for a man who literally cannot move.

Meanwhile, the entire film is a voyeuristic fantasy masquerading as a morality tale. Jeff is constantly warned by his nurse (the no-nonsense Thelma Ritter, who deserves her own film) that he’s pushing boundaries, but the movie sides with him anyway. He’s right about the murder. He gets the girl. He gets his cast signed with moral vindication. The fact that he violated everyone's privacy and nearly got Lisa killed? Glossed over in favor of one more smug grin from the guy who solved a crime from a chair.

Hitchcock frames it all with precision, of course—his camera movements are surgical, the suspense masterfully orchestrated. But let’s not mistake craft for conscience. Rear Window doesn’t challenge voyeurism—it celebrates it. It says: as long as you’re right, it doesn’t matter who you watch, what you risk, or who pays the price.

3.5 out of 5 telephoto lenses
(One for Grace Kelly’s wardrobe. One for Thelma Ritter’s blunt wisdom. One for Hitchcock’s technical genius. Half a star for the brutal clarity of its message—just not the one it thinks it’s sending. The missing star? Left on the windowsill, along with Lisa’s wasted potential and a warning about trusting men who prefer you in silhouette.)

#47 ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

Decay, Desire, and the Ritual Humiliation of a Woman Who Dared to Age

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) isn’t just a film—it’s a slow, Southern-fried exorcism of feminine vulnerability, dressed in torn lace and lit by the flickering bulb of a single bare light. Tennessee Williams wrote a tragedy. Elia Kazan filmed a crucifixion. And at the center of it all is Blanche DuBois, clinging to her dignity like it’s the last dry match in a storm of male aggression and moral rot.

Vivien Leigh plays Blanche with operatic fragility—cracked, haunted, and clinging to performance as survival. She floats into New Orleans like a ghost of the Old South, all perfume and illusion, only to be torn to pieces by Stanley Kowalski, the snarling, sweat-soaked symbol of postwar masculinity in full, unrepentant bloom. Marlon Brando’s Stanley doesn’t just dominate the frame—he sweats on it, grunts on it, drags it into the bedroom and dares you to look away.

And that’s the real thesis here: power isn’t just taken, it’s forced into the light. Blanche's crimes? She’s older. She’s sexual. She’s poor. She tells lies, yes—but they’re the kinds of lies women are forced to tell just to be tolerated in rooms that have long since stopped making space for them. She wants kindness. Stanley wants dominance. Guess who wins?

The film stages their conflict like a death match, except there’s never really a question of outcome. Stanley is brute force, sanctioned by class, gender, and the camera. His violence is eroticized, his rage legitimized. He’s allowed complexity—he’s a working man! He’s threatened by change! He’s primal! Blanche? She’s just “crazy,” which is code for “too much.” Too loud, too dramatic, too full of inconvenient memories.

And when the inevitable happens—when Stanley rapes her (a scene softened by censors but still pulsing with horror)—the film doesn’t linger on her trauma. It pivots. Blanche is sent away, her psyche shattered, and everyone else gets to go on with their lives, with Stella cradling her newborn and choosing to stay with the man who destroyed her sister. Because apparently, the comfort of familiar violence is preferable to the discomfort of truth.

Women in Streetcar exist in two modes: martyr or fool. Stella is the good woman—devoted, fertile, forgiving. Blanche is the bad one—used up, performative, sexual outside the confines of marriage. One gets to stay. The other gets institutionalized. The message is clear: there’s no room in the world for complicated women. Not in New Orleans. Not in cinema. Not even in tragedy.

Yes, the performances are seismic. Yes, the direction is electric. But A Streetcar Named Desire is not just a masterpiece—it’s a slow-motion execution of a woman who dared to need more than pity and pearls. It drapes itself in lyricism and Southern decay, but underneath the sweat and bourbon is a stark warning: if you outlive your beauty, your use, or your mind, the best you can hope for is a polite escort to the edge of the frame.

4 out of 5 shattered lightbulbs
(One for Leigh’s devastating collapse. One for Brando’s terrifying magnetism. One for the raw poetry of Williams’ words. One for the film’s refusal to flinch. The missing star? Ripped away with Blanche’s dignity, never returned.)

#46 ‘It Happened One Night’

Class, Control, and a Lesson in Being Tamed by a Man With a Bus Ticket

It Happened One Night (1934) is often celebrated as the first true screwball comedy—the film that made banter sexy, launched a thousand rom-com clichés, and made walls of Jericho out of bedspreads and repressed desire. But peel back the charm, and what you really get is a Depression-era etiquette manual for rich women on how to become more likable by shutting up, eating carrots, and letting a down-on-his-luck reporter run your life.

Claudette Colbert plays Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who leaps off a yacht to escape her controlling father and marry a man he disapproves of. Enter Clark Gable as Peter Warne, a journalist with a hangover, a chip on his shoulder, and the firm belief that all a high-maintenance woman needs is a man to yell directions at her until she says thank you.

The plot? A cross-country journey where he teaches her how to dunk doughnuts and carry luggage, and she teaches him… well, nothing. Ellie is humiliated, patronized, and slowly ground down from sharp-tongued socialite to manageable love interest. And the film frames all of this as progress. A romance, even.

Their chemistry crackles, yes—but that’s because Colbert and Gable are working overtime to make this emotional hostage situation look cute. Peter steals her clothes, threatens to spank her (oh yes), and moralizes constantly about her “kind.” But don’t worry, he’s broke and handsome, so it’s framed as roguish charm instead of straight-up bullying.

The real transformation isn’t romantic, it’s ideological. Ellie begins the film as independent, entitled, and expressive. By the end, she’s been converted into the ideal Depression-era woman: modest, grateful, and ready to elope with a man who spent the entire film negging her into submission. Her reward for leaving behind wealth, security, and autonomy? A motel room and a man with a typewriter.

And let’s not forget the class politics. This is a film obsessed with the nobility of the working man and the frivolity of the rich—so naturally, the only way for Ellie to earn the audience’s sympathy is to be repeatedly humbled. She’s stripped of her privilege (literally), mocked for her ignorance, and ultimately redeemed only by accepting the gospel of manly common sense delivered by a guy who can’t even keep his job.

Yes, the dialogue is clever. Yes, the performances are iconic. Yes, it invented the modern romantic comedy. But It Happened One Night is less a love story than a domestication narrative wrapped in bus tickets and double entendres. It doesn't ask how two people can change together. It asks how a difficult woman can be rebranded into a desirable one—preferably by a man who knows how to hitchhike and say “shut up” with a smile.

3 out of 5 soggy carrots
(One for the sparkling script. One for Colbert’s luminous rebellion. One for the way Gable eats scenery like it’s part of the meal plan. The missing stars were last seen hiding behind the blanket of faux-equality, waiting for a rewrite where Ellie doesn’t have to be broken in to be loved.)

#45 ‘Shane’

Saddle Up, Shoot Straight, and Shut the Woman Up

Shane (1953) is often revered as the quintessential American Western—moral, mythic, and melancholic, with a mysterious hero riding in from nowhere to save a wholesome frontier family from capitalist thugs. It’s elegiac. It’s iconic. And it’s yet another cinematic hymn to masculine virtue, where the only thing more endangered than justice is a woman who speaks more than three times in a row.

Alan Ladd plays Shane, a gunfighter with a tragic past and perfectly pressed buckskin, who stumbles into a homestead full of salt-of-the-earth types and decides to play house… just long enough to mow down some villains and ruin a small boy’s emotional development forever. Shane doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it’s usually in terse, noble maxims that sound like they were written by a committee of Marlboro ads.

Shane is the ideal man of American myth: emotionally unavailable, morally tortured, deadly with a revolver, and gone before he can be held accountable for anything resembling intimacy. He’s brought in to help the Starrett family, led by Joe (Van Heflin), the sturdy homesteader who represents decency without sex appeal, and his wife Marian (Jean Arthur), who exists to serve dinner, look concerned, and radiate suppressed desire in every scene.

Because yes, there’s a love triangle, though it’s less a triangle than a blinking neon sign reading WOMEN LOVE MYSTERIOUS STRANGERS. Marian clearly yearns for Shane, but the film politely pretends she doesn’t, because acknowledging female desire—especially married female desire—might set the curtains on fire. She’s trapped in the role of frontier angel: morally pure, silently suffering, and sexually inert. Her big moment? Begging Shane not to kill anyone, which he promptly ignores.

Then there’s little Joey, the walking embodiment of postwar American innocence. He worships Shane with wide eyes and breathless declarations like “Shane! Come back!”—a line that echoes through film history like a cry for help from a generation raised on emotionally constipated heroes who solve everything with a bullet and a brooding stare. Joey doesn't want Shane to leave because Shane is his father figure, fantasy, and morality tale all in one. Also, Joey has no actual arc. He’s there to witness, adore, and ask the questions adult men are too repressed to voice.

Let’s not forget the villain, Jack Palance’s black-clad gunslinger, who’s evil because… well, he wears black and enjoys his job. He’s a stock baddie in a morality tale where violence is only justified when it’s your side pulling the trigger.

Yes, Shane is beautifully shot, all amber fields and majestic peaks. Yes, the performances are quietly affecting. But at its core, this is a movie about how the only good man is the one who leaves before you realize he doesn’t actually know how to stay. It glorifies the masculine exit—ride in, fix things, shoot people, don’t get emotional, leave. Women and children? They stay behind and deal with the fallout.

3 out of 5 saddlebags
(One for the cinematography. One for Jean Arthur's cheekbones doing all the emotional labor. One for the way Alan Ladd makes silence almost sexy. The missing stars? Lost on the trail, somewhere between toxic stoicism and the myth of the man who’s only good as long as he’s gone.)

#44 ‘The Philadelphia Story’

Champagne, Class, and the Rehabilitation of a Woman Who Talked Too Much

The Philadelphia Story (1940) is often praised as a sparkling screwball comedy, a triumph of wit, elegance, and romantic repartee. And sure, it’s got enough zingers to fill a martini glass. But under all the satin and banter lies a cautionary tale for ambitious women everywhere: if you’re too confident, too articulate, or too unwilling to be adored on command, you will be humiliated into submission—preferably by three men at once.

Katharine Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, a patrician goddess with a brain sharper than her cheekbones and a spine straight enough to make the entire male cast deeply uncomfortable. She’s introduced as imperious, self-righteous, and “unforgiving”—because nothing unnerves a man like a woman who expects consistency. She’s about to marry a self-made, slightly boring man, when her alcoholic ex-husband (Cary Grant, twinkle-eyed and casually violent) shows up to win her back with a smirk and some light gaslighting. Cue the class tension, champagne-fueled insults, and sudden moral enlightenment.

Tracy’s fatal flaw? She holds people to standards—including herself. This is presented not as integrity, but as ice. The men around her—her cheating father, her emotionally manipulative ex, and the tabloid reporter with a savior complex—all get to have flaws. Tracy? She has expectations. The horror.

Throughout the film, three men—each representing a different brand of masculine entitlement—circle her like vultures with tuxedos. Dexter (Grant) wants her back but only if she stops being so high-and-mighty. Mike (Jimmy Stewart) wants her to see the poetry in herself, but only after drunkenly pawing at her. George, her fiancé, wants her as a prize—idealized, pedestalized, and ready to be displayed like one of the family’s racehorses.

By the end, Tracy is brought low by a series of emotional interventions masquerading as romantic gestures. She realizes she’s “not human enough,” too “like a goddess,” and what she really needs is to be adored in spite of her imperfections. Which sounds empowering until you realize it’s code for: “Stop holding your boundaries, darling, and let one of us mansplain you into happiness.”

Yes, the script is clever. Yes, the performances are dazzling. Hepburn is radiant even as the film punishes her. Grant is dashing even as he shoves her to the floor in the opening scene—played for laughs, naturally. Stewart is charming, if clearly aware he’s third-string. But the core message never quite sparkles the way the surface does: if a woman dares to be more than an object of affection, she must be taken apart and reassembled into something softer, gentler, and just a little less herself.

3 out of 5 wedding veils
(One for Hepburn's brilliance, dimmed but not extinguished. One for the razor-sharp dialogue. One for Ruth Hussey, the only woman in the film who doesn't fall apart for a man. The missing stars were last seen somewhere in the champagne bucket, drowned in expectations and double standards.)

#43 ‘Midnight Cowboy’

Cowboy Hats, Crushed Dreams, and the Homoerotic Lament of American Failure

Midnight Cowboy (1969) struts in wearing boots, chewing on masculine mythology, and promptly collapses on a bus full of broken dreams. It’s the only X-rated film to win Best Picture, which sounds rebellious until you realize it’s mostly an elegy for straight male fragility wrapped in a fur coat of exploitation, poverty porn, and quietly repressed desire. It’s a tragedy, yes—but mostly a tragedy for men who thought the American Dream would include a blowjob and a penthouse.

Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a blonde himbo in a ten-gallon hat who thinks he can conquer New York City with nothing but a smile and a sexual business plan. He’s part cowboy, part child, all delusion. His idea of success is seducing rich women for money—a male prostitute with a Marlboro Man fantasy and the emotional depth of a wet cigarette. Spoiler: it does not go well.

Enter Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman, filthy and feral), a limping conman who sounds like he gargles gravel and lives in what can only be described as a biohazard. He befriends Joe, scams him, pities him, and ultimately becomes his only human connection in a city that chews through people like discarded fast food wrappers. Their bond? Tender, fraught, homoerotic in a way that makes 1969 deeply uncomfortable—and the film knows it. It hovers over their intimacy like a censor, never naming it, but always framing it as other.

Women, of course, are either predators or props. Joe's flashbacks to past trauma reduce one woman to a panting sex doll and another to the source of his psychic unraveling. The only women in the present are rich, lonely, or high—there to be judged, screwed, or hallucinated. The idea of mutual pleasure or emotional equality is not just absent—it’s unimaginable. The only tenderness allowed here is between two broken men, and even that ends in silence and death.

The film’s strength is its grime. Director John Schlesinger shoots New York like a sewer lit by neon. The dream is over, capitalism is a joke, and everyone’s body is for sale—but only the male body gets a close-up, a character arc, and a bus ride to Florida. Women’s bodies? Just part of the collateral damage of male disillusionment.

By the time Joe finally sheds his cowboy persona and tries to become “normal,” it’s too late. Ratso is dying next to him, and the film doesn’t offer redemption, just resignation. The message? America is not a land of opportunity. It’s a meat grinder of masculine fantasies, and all the women are just stains on the upholstery.

3 out of 5 dead dreams on the sidewalk
(One for the cinematography. One for Hoffman’s tragic charisma. One for the queer subtext it’s too scared to admit is text. The rest got left in the abandoned apartment with Ratso’s crutches and the myth of straight salvation.)

#42 ‘Bonnie and Clyde’

Guns, Glamour, and the Fetishization of Doomed Rebellion

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) wants you to believe it’s a revolution—a jagged, sexy break from the sanitized violence and moral platitudes of Old Hollywood. And in some ways, it is: it's bold, bloody, and fueled by the same defiance it pretends to critique. But don’t be fooled by the berets and the banjo. At its heart, this film is yet another tale of male dysfunction given mythic weight, while the woman beside him gets immortalized for daring to hold the gun.

Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow is a limp-dicked dreamer with a gun fetish and an ego problem. He’s charming, sure, in that casually narcissistic way men often are when they’ve never been told no. He meets Bonnie (Faye Dunaway), a bored waitress yearning for something more than empty lipstick tubes and dusty front porches. But instead of offering her freedom, he hands her a pistol and a place in his fantasy.

And what a fantasy it is. Clyde doesn’t just rob banks—he curates the performance of rebellion. He wants the fame, the danger, the immortality. And Bonnie? She’s expected to perform devotion, hunger, and horniness—just not too much of any of them. When she demands intimacy, he recoils. When she writes poetry, he dismisses it. When she becomes the face of their legend, he pouts like the myth is slipping from his grip.

Bonnie is fascinating—smarter than the script gives her credit for, sharper than Clyde deserves. Faye Dunaway plays her like a woman torn between hunger and doom, lust and despair. But the film doesn’t let her evolve. She's not a partner—she’s a reflection of Clyde’s ego and the audience’s arousal. Her longing for purpose is packaged as youthful recklessness, her sexuality reduced to a narrative inconvenience.

And then there’s the violence. Bonnie and Clyde didn’t just raise the bar—it blew it away with a tommy gun. The slow-motion bloodbath that ends the film is iconic, yes. But it’s also indulgent. The film wants to have it both ways: to revel in the erotic charge of danger and then punish its characters for being too good at it. It’s a morality play where the audience gets off on the sin and still gets to feel virtuous when the hammer drops.

Women in this world are adornments, sidekicks, mothers, or burdens. Blanche Barrow is hysterical comic relief, a shrieking foil to Bonnie’s cool detachment. And Bonnie herself is punished for picking up the gun—not because she kills, but because she dares to find pleasure in it.

Yes, the cinematography is electric. Yes, the editing changed cinema. But Bonnie and Clyde doesn’t subvert the myth—it feeds it. It packages masculine violence in sepia tones and pelvic thrusts, then asks us to mourn when the bullet casings hit the ground.

3.5 out of 5 stray bullets
(One for Dunaway. One for that final, devastating silence. One for making Old Hollywood flinch. Half a star for style. The rest riddled through the windshield—because in the end, rebellion was always going to look better on him than on her.)