The Observer Unveils '50 Lost Movie Classics'

The Sunday Observer has a big surprise -- a nearly 5,000 word list of '50 Lost Movie Classics,' as compiled by the paper's film critics with assistance from filmmakers like Joe Wright and Peter Webber. By 'lost', they don't mean silent films that failed to survive to the present day or anything like that. They mean films from all eras that the critics supposedly got wrong and now should reevaluate. About half of the list is intriguing, while the other half is crazy. One of the most intriguing selections is Dreamchild, a 1985 fantasy-bio of Alice Liddell, the child who inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Also, there's 1978's Newsfront, which is supposedly Australia's version of Network, and a little-known Randolph Scott western called Ride Lonesome. They also rave about an obscure 1971 horror film called Let's Scare Jessica to Death. All of these will be arriving in my mailbox soon. However, the list also contains some 'lost classics' that I know were rightfully 'lost' the first time.

Those include Spike Lee's unwatchable borefest Bamboozled, a snorer from the Naked Gun guys called Top Secret! and Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin from 1952, which was improved on in the 1990 remake with Gene Hackman. Then there's Kevin Costner's Tin Cup, which I'm not even going to comment on. The list also includes titles with 'blacklist' cred, which is never a quality guarantee. Finally, there are films like 1969's Queimada, a "dramatised Marixst essay" about "neo-colonialism," and Le Petomane, a "masterpiece" from 1979 about a man with an "elastic anus."