Directed by Steven Spielberg – Part One

November 26, 2021

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Fifty years ago, a young filmmaker made his first feature movie, which debuted on network television.  Duel told the story of a man traveling on a business trip who is terrorized by a mysterious truck driver.  The film was well received, particularly for the directing style and accomplishments of Steven Spielberg.  Little did we know that he would help revolutionize the concept of a blockbuster movie and that fifty years later, he would still be going strong with a new picture out next month.  He has succeeded across all genres – action, drama, period piece, science-fiction, and even animated films.  On December 10^th, we will see him try something brand new – a musical.  He has decided to take on the remake of the hit Broadway show and 1961 film West Side Story.   One could ask if we really need a remake of a movie that’s considered a classic, but in rewatching it a few months ago, I couldn’t help but notice that aspects of it are a little dated (certainly the casting choices), and if there is anyone to trust with remaking a movie like this, it has to be Spielberg.  In anticipation of the release of West Side Story, I decided to revisit some of his most notable films, check out ones that I never saw, and see if I could decide on a top 10 list.  With a filmography like Spielberg’s, this naturally wasn’t very easy.  Each of the top five on my list could be considered one of the greatest movies ever made.  The scope of his career is truly impressive and is probably unrivaled by any other director we’ve seen.  Let’s get started.

Special Category – Historical Epics

When embarking on this two-part piece, I had to decide – am I ranking his “best” films or my “favorite” films?  I decided on the latter, simply because these are the movies that are the most fun to revisit.  Some are only a decade old, and some are ones that I saw when I was in grade school.  But I had to decide what to do with a few of his greatest accomplishments, but not necessarily ones that I consider favorites.  There were three that come to mind that I find Hall of Fame achievements in filmmaking, but for various reasons, ones I will likely rarely revisit.

• Schindler’s List (1993) – Probably one of the most important, but difficult films I’ve ever seen.  Spielberg’s tale of the Holocaust, with Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved over 1,000 Jewish prisoners from being killed in the Holocaust.  The film is moving throughout, but brutal at times, as Spielberg held nothing back in showing the horror of this time in our history.  He has often said that he considered telling this story earlier in his career, but realized that he needed to mature as a director (and as a person) before he could tackle such a difficult topic.  Schindler’s List delivered Spielberg’s overdue Oscar recognition with wins for Picture and Director, among five other awards.

• Saving Private Ryan (1998) – Much is made about the intense opening sequence of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, a harrowing depiction of the brutal loss of life that fateful day.  The sequence is an incredible achievement in filmmaking, albeit very difficult to watch.  But that’s just the beginning.  After the battle, Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks, in an incredible performance) learns that he must lead a mission to find Private Ryan (Matt Damon) to send him home, after his three brothers were killed in action.  Throughout the film, we feel the connection the troops establish with each other, just trying to keep their sanity.  But we also feel the terrifying suspense of something going wrong at any minute, which happens a number of times throughout the movie.  One of the best war films ever made (along with Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, released the same year), this film delivered Spielberg his second Oscar for Best Director.

• Lincoln (2012) – A tour de force performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16^th president makes Spielberg’s drama a compelling watch.  What works best, unlike most Lincoln biopics that try to tell the entire life story, is that Spielberg focuses only on the last few months of his life.  The film is concentrated on the time in which Lincoln is trying to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed through Congress, as the Civil War is about to end.  By taking this approach, we can spend enough time in the cabinet room and the halls of Congress to deeply examine the debates that were happening among the leaders of the country, instead of glossing over this time to get to all of the relevant details of his entire life.  It’s another example of why I like biopic movies that concentrate on a specific time to demonstrate the challenges and accomplishments of a character, instead of the typical “cradle to grave” story we see too often.  Day-Lewis would go on to win his third Oscar for his outstanding performance. 

OK, now that we’ve covered those Hall of Fame movies, let’s move on to my top 10.

10. The Post (2017)

I had a hard time settling on what to pick for this spot, with a few other films of Spielberg’s that I really liked (Munich, Empire of the Sun, and The Adventures of Tintin) just getting nudged out by this story of the journalists behind the discovery and reporting of The Pentagon Papers.  I wrote about The Post a year ago in my Clooney vs. Hanks piece, where I noted that aspects of the movie can be a little melodramatic in portraying journalists as heroes.  I think I will always compare this film to All the President’s Men, with The Washington Post in the center of the frame of both movies.  And that’s an unfair comparison – you can’t top one of the best journalism films of all time.  But The Post is still a very good movie, featuring Meryl Streep (in her first collaboration with Spielberg, if you can believe it) as Post owner Katherine Graham facing the dilemma of publishing a controversial story that could rankle Washington, D.C., all while facing her company’s bankruptcy.  Tom Hanks plays Post editor Ben Bradlee in a role that borders on impression at times, but thankfully Hanks’s talent keeps it from going too far off the rails.  Yes, it’s a bit of the old Hollywood magic that we sometimes see from Spielberg, but fire up the popcorn – I’m here for it.

9. Bridge of Spies (2015)

More than a decade after the forgettable snoozefest The Terminal, Spielberg once again teamed up with Tom Hanks for this real-life espionage thriller set during the Cold War.  When I first watched this film, I knew nothing about it, except for the involvement of Spielberg, Hanks and some British actor who robbed Sylvester Stallone of his Oscar.  You see, in early 2016, the sentimental pick for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards was Sly, for his reprisal of Rocky Balboa in the very successful Creed.  Everyone thought this would be a nice reward for someone who won Best Picture for the first film in the storied franchise forty years earlier.  It was considered a bit of an upset when Stallone lost to Mark Rylance, for his performance in Bridge of Spies.  Considering my limited knowledge about the film, I was quite surprised how much I liked it, and even revisited it last year for my Clooney vs. Hanks piece.

Hanks plays Jim Donovan, an insurance attorney who is tasked with representing Rudolf Abel (played by Rylance), an accused Russian spy who is arrested.  Faced with the moral dilemma of representing someone charged with committing a crime against his country, with the feeling that everyone deserves to be defended by an attorney, Donovan takes the case.   Fast forward a few years and Donovan is recruited by the government to help trade Abel for Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down and captured in Russia.  Hanks travels to Germany to help negotiate the deal, and the tension continues to escalate as he tries to get a deal done.

Spielberg does a wonderful job in directing this film, giving us the balance of an “everyman lawyer” in the form of Hanks (really, who is better than Hanks to play such a role) contrasting with the mystery of Rylance’s spy.  At the time of his arrest, Abel was in his late 50s (as was Rylance during filming), so it’s not like Hanks is squaring off with James Bond.  Rylance doesn’t portray the spy as someone who is intimidating and threatening.  Instead, he is cerebral and methodical in his role as an intelligence officer, trading secrets during the height of the Cold War.  If you like old fashioned spy movies, Spielberg, Hanks and Rylance deliver a strong one with Bridge of Spies.

8. Catch Me If You Can (2002)

Trust me, it was pure coincidence that the first three films on this list are all based on true stories, and all feature Tom Hanks in a leading role.  Here, he plays FBI agent Carl Hanratty chasing after Frank Abagnale, a con artist and master forger, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.  This movie is a blast – an excellent cat and mouse game of watching Leo try to outsmart Hanks, barely escaping his grasp many times.  Spielberg does a really nice job of mixing in the chase storyline with the “lives” that Abagnale chose to live – a doctor, a lawyer (fooling his fiancé, played by Amy Adams in one of her first roles, and her father, played by Martin Sheen), and most famously, an airline pilot.  At the end of the day, Abagnale’s just trying to make something of himself to impress his father, played by Christopher Walken, in an excellent performance.  Yes, the character motivation is a little cliched, but we’ll forgive it since the film is so well executed.   I almost picked this as a comfort movie for a recent post, then remembered it would probably crack my top ten for this list and (spoiler warning), will probably make another top ten list I’m working on for later this year.  While the runtime is a little long, and a few sequences could have been trimmed, Catch Me If You Can is the classic definition of a fun rewatchable film.

7. Minority Report (2002)

Watching this movie almost twenty years after it was made through the prism of today’s world of technology – holy shit.  Based on a 1956 short story by Phillip K. Dick, and set in 2054, certain aspects of the film’s vision of the future are downright creepy.  Tom Cruise plays an agent of the “Precrime” unit, where crimes are predicted before they happen by three “Precogs”, which allows law enforcement to stop the crimes before they happen.  When a vision arises with Cruise’s character committing murder, suddenly, the hunter becomes the hunted.  A futuristic world is the setting for an action thriller, where we follow Cruise narrowly escaping his pursuers, all while marveling at the universe that Dick wrote about and Spielberg brings to the big screen. 

While we don’t have people predicting crimes before they happen, considering Minority Report was released five years before the first iPhone, let alone all of the technology advancements since then, it’s pretty interesting to see how much is already in place today, let alone 30 years from now.  The ability to track anyone anywhere is pretty spot on, including facial recognition technology enabling the practices.  Electronic newspapers that look like future iPads.  Watching Cruise swipe through screens with the wave of his hands, like we regularly do now every hour of every day.  Audio responsive technology at his house that can play videos or music with ease.  A feeling sometimes that we are constantly under surveillance with our phones.  And while one could argue the power today is more in the hands of large technology companies than the government (with the film presenting an alternate scenario), do we really know everything the federal government knows about us?  OK, taking my tin foil hat off now.  One thing that is downright creepy is the targeted ads.  When Cruise is walking through malls or riding on public transportation with personalized advertisements trying to sell him the latest fashion product, it feels like those ads that show up on your phone an hour after you were having a conversation about the same product with someone.  Yup, we might be doomed.

6. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

OK, let’s try to end on a positive note, shall we?  After a subpar sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1984, and a few films with mild success, albeit with favorable critical reviews, Spielberg returned to the world of Indiana Jones with this third entry in the franchise.  He went back to the formula that worked so well for Raiders – an archeological adventure with fun action sequences, humorous moments, evil villains, and, in a brilliant casting move, adding Sean Connery as Indy’s father and comic foil throughout most of the movie.  Just like the original film, the opening sequence features Indy on a quest for something of value, this time in the form of a flashback when he was a teenager, played by River Phoenix.  In addition to being a fun way to start a movie, it also demonstrates the relationship between Indy and Henry, as well as Henry’s obsessive nature that he would pass down to his son. 

I’ve always had a soft spot for this film because of the fun action sequences and humor, but most of all, because of the puzzle-solving nature of the story as they try to locate the Holy Grail, based on clues they find along the way.  The knight’s tomb under the library (“X marks the spot.”) is a great sequence (well, except for the rats – yuck), leading to an exciting chase on speedboats through the canals in Venice.  Spielberg saves the best for last as the ending sequence sees Indy navigating a series of tests to find the knight guarding the grail, testing his faith along the way, in a mission to save his father.  As a lifelong mystery fan, anytime a character has to solve a puzzle to figure something out, I’m always going to be entertained.  Not to mention that this is a textbook definition of a fun popcorn movie.  Watching Ford and Connery go toe to toe is a lot of fun, like when Henry accidently starts a fire while they are tied up, flying together battling Nazi warships, and of course, when we learn the real source of Indy’s nickname.  But wait, if I love this movie so much, how can it only be number six on my list?  Well, we are talking about Steven Spielberg and my top five is a pretty impressive group of films.  We’ll cover those next week.

That’s all for this week.  I hope you enjoyed part one of my look at one of the best directors of our generation.  I’ll be back next week for part two.  Thanks for reading and if you’d like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe here.