Poll: Andrew Sarris and Your Greatest Films of All Time

In his column about the revival of Max Ophuls' "The Earrings of Madame de...," the dean of American film critics, Andrew Sarris, proclaims Ophüls' masterwork the greatest film of all time -- edging out, as the headline puts it, "Welles, Renoir, Ford, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Buñuel, Mizoguchi." [Please note: Dave Kehr points out that there is no umlaut in "Ophuls" -- although that's how it was (mis-)spelled in Sarris's NY Observer piece.]

Writes Sarris:

If you've never seen this masterpiece, now is your chance—and even if you have, a second or third viewing is strongly recommended. If you don’t choose to take my word for the film’s sublimity, then heed the sagacious words of Dave Kehr instead: “Should the day ever come when movies are granted the same respect as the other arts, 'The Earrings of Madame de …' will instantly be recognized as one of the most beautiful things ever created by human hands.” “Perfection,” proclaimed the late Pauline Kael, in one of her more perceptive pronouncements. And David Thomson delivers an eloquent encomium to Ophüls with a remarkably expansive entry in his much-honored "The New Biographical History of Film." Curiously, I’ve had a much harder time convincing my students in film class of the “greatness” of Ophüls and "Madame de…". It may partly be a generation gap, and partly the youthful suspicion of romanticism in some of its less cynical guises. Then again, even among my contemporaries, I have become notorious over the years for my ecstatic—to the point of orgasmic—addiction to camera movement as an expression of the tyranny of time in the drama of human life. This predilection on my part may be something I picked up from the unified-visual-field theories of the late André Bazin.