Robin Baker

When compiling this list I remembered Rex Harrison’s appearance as a castaway on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs – he had the chutzpah to select a playlist comprising almost exclusively of Benny Goodman tracks. By the same rules I could very easily have been happy with wall-to-wall Hitchcock, Powell or mid-period Woody Allen. In the name of diversity I have added a few other directors and, given that I know of no useful measure of greatness, I worked largely by the pleasure principle. I have watched each of these films repeatedly for decades. Each time I watch them they surprise with new meanings or details that I had failed to spot in the past. Even writing down their names makes me want to turn on the DVD player as soon as I get home. If, howver, I was eschewing notions of greatness and my list was wholly determined by the number of times I have watched a film it might have looked rather more like this: Parkgate Iron and Steel Co., Rotherham (Mitchell and Kenyon, 1901); N or NW (Len Lye, 1937); English Harvest (Jennings, 1938); Kiss Me Kate (Sidney, 1953); Land of the Pharaohs (Hawks, 1955); Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959); Snow (Jones, 1963); Zulu (Endfield, 1964); Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (Demy, 1967).