"I knew and liked David Lean, a director of genius, who was very kind to me when he was making The Sound Barrier for my Uncle Alex, and Brief Encounter has always seemed to me the very best of classic British filmmaking, with its fiercely restrained emotions and good manners trumping passion, typical of its era. It is the best of the “small” British pictures, which my Uncle Alex tried to replace with “big” British pictures in an attempt to outdo Hollywood, rather than coexist with it, after he left it for Britain in 1932. Lean, who in Brief Encounter made this most English of English films (a distinction perhaps shared by This Happy Breed and The Fallen Idol, see below), moved onward and upward to ever bigger pictures, by way of The Sound Barrier, Summertime, and eventually the biggest and best of all epic films, Lawrence of Arabia, escaping from the confines of England to “international” films that challenged and beat those of the Hollywood studios. But Brief Encounter was a perfect, close-up view of a shabby, threadbare England, the England of “books from Boot’s, good drains, and class distinction,” in John Betjeman’s words, and of a muted, sad, doomed, and very English love affair. It has always been a film that puzzles the French, who find it hard to believe in a love story with almost no eroticism, and in which the lovers are usually dressed in raincoats. It is also Trevor Howard, a wonderful actor, at his best."

"And number five, I’m going to say Smokey and the Bandit. I’m back on the comedy. It’s between Smokey and the Bandit and OSS 117, which is a French movie — it’s sort of like their version of the Naked Gun movies, but their agent’s really good; he’s actually very good at many things. He just happens to be a complete moron. But he’s a lover, he knows many languages… Anyway, Smokey and the Bandit, Jackie Gleason’s performance and Sally Field’s; she was amazing. It’s also a good snapshot of America when being a truck driver was cool. [laughs] Being an 18-wheeler truck driver was like, “That’s a good job.” I mean, they were badasses, and you don’t really think of that now; they don’t have that same mystique. But Jackie Gleason as Buford T. Justice… He has his own f***ing entrance music; every time he shows up, they’ve got this tuba playing, he’s there on the scene, and he’s doing his schtick, doing the best stuff. He’s another character, like the Joe Gideon character in All That Jazz, who’s despicable. He’s a racist, he’s a terrible father, he’s a sh**y cop, and you just can’t wait for him to get back on the screen. He has a line in there, talking about Sally Field, who runs off, and she’s a dancer, and he says, “That’s what you get for poontangin’ around with a bunch of hippie show folk.” [laughs] That is the quality of stuff he’s doing in that movie; it’s just so brilliant."

"One of my favorite mini-genres is the B crime movie from the late fifties and early sixties. It was a unique period in American cinema that gave birth to these half-cocked, no-budget movies that were made by some visionary filmmakers. They’re all super raw and gritty, very existential, and absolutely innovative in technique. It’s no wonder that the French New Wave filmmakers all discovered them and ripped them off (I’m looking at you, Jean-Pierre Melville). Movies like Don Siegel’s The Lineup and Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract (both of which have popped up on the new Criterion Channel recently!) embody this subgenre, but the high point for me is Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence, which seems to grow in stature every year. It’s hard to describe it. Imagine if Orson Welles was a crazed junkie on the Bowery in the late 1950s and somehow conned someone out of $20k to make a bleak movie about a hit man. It’s sorta part Point Blank, part Taxi Driver, part Shadows, and it’s as hardboiled as they come. It’s also one of the great New York City movies, with amazing time-capsule photography in all the boroughs and near pristine documentary coverage of streets. The Criterion disc also unearthed another absolute gem: a 1990 documentary in which Baron visits all the locations from the film. Oh, and the Criterion cover art, by comic artist Sean Phillips, is maybe my favorite cover! And the edition also includes a graphic novel based on the film! (Damn, should I have put this first?)"