[9]

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway star as the legendary real-life bank robbers in Arthur Penn’s volatile Bonnie and Clyde. With its anti-hero point of view and graphic violence, this film helped lead the charge for grittier, more realistic fare that cropped up throughout the ’70s. While the film certainly sensationalizes the criminals, it also humanizes them. It’s easy to see how a bored waitress like Bonnie Parker would fall for a handsome bad boy like Clyde Barrow (I mean, who wouldn’t get in a car with smoking-hot Warren Beatty?) And since the two only robbed banks, they became folk heroes to a working class destroyed by foreclosures. I also like that the film suggests Clyde is impotent. It’s refreshing to see a tough guy with flaws and foibles, and it also makes the romantic relationship more interesting than most.

Gunga Din (1939)

August 24, 1939

[10]

Directed by George Stevens and inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Gunga Din is the story of three indomitable British soldiers who find themselves at the center of a battle against the bloodthirsty Thuggee cult. Captured and enslaved with an aspiring water boy (the title character), the men endanger their lives to thwart an ambush of the British army coming to rescue them. Gunga Din is a rousing adventure that exalts camaraderie among men. The stalwarts are played by Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Oscar-winner Victor McLaglen (The Informer, The Quiet Man). The men spend half their time quarreling and the other half working against a common enemy — but it’s a three-way bromance, to be sure. Grant and McLaglen even spend half the movie trying to trick Fairbanks, whose character is leaving the army to get married, back into service. Joan Fontaine has the thankless role of Fairbanks’ betrothed, the Yoko threatening to break up the band.

The General (1926)

June 11, 1926

[9] Silent-screen star Buster Keaton plays a train engineer who gets rejected by the Confederate army because his job is too important to leave vacant. But he gets his chance to serve the South when Union soldiers steal his beloved…