My Top Ten Criterions

Tom Schnabel

Music director at Los Angeles’s KCRW radio station, Tom Schnabel started the daily program Morning Becomes Eclectic in the 1980s, first bringing world music to U.S. radio with such artists as Buena Vista Social Club, Ravi Shankar, and Caetano Veloso. Schnabel is also currently the program adviser for the Hollywood Bowl and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

1. Trouble in Paradise     Ernst Lubitsch Witty, wonderful, wacky Lubitsch at his best. His daughter worked at KCRW!

2. La strada     Federico Fellini I always cry at the end, then go out for pasta and cheap red wine.

3. Children of Paradise     Marcel Carné You can hear J.-L. Barrault cry “Garance!” from the other side of the world.

4. M. Hulot’s Holiday     Jean-Pierre Melville So funny I disrupted a screening with my laughter.

5. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie     Luis Buñuel The only thing better than this great movie is Buñuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh.

6. The Wages of Fear     Henri-Georges Clouzot The suspense is mesmerizing, even paralyzing.

7. Woman in the Dunes     Hiroshi Teshigahara It’s as much an impressionist painting as it is a film.

8. Tokyo Olympiad     Kon Ichikawa  This great film was made back when Olympic athletes were regular folk.

9. Unfaithfully Yours     Preston Sturges You’ll never watch a conductor the same way after seeing this great Preston Sturges film.

10. And God Created Woman      Roger Vadim I saw this movie as an adolescent in the late fifties, at the Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades, and it made me feel strange things I’d never felt before . . . I also thought that Brigitte Bardot was the number-one sex kitten on earth.