Author Michael Korda ( Charmed Lives: A Family Romance) writes:
Few things are more challenging than picking ten favorites out of such a long list of distinguished films as that of Criterion, and it seems only fair to point out that, since I am not a film scholar, my choices are largely idiosyncratic and personal, and consist mostly of films that I would like to see again, or that made a great impression on me when I saw them many years ago, or that are somehow involved with my life—for, to be absolutely honest, I am the son of Vincent Korda, the art director; a nephew of his brothers, Alexander and Zoltán Korda; and also a nephew of the actress Merle Oberon. And as if that weren’t enough, my mother was an English actress, Gertrude Musgrove, as was my aunt Joan Gardner (married to Zoltán). Well, go watch The Private Life of Henry VIII, with Charles Laughton, again, and you’ll see them all. Many of the directors on Criterion’s list of films I knew, albeit as a child, and a few of them had a sizable impact on my life; the French, British, German, and Austro-Hungarian ones were, many of them, close friends of my father’s and familiar figures around the dinner table in Beverly Hills or London. So don’t look for objectivity in this list.
Also, I am not going to try and rate these films, so they don’t appear in order of quality or importance so much as in terms of lasting impact on me. In most cases, I haven’t seen them for years, which perhaps adds to their glow for me, like seeing the name of an old girlfriend—yet in each case I can almost play the film in question in my mind’s eye, scene by scene. Well, I have that kind of memory. I didn’t grow up in the movie business for nothing! They are in alphabetical order, simply because it’s easier that way. So here we go.
Biography via Criterion.
