Ten American Films That Capture The Soul of America

Wild Boys of the Road

The premise is simple. I here present ten American films from the last ninety years that in their own way reveal aspects of the American zeitgeist. As both a visual and oral story-telling medium, cinema is uniquely qualified to mirror society and its ever-changing norms and shifting ideals and concerns. Between them the films I've selected do not capture every aspect of this country’s culture, but they do represent different times, different moods and different places reflective of the American experience, spirit and soul. The films I selected are:

Wild Boys of the Road (1933) Wellman

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Ford

On the Waterfront  (1954) Kazan

The Great Escape (1963) J. Sturges

The Last Picture Show (1971) Bogdanovich

Taxi Driver (1976) Scorsese

Do the Right Thing (1989) S. Lee

The Ice Storm  (1997) A. Lee

Mean Girls (2004) Waters

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) Tarantino

I don’t pretend that this is a definitive list. One could easily include another dozen or more films (I’ve got examples at the end of the post) and other people would have selected some very different movies for the same task. But I believe these films, from nine different decades and ten different directors, provide an introduction into an exploration of the American soul through film.

The first two films on this list are both set during the Great Depression which effected nearly every American — most adversely. The Depression wasn’t just a devastating economic event that dominated political discourse, it insinuated itself into the culture. Early on movies did two things with the Depression: try to make sense of it and try to distract people from it. These two films stared the Depression in the eye.

Wild Boys of the Road follows a group of teenagers who’ve left home to take their chances on the road. The main protagonist Eddie (Frankie Darro) has done so to ease the financial burden on his parents. It is an unflinching look at the hardships everyday Americans faced, particularly those who “rode the rails.” We see the brutality of those enforcing the law, whether city police or railroad bulls. There is a rape, a boy is maimed and children are arrested. Despite this, Wild Boys of the Road is not a pessimistic film. It is imbued with the spirit of can-do American youth and the belief that everyone is entitled to an even break. Wild Boys is also not sentimental. The ending is hopeful, not sappy. The kids are plucky and determined, unwilling to bow to the enormous obstacles that have been put in front of their pursuit of the American dream. It is a classic of the pre-code era directed by William Wellman,  arguably the greatest director of the pre-code era. In addition to Wild Boys he directed Heroes For Sale (1933) which is another hard look at the Depression, The Public Enemy (1931) and Midnight Mary (1933).

My favorite of John Ford’s films is Grapes of Wrath which explores a different aspect of the Depression, the Dust Bowl and the migration west from it by the people who came to be known as Okies. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by John Steinbeck, the film follows the fortunes of the Joad family, specifically Tom Joad who we meet after he’s released from prison after serving time for manslaughter. Tom is a sort of everyman, despite his time behind bars (after all it was self-defense). Through him we discover the devastation that has been visited upon the Great Plains by the combined might of Mother Nature and banks. Farms have been lost, families displaced and some people have given up or gone mad. The Joad family embodies the spirit of a people who push on, dreaming of greener grass on the other side — in this case California, where there are supposedly jobs aplenty. Upon arriving in the promised land they are confronted by the hard truth that this is no eden after all and the competition for menial jobs is stiff and the bosses are greedy and uncaring. To organize is to court trouble. Strike breakers are a vicious enemy as are — sadly — the police. Grapes of Wrath is a beautifully filmed and filled with brilliant performances (Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine to name a few) and in my mind one of the best films in the American canon. Part of its brilliance stems from — like Wild Boys, only more poetically — it’s realism. Again this is a film without sentimentally but one with a sense of hope. A cynical movie about the Depression would be cruel. Grapes of Wrath is no joyous romp but it does reflect the power of the American spirit.

On the Waterfront

On the Waterfront is a compelling film on a lot of levels. It is about working men, it is about corruption, it is about organized crime, it is about unions, it is about the often very fine line between truth-telling and betrayal, it is about the power of the group and the power of the individual. Set in the docks of  New Jersey in the 1950s, Waterfront was a star vehicle for Marlon Brando who portrayed the conflicted longshoreman, Terry Malloy. Malloy is a simple working class stiff who coulda been a contender as a boxer but has had to settle for the dreary nine-to-five routine. He is protected by a strong union (albeit a corrupt one) but is also at its mercy. A crime commission is investigating the union and others like it and stool pigeons are being dealt harsh mob justice. It is a classic story of how far loyalty goes and the heavy price of being honest. It was also a story ripped from the day’s headlines and thus resonated with audiences. Waterfront looked at American brotherhood and its corruption by evil forces. Another dichotomy of the American Dream. Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint also feature as part of one of the best casts ever assembled. 

The Great Escape was a phenomenon in the early and mid 1960s. It had an all-star cast led by Mr. Cool himself, Steve McQueen. It was set during the “Good War” when Americans were unquestionably the good guys. It was a true story. It had action. It was smart. It was beautifully shot. Americans have always loved war pictures of all kinds and have made scads of them, from the jingoistic and racist to gritty dramas with strong character development to the fantastical explosion-laden adventure story, to the faithfully told true story. Stars ranging from John Wayne, to Humphrey Bogart, to Brad Pitt to Clint Eastwood to Lee Marvin, to Cary Grant to Henry Fonda to Ben Affleck to George C. Scott to William Holden have featured. Casablanca (1942) Curtiz, can be safely considered the most popular of WWII films, as well as one of the most critically esteemed. But the Great Escape — the true story of a mass escape from a German POW camp during World War II — symbolized American derring do in the form of McQueen’s character Virgil Hilts. He was an individualist, thumbing his nose at the hated Nazis and he did it with verve, as encapsulated by his vain attempt to escape through the Alps on a motorcycle. The British were our allies, they were good, disciplined, smart people, but to American audiences they lacked the panache of Yankees like Hilts. Hilts was a one-man case of American exceptionalism.

The Last Picture Show shone a very bright light on small town America, Texas style. It’s cast of characters included lonely housewives, carousing youngsters, grizzled and wise elders, dashing playboys and the mentally challenged. It is at heart a sad story of emptiness and loss and the great efforts people make to escape their doldrums, without physically leaving. Sex is an escape. Drinking is an escape. The movies are an escape. Sports are an escape. But only a character who joins the army really gets away (and that to the confines of military life). This is an America rarely depicted in films but one that tens if not hundreds of millions have lived in. Life offers small rewards, sparingly doled out. Despair lurks around the corner for most, yet hope is a constant — whether justified or not. The Last Picture Show avoids being depressing; it has compelling characters whose stories are relatable and engaging. When a teenage boy psychologically wounds the middle aged women with whom he’s had an affair, we feel her rage just as we sympathize with the young man. They are all victims. America would not have been ready for The Last Picture Show anytime before it’s premier, but it came at a time when — with an unpopular war raging in Vietnam and cultural values shifting -- introspection and self-critique came into vogue.

Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver takes us into the heart of the big city — indeed America’s biggest — and it is not a journey for the meek of heart. Our guide is one Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) a disaffected taxi driver, war veteran and loner who — when he can’t find love — looks for meaning. But his is a damaged mind and his quest ends in bloody massacre and this after he nearly assassinates a presidential candidate. Taxi Driver explores the underbelly of the American urban experience and the deranged individuals there formed. Yet is it a poetic film and like all great cinema is never depressing -- in large part because it is so honest. It is also about the loneliness of the big city and how easy it is to get lost deep in the recesses of your own mind. Bickle is hardly an American everyman, but he is a product of a culture that over values individualism. Bickle is, in his own way, also a crusader whose ultimate goal is to do the right thing.

American cinema has largely shied away from issues of race but a major exception can be found in Spike Lee’s seminal 1989 film Do the Right Thing. The tension is palpable, the violence as if from a documentary, the issues are timeless. It’s set in New York but could just as easily be in any other large American city. There are types of people but no stereotypes of people. These are strong, well-crafted characters who as an ensemble reflect much of the joy and pain of being an other in white America. Do the Right Thing climaxes in a confrontation between the white owners of a pizzeria and its black customers. Into this scene comes a character who is restrained by police officers  — as if the story was ripped from headlines from the future —and is  killed in the process. A riot ensues. No one wins. There’s a harsh message right there. No one wins. Like many great films, DTRT asks questions rather than feeding audiences easy answers. It thus allows — nay, insists — that viewers do their own thinking, examining both the state of American race relations and their own feelings on the topic. Lee has made much of the fact that many viewers are more concerned with the destruction of the pizzeria than they are with the death of a character. DTRT can thus be seen as a kind of American racial litmus test.

Ice Storm is simply the best representation of suburbia ever committed to film and not incidentally a clever look at the 1970s and the upper middle class. The wise ones here are the teenagers who variously pursue love or find meaning in comic books our follow the latest news on Watergate. The adults go to key parties for a sad, perverted form of the sexual revolution and incidentally cheat on each other in less open, totally dishonest ways. Truth is spoken by the teenaged girl whose offering of grace at Thanksgiving is an attack on American consumerism and the theft of the lands from Native Americans. This is a decadent America that has lost its values. It is a prettified suburban version of The Last Picture Show. Ice Storm is an exposure of desolation of hearts in a soulless land of cocktail parties and banality. Remarkably we don't come to hate nor necessarily dislike any of the characters, that would be too easy.

Mean Girls

I’ve long championed Mean Girls as not only a cultural phenomenon but, a great film. On the surface it’s a light teen comedy that satirizes the high school experience, but it’s — perhaps despite its own intentions — far more than that. It is wise and witty and revealing of the cliques, social hierarchies and peer pressure that make the high school experience a fraught one for many. High school can be a walk in the park for some students while a race through a land mine ridden field for others. Other teen films — including those set in high schools — tend to focus on boys and how they will be boys. As the title suggest Mean Girls has a primarily female cast and given the struggles and triumphs and dramatic ups and downs of its main character, Cady (Lindsay Lohan) it can be seen as post feminist. Hierarchies and status are based less on merit and more on wealth. Beauty is extolled over intelligence. Social standing trumps academic standing. There are a lot of aspects to the high school experience that are universal, but still others that are unique to the United States and Mean Girls is adept at portraying them. The films journey to a happy ending is a fraught one with obstacles aplenty. Along the way viewers are guided through socialization American high school style.

I don’t know that any other film has captured the time period it depicts better than Quentin Tarantino’s OUTH. The sights, the sounds and even the colors of late Sixties California are so vivid as to be transformative. It is also a film rich in themes and ideas and history. It is about celebrity, about the film and television industry, about an era, about cults and about the struggle to stay relevant and popular in a competitive world. As he did in another of his great films, Inglorious Basterds (2009), Tarantino re-writes history and again it feels like the right thing to do for the story. In addition to reflecting a time, place and a mood, movies are good for occasionally taking us away from reality and if creating a new one is necessary, so be it. But the broader point about OUTH is its exploration of a given time in which the U.S. underwent the mad melding of the hip new counter culture with the tradition bound. Some people fully embraced the hippie movement, others adapted aspects of it such as longer hair or experimenting with drugs or listening to rock music. The late Sixties were a time when squares like Dean Martin and cool cats like The Beatles were competing in music’s top forty. The establishment’s Bob Hope and the counter culture’s George Carlin were both making American’s laugh. The establishment was providing jobs and financial security at the same time it was benefitting from institutionalized racism and sending young men to die in Vietnam. Meanwhile the counter culture was offering exciting alternatives in everything from music to fashion to gaining awareness at the same time it was producing the Manson Family and drug overdoses and runaways. OUTH gets it all and through the mores it explores provides a uniquely American kaleidoscope.

Other films I considered for this article were: Heroes For Sale (1933) Wellman, My Man Godfrey (1936) LaCava, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) Wyler, Rebel Without A Cause (1955) Ray, Midnight Cowboy (1969) Schlesinger, Shampoo (1975), Network (1976) Lumet,  Ashby, Platoon (1986) Stone, Boyz N the Hood (1991) Singleton, The Truman Show (1998) Weir, Milk (2008) Van Sant, and Get Out (2017) Peele. I highly recommend them all.