I THINK I'M GOING TO LIKE THIS GUY. Betsy's Page finds a report that Chief Justice nominee John Roberts likes Dr. Zhivago and North By Northwest. That might be reason enough for me to respond to a request from Eclectic Econoclast that I list the movies I thought of as my favorites, using the years of release. This game of weblog tag appears to have originated at Marginal Revolution.

First, a disclaimer. Bill Sjostrom, who worked with me for a while, will confirm that I'm somewhat clueless about the talkies, and that the usual movie-fan's gambit of "You have to know that. [Leading man.] [Leading lady.] [Vintage and plot summary.]" elicits nothing for me. On the other hand, there are some pictures that I'll make the time to watch when they turn up in reruns, and the chronological list relies on those. I have to leave Zhivago and any Howard Hawks John Wayne picture off the list, as these I discovered later. But, as readers will note, any of those will crowd out anything from the past 20 years. (I'm using King's algorithm to rule out stuff I discovered in reruns or at the college film clubs. He has some thoughts about Tinseltown's more recent efforts.)

So, on to the list. I'll start with North by Northwest. My folks let me stay up late enough to watch it sometime in the mid-1960s. They were amused by Hitchcock's cameo (he had discovered that people would watch for him rather than his directing, so in this picture he attempted to board a bus as the doors were closing) but what really stuck to my ribs were the trains.

Next up: 2001: A Space Odyssey, around 1970. What would you expect of a science club guy? "I'm sorry, Frank, I think you've missed it. Queen to Bishop's six. Bishop takes Queen. Knight takes Bishop, checkmate."

And that, intellectualoids, is as close as you're going to get to anything you'd refer to as film. Next up, however, is something with subtitles. Patton. I have not been able to convince the university to issue me a polished steel helmet, a riding crop, and a giant 48 star flag as considerations for offering a large lecture course.

Thereafter, my life became more complicated, and movies I'd bother to see better be relatively free of ambiguity. Case in point: Midway, in 1976. Might have worked better with the Japanese acting panicked in Japanese with subtitles, but in theaters of the day the Sensurround effects were marvelous, and the audience reaction as first three, then the fourth flattop got scratched was electric.

What else? Return of the Jedi, in 1983. It clarified what had happened in the preceding two movies. My father had recently died. Our relationship was nowhere near as strained as Luke's and Anakin's, fortunately.

The ensuing twenty years? Boring.