They tell the story of who we are and why this big, beautiful, rambunctious nation is one worth the fight.
They tell the story of who we are and why this big, beautiful, rambunctious nation is one worth the fight.
M y wife learned America the way most foreigners do, McFly before Madison. She had come from Cuba, where the state issues its citizens their loves along with their ration books, and I set out to correct the deprivation the only way a man raised on American movies would.
We started with Back to the Future, because a country that dreams in DeLoreans and second chances confesses something true about itself before any civics text can. Then Thirteen Days, so she could see the island that she fled bring the world within a hair of the end, and watch a young president’s prudence walk it back. Call it naturalization by double feature.
I knew the method well. Growing up in a community of exiles, long before I could have placed Washington or Lincoln, there was Fievel Mousekewitz, the seasick mouse of An American Tail, crossing steerage in the certainty that there were no cats in America. The picture worked on me precisely because it lied a little, the way the country’s best advertisements for itself always have, promising a place more golden than any that could survive contact with the pier. You spend the rest of your life discovering that no nation can quite live up to its myth, and loving America all the more because it keeps trying.
The classroom is the movie theater, the closest thing we have to a national town square, a place where strangers still assemble to dream in unison. The proof turns up in odd corners of the world. Stand at the Lambeth Bridge roundabout in London, gesture at the skyline, and pronounce “Look kids, Big Ben, Parliament,” and some guy in a Lakers cap will tell you “Oink oink, my good man.” No flag was waved, no passport was flashed. You both watched Clark Griswold make a fool of himself across the pond, and for a moment, two men, an ocean away from home, become more than strangers to one another.
That a 40-year-old punch line has the power to remind us of a common heritage is itself a small testament to American ingenuity. We may not have invented cinema, but we taught it to speak with our accent. Through it, the world came to know us, and we came to know ourselves.
Film is one of our great cultural treasures, and the country’s 250th is as good an occasion as any to celebrate it. Here, then, are 25 films — spanning the Founding and the frontier, the battlefields and the ballparks, the immigrant neighborhoods and the launchpads — that tell the story of who we are, and why this big, beautiful, rambunctious nation is one worth the fight.
1776 (dir. Peter H. Hunt, 1972) — Congress sweats through a Philadelphia summer while John Adams, “obnoxious and disliked,” badgers a room of lawyers toward treason. The genius of it is that independence arrives through horse-trading, exhaustion, and a South Carolina delegate’s price for his vote, with no wave of glory anywhere in sight. When the delegates finally sign, one by one, to a tolling bell and an emptying chamber, you understand the Founding as those men lived it, sober and costly and brave, and are moved that they signed at all.
Drums Along the Mohawk (dir. John Ford, 1939) — Ford’s Revolution happens at the edge of the map, where a young couple builds a farm the war keeps burning down. Claudette Colbert scrubbing a frontier cabin and Henry Fonda coming home hollow-eyed from battle give the Founding a domestic weight the pageant versions miss. When word comes that Cornwallis has surrendered and the new flag rises over the fort, Fonda’s Gil takes it in and says only, “I reckon we better be gettin’ back to work.” The Revolution as most who lived it knew it: a homestead defended, lost, and stubbornly raised again.
Glory (dir. Edward Zwick, 1989) — The 54th Massachusetts drills, argues, and finally charges Fort Wagner into the guns, knowing the odds. A bitter irony sits at the film’s center: These are men dying for a country that has not yet granted them the fullness of the citizenship they are bleeding to earn. On the night before the battle they gather to pray and testify, and Denzel Washington’s embittered Trip, asked to speak, can offer only that they have become something to one another, “We men, ain’t we.” They love the country anyway and mean to make it theirs by the force of their own valor.
Lincoln (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2012) — Not the marble but the operator, twisting arms, trading patronage jobs for votes, telling a bawdy story while the 13th Amendment hangs by a thread. Daniel Day-Lewis plays him as a tired country lawyer who happens to carry the moral weight of a nation, and the film’s sly scandal is that emancipation passed the House by the same grubby means as a tariff bill. It turns out the sublime and the sordid share a cloakroom, and the Great Emancipator knew how to work it.
Once Upon a Time in the West (dir. Sergio Leone, 1968) — Sometimes it takes a foreigner to show us ourselves, and Leone’s outsider’s opera sees the American frontier more clearly than we tend to. It is not always pretty, the greed, the killing, the settling paid for in blood. But in the closing movement, as the railroad stretches toward the horizon and a civilization rises out of the dust with Claudia Cardinale carrying water to the workmen laying track, the gratitude arrives unbidden, for the people, most of them nameless, who built the country the rest of us inherited. An Italian understood the cost of it, and the wonder.
Rio Bravo (dir. Howard Hawks, 1959) — Hawks made it in open contempt of High Noon, whose sheriff spends the picture begging a cowardly town for help. John Wayne’s John T. Chance refuses to beg, and a drunk, a cripple, and a green kid sign on to hold the jail anyway. There is a scene where Dean Martin, sweating out the bottle, steadies his hands just enough to roll a cigarette, and the whole film’s faith in earned self-respect is there in the tremor. A free people, Hawks insists, needs no conscription into decency. It volunteers.
The Long Gray Line (dir. John Ford, 1955) — An Irish immigrant fumbles his way into West Point as a mess-hall waiter and stays 50 years, training the officers who will lead the country’s armies and burying more of them than any man should. Tyrone Power’s Marty Maher arrives with nothing and gives everything to the academy, one of the great institutions a free country builds to outlast any single life within it. There he found a family, a purpose, and a place to belong, and he spent himself repaying what he had been given.
Yankee Doodle Dandy (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942) — James Cagney plays George M. Cohan as a strutting force of nature, born on the Fourth of July and writing the songs a nation marched off to war humming. Called to the White House late in life, Cohan marvels that a plain song-and-dance man can come talk things over with the head man, and the president tells him it is about as good a definition of America as he ever heard. Cagney’s stiff-legged dance down the mansion’s stairs afterward, improvised on the day, is pure delight caught by accident. Released just a few months after Pearl Harbor, it was a tonic for a frightened country, and it still works like one.
A River Runs Through It (dir. Robert Redford, 1992) — Adapted from Norman Maclean’s luminous novella, the film follows two brothers coming of age in 1910s Montana under a Presbyterian minister who draws no line between religion and fly-fishing. Redford shoots the Big Blackfoot valley with the kind of reverence the faithful bring to Chartres. Few films stir such tenderness for America’s natural patrimony, the rivers and canyons handed down like a birthright, far older than the men who wade into them at dusk. “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. . . . I am haunted by waters,” the older brother tells us in the twilight of his years, casting alone in the bend where creation spoke most plainly of its Maker.
Sergeant York (dir. Howard Hawks, 1941) — A Tennessee marksman who reads Scripture wrestles his conscience over killing, then single-handedly captures 132 Germans in the Argonne. Gary Cooper plays York’s plainness straight, so the reconciliation of faith and duty lands as hard-won rather than glib. The real York had refused Hollywood for 20 years, insisting “this uniform ain’t for sale,” and relented only to fund a rural Bible school, the same modesty Cooper honors when York comes home wanting nothing but the bottomland he can farm. Released as the country edged toward another war, it stirred such fervor that young men walked out of theaters and straight into enlistment offices, a movie that summoned patriotism as much as it celebrated it.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (dir. Frank Capra, 1939) — Capra sends a bumpkin idealist to the Senate and lets the machine nearly grind him to paste. What rescues it from sentiment is James Stewart on the filibuster’s second day, voice shredded to a rasp, swaying at his desk, telling the chamber that the only causes worth fighting for are the lost ones. Capra’s wager is that the republic runs on exactly this, one exhausted man too stubborn to sit down, and that the American experiment survives only so long as ordinary citizens keep faith with its founding ideals.
A League of Their Own (dir. Penny Marshall, 1992) — With the men overseas and the major leagues fearing they might have to go dark, the owners hedged by filling the ballparks with women, and discovered they could play. Tom Hanks’s washed-up manager comes to respect them one grudging inch at a time. “There’s no crying in baseball” is the line everyone remembers. The film’s deeper subject is civic duty, a generation of women taking up the national pastime and carrying it through the war years, so that a beloved institution would still be standing when our soldiers came home.
Saving Private Ryan (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1998) — The Omaha Beach landing opens the film with 20 minutes of unsparing slaughter, the camera as concussed as the men wading into the guns. Everything after asks what so much death demands of the ones who live. “Earn this,” the dying captain tells the young man he crossed France to save, and the burden of that command follows him into old age, weeping at the grave, begging his wife to tell him he was a good man. Few films have asked so directly what we owe the men who died so that we might live.
The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946) — Three veterans come home to a country that moved on without them, and Harold Russell, a real disabled vet playing a sailor with hooks for hands, must let his father undress him for bed like a child. Wyler holds on the small humiliations of peace, the job that shrank, the sweetheart who strayed, the hands that will not work, before he permits anyone to heal. It remains the truest film Hollywood ever made about the debt a country carries home from its wars.
The Right Stuff (dir. Philip Kaufman, 1983) — Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager rides a horse out to the X-1 he will fly through the sound barrier, laconic to the point of insolence, and the film never quite stops preferring him to the celebrities who follow. The Mercury Seven get the ticker tape and the magazine covers; Yeager, out in the high desert with a cracked rib he mentions to no one, keeps the thing itself. That is the nerve the title means, the American habit of treating the edge of the possible as a place to go to work.
The Iron Giant (dir. Brad Bird, 1999) — A boy and a fallen war machine meet in Cold War Maine, and the giant, built to kill and terrified of its own nature, refuses the purpose it was made for. Told it can be a weapon or it can be Superman, it chooses Superman, the orphan from another world who grew up to guard this one. When it flies into the incoming missile whispering that name to itself, Bird gives young audiences the country’s founding promise in a single image, that a person may choose what he will become and that the choice can be nobler than anyone’s design for him.
Lilies of the Field (dir. Ralph Nelson, 1963) — A black handyman driving through the Arizona desert stops for water at a farm of German refugee nuns and finds himself, half against his will, agreeing to build them a chapel. Sidney Poitier plays Homer Smith with a prickly independence that keeps trying to leave and can’t, held by the work itself: a chapel raised with no diocese and no money, until the whole desert community drifts in to help. Nothing commands them and no state requires it. They build because the thing acquires its own gravity, and in that rising adobe you can see the oldest American genius, free people meeting a need themselves, together, because it is theirs to meet.
Selma (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014) — The film opens with four girls descending a church staircase in their Sunday best, and then the blast at Birmingham tears them away. What follows is a claim upon America rather than a revolt against it. David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King Jr., granted no halo here, the doubt and the strained marriage left in, leads a movement that asks only for the inheritance every American is promised, and these fellow citizens had been denied. They pursue it through the country’s own instruments: the ballot, the courts, the Constitution. You repair what you love, and the marchers loved the nation enough to make it keep its word.
Ford v Ferrari (dir. James Mangold, 2019) — A Texan carmaker and a hot-tempered Englishman set out to build the machine that can finally beat Ferrari at Le Mans, while executives fret about marketing and image. Mangold’s sympathies never leave the people who make things. Christian Bale’s Ken Miles, finding the perfect racing line across the desert dawn, makes craftsmanship look almost holy. The film locates its deepest patriotism somewhere simpler than flags or speeches: in the belief that something built right is its own argument for the country that built it.
Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975) — Released on the eve of the Bicentennial, Altman’s great American panorama gathers politicians, dreamers, musicians, grifters, homemakers, and has-beens into one sprawling chorus, each convinced the microphone belongs to them. Lesser filmmakers would treat such disorder with contempt. Altman answers it with affection. Even after sudden violence tears through the final concert, the crowd instinctively takes up the song. It looks like chaos until that first verse rises, and you understand you have been watching a country steady itself the only way it knows how.
Superman (dir. Richard Donner, 1978) — The story arrives from the stars but grows up in a Kansas wheat field, where the Kents raise a foundling from another world into a decent Midwestern boy before he ever learns to fly. He emerges into a country worn down by Vietnam and Watergate, and asks it, without a trace of irony, to believe again in truth, justice, and the American way. Christopher Reeve plays him with such decency and conviction that when the residents of Metropolis tip their heads back and cheer the man in the sky, the applause is really ours, a tired people letting itself hope out loud. Few films have been this sincere about the nation’s best idea of itself, and fewer still have made it soar so high.
Miracle (dir. Gavin O’Connor, 2004) — Kurt Russell’s Herb Brooks skates his college kids half to death until they can match the Soviet machine, then turns them loose at Lake Placid in 1980. The patriotism is earned on the ice rather than declared in speeches, and when the final seconds tick down against the Russians, a country sick of gas lines and malaise finds itself on its feet and roaring. “Do you believe in miracles?” Al Michaels cried, and for one night the answer was plainly yes.
Barcelona (dir. Whit Stillman, 1994) — Any American who has lived abroad will know the predicament: two cousins defend their homeland in a Spain where anti-Americanism passes for sophistication. Fred, a naval officer, meets the fashionable slurs with a straight face and a genuine bafflement that anyone could root against his country. Told the locals are full of anti-NATO feeling, he demands to know the alternative: “Soviet troops racing across Europe, eating all the croissants?” Stillman lets the joke carry a deeper loyalty, the stubborn, slightly absurd conviction of a man who loves his country and sees no reason to pretend otherwise.
Minari (dir. Lee Isaac Chung, 2020) — A Korean family stakes everything on a patch of Arkansas dirt, the father convinced he can grow produce for a market that hasn’t yet realized it needs it. The grandmother the children resent quietly plants minari beside a creek, where it flourishes with little tending, a modest green parable about bringing something from the old country that finds richer life in the new. What sustains the family, though, is more than their own stubbornness. Neighbors lend water, labor, friendship, and grace. Chung’s America is a place where immigrants arrive carrying seeds of their own, and a generous people helps them to take root.
The Straight Story (dir. David Lynch, 1999) — An old man rides a lawnmower across the Midwest to reconcile with his estranged, dying brother, and Lynch, of all directors, films it with total earnestness. Richard Farnsworth, himself dying as he played it, barely raises his voice; the movie belongs to the strangers along the road who feed and shelter him for no reason but kindness. When Alvin finally reaches his brother’s farm and the two old men sit together under the stars, saying almost nothing, you understand what the whole slow journey was for. Here is the country at its best, its people patient, decent, and bound to one another by more than they can say, and a fitting place to end, five miles an hour, with the porch light on.
Of course, no list of 25 films could encompass a country this big, this loud, this alive. These are only a beginning, and much of the pleasure is in the quarrel. Start your own collection, then share it with family, friends, and neighbors, in a dark room with the light flickering on upturned faces. Watching movies together can itself be a civic liturgy, a way for Americans to tell ourselves a common story on our 250th anniversary. That tradition, like the nation we love, endures only if we come to it in gratitude, tending it with care in our own time before handing it on to a smaller pair of hands, to steward in theirs.