The Personal Canon - #1-10

This week on "The Cinema King," the moment you've all been waiting for - the debut of what we're calling The Personal Canon. It's a list of fifty films that mean the most to me, for one reason or another. I don't purport that these are necessarily the fifty objectively greatest films of all time or the most important films. They're not even ranked in order of favorite-ness, nor do I suggest that they're better than a film that doesn't appear here. Instead, these are my movies. In fact, you might call them perfect movies - at least, as I define perfection, because these movies don't do anything wrong. They don't miss a beat.

Every day this week, it's ten films in chronological order of release. These are the films that reach the pinnacles and plumb the depths of the human condition. They're films that represent my ideals of the best humanity and the aesthetic community have to offer, films I'd put in a time capsule or a Voyager-esque space probe. They're films I can't wait to introduce to my children, contenting myself in the meanwhile to stop and watch them any time they're on television. They're films that, if someone close to me hasn't seen, I take it upon myself to share with them. I get angry if you haven't seen these, sad for the wasted years you've gone without these. Indeed, for one reason or another, the reason I love movies so much is this collection of fifty movies.

Today, #1-10 take us up through 1953.

#1 - #10

1. Duck Soup (1933)

2. Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)

3. Citizen Kane (1941)

4. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

5. Casablanca (1942)

6. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

7. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

8. Adam's Rib (1949)

9. Father of the Bride (1950)

10. Stalag 17 (1953)

Come back tomorrow, same Bat-time, for #11-20, and sound off in the comments - what movies made before 1953 are in your personal canon? What'd I miss?