In 1963, Cinema published a selection of ten films attributed to Kubrick as part of a poll of directors. The document offers a glimpse of a specific choice, made before much of his own filmography.
The ten titles in the selection published by Cinema
The list appears in the context of The Directors Choose the Best Films, a poll organized by the Lytton Center of the Visual Arts. It is often presented as Kubrick’s list of favorite films from 1963. It is important to keep the publication’s context in mind: this is a selection for a particular occasion, not a complete inventory of everything he had seen or admired.
- I Vitelloni, Federico Fellini, 1953.
- Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman, 1957.
- Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, 1941.
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston, 1948.
- City Lights, Charles Chaplin, 1931.
- Henry V, Laurence Olivier, 1944.
- La notte, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961.
- The Bank Dick, Edward F. Cline, starring W. C. Fields, 1940.
- Roxie Hart, William A. Wellman, 1942.
- Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes, 1930.
The attribution of The Bank Dick calls for a clarification often made in transcriptions: W. C. Fields is the film’s central performer, while Edward F. Cline is credited as its director. Preserving this distinction prevents a list of preferences from becoming, through repetition, an inaccurate filmography. The titles may also appear in different translations; the original makes it possible to identify the work without mistaking it for another film.
The date places the selection before the release of Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. It cannot be used to attribute an opinion to Kubrick about films that did not yet exist. Nor does it allow us to reconstruct, after the fact, all the reasons he chose these ten titles.
A variety that resists a single idea of taste
The presence of City Lights, The Bank Dick, and Roxie Hart makes comedy’s place in the selection clear. These are not three equivalent examples. Chaplin builds a relationship between gesture, misunderstanding, and emotion; Fields works with a comic persona defined by highly distinctive behavior and speech; Roxie Hart connects spectacle, notoriety, and public narrative. The list invites us to compare forms of comedy, not to seek a single model.
An interest in humor, irony, and the grotesque can inform a later reading of Kubrick, but it should not be turned into an automatic causal explanation. The fact that he chose a comedy does not prove that a particular scene in Dr. Strangelove derives from it. The selection documents appreciation; establishing a borrowing would require identifying specific techniques and providing other evidence.
Citizen Kane, Wild Strawberries, and La notte offer another possible basis for comparison: different ways of approaching a life or relationship that is not fully transparent. Welles structures a search through different accounts; Bergman brings the past into a journey; Antonioni sustains a crisis of intimacy through encounters and distances. This grouping is a proposed way of reading the films, not a comment Kubrick attached to the list.
Henry V, in turn, recalls how an adaptation can foreground the relationship between theatrical representation and cinematic space. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Hell’s Angels add experiences of adventure, risk, and collective action. The variety makes it impossible to infer from the selection an exclusive preference for intimate stories, big spectacles, or a single style of acting.
The films’ release dates span several decades, with La notte close in time to the poll. The selection combines works already separated from one another by time with a relatively recent viewing experience. This coexistence is more informative than presenting the list as an unchanging canon of classics that had always been celebrated. The document belongs to a moment when each title stood at a different temporal distance.
What can be read into what is present—and what is absent
A list of ten slots imposes a constraint. Leaving out a director does not prove that Kubrick rejected their work, nor does it allow us to rank every unmentioned film below those that were included. Making a selection for a poll is not the same as passing an exhaustive judgment on cinema. Attributions of preference should preserve that distinction when comparing lists with statements or recollections from other dates.
It is also best not to explain the order using reasons the document does not provide. We can reproduce the published sequence, but we should not invent a score, a consistent tie-breaking rule, or a detailed comparative evaluation. Saying that a title occupies a particular position is different from claiming how much more Kubrick preferred it or why he placed it there.
The list can accompany the study of his development as a filmgoer without replacing it. It does not tell us when he first saw each work, which version he saw, or how many times he returned to it. Those questions belong to viewing habits and require additional documentation. A title’s presence offers a starting point, not a complete chronology of his encounters with the films.
The list’s most concrete value is that it opens up a verifiable comparison between ten identified works and a dated selection. We can examine their techniques, recognize their differences, and revisit the hypotheses that emerge when we set them alongside Kubrick’s films. The limit is that we must not turn those hypotheses into an explanation the document itself never offered.
Reference document: Cinema, The Directors Choose the Best Films, a selection organized by the Lytton Center of the Visual Arts, 1963. Transcription checked against Nick Wrigley, Stanley Kubrick, cinephile, Sight and Sound/BFI. The Bank Dick’s director is identified using the film’s credits.
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