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Poets' Favorite Movies

Philip Levine

Favorite films in no particular order:

Land & Freedom (best political film I ever saw) by Ken Loach
On the Waterfront
The Treasure of Sierra Madre
Shoot the Piano Player
The Dawn Patrol (the one with Errol Flynn & David Niven)
Fat City (greatest boxing movie ever made)
Pennies from Heaven (a great musical)
The Barbarian Invasions
Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (or the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner)
Dr. Strangelove
La Dolce Vita

(This is very arbitrary: I’ve left out The Gold Rush, 400 Blows, Modern Times, The Maltese Falcon, Paths of Glory, Casablanca, La Strada, Breaker Morant, My Man Godfrey (with Powell & Lombard, etc.).

Philip Levine has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Poetry magazine’s Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Frank O'Hara Prize, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships and, in 1994, the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Simple Truth. Knopf published his most recent book, Breath (2004). The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994) is a collection of essays. He edited The Essential Keats (Essential Poets) and, with Ernesto Trejo, The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines. Philip Levine taught for many years at California State University Fresno and now divides his time between Fresno and New York City, where he teaches at New York University.

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