Robert Cumbow’s top 10 movies*
*originally appeared in Slant Magazine, August 2012
“I surmise that Edwin engaged me to teach Westerns and horror because no academic coming out of
the English department is going to be particularly
interested in teaching Westerns or horror,” he says.
Cumbow also taught Hitchcock, Kubrick, taboo/trans-gressive films, Douglas Sirk and even vampire flicks.
He began to teach at Northwest Film Forum (another
client) as well, including a course on “End of the West”
Westerns. Last year, for the Seattle International
Film Festival, he led a Cinema Dissection group—an
interactive explication of one movie over one night—on
Hitchcock’s Psycho. In March, he did the same with
Vertigo. A class on musical films, for the Women’s
University Club of Seattle, is slated for August.
Compact, with white hair and a white mustache—
John Mahoney, the dad in Frasier, would be a good
casting choice for him—Cumbow has a fastidiousness
and exactitude about him. Even in telling stories,
he needs the details just so, and circles back to get
them right. At one point he’s asked why movies are
so important to him, and he responds, “I thought you
were going to ask, ‘ Why didn’t you ever try to get into
the film business?’” and then answers that one. (He
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made amateur films in college and the Army, and
wrote several screenplays in the ’70s.)
Over the years, he’s collected quotes about teaching and says he has 12 or 14 good ones. The one he
keeps in mind every time he steps in front of a class
is from an old mentor, and after a long-ranging
discussion that includes the doorway theme in John
Ford’s The Searchers, he says from memory: “‘
Enthusiasm is contagious.’ … If you drop your inhibitions
and show people how much you love what you’re
King Kong (1933)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Seven Samurai (1954)
The Searchers (1956)
Vertigo (1958)
La Dolce Vita (1959)
Lawrence of Arabia (1963)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Why doesn’t he have anything since 1975?
“People often point that out to me. When you’ve got more than
a century of film and you can only pick 10, you’re going to go for
the ones that seem the most timeless, the most classical. And
it sometimes takes years, even decades, for a film to establish
itself; for you to realize, ‘ Wow, that really is a great film. I haven’t
appreciated that enough.’ You constantly reassess.”
