Film Registry welcomes sci-fi pics, Westerns

By Brooks Boliek

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - It was "Back to the Future" in more ways than one Thursday when the Library of Congress added the popular 1985 comedy to the National Film Registry, officially making it a "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant work to be preserved for all time.

"Back to the Future" was one of 25 pictures added to the registry, which now numbers 475 movies.

The Robert Zemeckis film wasn't the only icon of that era selected by the Librarian of Congress: Steven Spielberg's 1977 hit "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" also was included.

"We're always a little short on the science fiction genre, and this year we wanted to get more entries from the 1970s," National Film Preservation Board staff director Stephen Leggett said.

Other additions included the car-chase classic "Bullitt" (1968); "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962), John Ford's last great Western; Kevin Costner's epic "Dances With Wolves" (1990); New York film noir "The Naked City" (1948); Sidney Lumet's claustrophobic courtroom drama "12 Angry Men"; Humphrey Bogart's Hollywood satire "In a Lonely Place" (1950); Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical "Oklahoma!" (1955); the star-studded "Grand Hotel" (1932); William Wyler's "Wuthering Heights" (1939); and the Bette Davis masterpiece "Now, Voyager" (1942).

The films selected aren't necessarily the "best" or most popular films made, the Library noted, but are chosen for their artistic character, historical significance or their reflection of both the good and bad sides of American culture.

While Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly in "Back to the Future" tried to get back to the present day and Richard Dreyfuss' Ray Neary demanded to "speak to the man in charge" in "Close Encounters," the characters most remembered from "Bullitt" might have been a Dodge Charger and a Ford Mustang.

The film's 11-minute chase scene cemented Steve McQueen's iconic status, vindicated British director Peter Yates' decision to shoot the film in San Francisco instead of New York or Los Angeles and turned the Bay Area city into a prime location for movie shoots.

The latest list also bookends one of Hollywood's most enduring genres as two Westerns made 30 years apart made the cut.

"Liberty Valance" explored the end of the Wild West and its takeover by civilization and gave America one of its enduring taglines: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

"Dances With Wolves" comes at the other end of the shelf as it sought to rewrite the myth of the American West and helped revive the Western as a salable genre.

"The Western had died out," Leggett said. "'Dances With Wolves' and later 'The Unforgiven' revived it. Kevin Costner spent a lot of years and money getting it done."

When narrator/producer Mark Hellinger tells us, "There are 8 million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them," we know we've been on a trip to the dark side. Director Jules Dassin captured the spirit of film noir, using documentary techniques to tell the story of a murder and its investigation. It forever changed the way police were portrayed in film and how fictional crimes were solved, and its impact can be seen on TV today with the "CSI" franchise.

"No one had done a film where the real hero was a hard-working police detective, like the ones I knew in Brooklyn," said Malvin Wald, one of the film's writers. "We knew we were making a new genre that became the police procedural."

Wald told The Hollywood Reporter that his knowledge of Brooklyn, the filmmakers' willingness to learn how the police really operate and the fact that he'd been a postal inspector, "a civil servant, just like them," managed to get him unheard-of access to active cases.