Creator Titlesort icon Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) Theme
Director: John McTiernan Die Hard

The way to beat evil is to give no quarter, no compromise. Life is hard, but fighting for the right is rewarded.

Giving up in life is not an option.

Director: Emile Ardolino Dirty Dancing

Life is passionate and meaningful.

The joy and passion of love and life and dancing, while learning integrity and independence.

Author: John Steinbeck East of Eden

Life is filled with great and important choices.

The battle between good and evil, guilt and innocence. Takes the position that we are influenced by many things, but ultimately we have free will.

Choreographer: Harold Lander Etudes

Thrilling pleasure at beautiful movement and great success at developing the best within you.

Hard work results in great achievement in life -- and that results in beauty and excitement in life.

Director: Alan Parker Fame

Life is hard, but you can succeed, and it is worth it and exhilarating.

Go after your heart's desire.

Author: Nevil Shute Far Country, The

Life can be bright, happy and successful, but hard decisions must be faced and dealt with.

A good and happy life is made up of self-directed actions, self-chosen goals.

A less important theme is:
Freedom from government control.
Whether the government control results from devastating wars, or from socialist control of medical care, freedom is to be sought and prized.

Dancers: Torvill and Dean Flying Fish

A heightened sense that Life is fantastically unbounded by daily cares. Life is imbued with unlimited potential and ease of movement.

Life is light and fluid.

Director: Coppola Francis Ford Godfather

Life demands death; life is a horror of killing and retribution. Life is tragedy and malevolence

Behind beauty and success lies corruption and death.

Director: Hugh Hudson Greystoke

Life is Loss -- life is grim and culture is grim and the jungle is grim. All is grim.

The other important feature of the film emotionally is that Tarzan has been crippled by his circumstances of being brought up in the jungle -- he cannot live as a man, so the great tragedy of the story is that he has to return to the jungle, which is below primitive -- it is an isolated hell in which death is at every corner, and at best the companionship of apes. Given that the story partly portrays civilized men as brutes who relish killing animals, perhaps the emotional intent is to make the choice to return to the jungle as positive, but for this reviewer it is unutterably tragic and ugly.

Loss, Loss, Loss. Man as metaphysically alien from human culture.

Domenichino: Head of a Bearded Man

Pensive, worried, detached qualities of humanity

Worry is the way of the world.

Painter: William Hosner Her Face to the Wind

One gets the feeling that the young woman is able to stand strong in the world, with panache and beauty all at once.

Facing life in a fresh, strong, vivacious way.

Director: Fred Zinnemann High Noon

There is palpable evil in the world. There is heroism in the face of evil in the world. The movie is full of fear and foreboding and betrayal.

Civil Society is the ideal, and worth fighting for. Doing what is right is the right way to live. Don't let the evil bastards win. The theme is expressed repeatedly in the movie via the contrast of the Marshall who grimly faces the need to do what he lives for, despite the death facing him, vs. the mealy mouthed town folk, many of which who won't fight for their civil society, and vs. the deputy marshall who portrays the sellout who will give into evil force in order to "get along".

White, James Terry: Hyacinths to feed thy soul

Hopeful. Even in poverty one can have beauty.

Beauty is a form of sustenance

Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright Johnson Wax Building

Day to day life can be exalted and pleasurable.

To Work should be a condition of grandeur and joy.

Author: Henry Kitchell Webster King in Khaki, A

Honesty is a noble and practical way of life.

Business acumen produces both material wealth and moral right.

The success of the entrepreneur in this story, along with his relation to all his staff and secondary and tertiary folks on the island who work for him -- makes him into a "king" based on important human relations and the rightness of his decisions that result in a successful business enterprise.

A subsidiary theme might be termed the power of morality over physical power or economic "power".

Painter: Ettore Tito La Gomena (Towing a Boat)

There is great effort in life, and a woman can be the master of it. This painting is a curious combination of romantic heroism and 19th century genre naturalism. It has a visual dynamism and dramatic content that is strongly romantic, yet the subject is the prosaic task of pulling a boat out of the water.

The will and the power of a woman. Implacable determination.

Loysel, Jacques: La Grande Nevrose

The dynamic female body is beautiful and exciting. Although it may not explicitly suggest it, the nude and its tense position could be felt as erotic.

An animated female body is a vessel of perfection.

Shute, Nevil: Landfall

Heroes and Heroines are self-made, by anyone at any level of intelligence who seriously pursues what is important in their lives.

Truth will triumph -- with perseverance.

Sculptor: Agesander Laocoon (Laocoön and His Sons)

Life is a desperate, agonizing struggle.

The heroic but agonizing defeat of Men. This sculpture certainly represents at the same time the heroic nature of men but cast into an impossible situation that can only be tragic.

Director and Screenwriter: Richard Curtis Love Actually

Romantic love, family love, filial love, and the love of friendship are of central importance to human existence, and are possible to achieve.

Wonderful experiences of love are found in many forms and places.

Composer: Franz Lehar Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe)

Love brings gaiety and joy to life.

Love can be gay and tender, solemn and lighthearted, painful and joyous.

Architect: Louis Sullivan National Farmers' Bank

Being able to breath freely -- expansively, and feeling that there are no limits to what man can do.

The world is expansively, infinitely rich.

Sculptor: unknown Niobe

Human action is beautiful.

Life is movement.

Maugham, W. Somerset: Of Human Bondage

Life is a fearful gray spread of actions and in-actions without genuine values. We are all deformed in mind or spirit and should accept convention as demanded by those around us.

Man's life is outside his control. Conventionality is the final ideal.

Painter: Domenico Ghirlandaio Old Man with a Young Boy

Human companionship or family closeness is real.

Quiet familial love. (A grandfather (perhaps) gazing upon a grandson, and vice versa, in a clear moment of happy communion.)