THE TOP 100 MOVIES OF ALL TIME.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

The American Film Institute's official list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time is finally out and it looks, well, mighty official.

Chosen from a ballot of 400 titles and voted upon by some 1,500 film industry professionals, academics and critics, the top 100 is almost pathologically balanced between well-known artistic milestones and widely beloved entertainments. The pattern is established right at the top with ``Citizen Kane'' and ``Casablanca,'' long-considered Hollywood's ultimate auteur and studio system movies, respectively.

The list appears almost machine-tooled to satisfy both aesthete and sentimentalist, the spectacle-dazzled and the fans of character-driven fare (``Lawrence of Arabia'' at No. 5, ``The Graduate'' at No. 7), and young and old. Indeed, the titles split 50-50 before and after 1960, the year Billy Wilder's frank-for-its-time, 93rd-ranked ``The Apartment'' won the Oscar and Alfred Hitchcock's 18th-ranked ``Psycho'' effectively changed all the rules.

While this seems unusually neat for even a semidemocratic enterprise, the list managed to include space for a few fun surprises. ``Chinatown,'' at No. 19, ranked higher than one would expect the best-written movie of all time would in a poll conducted primarily among Hollywood insiders, a group notorious for its collective contempt of literary quality.

Along those same lines, it was nice to see the rigorously challenging likes of Stanley Kubrick's ``2001: A Space Odyssey'' (No. 22) and ``Dr. Strangelove'' (No. 26), Martin Scorsese's ``Raging Bull'' (No. 24) and even ``The Godfather Part II'' (at No. 32, the only sequel on the list) so high in the numbers.

Of course, they were all beaten by ``Star Wars'' (No. 15) and ``Gone With the Wind'' (No. 4), but it would have been foolish to expect otherwise. This was always going to be a popularity contest as much as a measure of artistic merit.

The truly disheartening thing about the AFI list is that, when it does get arty, it does it in a popularity poll manner, too. Sure, ``Raging Bull'' and ``Godfather II'' are anything but easy-to-take, reassuring movies - but even the folks who don't like sitting through them know that they're widely acclaimed.

What the 100 failed to leave space for were equally great, but less well-known, works, sometimes to the point of neglecting the most quintessentially American films and filmmakers altogether. And in the case of John Ford. . . . Well, I'll get to that in a moment, once I've revved up.

Conspicuously missing from the list are any works by, arguably, the three greatest practitioners of American film comedy.

Buster Keaton, whose Civil War-set masterpiece ``The General'' was a nominee, defined in his silent comedies a uniquely U.S. view of man as both master and servant of runaway technology. German emigre Ernst Lubitsch not only brought continental sophistication to our sex farces, but worked out a deft, subtle filming style that gave visual life to sound comedy. His ``To Be Or Not To Be,'' potentially the most tasteless film of the World War II era, ended up the century's supreme monument to the importance of laughing in the face of horror.

And the all but forgotten - by AFI voters anyway - Preston Sturges was the most popular comedy maker of those dark, early '40s days. His films captured the brash energy and rule-breaking impudence that, indeed, was the nation's secret weapon. Of Sturges' half-dozen knockabout masterpieces, the one that had to be on this list, but wasn't, is ``Sullivan's Travels,'' a cockeyed tribute to the primal power of fun at the movies.

The AFI list is also light on the distinctively American cycle of film noir, those shadowy, paranoid mid-century crime films that expressed society's psychological responses to a rapidly changing, endlessly threatening world. To make the AFI list, it helped if a noir was made by a well-known director like John Huston (``The Maltese Falcon,'' No. 23) or Wilder (No. 12 ``Sunset Boulevard'' and 38th-ranked ``Double Indemnity'').

What's generally considered the best of the bunch, though, the 1947 ``Out of the Past,'' was made by B-movie master Jacques Tourneur, not a household name even among the director-savvy set - and, apparently because of that, ``Past'' seems destined to remain an underappreciated nonclassic.

It hardly needs to be said that all 100 films on the list were made by white guys. You can't blame the voters too much for that; the industry has been a virtually exclusive, European-descended males' club for at least eight of the 10 decades being celebrated here.

Still, you'd think that, given the chance to honor some films that address the tortured racial relationships that are such an integral part of our national fabric, Spike Lee's searing ``Do the Right Thing'' could have trumped 99th-ranked ``Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,'' a film of such condescending hokeyness it gets my vote as the worst movie to make the top 100 cut.

But anyone could have predicted that the list would have its outrageous omissions and head-scratching inclusions. Within the list, however, is the most damning evidence that this endeavor, like any other attempt to numerically rank an entire field of creative work, is bound to fail.

Yes, I'm revved up now. It cannot be debated that John Ford was the film poet of the American experience. He is not unrepresented on the AFI list, three features made the cut. But boy, is he misunderstood.

Ford's thoroughly decent ``The Grapes of Wrath'' just missed the top 20, but that's not the problem. Though it's a ``little guy'' film par excellence, `Wrath'' cut out the bleaker aspects of John Steinbeck's certifiably great American novel, and ended on a note of much more simplistic uplift than the author imagined.

Which there'd be nothing wrong with if it weren't for the fact ``Grapes of Wrath'' is No. 21 while way down at No. 96 - just three notches ahead of the egregious ``Guess Who's'' - is Ford's toughest, most complex and, of course, most troubling work, ``The Searchers.'' Talk about confronting our racial problems head-on; this all-encompassing western, just barely this side of unforgiving, shows us in the harshest, most effective way we can see that the only hope for our future is in growing together.

Could an American film have a more essential message? In one of the AFI 100 specials coming up on the TNT cable network, Steven Spielberg - the director, significantly, with the most films (five) on the list - says there is one thing he has to do before he makes any movie.

He has to look at ``The Searchers.'' No. 96.

The Top 5

AFI's top five American movies:

1.``Citizen Kane'' (1941) - Orson Welles

2.``Casablanca'' (1942) - Michael Curtiz

3.``The Godfather'' (1972) - Francis Ford Coppola 

4.``Gone With the Wind'' (1939) - Victor Fleming

5.``Lawrence of Arabia'' (1962) - David Lean

The Forgotten 5

Here are five films that should have made the AFI's 100 greatest list, according to Daily News Film Critic Bob Strauss:

1. ``The General'' (1927) - Buster Keaton

2. ``Sullivan's Travels'' (1941) - Preston Sturges

3. ``To Be Or Not To Be'' (1942) - Ernst Lubitsch

4. ``Out of the Past'' (1947) - Jacques Tourneur

5. ``Do the Right Thing'' (1989) - Spike Lee

TOP 100 AMERICAN MOVIES

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

2. Casablanca (1942)

3. The Godfather (1972)

4. Gone With the Wind (1939)

5. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

6. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

7. The Graduate (1967)

8. On the Waterfront (1954)

9. Schindler's List (1993)

10. Singin' in the Rain (1952)

11. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

12. Sunset Boulevard (1950)

13. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

14. Some Like It Hot (1959)

15. Star Wars (1977)

16. All About Eve (1950)

17. The African Queen (1951)

18. Psycho (1960)

19. Chinatown (1974)

20. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

21. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

22. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

23. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

24. Raging Bull (1980)

25. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

26. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

27. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

28. Apocalypse Now (1979)

29. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

30. Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

31. Annie Hall (1977)

32. The Godfather Part II (1974)

33. High Noon (1952)

34. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

35. It Happened One Night (1934)

36. Midnight Cowboy (1969)

37. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

38. Double Indemnity (1944)

39. Doctor Zhivago (1965)

40. North by Northwest (1959)

41. West Side Story (1961)

42. Rear Window (1954)

43. King Kong (1933)

44. The Birth of a Nation (1915)

45. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

46. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

47. Taxi Driver (1976)

48. Jaws (1975)

49. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

50. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

51. The Philadelphia Story (1940)

52. From Here to Eternity (1953)

53. Amadeus (1984)

54. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

55. The Sound of Music (1965)

56. MASH (1970)

57. The Third Man (1949)

58. Fantasia (1940)

59. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

60. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

61. Vertigo (1958)

62. Tootsie (1982)

63. Stagecoach (1939)

64. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

65. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

66. Network (1976)

67. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

68. An American in Paris (1951)

69. Shane (1953)

70. The French Connection (1971)

71. Forrest Gump (1994)

72. Ben-Hur (1959)

73. Wuthering Heights (1939)

74. The Gold Rush (1925)

75. Dances With Wolves (1990)

76. City Lights (1931)

77. American Graffiti (1973)

78. Rocky (1976)

79. The Deer Hunter (1978)

80. The Wild Bunch (1969)

81. Modern Times (1936)

82. Giant (1956)

83. Platoon (1986)

84. Fargo (1996)

85. Duck Soup (1933)

86. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

87. Frankenstein (1931)

88. Easy Rider (1969)

89. Patton (1970)

90. The Jazz Singer (1927)

91. My Fair Lady (1964)

92. A Place in the Sun (1951)

93. The Apartment (1960)

94. Goodfellas (1990)

95. Pulp Fiction (1994)

96. The Searchers (1956)

97. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

98. Unforgiven (1992)

99. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

100. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, 3 Boxes

BOX: (1) The Top 5 (see text)

(2) The Forgotten 5 (see text)

(3) TOP 100 AMERICAN MOVIES (see text)

Photo: (1) no caption (Collage of characters from the Top Five movies)

Photo Illustration by Jon Gerung/Daily News

(2) no caption (Jimmy Stewart in ``It's a Wonderful Life'')