Ronee Blakely – "My Idaho Home" (1975)

We were young then

We were together

We could bear floods and fire and bad weather

Every ten years, the British Film Institute asks hundreds of film critics, programmers, archivists, and academics to pick what they think are the ten greatest movies of all time.  The BFI’s “100 Greatest Films of All Time” list – which is published in Sight and Sound magazine – is based on their votes.

The 2022 list is missing almost 20 movies that had been included on the 2012 list.  Four of those spots were filled with movies that were filmed between 2012 and 2022:  Parasite, Get Out, Moonlight, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.  (That’s not a joke, boys and girls.  The BFI voters actually believe that those four movies are among the hundred best ever made.)

The other 16 new additions to the list were older movies that could have been chosen for the 2012 list, but weren’t.  There were a number of new voters in 2022, so you would expect some differences of opinion.  

But what explains most of the turnover on the list is political correctness rearing its ugly head.  More woke voters = more woke movies = a clearly inferior “100 Greatest” list.

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Among the movies that were deleted from the “100 Greatest” list in 2022 were Nashville, The Wild Bunch, and The Godfather Part II.

ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME?  I mean, Parasite was a very clever and original movie.  But better than Nashville, The Wild Bunch or Godfather Part II?  

Be honest.  Having seen Parasite once, do you ever need to see it again?  I didn’t think so.  

But that’s certainly not true of the three movies mentioned above that were dropped from the list – I’ve watched each of them multiple times over the years, and I’m ready to watch each of them again.

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Unlike Martin Scorsese – who used classic-rock songs like “Gimme Shelter” and “Layla” on the soundtracks of his gangster movies – Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather movies feature instrumental music composed especially for those films.  

The Nashville soundtrack is something entirely different.  It features songs that were written and performed by several of the movie’s cast members.

Keith Carradine wrote three songs for Nashville and sang two of them in the film – including “I’m Easy,” which won an Academy Award.

Ronee Blakely in Nashville

But I think the best songs on the soundtrack were those written and performed by Ronee Blakey, who was a singer-songwriter first and an actress second.  (Blakely had recorded two albums before making her utterly convincing acting debut in Nashville.)

My favorite of the half-dozen songs she wrote for Nashville is “My Idaho Home.”  (Blakely was born and grew up in Idaho.)

It’s as sentimental and corny as any country-western song you can name, but it works because Blakely performs it as if she believes every single word.  A song like “My Idaho Home” isn’t meant to be analyzed – turn off your brain and turn on your heart when you listen to it, and you’ll believe every word, too.

Click here to watch Ronee Blakely singing “My Idaho Home” in Nashville.  (If you’ve seen the whole movie, watching this three-minute excerpt will be enough to remind just how remarkable a film it is.)

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.