America's story: 20 movies for the Fourth of July 2020

With most public fireworks displays canceled and many family reunions postponed, people are more likely to cocoon out of coronavirus caution than to party hearty this holiday weekend.

That means that this Fourth of July will find more people than usual in front of their televisions, streaming so-called "content."

So here, for 2020, is a list of 20 movies that tell American stories — 20 movies that are particularly "American" in outlook and origin, by which I mean they grapple, in images if not in speeches, with aspects of American culture, society and identity.

Together, they present a fragmented and obviously incomplete portrait of this country, because 20 is not enough to get the job done — even 2,020 wouldn't be enough.

For this list, I tried to leave out some of the more obvious candidates, controversial or not: "The Birth of a Nation," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "Gone with the Wind," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "1776," "Born on the Fourth of July" and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," to name a few. 

Other obviously "American" must-sees not on the list include "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Best Years of Our Lives" and "Easy Rider" (in which Peter Fonda rides a star-spangled Harley that was nicknamed Captain America). 

So here they are, for Independence Day: 20 movies about American lives, attitudes and ideas.

1. "The Crowd" (1928): A man born on the Fourth of July finds love (a bride), grief (the death of a child) and economic uncertainty (jobs come and go) in the overwhelming American metropolis of New York. A more visually extravagant complement to director King Vidor's 1929 "Hallelujah," which focuses on an African American duo in a smaller, less cosmopolitan city: Memphis.

2. "City Lights" (1931): Ninety years before Americans began removing and toppling insulting statues, Charlie Chaplin — the genius "London guttersnipe" (to quote infamous Memphis censor Lloyd T. Binford, who disapproved of Chaplin's politics and love life) — opened his silent masterpiece with a riposte to the injustice enshrined by so many public monuments: The first scene finds Chaplin's homeless yet dauntless "Little Tramp" asleep in the marble lap of a sculpture dedicated to "Peace and Prosperity." 

3. "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932): Law-and-order resolve is the pretense for quick incarceration and cheap convict labor in director Mervyn LeRoy's pre-code wow about a disillusioned veteran (Paul Muni). No studio was more dedicated to depicting the struggles of the working class and the underclass than Warner Bros., and the finale here is uncompromising: Asked "How do you live?" the man sinks back into the shadows and hisses: "I steal."

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4. "Young Mr. Lincoln" (1940): Which John Ford film to pick? How about this admiring biography, which presents the future president (played by Henry Fonda) as a beardless novice lawyer in Springfield, Illinois? "I may not know much of law," Abe says, "but I know what's right and what's wrong."

5. "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942): "Citizen Kane" is certainly an essential American film, but so is director Orson Welles' follow-up, which chronicles the impact of social and technological (i.e., the newfangled automobile) change on a wealthy Midwestern family. 

6. "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944): Any attempt to pick the definitive American movie must reckon with this Technicolor MGM musical from director Vincente Minnelli, which casts Judy Garland as one of four daughters whose exuberant growth seems connected with that of their young country, as it enters a new century (the movie is set in 1904, at the time of the St. Louis World's Fair).

7. "Hail the Conquering Hero" (1944): As authentic and distinctive a master as American cinema ever produced, writer-director Preston Sturges cast Eddie Bracken as Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, a hay fever-besotted milquetoast mistaken for a war hero in his proud hometown.

8. "The Night of the Hunter" (1955): Somewhere between Huck Finn and Norman Bates resides director Charles Laughton's hackle-raising and spirit-lifting masterpiece, a Southern Gothic fairy tale about fugitive children on a river odyssey, the battle between L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E (the letters are tattooed on Robert Mitchum's fingers), and true Christian love (embodied by Lillian Gish, who laments: "It's a hard world for little things"). 

9. "The Exiles" (1961): Both dreamlike and documentarian, Kent Mackenzie's film follows a group of Native Americans in Los Angeles: "urban Indians" who have traded the limitations of reservation life for the uncertainties of the city. 

10. "Portrait of Jason" (1967): As accurately titled as a movie can be, Shirley Clarke's documentary provides a 105-minute showcase for its increasingly inebriated subject, an alternately exuberant and sorrowful, boastful and defensive gay Black hustler and raconteur whose conversational autobiography opens a window on a world otherwise closed to most moviegoers at the time.

11. "Killer of Sheep" (1978): Hard to see until its 2007 remastering and re-release, this $10,000 tour de force from writer-director Charles Burnett — the most significant artist to emerge from the affiliation of Black filmmakers known as the "L.A. Rebellion" — makes no distinction between the documentary authenticity of its Watts locations and non-professional actors and the poetic truths of its dramatic and visual artistry.

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12. "Used Cars" (1980): The rivalry between nearby car dealerships enables director Robert Zemeckis to dissect unchecked American capitalism in all its crass, deceitful, gluttonous vainglory. A riotous comedy, with Kurt Russell as its plaid-jacketed ringmaster.

13. "Chan Is Missing" (1982): Hong Kong-American director Wayne Wang's indie comedy-mystery was one of the first widely distributed U.S. movies to feature Asian characters in an actual Chinatown (in San Francisco), in contrast to the decades of Hollywood movies in which actors in "yellowface" inhabited similarly phony "Chinatown" sets.

14. "Mystery Train" (1989). Memphis. Tourists. A booth in a diner. An empty train station. Gunshots out a hotel window. The ghost of Elvis. The living Rufus Thomas. What could be more American than Jim Jarmusch's haunted valentine to the so-called birthplace of rock and roll?

15. "Unforgiven" (1992): Don't know if Clint Eastwood is a Bob Dylan fan, but to me there's almost something Dylanesque about the writer-director's conflation of history and myth, violence and innocence, and patriotism and skepticism in this Best Picture Oscar winner, which reminds us that the Western is America's mirror genre: the one most regularly used to examine the nation's self-image.

16. "Casino" (1995): From "Boxcar Bertha" to "The Irishman," Martin Scorsese's films suggest that a shadow version of American history exists beneath the words inside the official texts; the movies use blood like a chemical reagent, to illuminate the invisible ink that spills the truth of these dark deeds. This chapter in Scorsese's careerlong project depicts the gangster-abetted rise of one of the nation's most potent symbols of power, glamour and "success," Las Vegas, with Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone along for the wild ride.

17. "Get on the Bus" (1996): Any Spike Lee film could make this list ("Do the Right Thing," especially, thanks to the fate of Radio Raheem), but this hopeful ensemble drama inspired by the 1995 Million Man March in Washington feels especially right for this summer of protest.

18. "The New World" (2005): Director Terrence Malick demythologizes the famous romance of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), yet brings his own trademark rapturous visual style to a story that at one time was familiar to every school student.

19. "Wendy and Lucy" (2008): Michelle Williams is Wendy, a jobless wanderer in the Pacific Northwest; a mixed-breed dog is Lucy, Wendy's companion; and Kelly Reichardt is the director of this absolutely on-the-(cold wet)-nose portrait of the loneliness that sometimes accompanies independence.

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20. "Moonlight" (2016): An Oscar winner for Best Picture, director Barry Jenkins' film follows its sensitive, wary hero through three phases of life, each identified by the character's new name. The fluctuating monikers offer a reminder that the young man is a resident of a country that stripped his ancestors of their cultural and literal identities. "Who is you, man?" someone asks him, and the question becomes as profound as Shakespeare's "To be or not to be" or Pontius Pilate's "What is truth?"

As I said at the start, this list could number in the thousands. Other titles that could have made the cut are "Daughter of Dawn" (1920), "The Iron Horse" (1924), "The Public Enemy" (1931), "Wild Boys of the Road" (1933), "It's a Gift" (1934), "His Girl Friday" (1940), "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), "Winchester '73" (1950), "Gun Crazy" (1950), "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), "The Girl Can't Help It" (1956), "A Face in the Crowd" (1957), "Imitation of Life" (1959), "Blue Hawaii" (1961), "Two Thousand Maniacs!" (1964), "Salesman" (1969), "Medium Cool" (1969), "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970), "Wanda" (1971), "Top of the Heap" (1972), "The Conversation" (1974), "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974), "Dolemite" (1975), "All the President's Men" (1976), "Smokey and the Bandit" (1977), "Born in Flames" (1983), "Bless Their Little Hearts" (1984), "Daughters of the Dust" (1991), "There Will Be Blood" (2007), "13th" (2016), "I Am Not Your Negro" (2016), "Support the Girls" (2018), "Apollo 11" (2019) and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (2019), to name a very, very few.

Most of these movies are available on DVD and/or Blu-ray disc. For streaming availability, visit the website justwatch.com.