100 Best Films

In last week's Sunday Telegraph someone made a list of their 100 best films under headings: Drama, Thriller/Action, Comedy, Animation, Horror, Romance, Kids, Musicals, Documentary, World Cinema.
No Westerns?
No "Shane" or "The Searchers" or "The Big Country" or "Stagecoach"?
No Chaplin?
No Welles?
Someone asked us all, in a group of holiday makers a few years ago, what were our favourite films. I said, without much thought, "Casablanca". But in retrospect I feel I should have chosen - with all its faults and it has many, and with its shovel-fulls (or should that be shovels-full?) of sentimentality - Chaplin's "City Lights".
I always marvel at the organisation of the plot and the choreography of the silent comedy routines. And there are scenes in it when I am swept away by the sheer brilliance of the details: the first time Chaplin meets the blind girl is superb because it is so well organised and so moving and so funny too; the end of the film when the girl has had her sight restored and sees, for the first time, the man - the down-at-heel, ill kempt tramp who'd paid for the operation (his having gone to prison for theft to pay for it) and realising he was not after all the rich, Rolls Royce owner she thought he was from an earlier scene. And when she offers him a coin which he first refuses but then accepts and on touching his hand she knows who he is.... and Chaplin's musical accompaniment rises to Puccini-like heights of rapture....
Pass the handkerchief please.