Here’s the second part of our annual summer feature “Through the Decades”, taking advantage of the dearth of new movies at the cinema –though I’ve heard 28 Weeks Later is pretty good – to go back a decade at a time, ending up in 1947 next Sunday.
THROUGH THE DECADES: 1977
1977 facts and figures:
Top 5 Money-Makers (US):
Star Wars
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Smokey and the Bandit
The Goodbye Girl
The Deep
Best Film Oscar: Annie Hall
Best Actor Oscar: Richard Dreyfuss, The Goodbye Girl
Best Actress Oscar: Diane Keaton, Annie Hall
Cannes Festival ‘Golden Palm’: Padre Padrone (Italy)
The Rule of ‘7’ – positing that years ending in ‘7’ are good years for movies – seems to have bypassed 1977; apologies if the choices below are more obscure than usual, but I’m not a big fan of the year’s most talked-about films. On the other hand, this may be the most influential year in movie history (after 1927, and the advent of Sound) because a sci-fi actioner set “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” tore up the rulebook, becoming the most successful film of all time. Star Wars is fun, and would place at around #12 on my Best of the Year – but here’s 10 films I like even more, plus 15 others that marked the year.
1. ANNIE HALL. The lobsters. The cartoon interlude. Doing coke, and sneezing at the worst possible moment. “Don’t knock masturbation, it’s sex with someone I love.” “We use a large vibrating egg.” “Oh yeah? Well, I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here!” Maybe not Woody Allen’s best film – that would be Manhattan – but the funniest, sweetest and (despite the endless Jewish jokes) most universal. “Boy, if life were only like this…”
2. 3 WOMEN. One woman (Sissy Spacek) has no personality. Another (Shelley Duvall) has no class. The third (Janice Rule) is barely glimpsed, and may in fact be dreaming the whole thing. Mirrors, veils and all kinds of dream-logic in Robert Altman’s magical – and funny – puzzle, one of the most unconventional films of the 70s. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.
3. PROVIDENCE. More pretentious twaddle? Well, perhaps – but also a superb performance by John Gielgud, as a dying writer composing (or recalling?) a novel based on his life. Lush, surreal, elegant, sometimes hilarious, but mostly a film about Death, and every writer’s attempts to escape his own mortality by exercising powers of life and death over his characters.
4. AMAR AKBAR ANTHONY. Bollywood in excelsis! Three brothers lost and (eventually) reunited in one of Indian cinema’s biggest hits of the 70s, full of plot twists, fight scenes, comic knockabout, insane melodrama and of course songs. How insane is it? Let’s just say it takes 20 minutes before we even get to the opening credits!
5. MARTIN. Meet Martin. He’s a teenager. He lives in Pittsburgh. He’s a vampire. George Romero’s singular horror movie walks a fine line between empathy and fear – and finally turns into a quirky, tender film about anyone who’s different and/or marginalized. Also: most surprising ending of 1977.
6. THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER. Broderick Crawford as the hatchet-faced, secretly gay Hoover, who ran the FBI from 1924 to 1972 – and the film is a whirlwind cartoonish tour of 20th-century American politics, taking in everyone from JFK to the Birdman of Alcatraz, backed by an incongruously lavish Hollywood score. Gloriously demented.
7. THE DUELLISTS. Before he made Alien and Blade Runner, Ridley Scott made this odd, gripping tale of two French soldiers obsessively duelling – again and again and again – at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. As the more unreasonable of the two, Harvey Keitel is a savage beast, a force of Nature – and almost as scary as the alien bursting through that poor guy’s stomach.
8. JULIA. Europe in the 30s, Nazis on the rise. Jane Fonda as writer Lillian Hellman, Vanessa Redgrave (luminous, and Oscar-winning) her radical friend Julia. Moments framed and memories burnished in a careful, atmospheric drama, one of the year’s big prestige pictures. Also: 27-year-old Meryl Streep in her debut.
9. DESPERATE LIVING. “I have never found the antics of deviants to be one bit amusing!” Bad taste galore in John Waters’ scabrous comedy (his best), with Mink Stole giving a hilarious portrait of female hysteria. Elsewhere, a tyrannical Queen is injected with rabies and a penis is sheared off with a blunt pair of scissors. Not for all tastes.
10. (tie) ERASERHEAD and LAST CHANTS FOR A SLOW DANCE. A good year for experimental US cinema. David Lynch made his name with Eraserhead – featuring an iconic cylindrical hairstyle, a singing lady with chipmunk cheeks and the most demanding (deformed) baby in film history – and never looked back. Jon Jost made a hypnotic study of a killer in Last Chants for a Slow Dance, but unfortunately never got the recognition he deserves. Forget it, Jake, it’s the 70s…
15 OTHER MUST-SEE FILMS FROM 1977:
THE AMERICAN FRIEND. He wears a cowboy hat and everything.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. It’s better than goofy golf!
CROSS OF IRON. War is Hell, apparently…
THE GOODBYE GIRL. Richard Dreyfuss: murder to live with.
KILLER OF SHEEP. Slaughterhouse worker in the ghetto kills sheep, lives his life. One for the critics…
KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE. “Mr. Grunwald, would you please follow me to the south end of the courtroom?” “Objection! He’s leading the witness!”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK. Most notorious flop of 1977.
PADRE PADRONE. The lives of young Sardinian goatherds. Give this film a Golden Palm!
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. “I’m going nowhere / Somebody help me…”
SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT. Car chase! Car chase!
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME. “No-o-body does it be-e-etter…”
STAR WARS. May the Force be with you.
SUSPIRIA. Best music for a horror film since Psycho.
THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE. Heroine played by two different actresses. Weird!
THE TURNING POINT. Look, it’s Carrie’s Russian guy from Sex and the City…
THROUGH THE DECADES: 1967
1967 facts and figures:
Top 5 Money-Makers (US):
The Graduate
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Valley of the Dolls
The Dirty Dozen
You Only Live Twice
Best Film Oscar: In the Heat of the Night
Best Actor Oscar: Rod Steiger, In the Heat of the Night
Best Actress Oscar: Katharine Hepburn, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Cannes Festival ‘Golden Palm’: Blow-Up (UK)
The Rule of ‘7’ is back with a vengeance for 1967, one of those great 60s years with iconic names all the way down our Top 10. Here it is, plus 15 other films that marked the year.
1. BONNIE AND CLYDE. A scandal, a sensation, an event, a revolution. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as the charming duo of bank robbers in a film that mixed extreme (for the time) violence with a light-hearted tone and loose, alluring style. “That the movie was so much fun may have been the most disturbing thing about it” – A.O. Scott, New York Times, August 2007.
2. THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT. The ultimate musical – a world where singing and dancing are as natural as breathing. Catherine Deneuve and real-life sister Francoise Dorleac as the Young Girls of Rochefort, “twin sisters born under the sign of the Twins”. Colourful, blithe, and as casually magical as any movie ever made.
3. THE GRADUATE. The pool. The hotel room. Hello darkness, my old friend. “Plastics.” “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me … Aren’t you?” “Don’t you think that idea is a little half-baked?”; “Oh no, Dad, it’s completely baked.” A comedy for the ages.
4. EL DORADO. John Wayne the gunman, Robert Mitchum the drunken sheriff, James Caan the ‘kid’ who can’t shut up. Wayne an
d director Howard Hawks remake Rio Bravo, and actually improve on it: a delightful Western that’s also a moving hymn to inter-connectedness and the deep-rooted bonds between friends.
5. HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. “I do it the Company Way / Wherever the company puts me, there I stay…” Terrific office musical – based on a Broadway hit – full of bright colours, cynical gags and songs both sharp and hummable. And remember! “A secretary is not a toy.”
6. POINT BLANK. Lee Marvin is Walker, working his way systematically – and violently – through a major corporation as he seeks the money they owe him. “You’re a very bad man, Walker, a very destructive man!” Flashy style, unexpected levity, Marvin as an exemplar of cool; semi-remade with Mel Gibson as Payback.
7. TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER. ‘Her’ being Paris, our heroine (Marina Vlady) or a dozen other possibilities. Rich, cluttered dazzler from Jean-Luc Godard, who also made two other classics – La Chinoise and Weekend – in the same year.
8. BELLE DE JOUR. Housewife in the mornings, prostitute in the afternoons: icily lovely Catherine Deneuve in her most famous role – a film (by Luis Bunuel) of simmering sensuality, from its opening S&M fantasy to the final merging of real and surreal.
9. WAIT UNTIL DARK. Audrey Hepburn owns a doll stuffed with drugs. Crooks want the drugs, but don’t know where the doll is – so they have to trick her. The twist? She’s blind! Mind-games galore in smart, talky thriller, ripe for revival. Next year’s Summer Marathon, perhaps?…
10. THE TRIP. Pure kitsch, pure psychedelia, pure guilty pleasure. Peter Fonda takes LSD and goes on a multi-coloured ‘trip’ – with a script by Jack Nicholson. Groovy!
15 OTHER MUST-SEE FILMS FROM 1967:
BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Jane Fonda? Robert Redford? Omigod, they look so young…
BRANDED TO KILL. Japanese gangsters. What’s not to like?
COOL HAND LUKE. “What we got here is a failure to communicate.”
DON’T LOOK BACK. It’s Bob Dylan! Bob, over here!
THE DIRTY DOZEN. Dirty killers, one and all.
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER. Racism For Dummies (Part 1).
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. Racism For Dummies (Part 2).
THE JUNGLE BOOK. “Look for the bare necessities / The simple bare necessities…”
PLAYTIME. Fun with architecture.
REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE. Marlon’s gay, Liz is a bitch.
LE SAMOURAI. Alain Delon: coolest dude of 1967.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. Liz Taylor, Richard Burton. Oh, and Shakespeare.
TO SIR WITH LOVE. “A story as fresh as the girls in their minis.”
WAVELENGTH. One shot, 45 minutes.
WEEKEND. Biggest traffic jam in movie history.
Next week: 1957 and 1947.
