A list by country
Apr 23 '09
The Bottom Line A decade in which I saw a whole lot of great movies (in theaters).
I think that what many people mean by "the sixties" didn't begin until 1966 or 1967 and lasted until 1972 or 1973. For independent director-driven American movies, "the seventies" perhaps started in 1968 and ended in 1975 with the first summer blockbuster, "Jaws."
Taking the convention 1970-79 interval, I decided to make a list by country/language (having done an all-time list that way.
Brazil: Bruno Barreto's film of Jorge Amado's "Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos" (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, 1976) with Sonia Braga lighting up the screen as the polyandrous heroine.
Canada: "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (1974) with Richard Dreyfuss, or "Lies My Father Told Me"? 1975) directed by Ján Kadár from a story by Ted Allen? Both set in the past in Montréal.
China: not yet!
France: Though the "new wave" had waned and Jean-Luc Godard went off the deep end, Jean-Pierre Melville's heist and doom "Le cercle rouge" (The Red Circle) dates from 1970 (with great performances by Alain Delon, Yves Montand, and Gian Maria Volontè). There are Truffaut films from the 1970s I like (though I think "Day for Night" vastly overrated). The French master of the decade for me was Louis Malle. "Le souffle au coeur" (Murmur of the Heart, 1971), a coming-of-age film set at the time of the French defeat at Dienbenphu with a young jazz aficionado and a very loving mother is one of my favorite films. I think that "Lacombe, Lucien" (1974) is the best movie about the Nazi occupation and local collaborators ever made, and Malle closed out the decade (in English) with "Atlantic City" (1980), which I saw on my first date with my life partner.
One of my favorite performances of the decade came from the great Simone Signoret as "Madame Rosa" in the 1977 Oscar-winning movie directed by Moshé Mizrahi.
German: Rainer Maria Fassbinder and Werner Herzog were both prominent in art-house venues of the 1970s. Many of the Fassbinder movies irritated me. My favorites were "Angst essen Seele auf" (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) and "Faustrecht der Freiheit "(Fox and His Friends, 1975), though "Die Ehe der Maria Braun" (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979) is proably the most fully realized one. The most amazing German film (maybe ever) was Herzog's "Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes "(Aguirre, Wrath of God, 1972) with Klaus Kinski going mad going down the Amazon in armor. "Ali" as my favorite, "Aguirre" as the best?
Greek (? who knows what country to assign it to? Director Costas-Garvas is Greek!) "State of Siege" (1973), like C-G's "Z" starring Yves Montand. This movie was very controversial and would seem of relevance in this millennium in which kidnapping remains a weapon of ideologues.
Hong Kong (Cantonese) "Zui quan" (Drunken Master, 1978), directed by Yuen Woo Ping and Jackie Chan, with a fight between two pairs of lion dancers at the start that is my favorite fight choreography ever.
India (Bengali): Satyajit Ray's film about 1942 famine during the disruption of supplies from Burma to Bengal, "Ashani Sanket" (Distant Thunder, 1973) is harrowing. (The distant thunder is WWII.)
Italian: The consensus favorite, perhaps the best, certainly is Fellini's "Amarcord" (1973). My favorite is either Bertolucci's adaptation of Alberto Moravia's The Conformist, or Visconti's luxuriant adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1971). The latter might be disqualified as an Italian entry for being in English (but Italian films were all dubbed into Italian) starring Dirk Bogarde (who also turned up in the undeservedly neglected Fassbinder adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Despair). And the Antonioni masterpiece from the 1970s "The Passenger" (1975) starring Jack Nicholson also seems to have been shot in English.
Ivory Coast: I'd say that "Black and White in Color" (1976), directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud is a French movie. It is a great movie about colonial pathologies (and/or about the lunacy of World War I).
Jamaica: "The Harder They Come" with the great Jimmy Cliff and the great reggae soundtrack. The movie was directed by Perry Henzell, but plot and character are incidental to the soundtrack.
Japan: the 1970s were not a good decade for the greatest master of all, Akira Kurosawa, or Japanese cinema in general. His "Dodesukaden" (1970) was a disaster in every regard and its failure led to a suicide attempt, though he triumphantly returned in 1980 with "Kagemusha." and went on to make the culminating masterpiece "Ran" (Chaos) in 1985. The great Ichikawa and Okamoto films came before the 1970s. Mizoguchi and Ozu were dead; Kobayashi died before adding any more masterpieces to his oeuvre. With Kurosawa on the list under "Russian," almost by default Imamura Shohei's "Vengeance Is Mine" is my Japanese pick.
Korea: not yet!
The great Eastern European movie, not just Polish, was Andrzej Wajda's exploration of a kind of celebrity in a communist autocracy, "Czlowiek z marmuru" (Man of Marble, 1977), a worthy successor to his famed earlier trilogy of movies about the substitution of Soviet for Nazi overlords at the end of the Second World War.
Russian (Siberian) Akira Kurosawa could not get movies financed in Japan during the 1970s but got Soviet funding to make the gorgeous tale of an indigenous guide to a 19th-century Russian scientific expedition, "Dersu Uzala" (1975).
Senegal (in Wolof): The great West African movie made by a West African, Ousmane Sembene's 1975 "Xala," is a mordant comedy about a corrupt post-colonial official who overreaches (and not just in taking a third wife). My list does not have a lot of comedies. This one is black in more than one sense.
Spaghetti western (is it Italian or American?) Tonino Valerii's (1973) "My Name Is Nobody" with Henry Fonda and Terrence Hill (in the title role)
Spain: Pedro Almodóvar started making movies during the 1970s, but I've seen none of them. The one acknowledged great Spanish movie of the decade was "El espíritu de la colmena" (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) written and direct by Víctor Erice (with a major assist from James Whale's "Frankenstein" which obsesses the young protagonist). My favorite, however is Carlos Saura's "Cría cuervos" with another astonishing pair of young girl performances (plus Saura's wife, Geraldine Chaplin, as a mother dying of cancer). (Saura's flamenco trilogy came during the 1980s.) Luis Buñuel's (1970) "Tristana" also deserves consideration.
The great Swedish movie of the 1970s was Ingmar Bergman's pain-inducing "Viskningar och rop" (Cries and Whispers,1972), but I'd far rather watch "Trollflöjten" (The Magic Flute, 1975) any day or night. With Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman, Bergman's (1979) "Autumn Sonata" is also formidable a chamber piece.
Taiwan: not yet!
UK: I'm not sure if Joseph Losey's film of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" (1979) qualifies. Losey also directed the very interesting "Mr. Klein" (1976) with Alain Delon and "The Go-Between" with Julie Christie and Alan Bates. My favorite Losey movie and my favorite English movie of the 1970s, however, is "The Romantic Englishwoman" (1975) with Glenda Jackson in the title role. She is married to a character of considerable duplicity played brilliantly by Michael Caine and having an affair across Europe with the beautiful Helmut Berger. (Caine made many bad movies during the 1970s, but was outstanding in "Get Carter" and "Sleuth" early in the decade: 1971 and 1972. I loved Glenda Jackson's turn as an abbess Richard Nixon in "Nasty Habits" in 1977.) Jackson was also the female point of a triangle in John Schlesinger's great 1971 "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" (and I'd add that his 1979 "Yanks" starring Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Gere has been unjustly forgotten—I'd rather forget "Midnight Cowboy" (1969).)
And it's impossible to forget Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1971). Was Kubrick English by then? Was he ever?
US: My favorites are Robert Altman's frozen western "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971) and Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" (1972), neither of which succeeded in revitalizing their genres (the western and the musical). I was an Altman fan from close to the beginning (with "Brewster McCloud" in 1971). I liked and admired "The Long Goodbye" (1973) and "Nashville" (1975), though not some other Altman moves, especially as the decade went on. I admired more than like Fosse's "Lenny" (with Dustin Hoffman playing Lenny Bruce) and "All That Jazz" (with Roy Scheider playing Fosse: with what a clinactic production number!).
The 1970s were a good decade for Woody Allen, who attained critical acclaim and his biggest audience for Annie Hall" (1977) and "Manhattan" (1979) (and promptly crashes and burned with "Stardust Memories" and "Zelig" at the start of the 1980s).
I think that Sam Peckinpah's (1968) "The Wild Bunch" is a contender for The Great American Movie accolade. I like his offbeat comedy with Jason Robards and Stella Stevens "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970) and have a great fondness for "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (1973) with James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson in the title roles, Bob Dylan as the chorus. Who'd have thought that Chill Wills would have one of the most affecting scenes ever (here with Katy Jurado and Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door")?
George Roy Hill's reteaming of Paul Newman and Robert Redford (and a great villain turn by Robert Shaw) in "The Sting" (1973) was a crowd-pleaser that reintroduced the ragtime music of Scott Joplin to a large audience. (The 1981 movie "Ragtime" was a disappointment, even though it brought James Cagney back to the screen.)
Francis Ford Coppola managed to top his critical and commercial success from "The Godfather" (1972) with the sequel (1974) with the smaller-scale masterpiece "The Conversation" (1974) in between before bringing the fascinating mess of "Apocalypse Now" in before the decade ended. (I think that Coppola made some interesting movies during the 1980s, but the 1970s were his decade.)
Martin Scorsese made a big impression (along with his actors Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel) in "Mean Streets" (1973) and (with DeNiro and Jodie Foster) in "Taxi Driver" (1976). I adore Ellen Burstyn and Scorsese's helmsing of her to an Oscar for "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (1974), but my favorite Scorsese film (not just of the 1970s) was the commercial failure "New York, New York" with DeNiro and Liza Minnelli.
I thought that Vanessa Redgrave was luminous in Fred Zinnemann's film adaptation of Lillian Hellman's unreliable memoirs, "Julia" (1977) with a very entertaining turn by Jason Robards as Dashiell Hammett coping with Jane Fonda as Hellman. Zinnemann also helmsed the classic thriller "The Day of the Jackal" (1973).
Paranoid thrillers popped out during the 1970s. A quintessential 1970s movie in which Jason Robards had another meaty part was Alan J. Pakula's (1976) "All the President's Men." It was quintessential not least in that what seemed like "paranoia" was not. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford unearth some of the high crimes of Richard Nixon in dramatic fashion. (Pakula also directed another quintessential "paranoid thriller," "The Parallex View" in 1974. I'd argue that "Klute" in which Pakula directed Jane Fonda as a prostitute serving as bait for a killer in 1971 is also a "paranoid thriller.")
Peter Bodganovich's adaptation of Larry McMurtry, "The Last Picture Show" (1971) is one of my favorite films, especially for the performances by Ellen Burstyn and Ben Johnson.
An outstanding performance that I can't fail to mention is Gena Rowlands as A Woman Under the Influence (1974), directed by her husband, John Cassavetes. For a mostly female ensemble, "Interiors" (1978), directed by Woody Allen. For a mostly male ensemble, "I Never Sang for My Father" (Gene Hackman had almost as good a 1970s as Jack Nicholson!) And "Days of Heaven" for cinematography (Nestor Almendros).
(Alas, I have not seen "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs," "Investigations of a Citizen Above Suspicion", "Iphigenia," "Magnificent Bodyguards," "The Marquise of O," "A Simple Story," or "Two-Lane Blacktop." I never made it through either version of "Solaris," and only made it through "Killer of Sleep" by speeding up the DVD. I don't remember The Mother and the W_hore well enough to evaluate it, or most of "Five Easy Pieces," except for the restaurant "hold" scene!)
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You want a ranked listing of ten? OK, my dozen favorites as of today:
(1) McCabe and Mrs. Miller
(2) Le cercle rouge
(3) The Harder They Come
(4) The Last Picture Show
(5) New York, New York
(6) A Romantic Englishwoman
(7) Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(8) Le souffle au coeur
(9) Cabaret
(10) Man of Marble
(11) Cría cuervos
(12) Dersu Uzala
The best? How about "The Conversation"? (I have not objection to "Godfather II" in that slot, but how does one compare the "bestness" even of those two movies from the same director in the same year?)
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I've also listed
my favorite films of all times,
the best films ever,
best non-English-language movies by country,
best noirs,
best French organized crime movies,
best English organized crime movies,
best westerns not set in the American west,
best romantic movies with happy endings,
best romantic movies in which the lovers do not end up together for reasons other than the death of one or both of them,
best romantic movies including the death of a lover,
best religious movies celebrating a religious figure,
best movies portraying the dark side of religion,
best holidaze (Christmas and Thanksgiving) movies,
best rock-n-roll movies,
best musicals,
best gay feature film,
best gay documentary film,
best cult movies,
best black comedies,
best World War II movies,
best post-WWII German films,
best epics,
and best anti-epics,
best movies of the 1940s, the 1970s, the 1980s,
1939, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006,
and 2007.
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