0 The Sound of Music (1965)

USA, 174 minutes
Director: Robert Wise
Writers: George Hurdalek, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse, Ernest Lehman, Maria von Trapp
Photography: Ted D. McCord
Music: Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Irwin Kostal
Editor: William Reynolds
Cast: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker, Peggy Wood, Anna Lee, Marni Nixon, Angela Cartwright

At some point I realized that 1965 was going to be a critical juncture in this ongoing Movie of the Year project. It was the year I personally became aware of "going out to the movies" as an activity that meant something specific, and special, although parental accompaniment—or at least permission and transport—were still necessarily involved. I'm thus aware that my choice is something of a sentimental one, as seeing The Sound of Music was precisely a mandatory family activity, in the same year that I discovered top 40 radio and that the Beatles' Help! was released. I resented The Sound of Music then, rejected it as corny, and never looked back until a few years ago, when it somehow got in front of me again (also probably for sentimental reasons, with the death of my father looming). Programming note: It is also the last one I will be offering in the series for a little while, as I increasingly feel the need to research what's ahead for the early '60s, '50s, and back—March or April next year is my target for resuming, with 1964. From here on, all picks will come from retrospect, so I'm indulging one last opportunity for a movie I saw in its time, though my feelings about it are somewhat complicated.

Actually, in that later viewing, there was a particular moment that decisively turned me around on The Sound of Music, which for something like two hours I watched alternating between groaning and wincing and, surprisingly often, thinking, "Hey, this isn't so bad." When I realized the song "Something Good" was not only in the movie, but came from it, I fell in line. I had come to love the homely mystical approach of that song (both musical and lyrical) by way of a Caetano Veloso cover version of it in 2004. Coming at a swooning romantic high point of the picture, I was done. That was it. Even Julie Andrews capering about as dim bulb nun and mountain meadow maid (it has to bear some responsibility for The Flying Nun, yes?), with those magnificent snow-capped Alps peaks in the backdrop, convinced me now. I made my peace. The hills are alive, see.



In so doing, in giving in not just to a blatant musical, but to that most blatant of all musicals, the '60s musical, I realize I have gone through a looking-glass. Probably for reasons of technology and economics, '60s musicals metastasized the whole interpenetrated song and dance thing with the visuals and narrative to absurd degrees rarely seen so routinely before or since. The music churns and washes up in multiple ways, getting into everything. It is diegetic and not, sometimes within the same scenes and songs. At a casual meeting in a magnificent stone vestibule, for example, the nuns work up six-part harmony with full invisible orchestral accompaniment on "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" When Maria comes rushing in because she's always late for everything, of course, they quickly stop and have a comic exchange with the echoes of the vestibule heard. When Maria leaves again the full invisible orchestra is back and so are the singing nuns. Or there are moments, as in cars, when a single line is sung, and sounds like a studio production, and then back to the natural sound interior of the car.

I love how much some of the principals hated this movie, even as they worked on it—notably Christopher Plummer, the co-star, and director Robert Wise, who wrings the saccharine from this with abandon, rapaciously robbing the vault of totemic cinema with explicit references to Casablanca and Grand Illusion among many other great sins. But it works, it works! Plummer's venom for the property takes the form in his performance of a perfectly modulated loathing of Nazis, and who doesn't hate Nazis! Wise's larcenies have the paradoxical effect of bringing great dignity to the foofaraw, right when it needs it most, and can get away with it best, in its last third.

Because another point where The Sound of Music is undeniably strong is its rampaging narrative, which goes where it will. Mostly it plays as an insipid romantic comedy musical that is busy with charming incident for two hours or so, which works well enough for me because I'm partial to romantic comedies. Then it disposes of the romantic comedy with the happy ending of a spectacular fairy tale wedding (the invisible orchestra sawing away variations on "Maria")—remember that among its many weaker points The Sound of Music is a story of vastly privileged white people. And then it pivots seamlessly into a musical thriller about Nazis, with a very good tale of escape and/or hiding from Nazis, which of course is a basic staple of Nazi movies and stories, starting with Anne Frank.

For as good as the ending of The Sound of Music is, it does take some time getting there. It must be said clearly that you are in for a baggy, loose narrative overflowing with schmaltz in The Sound of Music. I hope this does not come as too much of a surprise. There's no end of wince-worthy mugging and pratfalls and adorable children in the long story of recalcitrant nincompoop Maria leaving the convent to become a governess of seven children, where she is a spectacular and beautiful success, not least because she knows how to put on a song and dance show. Their father (Plummer) is a widower and a mighty fine military sea captain (that's why the Nazis insist he stay), a proud not to say jingoistic Austrian not happy to see the developments in his homeland and, oh yeah, he's pretty handy with a guitar too. There's a lot of mangling of history here, so probably best to look away from the details. As always, rely on the appearance of the swastika to quickly distinguish the players. As for the length, think of it as a long hot soapy bath. Sing along, as inclined.

Top 10 of 1965
1. Repulsion
2. The Sound of Music
3. Fists in the Pocket
4. For a Few Dollars More
5. The Collector
6. Bunny Lake Is Missing
7. King Rat
8. Red Beard
9. Pierrot le fou
10. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines

Detail: The Sound of Music (1965)

0 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Italy / Spain / West Germany, 161 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Mickey Knox
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editors: Eugene Alabiso, Nino Baragli
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Antonio Casas

Eli Wallach's teeth are too good—and that goes for Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef too. Gleaming white and straight and lined up just the way modern-day dentists like them. At some point—I think usually around the time Tuco (aka "the Ugly," Wallach) has brought Blondie (aka "the Good," Eastwood) to a monastery to recover from a bad time in the desert—I notice how well tended those teeth are and I am taken temporarily out of the action. My last complaint. That's the niggling level of my criticism about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is otherwise practically flawless.

It is, as the mystifying phrase we like to use now has it, what it is, and makes no bones about it. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a cartoon-level Western trafficking in existentialism, with extra fine shooting and a bone-simple story of revenge and greed animating the three principals, as the divertissement, cutting across history and causing it to fall away: the Civil War, the railroads, horses and guns and broad brim hats and brown liquor downed straight. All the familiar elements are here, but merely to serve as feeble context for these three gods striding through and defining the action, straight out of a deck of tarot cards—the two angels of heaven and hell, and the trickster fool with the sad, sad story.



Director and co-writer Sergio Leone worked out a style as dependent on visuals and music as on narrative and words. Not a word is heard in the first 10 minutes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and indeed the first 30 are dedicated to elaborate, stylized introductions, each with a freeze frame emblazoned with the key signifier: "the Ugly," "the Good," "the Bad." He liked it so much, and it works so well, that he repeated it again at the end.

Leone takes his sweet time over and over again setting up the many epic confrontations that populate this movie. We see one person doing something, and then another person doing something else, and then yet another person wandering away from the scene, and eventually all things connect up. But it takes a long time getting there—the picture is nearly three hours. As explosive and quick as the climaxes are we finally start to realize it's not the point at all. They are repetitive and redundant, an unending random game of rock-paper-scissors. What matters, in true existential fashion, is the beauty of each moment and the ability to grasp and see each one as it goes by. That's why it's slow.

There is a cinematic line that passes through Lawrence of Arabia and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and on to Apocalypse Now and John Woo's Red Cliff, great sprawling epics plunged into history and unfamiliar landscape—unfamiliar to its characters, its makers, its audience. Leone's work has been labeled "spaghetti western" from the first because he is Italian and brings a penetrating sense of foreignness to these quintessentially American scenes. The classic high-noon drawdown on main street here for example has the additional element of being in a war zone, with shelling. The story takes place in the middle of the Civil War, often intersecting directly with it. At one point Blondie and Tuco become prisoners of war in a Union POW camp where Angel Eyes (aka "the Bad," Van Cleef) has somehow become a commanding officer.

There is also something very funny (funny ha ha, I mean) about the way the plot points line up. Blondie is "Good" only in the sense of being skilled, but he is also a blessed figure in a way, often escaping harm altogether where Tuco suffers enormously. Blondie is absurdly able to operate serendipitously, at one point for example finding a cannon ready to fire and aimed just where he needs it. All he has to do is drop his arm and rest the coal of his familiar cheroot on the fuse. There is a sense of a greater power behind him, as there also is with Angel Eyes, in whose case the source is obviously infernal. By process of elimination that leaves Blondie as "Good." All things balance.

In a year when European art film was reaching certain enduring high points Leone was relegated more to the back and side of that, though we see better now that he certainly belongs with Bergman, Bresson, Tarkovsky, and the others. But spawning an international superstar in Clint Eastwood, playing with fundamental American b-movie elements, and incidentally seeing a good deal of commercial success obscured that somewhat, at least until Quentin Tarantino came along a few decades later (since which the problem tends to run in the other direction).

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a movie I return to frequently, not least because so many are willing to agree on it (as they never would for, say, Andrei Rublev), and it works even in fragments, which I know from running across it on TV. It's slow, but always engrossing—there is a fascinating intricacy to the parts, and there is something pleasingly geometric about the forces balanced against one another and how they play out. The end is represented by the lines of a triangle inside a circle. It has the capacity to surprise very much; I can still never quite get over the scene with the POW orchestra, haunted by "More feeling," one of the cruel guards barks at them at one point. It's funny and harrowing and unnerving as hell, and sweet and beautiful and haunting as well. The whole movie balances on the edge of a blade, for nearly three hours, and then pirouettes to an astonishing finale. It never gets old or stale.

Top 10 of 1966
1. Au hasard Balthazar
2. Persona
3. Andrei Rublev
4. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
5. What's Up, Tiger Lily?
6. Masculin feminin
7. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
8. Seconds
9. The Battle of Algiers
10. Blow-Up

Detail: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

0 Wait Until Dark (1967)

USA, 108 minutes
Director: Terence Young
Writers: Frederick Knott, Robert Carrington, Jane-Howard Carrington
Photography: Charles Lang
Music: Henry Mancini
Editor: Gene Milford
Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Jack Weston, Robby Benson, Julie Herrod, Samantha Jones

A star vehicle based on a stage production and arguably a by-the-numbers thriller of the day, Wait Until Dark made a lot of money but tends to get lost in the glare of an especially historic year for film, which saw releases of Bonnie and Clyde, Dont Look Back, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Play Time, among others. Those movies are a big deal. Wait Until Dark is more of a small-scale deal—a sentimental pick on my part, perhaps. It is one of the first movies I saw without parental accompaniment, a memorable experience because one of those old school gimmicks was involved: No one was allowed entrance during the last 30 minutes, at which point all the house lights of the theater were turned off (against public regulations, I might add) during a key scene.

The formidably glamorous Audrey Hepburn was already established as an archetype of the "manic pixie dream girl" and here she carries on, playing Susy Hendrix, a woman adapting to total blindness after she has recently lost her sight in a fiery car wreck. "Do I have to be the world champion blind lady?" she chirps playfully more than once, the very image of pluck. Set in downtown New York City, the movie has unmistakable connections to a contemporary TV series, That Girl. Susy's version of Ann Marie's "Donald," her husband Sam, is played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who also has a TV way about him (The F.B.I.). Director Terence Young is best known for making early James Bond pictures—Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball—and the experience serves this picture well, as it slips easily into creepy spy thriller / action mode, with eerie discordant music and a screenplay that plunges us into all kinds of mysterious ongoing nefarious activity. We barely have time to catch a breath, as the saying goes. Some potential spoilers ahead.



It is very much an Alfred Hitchcock tale, complete with MacGuffin in the form of a doll stuffed with heroin for purposes of smuggling and a "wrong man" scenario. Susy Hendrix is the "wrong man" (not to mention a version of the Hitchcock blonde) as she and Sam have come into possession of the doll, unknowing of its significance. When Sam has to travel for business, the bad guys show up at the Hendrix apartment looking for the doll, and soon enough one thing leads to another. The origins of Wait Until Dark as a stage production remain transparent, as the vast majority of action is centered in the Hendrix apartment, with the bad guys first attempting a kind of elaborate sting on Susy before progressing to the harder stuff. It is reminiscent in certain ways of a movie with a similar premise, based on a radio theater production, 1948's Sorry, Wrong Number.

Chief bad guy is a man named Roat, played with zest by a grandstanding, youthful Alan Arkin, who has something of a showcase role here and is well up to it. It verges on silly the way it is written, and Roat's cool sadistic side is almost comical caricature too, but never mind. The story moves quickly enough to obscure such flaws, and Arkin even at his most ridiculous retains a coiled power that is always a little unnerving. He still looks bad now, and he was a terrifying monster in the '60s. Richard Crenna and Jack Weston (more faces familiar from TV) are Roat's half-witted henchmen, coerced by him into the deal, and they are fine too.

It's a good premise, with first the unfolding sting, designed to prompt Susy to give up the doll in the spirit of a sincere misunderstanding, and then the vulnerability of the blind woman fully exploited. In the ingenious climax she is able to turn that very vulnerability against her tormentors. Susy only gradually realizes that the people coming to her door and calling her on the phone are not who they say they are, and the more she comes to understand that, in separate revelations, the more serious and worrisome the action becomes. The movie's best moments are at those points of understanding, when it is the best kind of chamber play and movie both, close and intimate and nerve-wracking.

Another movie it reminds me of is Marathon Man, also a gritty New York thriller with memorable musical moods, especially as it descends into a savage cat and mouse game for life and death. In Wait Until Dark, to defend herself, finally understanding her terrible jeopardy, Susy roams the apartment smashing all the light bulbs. Much of the rest of the movie occurs on a black screen (though she does forget one light bulb)—this was also the point when house lights were turned off in the theater.

While it remains stagy, Wait Until Dark is nimble and pointed, with lots of surprises and nice moments, wisely riding along on the powers of the original play when it has to. Audrey Hepburn is more star than player, but she's good enough at the physical mannerisms of a blind person. If her extreme cheer seems shallow, it comes to occupy more terrifying dimensions when the limits of her will to survive are revealed. Her persistent chipper way seems something else entirely then—steely if not pathological, reverting to her Holly Golightly persona. Arkin takes his stunt turns and everybody else knows to hit their marks from TV productions. So it goes like clockwork and the result is a nice little thriller. Too bad there will never again be a theater that turns off its house lights entirely for the end. [/nostalgia]

Top 10 of 1967
1. Wait Until Dark
2. The Graduate
3. Dont Look Back
4. Bonnie and Clyde
5. Play Time
6. In Cold Blood
7. La Collectionneuse
8. Cool Hand Luke
9. In the Heat of the Night
10. Point Blank

Detail: Wait Until Dark (1967)

0 Rosemary's Baby (1968)

USA, 136 minutes
Director: Roman Polanski
Writers: Ira Levin, Roman Polanski
Photography: William A. Fraker
Music: Krysztof Komeda
Editors: Sam O'Steen, Bob Wyman
Cast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Patsy Kelly, Ralph Bellamy, Maurice Evans, Angela Dorian, Elisha Cook Jr., Charles Grodin, Tony Curtis, William Castle, Hope Summers

Devil worship in the heart of Manhattan was not exactly a new idea in 1968—producer Val Lewton had already taken a turn at it with The Seventh Victim some two decades before. But Rosemary's Baby is a series of contradictions at multiple levels, mixing old and new, outlandish and pedestrian, fashionable and homely, into a heady brew. It starts with the contradiction of stylish European film director and screenwriter Roman Polanski at the helm of a William Castle production. Castle, whose legend is lampooned in Joe Dante's 1993 Matinee (worth seeing), was famed for his horror movie promotions in the '50s and '60s: The House on Haunted Hill ("filmed in Emergo"), The Tingler ("filmed in Percepto"), and 13 Ghosts ("filmed in Illusion-O"). The words ending in "o" refer to stunts such as vibrating motors attached to the undersides of theater seats for The Tingler.

Castle even makes a cameo in Rosemary's Baby, grinning and honking on a stogie while he waits for Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) to free up a public phone. Rosemary's Baby, both the movie and the novel it was based on, was very much of its particular moment, come swirling out of the mid-'60s and the year of the beast, 196-6-6, long hot summers and deepening of the Vietnam War, etc., when Joan Didion first began to embrace dread as a critical aesthetic and Time magazine dedicated one of its covers to the question, "Is God Dead?" That very Time magazine cover puts in an appearance at one point in Rosemary's Baby in a doctor's waiting room. Blood and fantastical images are used sparingly, but Polanski is working very self-consciously in the realm of horror, with these devil worshipers and a celebrity appearance by Satan himself. At one point, the gnawing physical pain Rosemary experiences in her pregnancy suddenly vanishes and she feels it kicking inside her. "It's alive," she cries with joy and relief, echoing the famous lines from Frankenstein. "It's alive!"



More often, Rosemary's Baby is full of low-key scenes and characters of New York City life—in many ways Farrow's audition for Hannah and her other roles in Woody Allen movies. There are times I'm convinced the best performance in the whole thing is by Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castavet. Listen close and you can hear where Christopher Walken picked up some of his tricks. Minnie is a frumpy wizened aging housewife, a wall-sharing neighbor of Rosemary and Rosemary's husband Guy (John Cassavetes). Minnie is married to Roman Castavet, the son of a notorious diabolist of another era. She worships Satan but as a wifely duty, much more relishing her time gossiping with the girls (who are also devil worshipers—this movie has more than one connection with The Seventh Victim).

Rosemary doesn't like Minnie, describes her as nosy and pushy, and it's true enough Minnie really belongs in Queens more than the midtown Manhattan Dakota (called the Bramford in the movie). Like any good New Yorker, and unlike Rosemary who is easily buffeted about, Minnie remains flinty and unmoved in the face of everything, another sharp contrast that adds to the movie's effect. At the scene where the Angel of Darkness is having his way with a drugged Rosemary, and the rest of the coven stands around the bed naked (and unattractive) and chanting, Guy is worried Rosemary may be coming to. "As long as she ate the mouse, she can't see nor hear," Minnie hisses, brushing him off. "Now sing." She pronounces "mousse" as "mouse."

Polanski balances new and old in other ways as well. Rosemary's severe Vidal Sassoon haircut, which comes midway, or trendy '60s New York in general and its easygoing, pervasive focus on youth and energy, is set off with a phalanx of old-time Hollywood players: Gordon, Elisha Cook Jr., Ralph Bellamy, Sidney Blackmer, and more, pros one and all. Tony Curtis makes a wonderfully chilling uncredited appearance in a phone call as the disembodied voice of Donald Baumgart, an actor who wins a part Guy covets and then is mysteriously blinded.

"Blinded"—nice detail. It sounds like the kind of thing midtown Satanists would ask and receive from their dark lord. Rosemary and Guy skirt the other extremes. She is from Omaha and he is from Baltimore and they are in New York for Guy to start his career as an actor. Rosemary is the classic loyal helpmeet, content to stay at home and fix up their apartment, eager to start a family. She is not really of Manhattan, just passing through. Guy is a little more complex, or at least a little more easily corrupted, as he is effectively turned the second night after meeting the Castavets. His betrayal is rapid and thorough, scoring Rosemary's isolation. "I dreamed someone was raping me. I don't know, someone inhuman," she says the morning after her night with the devil. "Thanks a lot!" Guy yells from the next room.

The name of Alfred Hitchcock is often invoked in relation to Polanski movies, which is hardly surprising because they both work the terrains of anxiety so diligently. In Rosemary's Baby, the parallels are as obvious as they ever have been. Rosemary and Mia Farrow stand in as the classic Hitchcock blonde woman, warm and giving yet framed and shot as icy-cold, the better to become the objectified focus of a kind of sublimated rage of impotence, victimized every which way and up and down, continually. It's bad enough that Rosemary is raped by the devil, but the hardest scene to watch is when she turns to her original obstetrician for help. Even though Rosemary has added up all the elements of her situation pretty accurately, she inevitably sounds insane when she tries to explain it. She is almost perfectly pitiable in that moment.

Mia Farrow gives a fine studied performance, playing best I think at the most hysterical levels, as late when she reacts to first sight of the baby. Her quiet moments are often blank and empty, worked out carefully with Polanski. She feels impossible to read sometimes, out of synch and disconnected, though on the surface clean and pleasant and all convention. There's something not right about her even as she explicitly becomes the victim. The subtle horror of the ending—"You're trying to get me to be his mother," Rosemary says to the mollifying Roman Castavet as they stand before the black crib. "Aren't you his mother?" he responds—has shifted subtly over the years, thanks in part to Mia Farrow's deeply ambiguous performance, and the way the role was written. It's harder than ever to make out in the end whether she is a monstrous mother or a victim to be pitied, even as her next actions are transparent.

Top 10 of 1968
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Rosemary's Baby
3. Night of the Living Dead
4. Salesman
5. Once Upon a Time in the West
6. The Swimmer
7. The Party
8. Pretty Poison
9. Hour of the Wolf
10. Shame

Detail: Rosemary's Baby (1968)

0 Midnight Cowboy (1969)

USA, 113 minutes
Director: John Schlesinger
Writers: Waldo Salt, James Leo Herlihy
Photography: Adam Holender
Music: John Barry
Editor: Hugh A. Robertson
Cast: Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Brenda Vaccaro, Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Barnard Hughes, Bob Balaban

Midnight Cowboy has always been preceded by the dust cloud of its reputation, involuntarily turning into a lightning rod for social values by focusing on underclass characters. For its efforts it was rewarded with a scandalous X rating—based mostly on the existence of a delicately handled scene of an anonymous gay encounter—and then three gaudy Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay Adaptation) along with endless praise for its stars in Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Shortly afterward, the MPAA rating group approached director John Schlesinger with an idea for a compromise. Schlesinger refused to change a single frame. The rating group shrugged and reassigned it an R anyway. I'm not sure what the lesson here is.

Obscured in all this still is a very fine and subtle movie, rock solid in every particular, a showcase of film performance and direction, a wonderful profile of New York City in the '60s, and one of the best winter movies I know. It's also, always, a weird and unexpected picture. In a year of buddy movies (with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Easy Rider), Midnight Cowboy took the framework to hypersexualized and frenzied places it rarely goes, matching a strapping naïve Texas boy, Joe Buck (Jon Voight), with a tubercular Bronx con man, Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). In the end, what unites them is the 100% will to survive. Before that, the mind immediately leaps to a thousand ways this goes wrong.



The picture opens as Joe Buck shakes off the dust of his grimy Texas dishwasher job because he has somehow embraced the idea that New York City is full of rich women who will gladly pay for his lovin'. Donning fancy new cowboy duds, off he goes to get there, on a long bus ride. In New York he attempts to meet women by stopping them in the street and asking how to get to the Statue of Liberty. He is in love with his new cowboy outfit, with mirrors, and with himself, in approximately that order. New York collectively sizes him up, and then opens its doors to him in order to pick his pockets.

Ratso Rizzo, along with just about everyone else Buck encounters in the big city, is happy enough at first to sit back and watch every second person make a fool and take advantage of him—and Rizzo takes his own turn at it as well. Buck is systematically pounded like a piece of meat by a tenderizer, losing everything one thing at a time for his own pure dumbness, yet he never loses his sunny disposition and optimism. At about the moment Rizzo takes pity on him, we realize we have too.

Schlesinger's style streams with swirling sounds and images, with narrative and backstory related glancingly, sidelong. The method to his madness is apparent in his best, such as Midnight Cowboy or The Day of the Locust. The scenes in Midnight Cowboy are built out of hours of rehearsal and improvs and used because they work. Some are bigger than life, as in Buck's encounters with a call girl played by Sylvia Miles ("In case ya didn't happen to notice it ... I'm one hell of a gorgeous chick!" she yells at him when he asks her for money). An encounter with a deranged evangelist played by John McGiver goes numerous directions you can't anticipate (my favorite detail is the neighbors pounding on the walls when he starts). The best scenes are quiet and unnerving, as one nearly wordless encounter that Buck has in a diner, at a moment when he is particularly down on his luck, with a strange woman and a cruel little boy.

There's a good deal of busy-work going on all through the movie in terms of establishing a complex backstory for Buck, in part to explain the words that haunt him: "You're the only one, Joe. You're the only one." It's arguable it's excessive as those words themselves and Buck's nature and behavior—and Voight's performance—flesh out this character as much as we need. For me, Midnight Cowboy works best as a series of meditations and set pieces in the present time, sharply realized yet whose greatest impact is only felt later, or with subsequent viewings.

In fact, the strongest elements of the movie seem intended for exactly that. Nilsson's haunting version of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" plays constantly through the movie, like a refrain (made even more effective for me by all the associations I have of that song with exactly that time). The movie's version of New York City in the '60s already feels classic, with the down and out struggle of the hustlers contrasted with the high life lived by those who've made it. Taxi Driver and many others owe Midnight Cowboy very certain debts around the portrayal of the city.

There's a wonderful party scene late in the picture. It was modeled on events staged at Andy Warhol's Factory, and Warhol and some of his principals were involved in creating it. The people are gorgeous, the drugs are harmless and mind-expanding, and the music sounds like Stereolab (it's actually Elephant's Memory, with "Old Man Willow"). It's strange and beautiful, even as Voight and Hoffman continue to carry the show with their indelible characters in the surprising context of this beautiful vision of psychedelic '60s New York.

The ending, an amazing climax to the unlikely friendship, only becomes more affecting the more times I see Midnight Cowboy. That's when it's clear what John Schlesinger managed to do with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight and this story. There's a beautiful symmetry in terms of bus rides and Joe Buck's cowboy costume, a totally credible (and totally heartening) change of character in Joe Buck, who allows to no one in particular that there has to be easier ways of making a living than hustling. With Rizzo by his side (what is it about Dustin Hoffman and buses and the ends of movies?), wearing his new store-bought clothes, Buck turns bravely to face the future. It's one of the greatest moments in all movies.

Top 10 of 1969
1. Midnight Cowboy
2. The Sorrow and the Pity
3. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
4. They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
5. The Sterile Cuckoo
6. My Night at Maud's
7. The Wild Child
8. The Wild Bunch
9. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
10. Eros + Massacre

Detail: Midnight Cowboy (1969)

0 Gimme Shelter (1970)

USA, 91 minutes, documentary
Directors: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin
Photography: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Gary Weis
Music: Rolling Stones
Editors: Joanne Burke, Robert Farren, Ellen Giffard, Kent McKinney
With: Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Tina Turner, Hell's Angels, Melvin Belli, Meredith Hunter

In late 1969, the Maysles brothers (Albert and David), with Charlotte Zwerin, had already made their reputation as iconoclastic documentary filmmakers on the strength of their extraordinary Salesman from 1968 and other projects. The Rolling Stones, just then about to assume the mantle of greatest rock 'n' roll band in all history, had returned to touring after an interruption of a few years that was due to drug busts, turmoil inside the band, and other breakdowns. Also, Woodstock had just happened. Thus, the elements were in place for a first-rate and very interesting concert film. Then events stepped in to help make sure it couldn't be anything else. The more you look at Gimme Shelter now, the more eerie and weird and unfortunate it all seems, which the movie exploits almost perfectly with its dense atmosphere of dread.

The two sides were remarkably in synch from the start. The Maysles team only knew they wanted to make something "more than" a concert film. Mick Jagger, speaking for the band, kept laying down terms the Maysles were already abiding by or happy to comply with: no acting, no recreations of scenes, no voiceover narration, and none of "that Pennebaker shit." So far so good,  except the Maysles knew the last one might be a problem, depending on what Jagger meant by it. They kept nodding their heads and saying no problem, and they kept shooting.



Gimme Shelter more or less starts as a typical enough concert film, with arrivals at airports, press conferences, recording sessions on the road, hotels and buses, and concert footage shot at the Stones' '69 Madison Square Garden show. In performance, Jagger carries on in iconic fashion, wearing a long scarf, cape, and star-spangled top hat. The sound is not very good but the images compensate. Mostly what makes the scenes work as well as they do are the audience reaction shots, which really bring the adulation and the fervor, a sense of what an event it was.

But the movie has already started to subtly enlarge its scope. Zwerin, who was largely responsible for shaping and structuring all the hours that the Maysles and their crews gathered on their travels with the Stones, already knew of course that this story ended in Altamont. It couldn't be ignored, so she worked with the Maysles to establish a thread early in which the Stones are brought in to look at portions of the film. Their reactions to it are in turn filmed. By this time they had already worked with Jean-Luc Godard on the 1968 documentary Sympathy for the Devil so they were evidently comfortable both with cameras and with strange experiments.

Going "meta" like this—"see the Stones, seeing themselves!"—is somewhat arch but it's also a nice way of foreshadowing what the filmmakers have got. As an event, Altamont was well known by the time the project went into postproduction, or at least the general shape of its disaster was. Altamont remains an epic cluster-fuck, the poster child for how to do an outdoor festival wrong on practically every level, capped off by the murder of a concertgoer at the hands of the Hell's Angels, who had informally been put in charge of security, which they provided—no surprise—the Hell's Angels way.

What the filmmakers got, of course, is the kind of thing now called "documentary gold"—a scene so raw, unfiltered, and real that it practically makes the picture essential viewing all by itself. In this case, it was the murder of Meredith Hunter. The army of camera operators the Maysles sent into that strange sea of 300,000 on that December day (trivia fans may enjoy knowing that one of them was George Lucas) somehow happened to catch the murder itself on film, which was subsequently discovered during the editing.

It's a pretty neat way to solve the problem of using an event without exploiting it, though it operates in a gray area. The murder happens swiftly, inside of a thick crush of people just 20 or 30 feet away from the stage. To clarify it for the viewer, it is dwelt on and looked at more than once, including in slow motion and with freeze frames. It has to be shown, arguably, because the context is everything—and because it is the single event that defines Altamont. But it's no simple case of peace-loving hippies assaulted by demented biker gang. Hunter had a gun and was holding it in his hand. He was not merely an innocent bystander but an active player in the violence erupting all around.

That context is crucial, and establishing it may be the single most important part of the film, documenting the turn—as many have pointed out before—from '60s fairy pop dreams of Monterey Pop and Woodstock to something far more grim and depressingly human. The scenes at Altamont are repulsive, taking the images of quaint hippie eccentrics we knew from before and making them impossibly grotesque. Naked people, stoned people, hairy people, with dead eyes and buckskin fringe—it looks like anomie made palpable.

The Stones' performance at Altamont caps it all off perfectly. This is not the riding high of Madison Square Garden. The band is hemmed in on all sides by the mob, which is no more than five or six feet away from them. The stage itself is barely elevated. The band is obviously scared—as they should have been, because the Angels had already assaulted Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane as well as many, many attendees. But they are attempting bravado to get through. It's not the usual scene of concert intimacy, when performers allow the audience close as they perform. This is more like a picture of kidnapping and extortion.

The best description of the Stones and Altamont is in a book by Stanley Booth called The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (released originally as Dance With the Devil). Gimme Shelter is best taken as an adjunct to that book, which is much better able to penetrate and explain the details. They are as complicated as they are unfortunate, and Gimme Shelter does very little to illuminate them if you don't already know them. Still, it remains one of the single most crucial documents of its era. It's not fun to watch but it will never leave you.

Top 10 of 1970
1. Gimme Shelter
2. Performance
3. Catch-22
4. MASH
5. Days and Nights in the Forest
6. Where's Poppa?
7. Goin' Down the Road
8. Woodstock
9. The Conformist
10. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Detail: Gimme Shelter (1970)

0 A Clockwork Orange (1971)

UK / USA, 136 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess
Photography: John Alcott
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven
Editor: Bill Butler
Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Warren Clarke, James Marcus, Michael Tarn, Patrick Magee, Adrienne Corri, Michael Bates, Sheila Raynor, Philip Stone, Anthony Sharp, Carl Duering, Michael Gover, Aubrey Morris, David Prowse, Clive Francis

There's nothing subtle about A Clockwork Orange. Its famous violence is obvious and programmatic: assault, robbery, rape, murder, the usual. In fairness, the picture does a reasonably good job of anticipating how ongoing societal breakdowns play out. And the solutions to the violence, arguably the point of this near-future fantasy, are also obvious and programmatic (see title metaphor, which belongs to the author of the original novel, Anthony Burgess). In the end, in an example of classic Stanley Kubrick cynicism, it appears that attempting to solve problems only makes them worse, and in unimaginable ways. We are left to try to live with the consequences. I suspect all the heavy-handed, clonking points are as much as anything the reason why I loved it so much as a teen. I do appreciate better now the horrors of the violence in the first 15 minutes alone—"the old ultra-violence," as voiceover narrator and main dude Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) insists on calling it. But I also still appreciate the energy, concision, and choreography that went into those early scenes, especially the gang fight, which is a case of pure infectious dynamics. And the Beethoven soundtrack only propels it.

In fact, much like the case with some Woody Allen movies, I now experience A Clockwork Orange at least partly as formative and already internalized, operating in a kind of twilight haze of nostalgia. Some of the language formations—the moronic "well well well well well well well" of one of the thugs, the use of "appy polly loggies" as a sarcastic way to apologize, "eggiwegs" and such for food, and Alex's occasional elaborately Shakespearian turns of phrase, such as "what didst thou in thy mind have?"—I still use, and am often surprised on revisits to this movie to find them waiting for me there. A Clockwork Orange is less than convincing in its ideas, bogged down in outdated Cold War gestures such as a youth slang pervaded by Russian (that was Burgess more than director / screenwriter Kubrick), or just simply smug about its ability to shock. But some of its individual elements nonetheless remain outstanding—a hallmark of Kubrick films, as we can see better all the time.



In A Clockwork Orange, the single most important element is the performance by Malcolm McDowell, which it's fair to call a tour de force. Scrape away the smirking façade of McDowell's Alex and you are left with only another smirking façade, a taunting, jeering face of cruelty and youth, impatient for what he wants and taking it as he will, laughing at the gyrations of a society claiming to believe in things like fair play. Interestingly, a good deal of what makes McDowell's performance so effective is how much punishment he takes—not just his character Alex, but McDowell himself, playing him. He is spat on, forced to strip naked, knocked about frequently, his eyes pried open with clamps—and a lot of times it looks like it hurts. In one scene his head is held underwater for a very long time—time it yourself. He plays a horrible person but no one can say he doesn't receive his come-uppance.

Another important element: Beethoven stands in as a rich, complex symbol of culture and privilege. I like it better than Wagner, because it doesn't have the overt linkages to Nazism, yet Beethoven and more broadly the romantic style of symphony are Germanic (and 19th-century) enough that there is some unmistakable overripe hint of its poisoning the action with pulpy decadence. If at first Alex's appreciation for "the lovely Ludwig van" seems like a cheap affectation, it comes to work very well, as the pervasive ubiquity of Beethoven resembles the youth culture Alex wallows in. Beethoven's image is on every wall Alex calls home, and during the crime for which he is ultimately sent to prison he is attacked with a bust of the composer (defending himself with a giant statue of a cock and balls). The Beethoven element reaches its climax when the music is used to deliberately torture Alex—in one indelible image, his torturers are gathered around a pool table while the music plays, one of them idly rolling a ball back and forth across the table.

It's all a bit strained in the idea area, as I said—these are all-too 20th-century views of paranoia, totalitarianism, and manipulation of human will via techniques derived from Pavlov, Skinner, etc., which felt remarkably stale even at the time, one reason I suspect Kubrick omitted even reference to the title, let alone explication. And the story goes approximately the only direction it can go. But Kubrick (well, Burgess) even salvages that with a mechanized action / reaction narrative structure, in which many of Alex's victims get their turns as victimizers, and Alex, as he himself mentions late in the film, suffers his own tortures of the damned.

Perhaps most interesting, and to its vast credit, A Clockwork Orange is virtually drained of hackneyed emotional connections. In most vengeance-driven narratives we tend to be manipulated to be on one side or the other, often finding ourselves willy-nilly taking great vicarious satisfaction in the violence (cf., for just one obvious example, the 24 franchise). Perhaps Kubrick's greatest achievement is to keep us fairly neutral. What Alex does is horrible. But what is done to him is equally horrible and there's very little satisfaction in it—much less so when the injustice is only compounded and it begins to occur to us that there may actually be no just resolution available here at all, let alone a satisfying one.

In that case, maybe it's better to laugh, and so the movie goes out perhaps the only way it could: on one last vision of violence, Alex's declaration, "I was cured, all right," and the death-rattle chuckle of Gene Kelly's version of "Singin' in the Rain" playing over the credits.

Top 10 of 1971
1. A Clockwork Orange
2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
3. Walkabout
4. The French Connection
5. Carnal Knowledge
6. The Last Picture Show
7. Macbeth
8. Two Lane Blacktop
9. And Now for Something Completely Different
10. Duel

Detail: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

0 Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, West Germany, 93 minutes
Director/writer: Werner Herzog
Photography: Thomas Mauch
Music: Popol Vuh
Editor: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Cast: Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra, Peter Berling, Cecilia Rivera, Dan Ades, Edward Roland

Pretty much everything we have come to know and love about Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking is already present in his early masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God: a location fraught with peril, hardships for everyone involved, Klaus Kinski the impossible, otherworldly music from Popol Vuh, a dim and bleak view of human history, and a genius for working with what is available, including indigenous extras, a barrel of squirrel monkeys, and an idea for building a ship onto the top of a tree. The whole thing was shot using just one camera (which Herzog had stolen), and the majority of it is made up of one-take shots, which is understandable given the exigencies, but all the more remarkable for how sure and brilliantly visionary it is. Cinematographer Thomas Mauch deserves high praise, with Herzog (and Kinski), for making Aguirre unlike anything seen before or since.

By focusing on the 16th-century European mania for gold in the New World—notably the search for a legendary "El Dorado," which New World natives likely invented simply to placate the European explorers descending on them—Herzog found nearly an ideal vehicle for his ongoing meditations on human foolishness writ large. He never questioned how to go about it. Asked on the DVD commentary if he considered using studio soundstages, Herzog responds emphatically, "The story takes place in the Peruvian jungle. You have to go there. There's no alternative."



So to the Peruvian jungle we go, even more primitive in 1971 than it is now, hauling a cast and crew of some 450 across dangerous interior mountains, up treacherous rivers, and along trails where a person can sink to the hip in mud. It's obviously dangerous. All you have to do is look. They are playing parts in a movie, but they are evidently sweltering in the heat with pounds of conquistador armor on them, barely holding their feet on narrow trails, or stopped entirely by vegetation that gives way reluctantly and only with the prodding of determined hacking. Those water spots on the camera lens, as on one scene with rafts floating down the churning rapids of an isolated river, are not there for the effect. When it's only one take, and the main consideration is staying aboard the logs lashed together for the purpose, it just has to be enough that the players maintained their characters and costumes for the duration, never mind water on the camera lens.

That's how it worked. One morning on the shoot they woke to find that the river they were camped on had risen 15 feet overnight and taken their rafts. In response, Herzog incorporated that as a plot point into the movie and made scenes out of the necessity of rebuilding the rafts. As a travelogue alone it is amazing and often breathtaking, and incidentally breaks all kinds of moviemaking rules along the way. At the first encounter of the river, for example, thick brown water churning and rolling over the rocks and breaks of volatile rapids, the camera simply sits and looks for several minutes. The energy of the water, and its danger, are felt viscerally. It is hypnotic, hard to look away. In fact, it's so mesmerizing I never noticed how long the shot is until someone pointed it out.

But Aguirre, of course, goes far beyond travelogue, worming its way down to human fundamentals of hubris and greed with the neat allegory of these Spanish explorers, who are so overflowing with evil, even as they pay lip service to Church, State, and whatnot. They do it all for the greater glory, which is only the usual cover story. The monk who accompanies the party (and ostensibly provides the journal on which the story is based, though that's just something else Herzog made up for the sake of the picture) is actually the worst kind of craven moral relativist in the face of the enormity of Aguirre, who routinely does away with anyone in his way. A woman who is likely to be murdered comes to the monk for his help, but he only tells her, "You know, my child, for the good of our Lord, the Church was always on the side of the strong." ("That's how I see the role of the Church in Latin America," Herzog quickly adds on the DVD commentary.)

As a movie, Aguirre, the Wrath of God is practically insane. Out of the bleakness it takes sudden turns into mordant (and very funny) humor. Out of the evident privations we witness there is a real beauty in the ability of people—story characters, actors, and crew alike—to overcome their circumstances and prevail, however temporarily, however illusory. And, of course, Klaus Kinski practically puts this movie on his shoulders and carries it all the way home, with his bug-eyes, his strange rolling gait, and his constantly unnerving presence. "He was a pestilence every day during the shoot," Herzog says casually at one point, confirming the legendary story that he threatened to kill Kinski and then himself if Kinski followed through on a threat to leave the production. "I would have too," Herzog says, though he is also often filled with frank appreciation of Kinski's smallest gestures, such as the way he tosses away a monkey he has been talking to near the end.

Kinski as Aguirre is nothing short of magnificent in the many horrible power struggles that erupt on the journey, and in the way he is so single-minded about keeping them focused on the gold and the glory, manipulating, prodding, intimidating, tirelessly. The first time I saw Aguirre it somehow didn't make much impression, but every time since it has only thrilled me, and continued to do so. This is what gonzo filmmaking looks like.

Top 10 of 1972
1. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
2. The Godfather
3. Cabaret
4. Last Tango in Paris
5. The King of Marvin Gardens
6. The Getaway
7. Deliverance
8. Kansas City Bomber
9. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
10. The Candidate

Detail: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

0 The Mother and the Whore (1973)

La maman et la putain, France, 210 minutes
Director/writer: Jean Eustache
Photography: Pierre Lhomme
Editors: Denise de Casabianca, Jean Eustache
Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Francoise Lebrun, Bernadette Lafont, Isabelle Weingarten, Jacques Renard, Jean Eustache

For practically everyone involved in The Mother and the Whore, certainly director and writer Jean Eustache (who committed suicide in 1981), Paris May 1968 was obviously a critically formative time and place to be alive, aware, and active, whether politically motivated or otherwise. The events of that time are rarely referred to even passingly in this overlong movie of three and a half hours, but they shadow everything. Or something does—a sense of profound shared experience, even a devastating one, lies back of everything witnessed in this picture, which alternates blindly, like a beast, between public and private spheres, with a common mode of abject failure.

Is it important to share feelings about that time and place, or even to know and understand them? I don't think so. I saw The Mother and the Whore first in 1975, knowing very little of its background and sources, and it completely thrilled me. It appeared then like nothing so much as a very odd (and charming) epic of desultory chat and small-scale relationship hiccups, which is what it remains at its best. It only unfolds and opens from there. The more you know about the historical context the more appeal it has, perhaps, but it remains alluring and resolutely human, as in the good-humored way it keeps showing how profound the inconsequential points we make in conversation are. But the conversational points are not what's important. The connection is. And here we see, the modern condition, characters attempting again and again to connect, and failing.



So many things about The Mother and the Whore are paradoxical and counterintuitive, underscoring the profound inability of connection at its heart. Set in Paris in the early '70s, it is shot in a muddy black and white, its images often swamped and effaced by darkness, stark and almost forbidding. There is no music except when people play their records—yet these moments, when we see people turning specifically to music for pleasure and solace, are among its most powerful. The great bulk of the movie takes place either on a mattress on the floor in the apartment shared by two characters or in various café settings. Not very much happens at all, though people are continually talking and smoking and drinking and eating and talking some more.

The picture focuses on Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a younger man kept by an older woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont). Their relationship is more or less "open," a status accepted without question by one and all (vestiges of the era). It embeds like food lodged in the throat a certain level of mistrust and not unrelated manipulations in the relationship. At the beginning of the picture Alexandre is acting the part of a heartbreak victim (the role seems familiar to him), thrown over by Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), who aborts his baby and finds another man before the next semester starts. Alexandre spies Veronika (Francoise Lebrun) in a café and picks her up, beginning a pointless affair with her.

The Mother and the Whore is set at an interesting and very brief point in modern Western history, shortly after a good deal of the anti-imperialist energy of the '60s in Europe had dissipated but shortly before feminism had become a powerful social force. Thus, somewhat surprisingly (to me), Alexandre and his friends are easily recognizable as chauvinist pigs, making no apologies for it—indeed, making excuses for it, in terms of perceived threats to their naturally superior masculinity.

Alexandre is, in fact, a fatuous idiot, as shown in one scene early in Marie's apartment where she complains, as she is doing the dishes, that he never helps with the dishes. This leads him to a soliloquy on the rewards of honest labor such as doing dishes, connecting it with the authentic proletarian experience (meanwhile not budging an inch to help with the dishes). Marie is exasperated but as she listens to him go on finally has to laugh at him. His stupidity is unthreatening and charming to her, and he has won her over again, though without quite knowing how.

In many ways, the cast is the class of European art film at the time, starting with Leaud, already the staple by then of important films of the '60s by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. At this point in his career—with appearances here and in Day for Night and Last Tango in Paris—Leaud had about entirely transformed himself into some iconic saint of art cinema, always the character who wants to go to the movies, who talks about movies constantly, who forever smokes cigarettes and compares events in life to scenes in movies. In the first hour of this picture he name-checks Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Bresson, F.W. Murnau, and Nicholas Ray. Playing opposite him, Bernadette Lafont is as gloweringly warm and beautiful as she has ever been. Francoise Lebrun is enigmatic and gnomic, her beautiful round face beaming out of a slightly stooped and figureless form wrapped in shawls or bedsheets.

At this point in the lives of the characters of The Mother and the Whore, especially Alexandre, sexual revolution is all they have left—political revolution did not work out. So the three of them—Alexandre, Marie, and Veronika, i.e., the mother and the whore—proceed, and so proceeds the movie, through predictable jealousies, declarations of love, envenomed spats, groping for the edges and the limits for definition. But the edges and the limits keep receding and there is no definition. So life. There is only the next conversation and the next café date and the next night and bed and lover. Eventually all three end up in bed together, none of them any happier for it and a good deal more miserable.

I'm acting like the plot is the point here and in some ways it is. The downward trajectory of the fantasist revolutions, moving from the public sphere of politics into the private one of sex, with the same results, is much the point, and the story illustrates it well. But the best and truest moments in the movie are when it's closest to human experience—showing men and women who want to be adored, want what's fair and right for all, want what's easiest. They reject the conventional but never forget its promises. They want to feel superior, secure, loved, free from anxiety. They want the things they can never have, except by luck or single-minded dedication to one that excludes all the other things they want too.

Top 20 of 1973
1. Scenes From a Marriage
2. The Mother and the Whore
3. Don't Look Now
4. Mean Streets
5. Badlands
6. Sisters
7. The Last Detail
8. The Wicker Man
9. Save the Tiger
10. The Exorcist
11. Day for Night
12. A Touch of Class
13. F for Fake
14. High Plains Drifter
15. O Lucky Man!
16. American Graffiti
17. The Long Goodbye
18. The Spirit of the Beehive
19. Serpico
20. Enter the Dragon

Detail: The Mother and the Whore (1973)

0 Lenny (1974)

USA, 111 minutes
Director: Bob Fosse
Writer: Julian Barry
Photography: Bruce Surtees
Music: Ralph Burns
Editor: Alan Heim
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Valerie Perrine, Jan Miner, Stanley Beck, Gary Morton

In the chronicles of the careers of stand-up comic Lenny Bruce, director Bob Fosse, and the movie star Dustin Hoffman, Lenny may well be considered a low point. Downbeat, dreary, black and white—something of a willful distortion of a figure now basically obscure beyond "free speech" nuances of legal interpretation and general '60s martyr-mongering, where his reputation largely rests. Released in a particularly emblematic year of '70s cinema, overshadowed by Chinatown, The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation, and many others (not to mention box office juggernauts The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and Airport 1975), Lenny sometimes seems all but lost to history now.

For me, at 19, having dutifully plowed through Albert Goldman's Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!! and in the process of attempting to construct an authentic bohemian existence for myself in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it was a revelation and running away my favorite movie of that year. I saw it numerous times. The Goldman biography was written before his books on Elvis Presley and John Lennon revealed Goldman to be a mean-spirited distortion artist, and some of those problems plague his Bruce project as well, albeit in milder form. For the most part they are cleaned up in the movie, which then as now is much less about Bruce anyway and much more about Fosse and Hoffman and their egos and pushing the boundaries of moviemaking.



In fact, what I always liked most about Lenny was the Bob Fosse style, adapting the original Julian Barry play (which I otherwise don't know), making it stagy and showy with razzamatazz editing, bold use of light and dark in black and white, and an elliptical, glancing narrative style that has only the dimmest acquaintance with sequential chronology, yet tells a story very well. I suspect I liked Lenny so much because Cabaret had proved too challenging for my teen self in terms of its sexual license and the various dangerous implications of freedom (later I changed my mind). Besides being more or less strictly heterosexual, Lenny also offers visions of a world I thought I knew better, the underground West Coast bohemian life of the '50s shading into the Kennedy era, with its cool jazz and fondness for language that comes in powerful torrents.

Lenny is full of that, underlined by the grainy black and white scenes of people in apartments getting high and nodding out to jazz, laidback, low-key, drinking wine and talking the cool talk, dig—visual representations of what I was reading about avidly in books like Lawrence Lipton's The Holy Barbarians. Lenny Bruce was not exactly in that set, but moved easily enough around it, coming somewhat later than its main figures, if Goldman's book and this movie are to be trusted. In many ways, Lenny was exactly what I was looking for: the gritty realities of decadence and Nazis in Weimar Germany giving way to the gritty self-absorption of bohemians in post-WWII California. I thought Fosse was totally making the right move.

The most confounding element of the whole thing, of course, remains Dustin Hoffman. At 19, I was dazzled by the brilliance. Now I am a little more baffled by the bullshit. Until then—notably in The Graduate, but also in Midnight Cowboy, Papillon, Little Big Man, and other of his virtuoso performances (many still ahead, of course)—his persona tends to be a person who is a bit of a square and conventional. Ratso might have known the score, but what he wanted was to live in Florida. When I sat down to look at Lenny again for the first time in probably decades the first thing I noticed was how many shots are framed to make Lenny Bruce look like Benjamin Braddock. Hoffman and Fosse are playing equally to it, and it's a little unsettling, occasionally too much entirely.

In terms of a monster of language, well, this is the movie where Hoffman proves he can play exactly that, just as Midnight Cowboy, Tootsie, The Rain Man, and many others provided "stretch" roles for him to flex his considerable cinematic acting skills. The let us say "orality" of this picture is emphasized from the opening shot, an extreme close-up of Valerie Perrine's mouth as she prepares to answer questions for an off-camera documentary filmmaker. The obscured voice of that filmmaker is Bob Fosse's, by the way, and spinning reels on reel-to-reel tape recorders come to take the role of the reporters in Citizen Kane, attempting to piece together the puzzle of a life. This is another strength of the movie, as the freedom for jagged, abrupt movements of the camera and editing (Cassavettes style, yet another note) is afforded by explicitly making it a faux documentary.

The only surprise, in retrospect, is that it opens on Perrine's mouth rather than Dustin Hoffman's. It is very much a movie of Dustin Hoffman talking, talking, talking—numerous stand-up routines at various stages of Bruce's career, which eventually devolve into ranting and reading from trial transcripts, and then scenes from those trials themselves, with Bruce trying to get a word in edgewise to the legal pedantry and succeeding to the extent that he is jailed frequently and harassed. He had their attention. The climactic scene, shot in long from the back of a small club, shows Bruce zonked out on heroin, wandering the stage barefoot and bare-legged in an overcoat, paranoid, mumbling, muttering incoherently, never getting it together to make a point, let alone crack a joke. It reads in many ways like a grotesquely puffed-up piece of self-indulgent improv on the part of An Ambitious and Important Actor, but it turns out to be a verbatim reproduction of a tape-recorded show by Bruce.

I'm calling Lenny the movie of the year for 1974 because it's a sentimental favorite, and because, if you haven't seen it yet, or not in a long time, it just might be more skillful than you think. There's a case to be made for Hoffman chewing the scenery, obviously, and a sadder one about an iconic stand-up comic who doesn't actually seem to have much of a legacy, and yeah, after Star 80 I can see the case for it being the least of Fosse's movies. Yet however much the underpinnings of Lenny may or may not have decayed out from under it, it is simply so good at doing what it does that it's still well worth seeing.

Top 10 of 1974
1. Chinatown
2. Lenny
3. Young Frankenstein
4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
5. A Woman Under the Influence
6. The Conversation
7. Thieves Like Us
8. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
9. Blazing Saddles
10. Phantom of the Paradise

Other write-ups: The Godfather: Part II

Detail: Lenny (1974)

0 Nashville (1975)

USA, 159 minutes
Director: Robert Altman
Writer: Joan Tewkesbury
Photography: Paul Lohmann
Music: Arlene Barnett, Jonnie Barnett, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Gary Busey, Keith Carradine, Juan Grizzle, Henry Gibson, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Joe Raposo
Editors: Dennis M. Hill, Sidney Levin
Cast: Ronee Blakley, Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Henry Gibson, Keenan Wynn, Geraldine Chaplin, Gwen Welles, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, David Hayward, Shelly Duvall, Jeff Goldblum, Thomas Hal Phillips, Barbara Harris, Richard Baskin, David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Elliott Gould, Julie Christie, Howard K. Smith, Steve Earle

Nashville has always seemed to me much larger and more generous than its rather narrow view of country music—a movie with ambitions of the white whale and designs on America (and/or "America") itself. Which only makes sense given its timing, made in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam 'n' Watergate, a time when cynicism naturally felt like sincerity. Straight ahead, a host of chambers of commerce were looking to the 1976 American Bicentennial for balm and healing, but no one else was. Nashville is here to explain some of the reasons why.

As a self-conscious Bicentennial checkpoint for director Robert Altman (and writer Joan Tewkesbury, and members of the very large cast, who improvised much of their dialogue and in many cases wrote their own country songs to sing), it tilted decidedly toward one side of today's stark national divide. It's full of mocking derision for the South, smug movie stars making cameos, elitist to its core, with adultery, casual sex, drugs, corruption, and celebrity culture. It was long, it was different, it was Important (with its famous sound design use of overlapping dialogue). It was suitably decorated with Oscar nominations and suitably denied most of the wins. Pauline Kael wrote a review for The New Yorker that was nearly as famous as the movie. It was emblem, fleeting icon, and prize in its time of what we've come to call Blue America. But over the years since it has become something else, or easier to see it for what it is.



In fact, watching it recently in a double feature with Goodfellas, I was impressed by how gentle and good-hearted Nashville is at its most bedrock levels. It represents a sensibility that can still be shocked by political assassination or the humiliation of a deluded singer with no talent. Altman's background in television serves him well with a light touch, punctuating his burbling, unfolding stream of scenes (largely shot in sequence) with deft setups, foreshadowing, rhyming themes, and comic set pieces. It's a banquet, basically. His huge cast of some two-dozen-odd enable him to isolate and match and mix unique elements. So, for example, we have the unnamed "tricycle man" (Jeff Goldblum), a hipster doofus in a floppy hat tooling around on a wacky motorcycle, playing various magic tricks, almost purely a visual element.

But the movie is a musical as much as anything and I'm sorry to say the music has worn least well about Nashville. It usually has enough charm to not slow things down much but is often about willfully misunderstanding country music. So we never miss the point, there's even one scene with a throwaway act in the background warbling, "Well, if makin' love were margarine / Then she is the high-priced spread." Ba da boom. The contempt is constant but even worse is when Nashville ham-handedly salutes a few figures, such as Vassar Clements, with the condescending air they are rare gems in an appalling wasteland. That Blue America thing again, I guess.

Yet the one part of Nashville I never tire of is the Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) thread, which is deeply musical and also where Altman lucked into something his movie needed more of: someone who not only understood the music, but was and is a pretty good songwriter and performer in her own right. I love the scene of her public breakdown not least because the first two songs she is able to get through ("Tapedeck in His Tractor" and "Dues") are so great. For that matter, so is the breakdown. It is riveting and poignant. Blakley pulls it off tentatively but completely for an amazing scene start to finish.

Another important and nicely worked out scene is nearly as musical, with Keith Carradine's performance of "I'm Easy," playing Tom Frank the womanizer. It's skin-crawling time as the gentle '70s country-rock song unspools and at least three women in the audience have reason to believe it involves them personally. Frank is an interesting element in the mix, a sourpuss rock 'n' roll guy whose music is anything but sourpuss rock 'n' roll (think Jackson Browne), an empty vessel of a human being, soulless, pathological, reprehensible, occasionally pitiable. "I'm Easy" is the perfect song for him. (On the matter of soulless, Karen Black as Connie White is the female analogue here.)

Nashville is a kaleidoscope ride, with flaws and bumps but a reassuring force to the narrative stream, so dense with detail that much is to be gained from multiple viewings, and it goes down easy, always with a friendly hello and smile. I love the way Altman and Tewkesbury make places and rituals the focal nodes of their large-scale structure. First there are the scenes at the airport, where many characters are simply coming and going on their business with others who have gathered to greet Barbara Jean's arrival. That is followed by a massive freeway pile-up. On Saturday night all the characters go out. On Sunday morning they all go to church—which characters go to which churches makes it one of my favorite sequences in the whole thing. (Once again Blakley steals the show, in a hospital chapel, singing "He Walks With Me." Goose bumps!)

That's the way it goes, lurching about, herding its cast through their rituals, and building to one of those Altman endings of great disaster, in this case an assassination, which may or may not have something important to say but certainly feels climactic. The key lyrical theme is rolled out big: "You may say that I ain't free / But it don't bother me." In recent viewings the political element—the campaign of Hal Phillip Walker, a third-party "Replacement Party" candidate for president, conducted via ubiquitous van with loudspeakers droning things like, "When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that's politics"—has more and more taken center stage for me. The random stupidity and undertone of malevolence in these blandishments feel chillingly prescient, although they are often funny. "You ever ask a lawyer the time of day?" the voice intones, making the case for eliminating all lawyers from the U.S. Congress. "He told you how to make a watch, didn't he?"

And more, with Nashville there is always more: Keenan Wynn's face, the galling stupidity of Opal from the BBC, Sueleen Gay's zen-like lack of self-awareness, Frog in the background constantly, Michael Murphy's smarm, Shelley Duvall as L.A. Joan ("she's from California," the constant refrain), Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), pompous buffoon, and Linnea (Lily Tomlin), perhaps the single most interesting character here of all, a gospel singer, a devoted mother, an adultress. And more. See it, see it again, and then see it again.

Which reminds me of the editing, and the earlier, longer versions, and the lost footage. I'd rather forget that, but on the bright side, I do think the editing is a high point in Nashville, sorting out the many characters, keeping them distinct, and making all their stories more or less coherent as it plows relentlessly on.

Top 10 of 1975
1. Nashville
2. Love and Death
3. Barry Lyndon
4. Picnic at Hanging Rock
5. Swept Away
6. Welfare
7. Dog Day Afternoon
8. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
9. The Passenger
10. The Mirror

Detail: Nashville (1975)

0 Network (1976)

USA, 121 minutes
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Paddy Chayevsky
Photography: Owen Roizman
Music: Elliott Lawrence
Editor: Alan Heim
Cast: Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, Ned Beatty, Beatrice Straight, Wesley Addy, Kathy Cronkite, Lee Richardson, Arthur Burghardt

Network is one of those movies with a not undeserved reputation for getting things right, large and small. But first and more than anything it is an acting showcase, cast almost perfectly, built around stellar performances (at least six by my count), realized via Sidney Lumet, a director deeply simpatico with the art. Then it lucked into one of those defining iconic things, which defined it, ultimately outgrew and overshadowed it in many ways, in the catch phrase, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore," writer Paddy Chayevsky's nearly perfect mantra of learned helplessness, resonating more than ever today. I'm willing to bet it's a feeling familiar to anyone reading this. The reverberation of that sense is one of the great surprises and enduring pleasures of this picture.

Full disclosure: I didn't much like Network at the time of its release. I thought it was too broad and obvious, and was put off by the highfalutin corporate vocabulary, even more by what I perceived as satire that was simply too easy. I didn't believe it. But seeing it decades later brought a shock of recognition, in its pitch-perfect sense of corporate environment and notably in its anticipation of those tabloid talk shows we got from Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer, all stocked with armies of raging plain folks and the depressing sense their motivations were just shallow, or incoherent—and certainly manipulated. Or, as Yeats described the situation some time ago, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."



Sometimes I think TV is such a profound shift in human history it's almost too big to grasp. Because everything around us has been changed by it, it may seem that nothing has changed. Network was jumping up and down shrieking about this nearly 40 years ago and is still doing so today. The urgency remains. This is where Chayevsky's ingenuity and insights, his master plan as it were, start to become so impressive. It's satire but there is a peculiar (and peculiarly human, in the context) romance at the heart of it, between Max Schumacher (William Holden), the old-school TV news man of the '50s, and Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), the brash new kid on the corporate block, 20 years or more his junior. The relationship, as written and performed, is somehow tender and believable even in the maelstrom of swirling, bizarre events.

Holden and Dunaway pull this off with powerful and well matched performances. They are both playing characters well over 50% preening narcissist each, yet they both have hearts and are tremendously likable, even charismatic. Beatrice Straight as Schumacher's estranged wife Louise further grounds this thread in a stunning breakup scene. It is nicely modulated relief to the circus antics of Howard Beale and the various corporate boardrooms, as comical and entertaining as they are—and they are very comical and entertaining. Chayevsky circles back even with this romance, shrewdly probing the impact of television in the generational differences between Schumacher and Christensen.

It's also a very funny movie, of course, reading corruption willy-nilly into everything. At one point a group of underground American terrorists, a '70s trope and so the natural stars of what would now be called a reality TV show, developed by Christensen, called The Mao Tse-tung Hour (and here I pause to savor ... the show has nothing whatever to do with Mao Tse-tung, which is nice in itself, but I particularly love that "Hour")—these ragtag terrorists, in their berets and camo and bearing arms, hunkered in their poorly lighted basement, are haggling over the terms of a contract with a team of network lawyers hunched into folding chairs in a semicircle. One of the terrorists lashes out in frustration as the negotiations begin to militate against her: "The Communist Party's not gonna see a nickel out of this goddamn show until we go into syndication."

Sleek and corporate, in Network everyone knows how to talk the talk of the TV business. Here is Christensen exclaiming over the potential of Howard Beale, even as he declines into dementia: "By tomorrow he'll have a 50 share, maybe even a 60. Howard Beale is processed instant God and right now it looks like he may just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore!" Everyone is dressed professionally and they all know their way around the warrens of offices and desks and windows and cityscapes. It has a decided middle-aged vibe, a marked, almost stark, departure from more typical youth concerns of popular culture in movies of all eras. Christensen is the kid in this picture and she's in her mid-30s. Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), in his 40s, is also a youth. As usual, Duvall is quietly excellent as a bullying, toadying corporate cockroach, forever scheming and surviving and moving on up.

"Shares" and "ratings" and "points" and playing the game are what it's all about, and in perfect comic fashion everyone here understands that—even the Communist Party. But it's still helpful to include the extraordinary scene with Ned Beatty, who thunders in impressive fashion (I hardly suspected he was capable of such a turn, and indeed in some fleeting moments you see how he appears to be at the furthest extremes of his own talent), explicitly declaiming the vision, mission, strategy, and tactics of what we would now call "the 1%." It's really chilling, and perhaps the single most prescient element in a movie that now seems full of them. The result of it, the failure of Beale to put across his message, in turn becomes one of the funniest developments in the whole thing.

Network is a rich and robust stew, moving easily and credibly from corporate buffoonery to affairs of the heart to incisive social commentary. Both Chayevsky and Lumet spent many years in television and obviously know the territory well—that shows in the intricate setups of the various television production scenes, even more in the organic way in which so many scenes and situations are conceived and develop. It has performances on the career-best short lists for Ned Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall (and that's saying something), Peter Finch, William Holden (yes, one of his best too), and Beatrice Straight. And it's sharply funny. I love it.

Top 10 of 1976
Taxi Driver is one of my all-time favorites so that gets pride of place for this year, and somehow I thought Eraserhead was 1976 rather than the 1977 shown on IMDb but I am including it because it's top 10 for any year for me (for those tracking closely, I would put it just ahead of Suspiria on my '77 list). Marathon Man was an obsession that still works pretty well for me. Harlan County and Josey Wales I've only seen for the first time in recent years. A pretty good year, I'd say: beyond these are still Carrie, The Omen, The Bad News Bears, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and 1900. Once again, the "didn't like so much" picks I actually like, they are just slight matters of being underwhelmed, or maybe I need to revisit. Hey, next year there will be some movies I hate, I promise.
1. Taxi Driver
2. Network
3. Eraserhead
4. Marathon Man
5. The Tenant
6. Harlan County, U.S.A.
7. All the President's Men
8. The Outlaw Josey Wales
9. Don's Party
10. Rocky

Didn't like so much: Bound for Glory; Face to Face; Next Stop, Greenwich Village; Small Change; Welcome to L.A.

Gaps: Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson; The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; Kings of the Road; The Marquise of O...; Obsession

Detail: Network (1976)

0 Annie Hall (1977)

USA, 93 minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: Woody Allen's record collection
Editors: Wendy Greene Bricmont, Ralph Rosenblum
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken, Russell Horton, Marshall McLuhan, Dick Cavett, Jeff Goldblum, Shelley Hack, Sigourney Weaver, Truman Capote

A lot of things that Woody Allen is good at—tormented narratives shattered by revision, pieces playing just so where they land, tender ruminations buoyed by comfort music and nostalgia and surprising jokes, and streaming patter of gags, to name three—arguably found their best homes in Annie Hall. The fine points of this very fine picture, the easiest and most obvious movie of the year I've had to pick yet and maybe ever, is a very long list as it also includes that indelible chemistry with Diane Keaton, that wonderful self-flattering feeling of grown-up sophistication in the cultural markers (from Groucho to Kierkegaard), that certain casting touch that goes down to the smallest roles, and being so funny generally. But you get the point. It is arguably both the best movie Woody Allen ever made and the best Woody Allen movie ever made, which are not necessarily the same thing.

So what to say? It's going on 40 years now and the template that Annie Hall established for romantic comedy has positively dominated since then, replacing the slightly shopworn screwball model, which had gotten to be a little stuffy or inane or both since its own heyday. Woody Allen brought more genuine emotional engagement to the enterprise and obviated the whole idea of matrimonial happy endings, replacing them with the much more expedient joys and frustrations of connection (or lack thereof), which in turn grounded and made it more appealing. Remember (spoiler alert), Annie Hall does not have a "happy ending." As Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) mentions in the first minutes of the picture, the breakup is already in the past. Yet it rarely leaves me anything less than happy, tickled, pleased as punch, or downright joyful. It has a very good energy, as the saying goes, from beginning to end.



There's always trading in trivia, courtesy IMDb. Diane Keaton was born Diane Hall, and went by "Annie," for example. You probably already knew that. The working title was Anhedonia, but Allen couldn't convince the producers to go along with it—that intrigues me both because the first two syllables mimic the ultimate title and because "anhedonia" is the last thing I would associate with anything to do with this particular movie. More: The first cut ran an additional 50 minutes. Marshall McLuhan was not Allen's first choice for the famous inspired cameo—he first approached Federico Fellini and Luis Bunuel. The winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest is actually Truman Capote. The average shot length is 14.5 seconds. Danny Aiello and Brooke Shields both had parts that didn't make it into the final cut.

And more: Allen remains mostly disappointed with Annie Hall (also Hannah and Her Sisters, which tells me anyway what I need to know about how much credence to give this), telling interviewer Eric Eisenberg just last year, "The relationship between myself and Diane Keaton was all anyone cared about. That was not what I cared about.... In the end, I had to reduce the film to just me and Diane Keaton, and that relationship, so I was quite disappointed in that movie."

It was originally conceived as more of a murder mystery (perhaps accounting for much of that original extra 50 minutes). For whatever reasons, Allen dropped it but finally developed the thread for 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, which interestingly, by circumstance, involved working again with Diane Keaton, who stepped in after Mia Farrow pulled out during the welter of the tabloid scandal.

Now I want to say a few words about Diane Keaton here, because she really made that latter movie, it's one of the few sparkling points for me in Allen's filmography since 1980 and the last great movie he made. And a lot of that, it's plain to see there and certainly in Annie Hall, is how good Diane Keaton is and how good she makes Woody Allen on film. It's a chemistry they have, they just draw it out of one another. Love and Death is worth seeing for that alone—I think it's his best straight comedy. She is the star of Annie Hall and Annie Hall is the landmark movie's most interesting character by far. She not only nails a certain upper Midwest personality type, but more broadly a whole way of being alive and sensible in the '70s, which was not an easy decade to navigate. Oh and also plus, the camera loves her.

Pieces of Annie Hall have systematically been torn away and imitated and grown cliché, and then enjoyed revitalization themselves again—several times over now. Did you see Frances Ha yet? Did you see (500) Days of Summer? Did you see When Harry Met Sally...? It is also a tremendous technical achievement, in terms of editing and shot setups. I love, for example, those long static street scenes with the line of the street running from lower left to upper right, which start as voiceover conversations until finally, long minutes later, the characters emerge within the frame, walking down the street, approaching the camera, which then begins tracking back with them once they are in medium. I love the ruminating nostalgic passages too, remembering Brooklyn and his childhood and family. Allen is very good at this type of filmmaking, as he would demonstrate later in Radio Days, but here it is casually sprinkled in for effect, powered by an energy of discovery.

Ultimately, I think, that may be the single greatest pleasure of Annie Hall, which is saying something. It brims with the energy of discovery. Examples: Opening and closing on jokes that are stale yet canny and resonant. Opening on Alvy Singer addressing the camera directly. Putting the rememberers in frame with the memory, and then enabling them to interact, sometimes in sly, nuanced ways. Allen is comfortable, and bold, with theatrical "fourth wall" exercises, and he's pretty good as well in Annie Hall at turning that fourth wall edgewise for cinematic split-screens, which are scattered across the film, used in slightly different yet always perfectly apt ways. It's also a really beautiful bittersweet romantic story, poignant and touching, and very funny too. A great one, that's all.

Top 10 of 1977
I think the glories of the decade may be more in the past starting with 1977, though the year certainly has some very bright flashpoints in the first three (or four) on my list, which is not even to start on the problem of Star Wars. I ended up relegating Star Wars to the "didn't like so much" category even though it is the only Star Wars movie that I like at all, and actually sometimes have liked very much. Call it blessing with faint censure. It's just that kind of year. I don't see that many significant gaps but by the lower echelons of my top 10 we are into recent finds and sentimental favorites, and meanwhile I kind of like some of the movies in the "didn't like" list. Even I can see that Between the Lines is not really that good. That leads me to believe it's just a weak year. Your opinions?
1. Annie Hall
2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
3. Saturday Night Fever
4. Suspiria
5. 3 Women
6. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
7. Slap Shot
8. Killer of Sheep
9. The Kentucky Fried Movie
10. Between the Lines

Didn't like so much: Fun With Dick and Jane; Julia; Martin; New York, New York; Star Wars

Gaps: The American Friend; The Duellists; The Goodbye Girl; Hitler: A Film From Germany; That Obscure Object of Desire

Detail: Annie Hall (1977)