1970s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[domino harvey]

Oddly Harold and Maude most definitely won't make my list, but more on him on Friday. The Rozier only seems available through the French Coffret set, does that have english subs?

All the films (full-length and shorts) have subs, the extras don't. We have a thread on the set here

[knives]

Thanks, I've been meaning to see his works and this film in particular for years. Now I've got no excuse.

[Mr Sausage]

I have no idea if I'll be participating in this list. I've watched exactly two movies in the past, like, three months, which happens periodically with me, and who knows if I'll be able to get back in the mood and do the necessary watching.

But, if I do, That Obscure Object of Desire will be my #1. I might even be inspired to write something on it later. To judge by its thread on this forum, the general approach to it is misguided. Everyone seems to be debating which of the pair (three?) ought to be sympathized with and which despised, when both of them are travesties of human beings and their relationship is a travesty of human desire in general. Its structural points are two people throwing water in each other's faces. The movie is Bunuel's most savage, piercing satire. Even Bunuel couldn't bear it for very long and blows up his own movie.

[YnEoS]

Out of curiosity is anyone else struggling with voting for "arthouse" vs "grindhouse" films in this decade, to use broad terms. I'm not sure if I'll be submitting a list for this project or not, but I could quite easily come up with a top 50 made up entirely of Kung Fu, Turkish Super Heroes, Italian Horror, Godzilla films, etc.

I know the general attitude is kind of "vote for whatever you like" and if no one else likes it then it won't have much impact. But I feel like if I voted for films in terms of my personal preference, it would just add a weird skew to the end results, where I'd have a ton of orphans and then a random Rivette here or Ruiz there. The more logical approach would be to perhaps vote mostly for the types of films that go down well over here, and then perhaps try and champion a few of the other kind of films to see if I can make any kind of dent.

I love the idea of seeing a canon that includes many different types of films made for different purposes and intentions, but I'm not sure this is necessarily the right time or place for that.

On another topic...

I have no idea if I'll be participating in this list. I've watched exactly two movies in the past, like, three months, which happens periodically with me, and who knows if I'll be able to get back in the mood and do the necessary watching.

But, if I do, That Obscure Object of Desire will be my #1. I might even be inspired to write something on it later. To judge by its thread on this forum, the general approach to it is misguided. Everyone seems to be debating which of the pair (three?) ought to be sympathized with and which despised, when both of them are travesties of human beings and their relationship is a travesty of human desire in general. Its structural points are two people throwing water in each other's faces. The movie is Bunuel's most savage, piercing satire. Even Bunuel couldn't bear it for very long and blows up his own movie.

Well if you do decide to vote, you'll have at least 1 other person with TOOoD in their top 10. Easily my favorite Bunuel of the decade.

[zedz]

Out of curiosity is anyone else struggling with voting for "arthouse" vs "grindhouse" films in this decade, to use broad terms. I'm not sure if I'll be submitting a list for this project or not, but I could quite easily come up with a top 50 made up entirely of Kung Fu, Turkish Super Heroes, Italian Horror, Godzilla films, etc.

I know the general attitude is kind of "vote for whatever you like" and if no one else likes it then it won't have much impact. But I feel like if I voted for films in terms of my personal preference, it would just add a weird skew to the end results, where I'd have a ton of orphans and then a random Rivette here or Ruiz there. The more logical approach would be to perhaps vote mostly for the types of films that go down well over here, and then perhaps try and champion a few of the other kind of films to see if I can make any kind of dent.

From memory, the 70s was the decade with the most votes for "grindhouse" titles last time around. I remember having to disentangle various Female Prisoner Scorpions and Lone Wolfs and Cubs while collating the votes. Lots of Italian horror / thriller and Japanese or Hong Kong genre films were voted for, but these votes tended to be quite diverse and thus orphanable. Talking up your favourite titles is highly recommended, both in terms of alerting participants to worthwhile films and in nudging like-minded folk to adopt a few orphans.

There's a lot of useful commentary in the horror list thread for 70s genre titles, needless to say.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with having lots of orphans on your list. It just gives the rest of as that many more films to get excited about. At the end of the voting, nobody is going to be excited about whatever films end up in the top ten.

[Mike_S]

My #1 will be Arthur Penn's Night Moves, a film which seems to me to get richer, more complex and more heartrendingly human with every passing year. It's also got Gene Hackman at his absolute peak as an actor and Alan Sharp's salty, endlessly quotable screenplay.

Otherwise, there will be a lot of Peckinpah, De Palma and Pakula. But I've enough room to pick up on some of the interesting suggestions from this thread.

[Mike_S]

I have no idea if I'll be participating in this list. I've watched exactly two movies in the past, like, three months, which happens periodically with me, and who knows if I'll be able to get back in the mood and do the necessary watching.

But, if I do, That Obscure Object of Desire will be my #1. I might even be inspired to write something on it later. To judge by its thread on this forum, the general approach to it is misguided. Everyone seems to be debating which of the pair (three?) ought to be sympathized with and which despised, when both of them are travesties of human beings and their relationship is a travesty of human desire in general. Its structural points are two people throwing water in each other's faces. The movie is Bunuel's most savage, piercing satire. Even Bunuel couldn't bear it for very long and blows up his own movie.

An excellent summation. My own take on the movie isn't sophisticated at all but I am always amazed at how funny it is. Fernando Rey on heat is like a desperately horny Wile. E. Coyote.

[Cold Bishop]

The Last Detail and The Landlord are both ones I have to rewatch but certainly live fondly in my memory.

I think The Landlord is easily his best film, and you'll probably see me stump for it before the project's over.

Out of curiosity is anyone else struggling with voting for "arthouse" vs "grindhouse" films in this decade, to use broad terms. I'm not sure if I'll be submitting a list for this project or not, but I could quite easily come up with a top 50 made up entirely of Kung Fu, Turkish Super Heroes, Italian Horror, Godzilla films, etc.

One of my main goals this go-around for the 70s/80s/90s is to do my best to not let ingrained snobbery knock these films off my list. AND to try to stump for them as loud as I can.

Join me, comrade!

[knives]

And combining those two ideas Ganja and Hess is one of the best vampire flicks of the decade even with Rollin at his best in competition. Gunn adjusts to cinema perfectly telling his story in a way that could only be done in the movies with some revolutionary cinematography thanks to James Hinton.

[Michael Kerpan]

Not sure that I can come up with a list of 50 films I truly love from the 70s -- same might be true for the 80s. Nineties and after shouldn't be a problem, however.

I would like to recommend 2 of Yoji Yamada's best films -- Kazoku / When Spring Comes Late (1970) and Kokyo / Home From the Sea (1972). There was once a mediocre DVD of Kokyo, but I don't think Kazoku ever has had a subbed DVD release.

[bamwc2]

Out of curiosity is anyone else struggling with voting for "arthouse" vs "grindhouse" films in this decade, to use broad terms. I'm not sure if I'll be submitting a list for this project or not, but I could quite easily come up with a top 50 made up entirely of Kung Fu, Turkish Super Heroes, Italian Horror, Godzilla films, etc.

One of the great things about this decade is that the lines between the two were often blurred, with many of the so-called grindhouse films adopting the conventions (thankfully without the pretensions) of the arthouse films of the previous decade. The same goes with the opposite direction, as many of the arthouse directors of the decade took on plots that sound like they could have been produced by Roger Corman. Four years before he gave the world Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick brought the ultraviolence of A Clockwork Orange to the big screen. That same year Louis Malle released a lighthearted comic tale featuring casual incest, and Fassbinder made a Western where the entire cast was in whiteface. In 1972 Michael Ritchie's Primecut, starring two of Hollywood's most famous leading men, opens with a gangster's corpse being processed into dinner meat. 1973 featured a musical about pagans performing a human sacrifice, and a group of men who gather together to eat themselves to death. That last one bears repeating. Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe is about a group of four men so frustrated with life that they decide to eat until they die...and one of them farts himself to death. Directors like Larry Cohen and Pier Paolo Pasolini spent the decade straddling the line between the two genres to the point that they don't clearly belong in either category. Heck, these divisions were so blurred that Dyanne Thorne famously thought she was making an Oscar worthy artfilm when she filmed Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS in 1974, and who can blame her with The Night Porter coming out that year?

[bamwc2]

With the semester over I should be focused on finishing my book. Instead I just watched five more films for this list:

Ballad of Orin: With the exceptions of Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees and Silence, I haven't been the biggest fan of the half dozen or so Masahiro Shinoda films that I've seen. That being said, his Ballad of Orin was a revelation, showing exactly what Shinoda was capable of with the right script. The film tells the story of Orin, a blind woman in pre-modern Japan, and the travails that she experiences at the hands of men who mistreat her at every turn as well as the women who abandon her when they deem her impure. While the film could have easily descended into bland melodrama, it never falls into that trap mainly because of the quiet dignity that Shima Iwashita (also recently seen in the great The Demon) brings to her character. Rather than coming off as a perpetual victim, she elicits both sympathy and respect without pity in her constant quest to change her fate in a cruel world. Although I'm not sure if it'll make my list, I'd be very disappointed if this masterpiece doesn't get some respect in the final list.

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands: I've had Bruno Barreto's 1976 sex farce on my Netflix queue for about five years now, but it was always stuck in the "very long wait" limbo. I stumbled upon it yesterday at my university's library by accident and gave it a spin when I got home. It was certainly a decent enough film with a strong lead performance by Sonia Braga in the eponymous role, but it did feel like the first act dragged on for far too long. The film's supernatural twist doesn't even occur until 3/4 of the way into the film, leaving only thirty minutes to explore the titular situation. If I'd have my druthers the film would have shifted its priorities around. It's by no means a bad movie, thought I do think that it's too flawed to make my list.

It's Alive: I love Larry Cohen's 70s output (God Told Me To is a lock for my final list, with both Bone and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover standing as strong contenders as well), and perhaps that's why I'm disappointed by this horror film without any scares. Perhaps this is because the plot has been aped so many times (think of A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child where a newborn Freddy makes his rounds around the delivery room killing the hospital staff. It wasn't scarey when I was 9, nor was it frightening when I saw Cohen's version of the same scene). Regardless, the plot concern a couple who after experiencing the joys of pregnancy, soon find their dream turned into a nightmare when their deformed son goes on a killing spree around LA. While I did appreciate the angst that the couple felt as their natural parental instincts clashed with the reality of their son, the film just never worked for me. I found it to be mediocre at best, so I am surprised to see it chart on the horror list from a few months back. I'd love to hear from those who voted for it. Perhaps I missed something.

It Lives Again: Somehow Cohen's sequel manages to be even worse than the original. John P. Ryan returns to the role of Frank Marshall, the father of the first mutant infant, though this time he leads an underground movement to rescue the killer babies before the government disposes of them. However, his role is secondary to a pair of young parents played by Kathleen Lloyd and Frederick Forrest. The two are never really given much to do other than to retread the same notes played in the previous film. Forrest's performance struck me as uncharacteristically leaden, and again the horror wasn't the least bit effective. Pass.

Satan's Brew: With the exception of his TV movies, this was the final 70s films of Fassbinder's that I had yet to see. Like so much of his output from this era this too is a masterpiece. In the film Walter Kranz is a sadistic poet with a severe case of writer's block and desperate longing for money. Instead of doing anything productive, he spends his time torturing his wife, his lovers, and his mentally retarded brother. The cold detachment that Kurt Raab brings to Kranz as he goes about brutalizing one victim after another is shocking, but the performances by the other members of Fassbinder's troop (e.g. Y Sa Lo, Katherina Buchhammer, Ingrid Caven, etc.) should also not be overlooked. Thinking ahead to my list, it's going to be interesting to see which of Fassbinder's films make it. Like just about every one from the 70s, this one has a legitimate chance.

[the preacher]

Spotlight #1:

Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag / Manila in the Claws of Neon aka Claws of Light aka Nails of Brightness etc. (Lino Brocka, Philippines 1975)

I'd like to put this film in the spotlight - and I surely know about Khavn de la Cruz' commentary on it. Let's say that in my eyes, this is not only one of the greatest 'Third Cinema' films ever made, but it's also often and, in my eyes, rightly considered to be the one filipino film you should have seen (It's recently been restored with the help of the WCF and has just been shown at Cannes, btw.) . It's a realist film dealing with migration, poverty, gender and LGBT issues, 70s style authoritarian modernization policies and the dreams as well as living conditions of slum dwellers etc. in the Marcos era, which had a huge influence on filmmakers like Ruy Guerra (A Queda) or Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) back in the days. That is if you should consider to vote for Taxi Driver, then you should have a look at this film, because, as far as I can see, it's obviously one of its subtexts (Please speak up, if you disagree). Watching it, you shouldn't forget that it's been made during the first years of the Marcos dictatorship, so it had to pass censorship and stuff which lead to Brocka using linguistic as well visual metaphors. By the way, it's also been prophetic in some way, if you think about the collapse of the framing of the Manila Film Centre in 1981 (Wikipedia) which has been one of prestigious objects of Imelda Marcos' cultural policy.

As for availability: I do not know, if there's a legit release of Maynila. I've heard someone might have released it in the Philippines in form of a limited edition recently and I'd be glad if someone would know about that and could steer me to a place where I could get it. But there are fansubs floating around, as far as I know, and it's been popping up on Youtube with subs again and again over the last years. Btw, I'll also vote for Brocka's Insiang, which is a wonderful melodramatic take on slum-dwelling with Hilda Koronel in the lead.

Well deserved! Since I choose one film per director I'll go to Insiang, but Manila and Tinimbang ka ngunit kulang are all must-see. Three Years without God is another filipino film with safe place in my ballot.

[bamwc2]

I too am glad to see the love for Lino Brocka, though I'm afraid that I've yet to see Manila in the Claws of Neon. It's worth mentioning that two of his other films, Insiang and Three, Two, One are both available for free on Amazon for prime subscribers.

[Michael Kerpan]

Does Ishmael Bernal have any 70s contenders. If I do an 80s list -- his Himala will rank high on it.

At one point. Brocka's Manila was available for streaming on Netflix.

[tojoed]

I wonder if many people have seen, or had a chance to see, Jonathan Demme's Citizen's Band.
I don't think it's available anywhere, but it would be great if someone knows how to see it.

Robert Altman's greatest, of about half a dozen 70s films, is, for me, California Split, and I hope
most people will see it, even though the DVD is slightly compromised and out-of-print.

[Foam]

All Mike Leigh fans should track down The Kiss of Death, which is my favorite of his films and an unflinching look at the most potentially painful/awkward moments of adolescence, thrown into sharp relief by the pervasive presence of death throughout the film. It's not plot-heavy, but the seeming opacity of each character's surface expressiveness is rich with contradictory suggestion, and the Paul Morrissey-like direction keeps it from feeling like one of his more stagy films of the period.

[movielocke]

I just rewatched The French Connection, which I haven't seen in quite a long time.

God damn.

SpoilerShow

What I remembered most about the film was the chase of the train and the car, the incredible editing of that sequence, in particular the woman Hackman nearly runs over. I'd forgotten that scene begins with a sniper attack.

But I'm even more impressed this time around by the pitch perfect pacing and sequencing of the cat and mouse game in the subway station. It's so simple and it plays out so magnificently, if anything it's a better sequence of film than the iconic train/car chase.

Interestingly, my memory had changed the ending, I remembered Hackman shooting someone, but I remembered it as him shooting the 'bad guy,' not the failure that is so effectively hammered home.

The other procedural beats of the film, the cop work at the beginning, tracking down leads etc, is all brilliantly and economically done. I have a hard imagining today's screenwriters turning in sequences as free of ornamentation as the subway scene or the scene where they first track the guy changing cars. It reminded me very much of Melville.

[bamwc2]

I wonder if many people have seen, or had a chance to see, Jonathan Demme's Citizen's Band.
I don't think it's available anywhere, but it would be great if someone knows how to see it.

I'm glad to be able to help you out here. I saw it maybe a year or two ago through instant streaming (Amazon, I believe). It's a fun little comedy that goes back and forth between a large cast with some amusing stories thrown in there. At one point it was in my top 10 for the year of its release, but I think that it's been supplanted.

...and look at this. It's available through Amazon's US streaming for $9.99 as a purchase (no rental available). I'm not sure if this service is available to you in England though.

[tojoed]

Thanks a lot, B. It's just nice to know it's available for others to
see for the project.

[bamwc2]

No problem. I looked it up and it seems that there are programs that should allow you to view it from the UK. Unfortunately, I can't remember if subtitles are available. If I remember correctly from our times trading about four years ago you're heard of hearing, correct? Are subs necessary for you?

[tojoed]

Yes, I nearly always need HoH subs, but I'll look into it. Thanks again.

[bamwc2]

Best of luck. It's definitely worth the effort (and $9.99!).

[colinr0380]

I was going to offer you a dub of my recorded-from-Channel 4 VHS tape tojoed, but on digging the tape out and rewatching it tonight the sound is fine throughout but the picture glitches in and out regularly, so it wouldn't be much use unless you were really desperate.

Is the soundtrack (i.e. Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful" over the end titles and 10cc's "I'm Not In Love" in the background of the opening scene) part of an issue with Citizen's Band/Handle With Care getting a wider release, or is it just because it is an older film that needs rescuing?

It is one hell of a film though with a great cast - it kind of prefigures a goofy National Lampoon-style comedy (in the bits where the CB pirate broadcasters are being tracked down and put out of commission; or Charles Napier's trucker ending up trying to juggle his two wives who have just met up in a (surprisingly civil!) tete-a-tete in his prostitute lover's newly purchased motor home. The great line from one of the wives when the women exchange pictures and find out their husband is the same man: "...Does this mean we are related?" gets the look of incredulous disbelief mixed with pity from the other wife that it deserves!) mixed into a film that plays like a shorter, snappier, funnier (but just as touching in many areas) version of Short Cuts in the way that the stories are impressively and effortlessly weaved together, with a dash of Talk Radio's interest in disemodied voices, if Talk Radio imparted a more life affirming message.

[tojoed]

Nice appreciation, Colin. To tell the truth I don't know why the film has not been
released on DVD, but I suspect you are right about music rights. Perhaps someone
here knows the history behind it and can tell us.