life_boy wrote:I'm guessing I will have around 16 also-rans and 7 orphans.
Pretty close: I had 17 Also-Rans and 9 Orphans, having seen 67/100 films in the final list.
1. Nashville (Altman, 1975)
2. Stroszek (Herzog, 1977) – ALSO-RAN This has been a favorite for years. I consider Herzog the equal of Altman this decade (and I voted for plenty of both), it's just that my favorite Herzog films are not
Aguirre and
Kaspar Hauser, though I like them both. I was surprised
Stroszek failed to chart since it charted last time but I guess if this iteration of the project has taught us anything besides the law of large numbers, it is that those lower echelons of the list are not safe for assumed classics.
3. The Merchant of Four Seasons (Fassbinder, 1971) -- ORPHAN - I was genuinely shocked that I was the only one who voted for this as I assumed Fassbinder support was broad and deep. I guess it plays very strangely for many (and there is so much Fassbinder to choose from in the 70's) but I found this delicate little melodrama completely moving. You can read my defense of it
further up this thread.
4. The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973)
5. Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971)
6. All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976)
7. Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
8. 1900 (Bertolucci, 1976) – ALSO-RAN I decided I preferred this to the formal rigor of
The Conformist. It is a huge film and takes some effort to get through but in the end I found myself deeply affected by it continuing to think on it for days. I gave it a
small write-up earlier.
9. Paper Moon (Bogdanovich, 1973)
10. At Long Last Love (Bogdanovich, 1975) -- The power of the Member Spotlight.
11. The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, 1971)
12. Don’t Look Now (Roeg, 1973)
13. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
14. Alien (Scott, 1979)
15. Alex in Wonderland (Mazursky, 1970) -- ORPHAN -- My spotlight that either no one saw or no one liked (looks like the Mazursky vote -- such as it was -- was split between several films). I knew it was an uphill battle arguing for this film because I know that of the few people who've ever seen it, most don't care for it. Since no one mentioned it in the thread I was starting to suspect its orphan status coming. I wrote
some about it earlier but perhaps it is a film in which more effort is necessary to pique interest.
Coming to audiences near the beginning of the New Hollywood era (1970),
Alex in Wonderland is both an appreciation of the artistic freedom afforded to directors by producers/studios during that time and a unique representation of the paradoxes and paralysis facing the New Hollywood filmmaker in light of that freedom. It is bold and audacious and brilliant, written and directed by Paul Mazursky, one of the forgotten dual talents of that era.
Alex is a film director who has just finished cutting his first feature for MGM. Premiered but not yet released, Alex’s film is already garnering him attention as an up-and-coming auteur. Beginning to believe the hype of the preview screenings, Alex and his wife begin to look for a new house where their family of four can live a little more luxuriously. But Alex isn't happy. He is troubled by his own political interests, by his own cinematic influences, by his own desire to be appreciated, and by his own fear of making the wrong next step. He cannot decide what he will make next, where he will put his creative focus.
The most obvious correlation is with
8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), but this is not a Hollywood riff on the Italian classic. It is a co-opting of the imaginative framework of that film to express the reductive tendencies of Alex. Does he truly love Fellini's films or love the acclaim Fellini's films have garnered? Beyond the question of influence is the real tension between liberal guilt and the obligations of artistic freedom. Alex wants to be respected, he wants to be innovative but he can’t move beyond shallow notions of politics and cinema. He feels an obligation now he had not felt previously to create a film that shocks its audience out of political complacency. The problem is, Alex is politically complacent. He can talk a good talk about the oppression of African-Americans and about the tragedy of war, but that doesn’t motivate him in any way beyond feeling guilty not to miss his chance to speak to these platitudes.
Artistry and commerce are two things that, according to the conventional narrative of American film history, came together beautifully in the New Hollywood era. Paul Mazursky isn't so sure. There is an overwhelming paralysis of choice. The countercultural artist must position himself against commerce but he is using the most commercial of mediums. He believe that movies must be important, not trivial. They must deal with important social issues and offer critique of the culture at large. They must motivate political action. These are the manifold tensions facing the New Hollywood, according to Mazursky, and they have not been alleviated in our day. Can a film simply be for entertainment or is that too light an aim? Critics have set up their camps and it is part of why the New Hollywood is revered. It put important social concerns in films during a time when there was a broad audience acceptance of those themes so they easily found the financial backing of the studios because the studios were out of touch with the youth market. Does that make the New Hollywood films more honest or more subtly exploitative?
A large part of the film takes place in Alex’s home, charting the slowly straining relationships with his wife (Ellen Burstyn) and two daughters. There is a life and charisma in these scenes, the emotional cues and some of the dialogue feeling very spontaneous. Mazursky has put the responsibility for the strain fully on the shoulders of Alex, whose coldness towards his wife and his passive acceptance of her conventional role in the home proves the shallowness of his political convictions. Alex is the one who really wants a new house but he carefully couches it in something close to the subtly sexist rhetoric of a 1950’s advertisement for home ownership. He wants the bigger house. He wants the more spacious yard. He wants the pool out back. But he pretends as if these are her desires given to him through her nagging.
Because of his calm and unassuming demeanor, it is easy to forget just how good Donald Sutherland is as an actor and how many unconventional roles he took on (particularly in the 70's). This is one of his finest performances, finding the intensely focused director bordering on obsessive who ostensibly breaks down in front of his idols and bristles with contempt when his wife only half listens to his story ideas. It is complex and dynamic, connecting the audience to a character who is essentially a passive wanderer, but still daring us to judge him as an object of satire. It is available through the Warner Archive or to rent/download on iTunes.
16. American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973) -- ALSO-RAN
There were probably boomer nostalgia movies before
American Graffiti, but there were definitely boomer nostalgia movies after it, helping give birth to a whole niche genre. But the thing that makes
American Graffiti stand out from the imitators and wannabes is the characters it plants within that time and place. Paul Le Mat’s “little too old for high school” hot rodder who gets tricked into driving around town with a flirtatious 12-year old, Richard Dreyfuss’ confused, wandering attempt to contextualize purpose for his life and thereby figure out what he is supposed to do about college (and along the way stumbling into the craziest antics that anyone in the film engages in), Candy Clark’s dim-witted beauty, who is strangely impressed by the exaggerations of a dork. All the characters seem so perfect, subverting the archetypes and finding some honesty underneath. There is enough doubt and confusion and uncertainty in everything the kids say and do to keep it from being simply a deification of 1950’s Americana, and Lucas ends the film with one of the more shocking mainstream subversions, a brief description of what happens to the four main males after that night. But,
American Graffiti also captures a feeling better than many imitators do, probably because it eschews a conventional narrative storyline in favor of a vignetted portrait of one crazy night, yet having the intelligence not to pretend that the one crazy could be every night. It only happened once and after that nothing felt the same. Perhaps it is a metaphor for America's economic post-war prosperity.
17. The Stone Wedding (Pita & Veroiu, 1973) - Great rec, swo! Another Spotlight success story.
18. The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978)
19. Even Dwarfs Started Small (Herzog, 1970) -- ALSO-RAN
20. Fata Morgana (Herzog, 1971) -- ORPHAN
What to say about these two strange films? Not much because they are films very hard to describe. The first is an intoxicating nightmare of destruction and the latter is a fever dream of creation. I love them both. I knew
Fata Morgana was in trouble when zedz listed his #51-60 picks.
21. The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974)
22. Network (Lumet, 1976)
23. Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
24. Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)
25. Electra Glide in Blue (Guercio, 1973) -- ORPHAN One of the great one-hit wonders of cinema. Everything that I dislike about
Easy Rider gets corrected here.
26. M*A*S*H (Altman, 1970) -- ALSO-RAN I've seen this film at least 5 times and it makes me laugh every time. I grew up on the show and was slow warming to the film but now my affections have flipped. The film gets a bad rap nowadays for how poorly Sally Kellerman gets treated but it is also one of the most ripping satires on the military, bureaucratic incompetence and American imperialism. And not that it matters in terms of personal taste, but simply in historical terms, we should all kiss the feet of
M*A*S*H for allowing Altman to do every other crazy thing he would do this decade.
27. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg, 1976)
28. A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971)
29. Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma, 1974) -- De Palma's weirdo rock opera picked up a groundswell of support.
30. Harlan County U.S.A. (Kopple, 1976) -- ALSO-RAN The only journalistic thriller this decade that was better was directed by Pakula.
31. La Soufriére (Herzog, 1977) -- ORPHAN Herzog goes to an island to wait for its volcano to erupt. Instead, he comes back with a fascinating film about failure and mortality.
32. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Meyer, 1970) -- ALSO-RAN One of the funniest movies of the decade, mostly because the comedy is often Meyer's aesthetic choices as much as it the characters, dialogue or situation.
33. The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Oshima, 1970)
34. Wanda Gosciminska – A Textile Worker (Wiszniewski, 1975) -- ALSO-RAN "Such a startling formal experience": words not usually used to describe documentaries (though this skates that line). Whatever the case, seek out the fantastic Wiszniewski set (is it still in print??) if you're participating in the Documentary genre project.
35. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes, 1976)
36. Catch-22 (Nichols, 1970) -- ORPHAN I haven't seen it in years so I'm not sure how it still holds up for me but such an utterly strange film. It kind of fails as an adaptation of the book but is still able to pull out some amazing moments.
37. Across 110th Street (Shear, 1972) -- ORPHAN If only Schreck still came around, he would get onto everyone for letting this be orphaned and then get onto me for not placing it higher.
38. Wrong Move (Wenders, 1975) -- ALSO-RAN Wim Wenders rips out the barely beating heart of the German post-war existential crisis and eats it for breakfast by breaking the golden eggs of despair, suicide, meaninglessness and absurdity on top of the aimless wanderings of would-be poets, lovers and carinvalé and seeing what sticks. The fact that he's able to do this with a great degree of cynicism and dry humor while keeping the whole thing light and engaging is testament to his strengths as a filmmaker.
39. Sounder (Ritt, 1972) -- ALSO-RAN Sorry my vote didn't get this charting higher, bamwc2. I never wrote anything about it because it was one of the last films I squeezed in before submitting but I found this to be a film of quiet power and grace. In such a simple way it is able to not just tug the heartstrings through overt melodrama but paint an honest and tender portrait of a black family of sharecroppers trying to eek out an existence during the Great Depression. There is social injustice and systematic indifference along with other slightly more subtle forms of prejudice, but the heart and soul of the film is the positive focus upon this family as they try and hold themselves together through every trial that befalls them. Martin Ritt keeps things from becoming too complicated and avoids overt commentary on the situation, while Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield and the young Kevin Hooks give such life and empathy to their characters it is hard not to love them and wish for the best.
40. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977) -- ALSO-RAN
41. Tale of Tales (Norshteyn, 1979) -- ALSO-RAN
42. Smile (Ritchie, 1975) -- ALSO-RAN Hilarious character comedy and social satire. This might be my favorite Bruce Dern performance.
43. Cockfighter (Hellman, 1974) -- ALSO-RAN Warren Oates plays a man who fights chickens. That should be enough said. Hopefully there's a Criterion Blu-ray in the future.
44. The French Connection (Friedkin, 1971)
45. Bone (Cohen, 1972) -- ALSO-RAN Write-up earlier in thread.
46. Thieves Like Us (Altman, 1974) -- ALSO-RAN Write-up earlier in thread.
47. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Sargent, 1974) -- ALSO-RAN
48. The Day of the Locust (Schlesinger, 1975) -- ORPHAN I didn't get to revisit this for the list but it holds a warm spot in my heart. This was an early important marker in my cinema-going, one of the first non-cannon American 70's films I "discovered" that astonished me that I had never read anything about it. It is beautifully shot and is a slow boil of sexual angst and repressed rage against Hollywood's perfections.
49. The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1978)
50. If You Spot a Cat Flying Through the Air (Szczechura, 1971) -- ORPHAN A weird and hilarious little oddity that's available on the Anthology of Polish Children's Animation. A one joke movie that makes me laugh every time.