The 1971 Mini-List

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah I guess that answers my question, since it would be pretty silly to vote for the umbrella project vs individual parts when half the parts aren't available

There aren't a ton of 'rarities' to recommend for this year compared to others, but I'll make a special plug for The Big Doll House, which I wrote up and then subsequently discussed with knives in the Corman thread in relation to other WiP films. It's absolutely bonkers in all the best ways. Also, if anyone hasn't seen Two English Girls yet, I think it's handily Truffaut's best

[alacal2]

Could we include the following please?
Unman Wittering and Zigo (John Mackenzie)
The Last Valley (James Clavell)
Psychomania (Don Sharp)
Fright (peter Collinson)
Quest For Love (Ralph Thomas)
Night Digger (Alastair Reed).

Thankyou.

[swo17]

Last Valley was already here and I have Psychomania as 1973. I've added the rest

[knives]

Sorry to be pedantic , but just noticed you only credited Adachi as director of The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, but Wakamatsu is also credited as director of the film.

[swo17]

No problem, I'd like to get details like that correct

[knives]

Here’s the letterboxd version of the master list.

Could you add the following: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb which might hold the low distinction of being he best mummy movie ever.
Fred Wolf’s The Point, which is great hippie nonsense from one of animation’s truly great independents.

Konrad Wolf is easily my favorite East German filmmaker and his Goya: Or the Hard Way to Enlightenment is a perfect example of why as it simply expresses a sense of reality that you can’t get elsewhere.

Finally is The Lady Hermit which is the film that allowed me to fall in love with Chinese action.

[swo17]

Thanks, I've added those

[TMDaines]

My watchlist of unwatched discs feels like 50% gialli for this particular year. I guess this is the moment their production peaked.

[knives]

My first two viewings for this list are hopefully an omen of things to come because they were truly magnificent.

First was one of two Harrington’s two collabs this year with Shelley Winters: Whoever Slew Auntie Roo. It was an amazing surprise although it shouldn’t have with Harrington at the helm. Even with that thought the two competing factors of the film would have caught me off guard. This is a through and true children’s film taking their perspective and limiting its horrors to what they would consider horrifying. Twinned to that I was on the edge of my seat throughout and even jumped a couple of times. Harrington takes the fairy tale origin of the story and gets to the root of the matter to really express how children could become afraid of friendliness. This is so perfectly tied together by Winters’ mad performance which is u hinged in the best sort of way.

The second was a Spheeris’ I Don’t Know which I hadn’t even hear of before. First and foremost it’s an amazingly shot documentary shifting between verite and direct cinema to intentionally craft of narrative of being. This allows Spheeris to present some absolutely wacky shots. There’s too many memorable ,omens to count, but one that made me burst out laughing is our cisgender protagonist dancing in the foreground sans shirt as another figure tries to repair a car. That sentence also lays out what is amazing about this film: it’s approach to gender and sex is ahead of most works today let alone what I was expecting from a short from the early ‘70s. The two leads of the film are respectively a lesbian and a person in transition. The film is largely in examination of identity in regards to the transition, but it isn’t an underlined defining topic. Michaels happens to occupy a space between genders which is interesting, but they’re also much more than that. It’s a frank and comfortable view that even today I wish we got more of.

[swo17]

Spheeris’ I Don’t Know

The director of Wayne's World!

[knives]

Honestly, as I get to know her work I feel like that film was a blessing and a curse. Obviously it gave her whole new levels of fake and she’s pretty well guaranteed to be remembered for a long time, but it also seemingly doomed her away from making the adventurous cinema she carved out in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

[DarkImbecile]

Does anyone know of a good way outside of YouTube to see Toshio Matsumoto’s Shura / Demons?

[ryannichols7]

Spheeris’ I Don’t Know

The director of Wayne's World!

my jaw dropped when I just wikipedia'd that she's related to Costa Gavras. I am a big fan of both Z and WW, never knew there'd be a connection!!!

Also, if anyone hasn't seen Two English Girls yet, I think it's handily Truffaut's best

I am looking forward to this movie greatly, but I will say the expectation is high since The 400 Blows sits comfortably in my top 5. I enjoyed Bed and Board aside from its...okay I should put my thoughts in the 1970 thread, but nonetheless I have faith in Truffaut again after a few weirdly uneven films

[ryannichols7]

swo where do you have Luminous Procuress? no clue if I'm voting for it yet, but I do have it upcoming based on Second Run's date

[swo17]

It goes here, I've just added it--thanks!

[Rayon Vert]

Also, if anyone hasn't seen Two English Girls yet, I think it's handily Truffaut's best

I completely agree, and it'll be in my top 3 here.

[swo17]

Are people aware that Pialat's 6-hour miniseries La Maison des bois now has English subtitles circulating on the internet? Like L'Enfance nue it's concerned with displaced childhood but transplanted to the countryside during WWI, where some parents had to send their children as they stayed to fight in the largely unseen war. Lots of room to breathe with small moments adds to a powerful cumulative effect when the plot's rug infrequently gets pulled out of the way

[ryannichols7]

slow start, only 4 in six days so far...I'll pick up

Beware of a Holy Whore - even the Fassbinder fans on this forum don't seem to be much of fans of this. once again I'm at odds with a fanbase I'm part of, as I thought it was an uproarious comedy, a perfect conclusion to Fassbinder's antiteatre years and a quantum leap forward in terms of his artistry. after the intimacy of the earlier films, it was nice to see Fassbinder put Michael Ballhaus at a distance and capture these hooligans arguing in beautiful surroundings and just generally being awful to each other. the metaness here seemed to predict everything from Day for Night to The Player even through the works of Hong Sang Soo, but generally lacking the warmth of any of those. even Glass Onion seemed a bit derived from this. but I gotta hand it to Rainer for not only casting a hilariously pompous director figure (Lou Castel is brilliant) mocking himself, and himself as an incredibly ridiculous character. even this one happened to feel ahead of its time for where the director would end up going with his filmography. now I need to track down Whity, which this was filmed during the filming of.

Get Carter - was excited to watch this but was left pretty adrift by it in the end. in Beware, it's funny that everyone is insufferable. in Get Carter it's all serious and this is where I struggle a bit. it's obviously well made and very watchable, but I just feel like there's no true soul to the story of this movie. maybe this is my aversion to gangster films speaking up, but I was hoping for a little bit more I guess - though everyone else loves it. what is great is the sense of location in gritty Newcastle in the early 1970s. most gangster movies use hyper stylized settings it seems to tell their hyper stylized stories. I give this one credit because it's gritty and down to earth, and everything feels painstakingly realistic. the women are empty, the violence intense - if this is your sort of thing, I'm sure you'll enjoy it, but I didn't really.

Luminous Procuress - I enjoy experimental cinema even if my votes don't always reflect that on here. I just had no idea what I was supposed to get from this - not only is there not a clear thesis, which is perfectly okay, but I don't get a clear sense of atmosphere either. I have said this about something else recently but this feels like the kind of thing that would be included in a boxset with a comprehensive overview of the director. instead, removed, it makes even less sense, and is very much an outlier in the release schedule of the label that put it out. if anything, notable because I actually watched a film on this wikipedia page for this project.

Carnal Knowledge - couldn't have enjoyed this more. dustybooks compared it to Bergman and that's honestly apt in many ways. an extremely fascinating movie about two gloriously selfish men, both on opposite ends of that very spectrum. everyone feels very real here and three dimensional, plenty of nuance amongst our four leads. it's no surprise Nichols was able to bring out this story, but it's his cast that really bring it to life. chalk this up to another brilliant 70s performance from Jack Nicholson, who is more uneven than ever here, in a role I feel Tom Cruise would end up taking a lot from during his career. Art Garfunkel is brilliant and genuinely makes me wish he did more movies, absolutely don't miss his role here as he goes toe to toe with some serious actors. but Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret are so top notch here, playing such strong characters who are so blatantly misunderstood by our two lead dudes. it's funny and intense, and I mention Cruise above but this really is proto-Eyes Wide Shut, exploring the psychology behind sex and how it's perceived amongst some and how it can be "valued" or "measured", if you will. the director's stage experience shows through but it's a gloriously cinematic affair, with a harrowing ending you almost can't help but laugh at when its over. a truly phenomenal film, one that deserves as much credit as anything Mike Nichols directed.

[knives]

I’ll probably be another vote for the Fassbinder which I agree with you on on all points. One of my favorites from this point in his career.

[therewillbeblus]

A few recent watches:

Pretty Maids All in a Row: I liked this a lot the first time, but this viewing mostly left me cold. Rock Hudson continues to shine in a role that works as a fun elastic stretch from his typical on-screen persona, though still existing within the realm of 'ultraconfident womanizer' (and perhaps cheekily depicts an interesting kind of psychoanalytic displacement, by which the type of guy who was able to get away with anything sexual in more ideologically-concentrated times cannot cope with zeitgeist shifts of thwarted belongingness in a blossoming youth culture, and reacts in accordance with the lack of skills we saw Greatest Generation parents struggle with in melodramas of the not-too-distant past). I also appreciate the playful dynamic between the main student and the bombshell teacher, portrayed with the right note of comic eccentricity, though all of the film’s promising details ultimately feel slight and trivial as nothing really comes together to amount to anything special or cohesive as a whole.

Taking Off: Uneven-by-design satire on the struggles of the generational gap, that would probably play out a lot better if aimed with just a shred of equity to the youthful group outside of elongated singing seshes. There's a lot to like here, but also plenty of bouts of dead-air that don’t feel purposeful to its vibe or admittedly-shaggy mission. However, the film never loses control from Forman's careful attention to a specific parental anxiety - for failing to find the pulse of a bewildering climate that's usurping their roles in parenting their children. It's a great strategy to break through into new territory, by correctly sizing up Americana and empathizing with his subjects' temperaments, including their impotence to really 'be' authentic characters in the first place. Also, while hardly a novel opinion, this is worth seeing for Vincent Schiavelli's marijuana seminar alone.

A Safe Place: I remember hating this the first time, so entered a revisit with the lowest of expectations, and... kinda liked it? Now, it's by no means some overlooked masterpiece, but what many have diagnosed as unintelligible trash I see as the logical conclusion to Easy Rider's acid trip. Here is a film that serves one single yet broad and all-consuming purpose: to tap into the experience of the star-eyed hippies from the late 60s swimming in murky waters of the early 70s; through eroding causes, enthusiasm, and comprehension of their own minds, the world, and how to engage with it and themselves in a meaningful way amidst overwhelming political, social, and pharmacological consumption. The way the film plays with memory, blending past, present and future, frames characters intimately connecting in ways that keep them distanced from one another.. applies psychedelia to the intangible harmony sought in relationships and self-discovery without proper systemic or communicational support. There is no safe place, no satiable relationship, no secure identity within a culture that offers vehicles deceptively but desperately-pitched as such, in just about the same way as they were falsely advertised in the previous era these older youth wished to escape from and concocted their counterculture movement in response to.

Most people who hate this will at least admit that Tuesday Weld is riveting, and she is, but I found myself even more captivated by Gwen Welles whenever she was on screen (hardly a surprise - now here's a starlet who should've had a more fruitful career, a genuine personality akin to Emma Stone). A few of the stories she dictates came across as more potent and personally-significant than they had any right to be on the page [As a side note, if anyone has any underrated/little-known Gwen Welles recs from this decade, please feed them to me.] I have no idea what Orson Welles's devilish fairy godfather is doing here - substituting a levitating crystal ball for peas in what feels like a commercial sewn into the margins of the movie - but at least his nonsensical participation gels with the ethos of psychological destabilization around one’s own subjective narrative of their milieu. I can understand the charge against this film that its aesthetic pretensions are exhausting, but the devotion to disorient its audience, with any and all available experimentation interventions within the medium, feels far more relevant than the other '71 BBS flick...

...Drive, He Said: Aaand conversely, I hated this one even more than on my first watch. The opposite of A Safe Place in the worst ways- too distilled and lucid, yet genuinely attempting and failing to grasp a culture it has no formal capacity to study and that is inherently ungraspable, even to its principals. If there was a stronger narrative to build this around, that could perhaps support the clarity of vision, but because it's trying to be both disengaging and engaging around no real substance, the aimlessness and banalities come across as not worthy of exploring. Which maybe they're not, at least not via this modality. The only interesting reading I can muster is for this to function as a self-reflexive document of how ridiculous it is to attempt to simply and coherently grasp the goingons of a hazy epoch, which will undoubtedly result in failure. But that doesn't make it a rich film, and I'm grasping at straws to find meaning myself there, where I'm pretty sure I've failed just like this film.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death: More like, let's bore therewillbeblus to death. I'd like to read Kim Newman's take on this sometime, because I couldn't detect anything separating it from any other 'what is reality' horror movie of its ilk from this era. The lead performance everyone raves about is fine, but honestly if you're going to venture into this kind of territory to reflect the unhinged perspective of your lead, you may as well do it in full-measures like A Safe Place If that film had leaned further into horror, perhaps it would be lauded like this? Nah, it's way too unfocused and bleeds multiple perspectives into one another to obfuscate a lead character from their own story, but I guess I find that way more appropriate for the intended nebulous effect than what this film offers, especially when it feels like it has one foot in and one foot out of its ethos until the very end.

[swo17]

Family Life (Ken Loach)
I'm curious what twbb might think of this from a therapeutic standpoint. Some cogs in the system describe the film's lead character as schizophrenic, her condition not having been impacted by her environment (which they describe as a favorable one in which she's had every opportunity) but this seems to me to be plainly ironic. In fact she's been suffocated by people who constantly talk about having her best interest in mind without considering her feelings, and she's come to a point of learned helplessness. In other Loach films the culprit might be some cold, unfeeling state welfare division, but here the most guilty party would seem to be the family unit itself and its insistence on children repeating the lives of their parents without necessarily any good reason behind it. Any deviation from the set path, or perceived intention to deviate, or even innocent dalliance that has a chance of leading in that direction is chastised as a failing that must be corrected before it becomes serious. And this all happens under the guise of parental love, which is beyond criticism because "all a parent can do is their best." Anyway, compelling stuff with no easy solutions, and Loach doesn't sugarcoat any of it

[Roger Ryan]

...[As a side note, if anyone has any underrated/little-known Gwen Welles recs from this decade, please feed them to me.]...

No, they're not little-known nor particularly underrated, but mention must be made of the two Altman films she did (California Split and, especially, Nashville) just for (Welles') posterity.

[therewillbeblus]

...[As a side note, if anyone has any underrated/little-known Gwen Welles recs from this decade, please feed them to me.]...

No, they're not little-known nor particularly underrated, but mention must be made of the two Altman films she did (California Split and, especially, Nashville) just for (Welles') posterity.

Yeah, for my money she gives the second-best performance in each of those Altmans. She's also great as part of the fun ensemble in Joan Micklin Silver's Between the Lines

[DarkImbecile]

First batch of viewings for this year, with only Dirty Harry being a revisit; none of these will make my list, but they were all at least moderately fun:

The Cat o' Nine Tails (Argento) — Only my third Argento, so I was surprised to see that this was a mystery-comedy with just a dash of spectacular murdering instead of the inverse. The big spectacular murder is pretty fantastic, though — enough to go a long way in making up for the saggier parts of the investigation and the laughable absurdity of the killer’s motivations. The big mistake Argento makes is in sidelining Karl Malden’s blind puzzlemaker for long stretches in favor of James Franciscus’ bland if pretty reporter; the movie is vastly more interesting whenever Malden is onscreen, and his disability makes for a nice visual contrast to the shots of the killer’s eye whenever we go into POV mode. The most straightforward and least interesting of the director’s films I’ve seen so far, but between the Morricone score, the morbid kills, and the scattered moments of visual inventiveness I didn’t feel entirely cheated.

Dirty Harry (Siegel) — The father of the modern reactionary action fantasy and still the best of them, this wouldn't be anywhere near as provocative or influential if so much of it weren't damn well made. It's not until the wildly implausible freeing of Scorpio by that damned bill of rights that the film's politics — which are clearly there and clearly regressive from literally the opening frame — begin to actively obstruct one's ability to enjoy Siegel's brilliant use of location shooting and establishment of a new iconography. Even then, there are moments (like that still absolutely badass shot of Eastwood waiting for the school bus on the overpass) that threaten to send even the most progressive heart racing with unwitting excitement.

A couple of mildly interesting notes I picked up on this viewing (my first since the mid-2000s):

*Scorpio's stomping and taunting of Harry at the big cross in the park struck me for the first time as a parallel to the famous "Do I feel lucky?" showdown outside the bank, with Scorpio's version being more obviously sadistic and brutal but similarly smug and self-aggrandizing.

*The film's emphasis on voyeurism from the first minutes of the film — murderous when through the scope of Scorpio's rifle, humorous when it's Harry getting roughed up for being a peeper, lecherous when it's Harry watching a young woman wander her apartment naked when he's supposed to be looking out for a sniper — was so pronounced it could have been a Hitchcock film.

Play Misty for Me (Eastwood) — Clint Eastwood's directorial debut shares quite a bit in common with Dirty Harry beyond being a time capsule of Northern California 50 years ago (this time in small-town Carmel): it's also a reactionary fantasy about a cool, sexy professional tormented by an insane representative of a group challenging the dominance of the mid-century male WASP power structure in the late '60s/early '70s. Said insane person is also aided and abetted by a social/justice system so scared of infringing on people's rights that it can no longer protect society from its most deranged and dangerous members.

Jessica Walter's Evelyn is a forward, modern woman aggressively courting Eastwood's late-night DJ and who of course descends with unsettling rapidity into psychotic possessiveness and instability. Walter's uncomfortable intensity makes this antagonist feel more believably scary and threatening than the more cartoonishly villainous Scorpio in Dirty Harry, but there are moments where the obsessive stalking behavior reaches heights that tip over into histrionic absurdity.

All that being said, Misty has its own stylistic and genre interests that indicate a sense of directorial vision: Eastwood and cinematographer Bruce Surtees make strong use of helicopter coverage of the cliffs and beaches, as well as some frenetic handheld camerawork during some of the more stabby sequences. There's also some fun material at the Monterey Jazz Festival and an emphasis on music and poetry generally that nicely balance out the lurid outrageousness of the thriller content.

The Beguiled (Siegel) — I think I'm one of a tiny handful who prefers the Sofia Coppola version to this one:

*Siegel's attempts at interiority — whether through flashback or voiceover — are distractingly clumsy or superfluous, with only those highlighting the contrast between McBurney's manipulations and reality paying off

*Eastwood and Page are great, but I prefer Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning's versions of the school's naïf and harlot

*Coppola's centering of the women's more complex and varied perspectives over McBurney's fairly shallow manipulator makes for a more compelling narrative drive

Anyway, this version has enough odd specificity to make it worth watching, but the somewhat queasy misogyny and tonal swings make it more of a curiosity than a standout in the filmographies of both director and star.

[therewillbeblus]

The Beguiled (Siegel) — I think I'm one of a tiny handful who prefers the Sofia Coppola version to this one:

Really? I was under the impression that this hadn't aged well and that most people, critics included, preferred Coppola's twist on the material. If not, I and a bunch of people I know are in that small hand