The 1972 Mini-List

[swo17]

My Hail Mary recommendations for the month:

SHORT ATTENTION SPAN SECTION

Mutations (Lillian F. Schwartz)
Hopefully those who liked her last film I posted will check this one out as well. As far as I'm aware, it's the one Schwartz film available on DVD (on the OHM+: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music collection) or you can watch the embedded video link toward the bottom of this page on the director's website.

Newsprint (Guy Sherwin)
Made without a camera by gluing strips of newspaper to the film reel, including the audio track. In other words, this is what feeds into the projector:

A cool experiment that's also invigorating to watch.

Threshold (Malcolm Le Grice)

Alien variations on a simple scene, with psychedelic visuals and a randomly stuttering soundtrack.

NIGHTMARE SECTION

La Femme qui se poudre (Patrick Bokanowski)

Carves out a niche in the uncanny valley that Lynch has also made his playground.

La cabina (Antonio Mercero)

As long as it's been now that phones have fit in our pockets, it's easy to forget that it was once the other way around.

Escape into Night (Richard Bramall)

Not-that-long British miniseries originally shot in color but only surviving in a fittingly creaky B&W version. I like zedz's description here

[knives]

Don’t think I posted my user guide, but here it is.

Also actually watched a few good films too.

A great surprise I had never heard of before was That Certain Summer, a television film featuring a young Martin Sheen as Hal Holbrook’s boyfriend. This is incredibly disarming for how well it handles not just their relationship, but the whole subject matter. Only one short scene at the end feels like it’s working like an after school special and the script even finds a way to undermine that. To realize a film this mainstream and well rewarded could approach homosexuality as so ordinary a matter built in love and care is shock for how it disrupts narratives on the past needing to have been so prejudiced. This content could override considerations of quality in other areas, but fortunately it remains a well made film in all areas. Sheen’s supporting role for example already see him acting like a major film star. It’s an incredible performance that shines even within a sea of diamonds.

Finally finished off Kazan, which is a satisfaction onto itself, with The Visitors. The film itself seems to make sense of the grungy new style popular outside Hollywood at the time as essentially theatrical and makes a play of things. Fuse that onto Kazan’s need for a strong narrative and you might have the best example of that form. It’s still not as satisfying as Kazan’s best work, but he crafts with such intimacy and disturbance, hear that sound design, that in the moment it is convincing as a great film.

Demy’s The Pied Piper surprised me as one of his better films. It has a proto-Python hum our and aesthetic with that Britishness helping to ground Demy’s whimsy in a way that saw Donkey Skin couldn’t.

[dustybooks]

Checking in from just over halfway. I know less about the '70s than probably any other period, as demonstrated by the fact that the following were all first-time watches:

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Fassbinder): A haunting and extremely striking film, exhausting all visual and interpersonal possibilities of a potentially very limited environment, with a particularly witty and challenging closing shot but much that is riveting and affecting throughout. And my first Fassbinder! Finally!

Love in the Afternoon (Rohmer): I cannot seem to see past my disinterest in Rohmer's characters as people to get much out of the Six Moral Tales. And reading other responses, here and elsewhere, I just feel like a big asshole who lacks empathy, but what can you do? I've also noted the old posts here that record viewers finding this and the other features in the series, especially Claire's Knee, alienating but then having them suddenly fall into place some time later. Maybe that will still happen to me.

Travels with My Aunt (Cukor): Flagrantly oddball adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about a nondescript bank teller's introduction to his dotty, liberated aunt who's secretly a career criminal features a central performance by Maggie Smith that was accurately described by Pauline Kael at the time as "desperate" and "flustered." Smith is a gifted comic actress but you wouldn't know it from this, which like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie lets her fall back on the easiest of stereotypes and vocal crutches. The production design is such that there are times when, at a glance, you could mistake it for a Wes Anderson movie, except with far less genuine wit or imagination -- and the comedy, for the most part, really thuds. Alec McCowen makes for a weak protagonist and audience vessel, halfway between Malcolm McDowell's H.G. Wells and Jules Dassin's intellectual fogey in Never on Sunday; but Louis Gossett is quite fun as a tarot-reading charlatan from Sierra Leone.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Buñuel): While it's "surreal" in a very broad sense, like Tristana this limits a lot of its more outré imagery to dreams, even it's less clear in this film where exactly reality begins, and those images are generally somewhat less forceful. It's really one of the director's bluntest instruments, its underlying message hard to miss and repeated across 100 minutes with clear enthusiasm. And it's also of course wonderful to look at and quite scathingly funny at its best -- it retroactively feels like a rebuke of every classed-up "Comedy of Manners" made in the next several decades -- but I actually don't think it has anything like the genuine anarchy or unpredictability of L'Age d'Or, which honestly wrestled similar themes and ideas and had a transgressive, alarming quality this simply doesn't. Is it a fair comparison; couldn't any director who made one of the greatest movies of all time at the very beginning of his career be foisted with a whole lot of undeserved baggage as a result? Maybe, but I'd really say the same when I recall The Exterminating Angel; this film feels probing, like a political cartoon, that one felt dangerous like an actual nightmare.

Solaris (Tarkovsky): This left me feeling shaken up, in awe, like I rarely do after a first viewing. There is much in it that I'm certain I haven't uncovered, and naturally it's the sort of film that one learns infinitely more about just by seeing it again, but that it's a distinctive, emotionally lively masterpiece already seemed obvious to me within an hour of its beginning. Its stilted, tentative treatment of virtually the deepest themes that movies are capable of exploring will haunt me for some time.

The Heartbreak Kid (May): Lenny is one of the most relentlessly evil characters I’ve ever had to spend time with, so this movie is egregiously tense and unpleasant, and the whole simmer of indecency it has just seems to get worse and worse. And yet you’re always left with the sensation that May is fully intending to leave us in a state of bother, almost like an act of protest against the middle class hymnals of all Neil Simon’s work including this. Sorry to invoke Kael again but she is right that you instinctively want something much worse and more outrageous to happen than the final moments, but the understated Graduate-like whimper we get has its own kind of brutal satisfaction. The pleasures come in the wrenching discomfort and audacity (is this really happening!?) of scenes like Grodin laying his “cards” out for Kelly’s father, or that utterly spectacular train wreck of a breakup scene. It’s less like a comedy than a constant act of needling, daring, and despite my frequent issues with being forced to endure assholes for the sake of cinema I’m actually here for it. It’s so obnoxious it becomes obliquely masterful, and I sort of love knowing in my heart of hearts that Lila will find happiness and Lenny never will.

What's Up, Doc? (Bogdanovich): I wish I'd seen this when I was younger, at which point it might easily have burrowed into an all-time favorite status. When you watch it and you're not young, the strain in some of the comedy shows; at times Bogdanovich and company are so desperate to show their expertise with the nuts and bolts of screwball as a genre that it distracts from the humor that works, much of which is just dyed-in-the-wool classic Borscht Belt comedy that's funny because it's funny, not because it reminds you of an old movie. But what doesn't show strain is the sheer ebullience -- you can really tell that it was made by someone who was happy, young, in love, and maybe most pertinently of all, terminally out of step with modern life. (Witness the direct targeting of Love Story, the use of Looney Tunes and Cole Porter as frames of reference.) It's no wonder that the kind of younger viewers who are intrinsically attracted to this are the same ones who will immediately be roused and gratified by the films that inspired it -- in a way, it has managed to become one of those films.

Lady Sings the Blues (Furie): This is far better fan service for Diana Ross than Billie Holiday. The entire story as presented here is fiction even by the standards of Holiday's extremely entertaining, salacious ghostwritten memoir of the same name. For the most part, you could just as well be watching a biopic of a completely generic Harlem jazz singer invented wholecloth, and the portions of Holiday's legend that the filmmakers spend most of these 143 minutes leaning into are the schlockiest and most fetishistic: I lost count of how many scenes we were given of Ross' Billie either high or coming down, in most cases with her suffering prolonged for the camera as much as possible for the potential concoction of the world's most tasteless awards reel. The cast is excellent, with Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor both engaging and emotionally rich in their supporting roles.

Fat City (Huston): I really did not enjoy this much as I watched it, but as it settled afterward I was surprised by how completely effective it was at delivering its ultimately bleak but humanistic worldview. Huston seems to align his creative instincts almost perfectly with the New Hollywood movement that ostensibly is the exact opposite of the classic era from which he sprung. This is one gritty exploration of the underbelly of a lively, despairing society -- has-beens, boxing clubs, sleeping spouses, drunken arguments that are a little too believable, suffering in silence, and the yearning to escape a future that's easy to foresee and impossible to control -- and it's kind of an awful place to occupy, but it's also so respectful toward and interested in its characters that its sheer existence feels like an act of much greater compassion than the crowd-pleasing cartoon seaminess of something like Rocky.

The Ruling Class (Medak): An extremely original film -- despite its debts to stuff like The Rules of the Game and Simon of the Desert -- that badly needed a ruthless editor. The marvelous flights of often morbid fancy -- including several completely out-of-nowhere musical numbers -- in this understated black comedy about a delusional nutcase in line for a Lordship are like shots of pure caffeine, and too much time passes between them; there's really no excuse for the various dialogue scenes to belabor themselves for so long or for the whole thing to extend so far past two hours. It ends ingeniously, though, and features the best Peter O'Toole performance I've ever seen.

... and a few revisits:

Roma (Fellini): In contrast to Satyricon, which I liked the first time and absolutely adored the second, no real change to my opinion on revisit, although with fuller perspective on Fellini's career I'm now aware that this is the last time he was in no way "cuddly." It puts Amarcord in particular in rather stark relief. This feels to me like a movie teeming with ideas and fumbling for a place to put them, which Fellini all but admits in his rambling attempts at thesis statements in the interview scenes toward the end. And while most of the various episodes have their moments, a lot of them linger well past their welcome. The movie also contains at least two of the most sublime moments in cinema -- the frescoes, which is a sequence so poetically tragic it could stop your heart and is made all the more so by the knowledge of how much work it must have taken to create it; and the motorcycle finale, which I now feel is a strikingly coincidental twin of the wrongly derided highway scene in Solaris.

Play It Again, Sam (Ross): Allen really could craft and conceive three-dimensional characters back then, and did so without ever really stepping on the brakes in terms of comedy. Still, the attraction here is the dialogue, which is almost unfailingly note-perfect and still delightfully funny, with so many hysterical lines I now regret not jotting any of them down so I could rattle them off again here. (Could do without the very '70s "rape -- now that's funny!" stuff, but that's really confined to under a minute.) And the forecasts to Annie Hall shine much more brightly than I recalled, from Diane Keaton's effortless, magnetic style to the air of acted-out fantasy and chronology-jumping that livens the whole affair up so much. Only real criticism is that it's all just a touch too neat -- the final scenes come a little too close to comfort for me to swallowing their own self-congratulatory "bigger man" bullshit. Allen wrote some wonderful monologues later on but I think all that "I just have to be me!" stuff just shows he wasn't quite at that level yet.

Sounder (Ritt): All I remembered about this, which I last saw in class in fifth grade, was that I loved it and found it enormously compelling. Happily it was just as intensely admirable as I remembered. This is a movie about the Black experience in America during the Depression but it is also a movie about an inward-looking introvert trying to make sense of the world around him. And on top of that, it's among the best portraits I can ever recall seeing of parents who are genuinely loving and nurturing to their children -- what makes the finale so cathartic is not the clichéd "family togetherness" stuff you'd expect, it's rather that the climax revolves around a parent letting their child go, and in fact encouraging them to go. I teared up as the scene played out and I tear up thinking again of it now.

[therewillbeblus]

The Heartbreak Kid (May): Lenny is one of the most relentlessly evil characters I’ve ever had to spend time with, so this movie is egregiously tense and unpleasant, and the whole simmer of indecency it has just seems to get worse and worse. And yet you’re always left with the sensation that May is fully intending to leave us in a state of bother, almost like an act of protest against the middle class hymnals of all Neil Simon’s work including this. Sorry to invoke Kael again but she is right that you instinctively want something much worse and more outrageous to happen than the final moments, but the understated Graduate-like whimper we get has its own kind of brutal satisfaction. The pleasures come in the wrenching discomfort and audacity (is this really happening!?) of scenes like Grodin laying his “cards” out for Kelly’s father, or that utterly spectacular train wreck of a breakup scene. It’s less like a comedy than a constant act of needling, daring, and despite my frequent issues with being forced to endure assholes for the sake of cinema I’m actually here for it. It’s so obnoxious it becomes obliquely masterful, and I sort of love knowing in my heart of hearts that Lila will find happiness and Lenny never will.

I think diagnosing Lenny as "evil" is too pat and missing the point of what May is forcing us to sit with: the ways in which we uncomfortably relate to delusional and selfish behavior as a response to unrest, as we engage in friction with parts of us that expect a fantastical partnership. I don't think Lenny is any more or less problematic than the other two principals, and they all have a very human, repellent commonality in how they force their wills onto others, but he does get the most screen time and so it would make sense that we'd have the most repulsion towards him just based on exposure! Anyways, these were my thoughts from a couple years ago.

Revisiting this in my 30s is a bizarre combination of soul-destroying and cathartic, witnessing deeply uncomfortable behavior yet validating its truth. May captures the tone of comedy through a straight-demonstration of clashing selfish actions as products of relatable predicaments, and her neutrality for the sake of laughing at life is not wholly sneering but laughing both with and at humanity.

The unmasking comes in gradual, at times painfully slow methodology, but can also feel sharply forced, and May's intentions are complex in validating the behaviors as well as one's shame for the behaviors! It's a grey picture that is inclusive of the awfulness as just as natural as hating oneself for unveiling the defenses keeping us from seeing this selfish side of us. I didn't relate to any character on a literal level, but this film triggers that selfish component that lashes out internally or externally, resents, tells white lies or outright lies without realizing it, talks about or listens to talk about someone behind their back, and goes on the offensive to protect oneself from surrendering their shell to acknowledge what's really going on.

Most of all, this is a film for everyone who has been in a relationship and knew it was doomed but could not dare accept it, just as it is for the person who thinks the next girl is 'the one,' doomed to repeat the cycle all over again; or the person who enjoys being sought so much that they cannot realize the harm or reality of the person on the other end. Grodin is magnificent as the typical average 'nice' guy who emerges as just as much of an asshole as everybody else (What a view of our cores as inherently selfish- My kind of movie!) Berlin walks a fine line between a figure we want to shut the door on too, but also feel incredible sympathy for, standing for a reminder of the sobering reveal that occurs when the blindness of love fades. Shepherd's bewitching vamp is also complicated in how we watch her nonverbal communication, even when blurred in the background of a scene, always hypervigilant of the emotions she's manipulating whether directly or watching an interaction play out for thrills.

All three characters are completely equal in their self-indulgent goals, always at odds with one another. Berlin wants her husband to be around her all the time and accept her quirks without imposing an identity of his own, Grodin wants to chase- to obtain a person's affection to feel special- before inevitably getting bored, and Shepherd wants to control others from an aloof state for personal amusement. Each wants power and unconditional devotion on their terms, and a part of each's quirk is in most people in some small, broad form. The empathy lands too because none of these people are even aware of their issues: Berlin cannot see her problematic positioning, Grodin cannot see that he is doomed to hunt, and Shepherd cannot see that she is not translating her attraction to puppeteering into genuine sexual attraction, but pivoting her manipulative tendencies as the stakes are raised with marriage! I've long said that being in a relationship is the most insane thing we do as people- for we bare our vulnerabilities around another human being with a different perspective and selfish agenda and expect to align. This is a film that says, yep that's crazy, we're gonna keep doing it anyways, and it's pathetically -and honestly- funny!

I just revisited this again, and it's probably going to come in first for me this year. Also, if you liked Solaris, I highly recommend watching Soderbergh's remake, which manages to pull off something incredibly rare - striking similar thematic power from an economically-edited take in half the runtime!

[domino harvey]

The end of May’s film is far more incisive than a pat comeuppance conclusion would be— it’s the best example of “Dog catches car” I can think of, and the look on Grodin’s face as he realizes that the chase was all there ever was to her is just perfect

[dustybooks]

TWBB, it’s well established that you’re a lot more forgiving than I am, and my hat goes off to you for it. I don’t genuinely believe people are “evil” for the record, I was just being colorful.

Domino, I agree — I was more just responding to my visceral impulse against the guy. I gather that maybe he triggered some issues within me compared to other viewers.

[therewillbeblus]

I didn't mean to come off as aggressively challenging a reductive reaction to Grodin, but rather pointing out that all three characters are operating from a common internal issue manifesting in different ways on the surface. So to pitch one's focus predominately onto Grodin's repulsive subject seems to be missing May's sights on the overall black comedy of social tragedy which also occurs in the peripheries with ostensibly-but-perhaps-not-actually more 'innocent' characters. To be fair, I think it's natural to focus more on him because his actionable behavior is the focal point igniting much of the discomfort and repulsion, but the more I watch this film, the more my attention shifts to Berlin and Shepherd for pity and accountability

[knives]

Got an essential film and a not so essential film down.

Under the Flag of the Rising Sun is far and away the best Fukasaku film I’ve seen and perhaps the best Japanese film directly addressing the war. Structurally this owes a lot to Welles, but the film has little interest in its Kane figure instead revealing the perspectives of those surrounding him as a way to say in absolute terms that the war was the worst thing Japan ever did.

The film tells this not just through narration, but an incredible array of styles that almost made me convinced the Oshima worked on the film. Each effect, especially relating to montage, reveals a different layer of truth while also insisting that any truth will be jumbled and impressionistic. The lead insists that after over twenty years of being ignored she simply wants closure even if it turned out that her husband deserved his death. While the film does give her an answer of sorts it’s ultimately an unsatisfying one still haunted by the unknown with the only surety being that Japan continues to retain many of its flaws.

Not anywhere near as great though still worthwhile is Tolstoy exploitation adaptation Night of the Devils. After an opening that is too ‘70s for its own good this film follows Tolstoy’s story reasonably close and in a surprisingly austere fashion. The distinction in style is actually so great I wonder if the opening was imposed on the filmmakers who otherwise seem interested in making an old fashioned feature. The adaptation is pretty good like a mix between Bava’s own adaptation and Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country. It never really rises to those examples, but it never returns to the Joe D’amato nonsense of the beginning either.

[DarkImbecile]

Here's a handful of new viewings and revisits over the last couple of weeks:

The Godfather (Coppola) — Urgent breaking news: this movie is very good. Still the least of Coppola's mind-boggling 1970s output, but iconic, gorgeous, and overflowing with detail nonetheless.

I'd always viewed Michael's Sicilian interlude as a bit of a drag on previous viewings, but this time it felt far more significant a piece of the narrative: you see Michael's cold, determined willingness to flex his power in his first meeting with his future wife's father; the wedding itself takes on significance as an embrace of the culture and heritage from which he seemed to have been using Kay as an escape route; and, most obviously, Apollonia's murder, which not only tears down the last of the wall Michael's tried to erect between himself and the family, but also seems to serve as a motivator for the brutality his American adversaries don't seem to realize he's capable of.

Also appreciated Brando's performance more than I ever had before — I suspect it's easy for the oft-imitated voice and classic lines of dialogue to overshadow the fineness of the performance underneath the fifty years of cultural weight piled onto it. From the opening scene, operating at the peak of his power and influence, he's laying breadcrumbs leading to what he'll reveal later as an unwell grandfather, struggling with memory and aging, but still capably advising his son through the darkest, most shark-infested of waters.

Deliverance (Boorman) — An excellent companion piece to the previous year's Straw Dogs, this remains similarly provocative and ambiguous as an examination of masculinity, modernity, cultural differences, and man's co-existence with nature. The opening shots of the dam construction illustrate the scale and force of the human work necessary to overcome the existing natural order, rendering the voiceover of our suburban foursome smugly preparing to canoe the river pathetic and insubstantial even before things go wrong.

I hadn't seen this since renting a pan-and-scan VHS copy in high school, so it was a real pleasure to see how well-shot and framed the film actually is; Boorman and Vilmos Zsigmond communicate the men's isolation and desperation extremely effectively through deep shots and wide backgrounds emphasizing space and scale.

I found Voight to be particularly compelling in the final act; after spending most of the movie an audience surrogate somewhere on the spectrum between Reynolds' hypermasculinity one end and Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox's more squishy vulnerabilities on the other, his post-traumatic reactions make him more of a real character in the final minutes, to strong effect.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask (Allen) — It's unfortunate that none of the other half-dozen sketches comes anywhere close to the committed absurdity of "What Is Sodomy?", in which Gene Wilder's commitment to the bit overshadows the performers in every other segment.

Of the rest, I'd say "What Are Sex Perverts?" and "What Happens During Ejaculation?" are my favorites; the former both perfectly captures mid-century daytime game shows and has one of the funnier single images of Allen's work (the rabbi tied to a chair and whipped while his wife kneels beside him eating pork), and the latter's execution of its concept is fun if not hilarious.

The least successful by a good margin are the transvestite and aphrodisiac sketches — unfunny and pointless, and in the case of the former, actively off-putting in how it seems to find the mere existence of transvestites inherently laughable.

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (Itō) — Probably the most entertaining take on the lowly caged woman exploitation genre I've seen, Shun'ya Itô's debut feature gets huge mileage out of Meiko Kaji's silent glares and somehow strikes a workable balance between overripe melodrama and bursts of laugh-out-loud extremity. The moment in a shower room featuring a wicked shard of glass is one of the funnier uses of gore in a film like this I've seen in a while.

There are scenes where Matsu's torture at the hands of prison guards, fellow inmates, or corrupt cops and gangsters drags on too long, but her constant victimization does make the stoic revenge she exacts that much more satisfying. Not sure I'll go out of my way to see the rest of this initial trilogy, but I wouldn't object if they popped up on a streaming service.

Un flic (Melville) — For the first hour of Jean-Pierre Melville's last film, I thought there was a solid chance this was going to be my new favorite movie of 1972. Intercutting between a moody, absurdly gorgeous Alain Delon doing the dirty work of being a big city cop and Richard Crenna's crew executing an atmospheric bank robbery in what seems like a low-grade hurricane, this felt like a French Heat — and when an even more absurdly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve appears as the diamond-cut centerpoint of a love triangle between the three men, I could not have been more on board.

The last third, sadly, fails to fully pay off either the sexy tension between the leads or the grittiness of the crime plot — Delon basically solves the case by slapping people in his office, while Deneuve disappears for far too long before the ice-cold finale. Very good, but tantalizingly close to being great.

The Ruling Class (Medak) — A satire in the same way dropping a cinderblock on someone's head is satire, Peter Medak's dark comedy at least skewers a ripe target in the English nobility in all its venal self-regard. Much like the similarly unsuccessful The Producers, much of the stagey humor is played to the cheap seats, with jokes usually repeated to make sure no one missed them the first time. The musical numbers, meanwhile, may be pointless and/or grating, but they're also usually brief.

What this film does have going for it is Peter O'Toole, who is perfectly capable when playing the god of love but genuinely unsettling when playing a more vengeful deity; the primal howl he unleashes before his appearance in the House of Lords single-handedly makes the "dark" part of the comedy more compelling than it has any right to be.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog) — There’s a part of me that still resists Kinski’s acting style — which mostly seems to consist of trying to figure out where the voices are coming from — but the palpable chaos and scale of setting Herzog captures is so overwhelming that I can overlook just about any shortcomings to wallow in the images he captures. The shots that bookend the film — the glorious pan down over men literally descending to earth from the heavens and the camera swirling around the unbreakable arrogance of a madman in the depths of a green watery hell — would be worth the price of admission all on their own.

It’s not a particularly violent film — mutterings of a decapitated head notwithstanding — but it’s a film that feels violent in almost every scene, whether that results from the radiating menace of Kinski’s volcanic temperament or because of the mindlessly destructive approach the Spaniards take to the conquest, enslavement, and ownership of everything they can grasp. By comparison, the actual violence visited upon the doomed expedition by the indigenous people, the jungle itself, or each other almost seems like a relief, bringing much-needed stillness and peace to a force of relentless chaos.

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1972

VOTE THROUGH APRIL 30

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

Reminder that the month is almost over

[knives]

Hoping to get two last viewings in though realistically I’ll only get to see The Italian Connection in time.

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1972

VOTE THROUGH APRIL 30

Last day to vote!

[Rayon Vert]

As I put my vote together, I was surprised at how strong a year this was. No problem putting 20 together and it's not like I'm a 70s expert.

[dustybooks]

I had great ambitions to watch two or three more films today but the weather and a socially busy weekend left me bedridden with a massive headache for most of the day and unable to cope with screens for an extended period. So, ballot cast and a few more items on the agenda for the December catch-up… (I’m feeling better now so I may sneak a long-overdue rewatch of Frenzy in.)

[therewillbeblus]

(I’m feeling better now so I may sneak a long-overdue rewatch of Frenzy in.)

Just did that last night - still feel about the same as my last rewatch. I can’t believe nobody talks about the proto-Lynchian eccentricity of the cop’s wife. She’s the best and most unnerving part of the film

[therewillbeblus]

I may have voted twice - I attempted to update my ballot by re-entering everything with one alteration, because I couldn't figure out a shortcut after I closed the submitted tab (but after submitting the second one, there was a link to edit that ballot on the tab). Is there an ideal shortcut so as not to tamper with results, or is manually entering everything again after closing a window the best/only way to revise?

[swo17]

Yes you did, and that potentially messes up both submissions (unless they were identical). I'll PM you a link that you can revise and resubmit if necessary.

As a general note, your lists can be revised as often as you want up until the deadline. If you click on the voting link and see "Update my ballot" then your cookies or whatever have saved your link for you. If you don't see this, please PM me and I can look up your unique link. If you vote twice then both of your ballots brundlefly into one unholy double list for reasons I do not fully understand, and this has to be fixed before I can count your vote

[therewillbeblus]

Okay, I was worried about that, which is why I mentioned it.. the problem is, when I re-click the voting link, the "update my ballot" text isn't a link, it's just unclickable text. But after I submit, it becomes a clickable link. Not sure if it's a browser thing (I'm using Chrome on a Mac) but my cookies aren't being saved

Anyways, I'll just PM you in the future if I need to revise - sorry about the hassle

[swo17]

No worries. Were you able to resubmit from the link I just sent you?

[therewillbeblus]

Yes, thanks

[swo17]

The 1972 List



##. Film (Director) points/votes(top 5 placements, aka likely votes in decade list)/highest ranking

01. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola) 235/12(8)/1(x5)
02. Солярис [Solyaris] [Solaris] (Andrei Tarkovsky) 213/11(6)/2(x4)
03. Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre, Wrath of God] (Werner Herzog) 205/11(8)/3(x5)
04. Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie [The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie] (Luis Buñuel) 201/12(5)/2(x2)
05. Viskningar och rop [Cries and Whispers] (Ingmar Bergman) 180/10(3)/3(x2)
06. What's Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich) 178/10(4)/1(x2)
07. The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May) 166/9(3)/1
08. Deliverance (John Boorman) 155/9(4)/1(x2)
09. Sleuth (Joseph L. Mankiewicz) 151/7(5)/1
(tie) L'Amour l'après-midi [Love in the Afternoon] (Éric Rohmer) 151/9(3)/2(x2)
11. Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock) 138/10(2)/3
12. Images (Robert Altman) 129/8(1)/4
13. Blaise Pascal (Roberto Rossellini) 118/6(2)/3
14. Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant [The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 116/8(1)/1
15. Még kér a nép [Red Psalm] (Miklós Jancsó) 105/6(3)/5(x3)
16. Play It Again, Sam (Herbert Ross) 81/5/6(x2)
(tie) The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson) 81/6/6
18. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Newman) 77/6/10
19. Cabaret (Bob Fosse) 75/5(1)/2
(tie) Ultimo tango a Parigi [Last Tango in Paris] (Bernardo Bertolucci) 75/6(1)/5
21. Nybyggarna [The New Land] (Jan Troell) 74/4(2)/1
22. Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville) 69/6(1)/5
23. Tout va bien [Everything's Going Fine] (Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin [Groupe Dziga Vertov]) 67/4(1)/4
24. Il caso Mattei [The Mattei Affair] (Francesco Rosi) 66/3(3)/3
25. L'età di Cosimo de Medici [The Age of the Medici] (Roberto Rossellini) 65/4(1)/3
(tie) Roma (Federico Fellini) 65/5/6
27. Fat City (John Huston) 64/5(1)/5
28. Acht Stunden sind kein Tag [Eight Hours Don't Make a Day] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 62/4(2)/2
29. Ulzana's Raid (Robert Aldrich) 61/4(2)/3
30. Across 110th Street (Barry Shear) 53/3(1)/4
(tie) Morgiana (Juraj Herz) 53/4/8
32. Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas) 50/2(2)/1(x2)
33. Milano calibro 9 [Caliber 9] (Fernando Di Leo) 39/2(1)/5
(tie) 哥 [Uta] [Poem] (Akio Jissōji) 39/2/6
(tie) I racconti di Canterbury [The Canterbury Tales] (Pier Paolo Pasolini) 39/4/7
36. Chung Kuo, Cina [Chung Kuo, China] (Michelangelo Antonioni) 37/2(1)/3
(tie) Avanti! (Billy Wilder) 37/2/6
38. Nel nome del padre [In the Name of the Father] (Marco Bellocchio) 36/2/8(x2)
39. Hapax Legomena II: Poetic Justice (Hollis Frampton) 35/2/7
(tie) Pánico en el Transiberiano [Horror Express] (Eugenio Martín) 35/2/7
41. Play It as It Lays (Frank Perry) 34/2(1)/2
(tie) Slaughterhouse-Five (George Roy Hill) 34/4/12
43. Bone (Larry Cohen) 32/2(1)/3
(tie) The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah) 32/4/10
(tie) Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (Woody Allen) 32/4/9
46. État de siège [State of Siege] (Costa-Gavras) 31/2/9
47. La Femme qui se poudre [The Woman Who Powders Herself] (Patrick Bokanowski) 30/2/8
(tie) Pink Flamingos (John Waters) 30/3/10
(tie) Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore [The Seduction of Mimi] (Lina Wertmüller) 30/3/12
50. The Other Side of the Underneath (Jane Arden) 29/2/11

ALSO-RANS

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston) 27/2/9
The Triple Echo (Michael Apted) 27/3/12
A Warning to the Curious (Lawrence Gordon Clark) 24/2/12
The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame) 23/2/13
Ludwig – Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König [Requiem for a Virgin King] (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg) 21/2/7
Prime Cut (Michael Ritchie) 19/2/9
Silent Night, Bloody Night (Theodore Gershuny) 19/2/9
軍旗はためく下に [Gunki hatameku moto ni] [Under the Flag of the Rising Sun] (Kinji Fukasaku) 15/2/14
Straight on Till Morning (Peter Collinson) 14/2/19(x2)
Horace (Alan Clarke) 12/2/15
Buck and the Preacher (Sidney Poitier) 12/2/18
Nationtime (William Greaves) 12/2/20(x2)

Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won't Grow Old Together] (Maurice Pialat) 11/2/20
The Hot Rock (Peter Yates) 6/2/22

ORPHANS

Film (Director) highest ranking

Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte [Willi Tobler and the Decline of the 6th Fleet] (Alexander Kluge) 19
La cabina [The Phone Box] (Antonio Mercero) 4
رگبار [Ragbār] [Downpour] (Bahrām Beyzāie) 18
My Childhood (Bill Douglas) 13
The Carey Treatment (Blake Edwards) 14
Eat the Document (Bob Dylan) 4
愛奴 [Ai nu] [Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan] (Chor Yuen) 10
Sitting Target (Douglas Hickox) 6
Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull) 12
Beauty Knows No Pain (Elliott Erwitt) 15
L.A. Plays Itself (Fred Halsted) 8
Death Line (Gary Sherman) 14
Superfly (Gordon Parks Jr.) 10
Newsprint (Guy Sherwin) 2
Marjoe (Howard Smith & Sarah Kernochan) 18
The Pied Piper (Jacques Demy) 12
Un homme est mort [The Outside Man] (Jacques Deray) 19
Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin [Groupe Dziga Vertov]) 11
天下第一拳 [Tian xia di yi quan] [King Boxer] (Jeong Chang-hwa) 15
The Night Stalker (John Llewellyn Moxey) 24
Tomorrow (Joseph Anthony) 22
The Assassination of Trotsky (Joseph Losey) 8
さようならCP [Sayōnara CP] [Goodbye CP] (Kazuo Hara) 1
子連れ狼 三途の川の乳母車 [Kozure ōkami: Sanzu no kawa no ubaguruma] [Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx] (Kenji Misumi) 15
بس يابحر [Bas ya bahar] [The Cruel Sea] (Khaled Al Siddiq) 4
Невестка [Nevestka] [Gelin] [The Daughter-in-Law] (Khodzha Kuli Narliyev) 2
秋決 [Qiu jue] [Execution in Autumn] (Lee Hsing) 13
Betty Tells Her Story (Liane Brandon) 14
Mutations (Lillian F. Schwartz) 7
Le avventure di Pinocchio (Luigi Comencini) 9
Threshold (Malcolm Le Grice) 11
À ceux qui perdent [A Sense of Loss] (Marcel Ophuls) 2
Liza [La cagna] (Marco Ferreri) 17
Sounder (Martin Ritt) 6
札幌オリンピック [Sapporo orinpikku] [Sapporo Winter Olympics] (Masahiro Shinoda) 18
Don't Play Us Cheap (Melvin Van Peebles) 22
Козият рог [Koziyat rog] [The Goat Horn] (Metodi Andonov) 12
The Candidate (Michael Ritchie) 2
Ways of Seeing (Mike Dibb) 1
San Michele aveva un gallo [St. Michael Had a Rooster] (Paolo & Vittorio Taviani) 18
The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell) 14
1776 (Peter H. Hunt) 11
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Peter Medak) 15
The Ruling Class (Peter Medak) 9
La Course du lièvre à travers les champs [And Hope to Die] (René Clément) 11
Hickey & Boggs (Robert Culp) 23
Agostino d'Ippona [Augustine of Hippo] (Roberto Rossellini) 23
Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah) 16
Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror) 11
The Concert for Bangladesh (Saul Swimmer) 25
А зори здесь тихие [A zori zdes tikhie] [The Dawns Here Are Quiet] (Stanislav Rostotsky) 8
المخدوعون [Al-makhdu'un] [The Dupes] (Tewfik Saleh) 1
Μέρες του '36 [Meres tou trianta exi] [Days of '36] (Theo Angelopoulos) 14
Bijou (Wakefield Poole) 10
Der Tod der Maria Malibran [The Death of Maria Malibran] (Werner Schroeter) 17
A Reflection of Fear (William A. Fraker) 9
Blacula (William Crain) 25
Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter [The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick] (Wim Wenders) 14
Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (Woody Allen) 25
Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer) 13

18 lists submitted

[knives]

Thanks for this and thanks to whomever else voted on Prime Cut.

The Taviani was the last film I saw for this project and it comes close to being the best film I’ve seen from them. It’s a wonderful bit of structural peculiarity to hilariously portray a very painful theme.

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks swo! Top ten + orphans bolded

1. The Heartbreak Kid
2. Solaris
3. Bone
4. Sleuth
5. The Godfather
6. Sitting Target
7. Poetic Justice
8. What’s Up Doc?
9. A Reflection of Fear
10. Aguirre: The Wrath of God

11. Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still
13. Lives of Performers
14. Betty Tells Her Story
18. Downpour

[alacal2]

Thanks Swo. Pleasantly surprised that Alan Clarke's seamlessly blended tragi-comedy Horace was an also-ran.

[ryannichols7]

I totally blanked on submitting my ballot...we would've had a different #1 if I had! totally hurts, but I was admittedly more scattershot with my watches this month. Eight Hours Don't Make a Day deserved better!