20 Movies to Kill For

SUNDAY, BLOODY SUNDAY

With a razory, literate script by Penelope Gilliatt and understated, masterful direction from John Schlesinger, this is an unblinking, ever-contemporary look at the rarefied world of the privileged few who appear to have everything but are, in fact, getting by with less than most. The 1971 film's central characters, Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, are urbane London professionals who--though they don't know each another--share mutual friends, an answering service, and a younger male lover, Murray Head.

The mature, complex story line, which covers the final week of Head's simultaneous affairs, is shot through with rue and regret, but is less about straight, gay and bisexual love than it is about the nature of love itself, as Head causes his lovers to wonder whether a good thing is good enough. Jackson's mother, disapproving of her divorced daughter's inability to find a long-term relationship, spells out the movie's implicit message when she opines, "Darling, you keep throwing your hand in because you haven't got the 'whole thing.' There is no 'whole thing.'" Her advice goes unheeded, however, for both Jackson and Finch keep running into their own romantic expectations, a fact not lost on Head. "I know you're not getting enough of me," he says at one point, "but you're getting all there is."

The movie's many telling details about the frazzled nerve endings of life in any big city--everything from missed calls to roaming street gangs--suggest strongly that one ought to be grateful for any tenderness, whatever the terms. This is a film that sparks internal debate long after it is over. Jackson's provocative manifesto of self-worth surely reverberates: "I've had this business [that] anything is better than nothing," she rails. "There are times when nothing has to be better than anything."

DON'T LOOK NOW

At the beginning of this unnerving film, architectural restorer Donald Sutherland sits poring over slides of a Venetian stained-glass window in his English country estate as his daughter, dressed in her shiny red slicker, drowns in the pond just outside the house. At the end of the film, Sutherland chases through the alleys of Venice after a small, red-slickered figure that turns out to be a hideous, serial-murderer dwarf who kills him.

These mirrored events bookend one of the most intelligent and most creatively photographed movie mind-fucks of the '70s--an era that specialized in such things. While much has been made of Don't Look Now's beautiful and erotic lovemaking scene between Sutherland and Julie Christie, who plays his wife, that is just director Nicolas Roeg's generous icing on a uniquely tasty cake. The feisty Mr. Roeg's flouting of the laws of gravity on the big screen has many times over the years drawn a collective "huh?" from moviegoers. But here his refusal to harness the wild, leaping horses of cinematic possibility to the corn-field-plowing mentality of conventional film really pays off, since he's telling the unconventional story of a man who possesses the power of "second sight" but denies his own perceptions, a mistake that provokes bizarre eruptions in the illusion of consistent time and space.

The weird edits and the inspired crosscuts between one place and time and another, both techniques straight from the heart of Roeg's vision of how film can represent our coiled inner logic, make for some fine tingles and a final cold sweat. This is prime cinema of discomfort.

SHAMPOO

Though it was intended by screenwriter Robert Towne as a chic indictment of the dubious morality to be found in Southern California, Shampoo's considerable comic charms actually come from the fact that this glittery bauble about the beautiful people on the Beverly Hills/Malibu circuit, circa '68, has a cast made up entirely of--that's right--the beautiful people on the Beverly Hills/Malibu circuit, circa '75: Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie, Carrie Fisher and Lee Grant, just for starters. Add to this the fact that Beatty is portraying a loverboy who can't love, and that two of his former girlfriends, Hawn and Christie, are essentially playing themselves, and it's easy to see why the threadbare story line--Beatty's a serial Romeo who gets his comeuppance--has such enduring appeal.

Pinpoint casting like this gives the movie a real kick, as-- whether it's Hawn blowing Beatty off, Christie diving under a table for Beatty's family jewels, or Fisher as a too-world-weary-for-words Beverly Hills teen--director Hal Ashby encourages this troupe to peel away the tinsel and show the real tinsel underneath. Shampoo is a high-water mark of shallow, charming moviemaking which, since the genre of romantic comedy has almost disappeared altogether, looks even better today than it did in 1975.

JAWS

Here's the funnest movie of the '70s, even if its effect on Hollywood was more ruinous than its aquatic star's effect on the succulent population of Amity Island. Just as the rogue shark eschewed flounder after getting a taste of Homo sapiens, so the studios had their heads turned by the flavor of blockbuster, and we were in for decades of movies designed to mindlessly eat their way through massive crowds of moviegoers. If only they had considered how good a film Jaws had to be to have scared the shit out of even the most landlocked moviegoer.

Steven Spielberg, then a pup possessed of the kind of genius that is almost wholly unencumbered by content, set up a seductive string of one-two punches that define visual suspense, and then sweetened the package with his characteristic brand of winning platitudes about small-town and nuclear-family life. Populist Spielberg's affectionately comedic view of common-man foible and folly, personified by the unlikely-faced Roy Scheider, the munchkin-nerd Richard Dreyfuss and a supporting cast of people who were dead ringers for types everyone had seen on their own beach, was the ideal cinematic comfort zone from which he then, with inspired timing, wrenched his audience into nerve-shredding confrontations with primal terror.

The hors d'oeuvre scene of the girl getting chewed up and spun around by the shark as her boyfriend sleeps in a drunken stupor on the shore (Spielberg was still funny back then) is, of course, the most memorable bit in Jaws, but there are other ghoulish delights, like relentless scenery-chewer Robert Shaw finally, thankfully, sliding between the shark's choppers. This film is in absolutely no way "important," but you have to admit that as more animal species disappear from Earth every year--thanks to us humans--it's uplifting to spend two hours with one that can really bite back.

ALL THAT JAZZ

There's nothing else in the annals of movie musicals like Bob Fosse's 1979 entry into the darkly comic, fiercely autobiographical "tell all" film sweepstakes so beloved by Fellini, Mazursky and Allen. Burning at both ends from wildly contradictory impulses--on the one hand the film paints a sour portrait of the artist as a no-good, two-timing louse, while on the other it stages a series of some of the most dazzling musical numbers ever put on film--All That Jazz is like a long, jagged night in an amusement park's hall of mirrors: not fun, exactly, but unforgettable.

Fosse's brutally truthful assessment of his own venal character gives the movie unexpected bite, and Roy Scheider plays the Fosse character ruthlessly, as a pill-popping, skirt-chasing megalomaniac who knows (correctly, as it turned out) he is living on borrowed time. It is not, of course, the "in" jokes or the sly casting of Fosse's own friends and lovers that gives All That Jazz its lasting fizz; that comes from the back-to-back-to-back musical numbers. Fosse--a performer turned choreographer turned director--had no equal when it came to scenes like these. There are so many stunners that it seems almost too much of a great thing, but that is surely what Fosse intended, as this movie is his last word on his own gifts.

WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN

There are two possible explanations for why this very good film bombed in 1978. The title, borrowed from the Creedence Clearwater Revival song on the soundtrack, was a demented choice to replace the title of the award-winning novel from which the film was adapted, Dog Soldiers. Was anyone really going to misinterpret the film as being the story of a bunch of combative Benjis? Still, while the title didn't help, the more probable cause of failure was the subject matter of drugs, and not just drugs, but heroin. Even when, or perhaps especially when, a significant portion of the entertainment community was out of its gourd on this or that illegal substance, as was the case in the late '70s, a big studio film about drugs in which the protagonists take and/or trade in drugs was handled nervously at best.

The public, a significant portion of which was also out of its gourd on this or that, could not then, as they cannot now, be told a realistic story about drugs, even when it is actually kind of an ultimate "just say no" affair. None of this changes the fact that director Karel Reisz preserved the core of Robert Stone's brilliant novel about what happens when a depressed Vietnam correspondent (Michael Moriarty) decides to cash in on the nightmare and sends a wad of smack stateside, via a Nietzsche-reading merchant seaman (Nick Nolte), to his pill-popping wife (Tuesday Weld), from whom it will be conveniently picked up for a nice price by some friendly CIA people.

As with the Vietnam War, nothing goes right; and as with the Vietnam War, some people die in body, others in spirit. Nick Nolte has never played a more complicated character or been better than in this film. Tuesday Weld, terrific as the smart, unhappy wife who falls for Nolte and heavy dope in the same breath, is fascinatingly un-sexed-up. Michael Moriarty perfectly embodies the ethical fragmentation and moral paralysis that spread like a plague through America's intellectuals as they witnessed Vietnam. All this and some hilarious, terrifying crackerjack villains too.

LUNA

The '70s were the last time anyone actually argued over the merits of a film--What's that you say? Fatal Attraction? Get serious!-- and Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial Luna divided the pro and con camps something fierce.

"Too much incest, too much opera, too much Jill Clayburgh!" went one group's rant, and while there were, perhaps, too much of those latter two, the rest of us were too enthralled by this strange, moody, deeply emotional film to care. Like Bertolucci's earlier film The Conformist, Luna had a discernible subject to which the film only infrequently returned; Luna was no more about mother/son incest, really, than it was about all the other things on Bertolucci's mind at that moment: loneliness, drug use, the ravages of stardom, one's relationship to nature, and the influence of the arts on real life.

Indeed, long after Luna was over--all too literally, for just try finding a videotape copy of it nowadays--the scene that haunts is the lush, vibrantly colored sequence set in a movie theater where, while Clayburgh's teenaged son, Matthew Barry, makes love to a girl on the floor, above him massive film images of Marilyn Monroe tower, and then a panel in the ceiling slides up to reveal the moon. Whew! Hard to say why so many didn't realize what Bertolucci was up to--trying to convey, on film, the kind of passion that people who love opera feel for that music--but, well, as for us, we can't wait to see it again. If you have any news of Luna's imminent release on video or laser, do let us know.

CHINATOWN

Chinatown, perhaps the most thematically charged movie of the '70s, succeeds at the tragic vision engineered by screenwriter Robert Towne with the saving help of director Roman Polanski, finally because of its performances. Faye Dunaway, a great movie star in her time but not thought of as a great actress, was reportedly driven to a pitch of anxiety by remorseless director Polanski, and from her wits' end delivered a portrait of the neurotic, superior, damaged Evelyn Mulwray that keeps the mystery and heart of the picture alive even as we suspect her of the worst.

John Huston, as Mulwray's father Noah Cross, the hidden evil center of all that is not what it appears, never even looks at the scenery almost any other actor would feel obliged to gnaw on; he layers a leisurely but calculating congeniality into his colossally corrupted rich man, and his performance sends out a permanently reverberating chill.

Ultimately, though, this is Jack Nicholson's movie, and it is certainly his best movie as well as one of his best two performances (see Five Easy Pieces for the other). The detective we get here, Jake Gittes, comes from the zone in the Nicholson persona that is at the pole opposite of The Joker's locale. Gittes is a cynical, cagey loner who is so sure he's seen everything that when the truth is flashed under his eyes in a series of photographs early in the picture, he fails to recognize it and spends the rest of the movie unwittingly serving as Huston's pawn. Too "experienced" to trust his heart, Gittes out-thinks himself into disaster and ends up replaying the worst mistake of his life all over again. For all that Chinatown has to say about money, power and corruption, it has even more to say about blindness, arrogance and obsession.

THE WARRIORS

The saga of a street gang fighting their way across Manhattan in one long night, The Warriors begins and ends near the famous Coney Island amusement park, underlining director Walter Hill's intent to take the viewer on a thrill-packed, unashamedly nihilistic, roller coaster ride through hell. A tricked-up B-movie study in random violence, the movie seems a good deal less surreal today than when it was made--then, the story of costume-and-makeup-wearing gangs had to be set in the Big Apple to play even as believable hyperbole; now, it could be about Anytown, U.S.A. and pass as gritty reality.

The story line is scant: falsely accused of killing another gang's leader, The Warriors must do battle with just about every sociopath in New York to clear their name. The stylized execution of these clashes and rumbles is the whole show, and Hill keeps these set pieces flying by, like the choreographed "challenge" dances in a great Broadway musical. Like West Side Story, in point of fact, though The Warriors is strictly a postmodern redo of that and a lot of other genres: no singing, no sentimentality, and the gang we're "rooting" for is every bit as sociopathic as their enemies.

If the film skates perilously close to self-parody now and then, Hilland company manage to keep the action from ever veering into camp through razor-sharp staging, editing, and music on the soundtrack like the pointed, pulsing "Nowhere To Run." Sadly, Hill never again lived up to the promising potential he showed here to become the action director of his generation.

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