20 Movies to Kill For

THE GODFATHER, PART II

It almost never happens that a sequel is better than the original. But The Empire Strikes Back was better than Star Wars, and, for sure, The Godfather, Part II is better than The Godfather. One of the big advantages of The Godfather, Part II over its predecessor is that the prerequisites for enjoying it do not include a fascination with gangsters or an appreciation of the mental problems of Sicilian families. Not only that, the peak-handsome Robert De Niro as the young Vito Corleone in Part II is much more pleasing to look at than the chipmunk-cheeked Marlon Brando in the original, and De Niro's voice, while clearly presaging Brando's dying-in-the-desert rasp, doesn't drive you to suck on eucalyptus drops for two-plus hours.

For that matter, Al Pacino looks great in this movie; he's the epitome of that dangerous ethnic beauty that reigned in the '70s. The Godfather, Part II opens and closes on a closeup of Pacino, and most of the entertainment in between comes from attempting to read that face as its owner gains more and more skill in keeping information off of it. What he's doing is getting more and more control over what's going on around him, and closing down more and more of what's happening inside him.

You don't need to know who Joseph Valachi was to relate to this. Nor do you need to know who Meyer Lansky was to get a thrill from moments like the one in which a party of dons cut up a birthday cake that has a map of Cuba on it. You don't even need to know where Sicily is to be chilled to the bone by the scene where Fredo gets killed while Michael stands removed in his dark living room. And you don't need to see The Godfather, Part III to understand all there is to understand about Michael Corleone's life.

CABARET

As glittering and as hard as a diamond, Cabaret was not even remotely a sure thing when it was made. A movie musical about the rise of Nazism, starring Liza Minnelli, who'd been passed over for the leading role when the show was a Broadway hit, and directed by Bob Fosse, whose only other film was the disastrous Sweet Charity? Nevertheless, the doomsayers were wrong; this is the greatest American musical film since Singin' in the Rain, and as unlike that satirical confection as a movie could be. Set in a politically corrupt, morally ambiguous, third-rate Berlin nightspot in the '30s, the film--like Minnelli's whooping war cry, "Divine decadence!"--hit a very real nerve with big city audiences in 1972, who were world-weary even before Watergate, and awash in the fashionable ennui of glitter rock.

Cabaret gains immeasurably from Fosse's trademarked cynicism, for the film's fairly frightening look at the sad lives of performers, desperate to please underneath their thickly caked-on makeup--nothing new to fans of Fosse's signature work on Broadway--was ideally suited to the subject at hand. Replete with goose-stepping chorines and an emcee, Joel Grey, who embodies the soullessness that is to come, the movie would have been altogether too icy to the touch but for the happy accident of Minnelli at last getting to play the role she had sought for so long.

Expansive, warm-blooded, altogether too much, Minnelli gives Fosse's chilling vision a badly needed infusion of humanity--without which, Cabaret would not continue to hold up, working its sinister charms on new generations of movie fans.

MANHATTAN

Long after contemporary culture has forgotten the twin fascinations of Woody Allen's career--to wit, whether his early comedies were the better films, and what went down between him and Mia--people will still be showing other people Manhattan, to demonstrate what they mean when they say they really don't make movies like they used to. However unfashionable Allen has become as of late, Manhattan remains inviolate as proof that he is, or anyway was, a seriously talented filmmaker. Jokes about Allen's on-screen romance with high school student Mariel Hemingway aside, this is a film that manages not only to make Diane Keaton seem desirable--no small feat--but even plausible as the "little Radcliffe tootsie" who comes between two pals, Allen and Michael Murphy, and threatens to ruin their current, if precarious, relationships.

But a pencil sketch precis of the script doesn't begin to touch on the film's deeper joys; it's a thrill to watch the company of flawlessly cast actors, among them Meryl Streep as Allen's ex, sustain long, expertly written scenes staged with no edits whatsoever--a movie art seemingly lost since 1979. Then there's the Gershwin score, and the stunning cinematography by Gordon Willis (stunning, that is, even by Willis's high standards), and... oh, just go rent it. Movies haven't been this good anytime lately.

3 WOMEN

Though Hollywood has long been referred to as a "dream factory," what it trades in is mere fantasy. After all, the open-endedness and multiple meanings of dream reality, the very qualities that best serve the yearnings of the unconscious, are anathema to beginning-middle-end/high-concept moviemaking. That's why for a quick index of just how exceptional the '70s were for American film, one need look no further than Robert Altman's 1977 3 Women.

This movie, unique in Altman's oeuvre, is downright astonishing in the annals of 20th Century Fox productions. It operates with all the metamorphic mysteries and opposite intensities of an actual dream, and with few of the shapes of conventional screen drama. Altman reportedly based this film on a dream he had while his wife was in the hospital; it may be equally important that he conceived it in the aftermath of the disastrous reaction to Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson in 1976, which immediately followed the triumph of Nashville in 1975. 3 Women, set in a spa for the aged in a timeless present, is filled with images of infirmity juxtaposed against youth, desert against pool, suicide against pregnancy, innocence against bitterness.

Its dominant "subject," in a plot that brings the malleable yokel Pinky (Sissy Spacek) into contact with the brittlely shallow Millie (Shelley Duvall), her mentor at the spa and then roommate, is the interdependency and porousness of human identity: Pinky absorbs Millie's persona, precipitating a transformation in Millie and, ultimately, a reconfiguration of the small desert community where they live.

As with any great dream, you are free to make of 3 Women what you need to. Though it forgoes conventional storytelling, it is nonetheless structured; its poetic echoes and polarities will support your deepest response, and its technical excellence will invite that involvement.

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Virginia Campbell and Edward Margulies are the executive editors of Movieline.

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Comments

  • Terry says:

    Enjoyable read. Interesting, as always, to see how younger generations react to films of the past. The comment on Sunday Bloody Sunday (no comma) was exceptionally well-written, as were the comments on A Clockwork Orange. Will we ever see their likes again? I so wish younger people would give foreign films more of a look: there are gems out there, they just don't seem to get made in this country right now.