We know we should love Taxi Driver, but it's just like one of those people sleep with. At least not twice. Same goes for The Godfather. Apocalypse Now movies of the 70s. Some of our choices may be disreputable, but we do love you respect and don't and a lot of the "best" the following 20 movies.
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A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Unlike Stanley Kubrick's earlier film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which seems far less revolutionary now than it felt upon release, A Clockwork Orange has gotten more radical over the years since it was first released. This adaptation of Anthony Burgess's novel about London in an overdecorated, undersensitized future was plenty shocking in 1971, but it was even more mind-boggling than shocking; its over-the-top choreographed "ultraviolence," so exuberantly shot to a score of exquisite Beethoven, set the degradations of the 20th century against the heights of the early 19th century in a way that popped one's circuit breakers and veiled the full force of horror.
In 1993, when Clockwork's prophetic accuracy is unmistakable--high-style gangs of serenely sociopathic, violence-addicted boys on drugs; tyrannized, impotent parents; systematically brutal, homosexually repressed legal authorities; arrogant, isolated rich people--the film is absolutely frightening. At the alarming heart of it all is the turn-of-the-millennium savage Alex, played by baby-faced, blue-eyed Malcolm McDowell, who delivers in full on Kubrick's stroke-of-genius casting decision. Alex and his "droogs" visit mayhem on the unprotected--that includes just about everyone--not with a mere lack of conscience, or with the anger of the misunderstood adolescent, but with a maniacal zest.
The thing is, he's the most attractive character in the movie. Everyone else is stupid, nasty, narrow or self-serving as they try to deal with Alex. Why watch a movie about this, you ask, especially when you might get carjacked on the way home from the video store?
First, because nowhere else can you experience all this awful truth unaccompanied by pieties, simplifications, melodrama, self-righteousness or false solutions. That freedom alone is dizzying. Second, Kubrick's filmmaking is deliberately, fabulously thrilling; it excites you while refraining from dictating your responses to its ideas. (Bad directors don't know how to make you feel anything; good directors can make you feel what they want you to feel; only great directors let you feel what you want to feel.) You need the exhilaration and dark laughter Clockwork provokes to deal with the quandary it paints for you. The same information is, after all, in the newspaper, where it is met with denial.
McCABE AND MRS. MILLER
Though the notion that the Wild West had been ruined by the coming of "progress" was pretty much old hat in 1971--Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch had already mined that ore--Robert Altman used just such a story line in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But in combining that relatively new cliche with the oldest one known to Westerns--that of the dim yet amiable cowpoke and his sinful yet saintly saloon gal--Altman created a vision of the American frontier that was completely original.
Altman's West is filled with daydreamers who can't quite stay one step ahead of their fate, and drug addicts who've already met theirs. In short, McCabe was the first Western to say that life then was amazingly like life now. This was a daring stance for a commercial movie, especially one that was the eagerly anticipated vehicle for two of the biggest stars of the day, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Yet, no doubt responding to Altman's intimate, quirky approach, Beatty and Christie both worked at the top of their form, giving performances that are among their best.
Beatty is the small-time operator whose life is changed when Christie, a hooker with a cash register for a heart, blows into the tiny town he's building. Soon, despite their different styles--he's all charm, she's all business--they are partners, then lovers. This is not a match made in heaven, as Beatty and Christie's sparring duets make clear. Even so, as Christie witheringly puts down Beatty's dreams, she allows us to see that she's well aware she is becoming central to them. When "progress" eventually rears its ugly head, we know that dreamer Beatty will not adapt to it, as surely as we recognize that realist Christie will. The bittersweet tug-of-war between what we want to have happen, and what we know will doubtless occur, makes the film a haunting love story.
The finale, in which the two characters demonstrate their respective ability to deal with change--Beatty staggers slowly around in the snow in a gun fight he cannot hope to win while Christie withdraws from the world into opium hallucinations--is one of the greatest, and saddest, closing sequences in movie history.
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
If you imagine space aliens to be bald, wrinkled, long-necked, benevolent creatures who like to hang out with pudgy children, then go watch E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial again. It's a fine film. But if the projection of your particular alienation (isn't that what aliens are?) is a pale, starving, neurasthenic loner who watches too much television, then perhaps The Man Who Fell to Earth is more your speed. The public at large hadn't the faintest idea what to make of this film when it was released in 1976. That bogglement might have been explained by the fact that 20 minutes were chopped from director Nicolas Roeg's film, except that it turns out the missing footage (now restored on the great Criterion laserdisc) involves a scene in which an aged, barely-clothed Candy Clark and a full-frontally-nude David Bowie bounce up and down on a bed drunkenly firing a gun.
Needless to say, that doesn't clarify much. Which is okay, because the dislocations and ambiguities of The Man Who Fell to Earth that seemed so weird in the '70s were all deliberately architected by Roeg to parallel the enormous inner queasiness that had overtaken our existence. Now that we as a culture have fallen as surely as Bowie's alien Thomas Newton--whose problems include anorexia, separation from nuclear family, alcoholism, workaholism, media saturation, agoraphobia, big government, technological betrayal and dyed hair--The Man Who Fell to Earth reads pretty clearly.
The film is remarkable for the way it, unlike almost all science fiction, has not dated, which is partly because of its intelligent design. The throwaway cameras that were such a cool idea in '76 have been a reality for years now; Newton's mode of dress--plain suits with buttoned collars and no tie--became David Lynch's and then much of Hollywood's late '80s style; the techno-Southwestern-Oriental style of Newton's life combined looks that dominate now.
Ultimately, though, the quality that will keep The Man Who Fell to Earth timely for a long time is its view of what ails us: Newton comes to Earth on his mysterious mission (never fully explained), armed with his own civilization's advanced technologies, many of them for devices that enhance perception--telescopes, microscopes, cameras, etc.--and he ends up getting betrayed by one of his own instruments, which is now being wielded by earthlings who are blinder than ever.
FIVE EASY PIECES
As is always the case in road movies, Jack Nicholson's Bobby Dupea travels many a mile in Five Easy Pieces, but director Bob Rafelson's 1970 film is one of those rare road movies which delivers on the genre's promise of movement over emotional topography, too. Screenwriter Carole Eastman, using the pen name Adrien Joyce, was a longtime friend of Nicholson's, and her creation for him--the freewheeling, yet joyless, Bobby--gave the actor ample room to demonstrate his formidable chops as a brilliant pianist who has tried, but failed, to drop out of the genteel society in which he was raised.
As Nicholson and his blue-collar waitress girlfriend, Karen Black, head north to visit the damaged family from which Nicholson is estranged, they pick up a pair of cleanliness-obsessed female hitchhikers, which leads to the film's justly famous sequence in which Nicholson lays into a hash-house waitress who gives him a hard time. But that's just one of many droll scenes in the sad, funny screenplay that is the solid foundation for the greatness of Five Easy Pieces. For example, in just one sentence, Nicholson makes mincemeat of haughty, humorless Susan Anspach after she's all but swooned upon hearing him play the piano: "I faked a little Chopin," he snarls, "you faked a big response."
In point of fact, Nicholson's character knows a great deal about faking it; the problem of lying-- to others, but especially to oneself--is at the heart of Eastman's portrait of this disaffected contemporary everyman. Although Bobby finds he's unable to run away from his past, his heritage, or his obligations, he remains nevertheless hellbent on trying, again and again. ("My character in Five Easy Pieces was written by a woman who knew me very well," Nicholson once said.) Five Easy Pieces stands as a testimony to the enormous talents of Eastman, Nicholson and director Bob Rafelson; and the movie that this trio created last year, Man Trouble, reminds us how fragile such talent is, or perhaps how special the '70s were for talented filmmakers, or both.
THE DEER HUNTER
This film was a bombshell when it was released in 1978. Up until then, the national self-hatred over the debacle of Vietnam had resulted in a political correctness code, expressed in popular media, that suggested that the United States as a whole might be considered something of an Evil Empire pursuing colonialism in Southeast Asia, that Ho Chi Minh could be regarded as a heroic freedom fighter, and that the U.S. soldiers who willingly volunteered could be thought of as grimly unenlightened, if not bloodthirsty.
The Deer Hunter presented a passionately divergent view with its story of what happens to three friends from an immigrant Russian community in Pennsylvania who go to Vietnam out of a basic sense of duty. John Savage, as the weakest of the group, is physically ravaged; Christopher Walken, as the most sensitive, is psychologically destroyed; and Robert De Niro, as the most controlled and naturally heroic, survives.
When the community of friends gathers at the end after a funeral and sings a sad, but un-ironic, "God Bless America," some critics of the late '70s were genuinely shocked: that's how little understanding of veterans and of the broader national experience was in the media consciousness of the day. Since Cimino went on to Olympian hubris with Heaven's Gate, and was unlucky enough to have his exploits detailed in an extremely well-written and popular book called Final Cut, and, worse, failed to ever again suggest the vision that fueled the Oscar-winning Deer Hunter, it's easy to look back on this film ungenerously. And its story always did suffer from notable strains of coincidence and improbability. But the performances, by De Niro, Walken, Savage and a virtually unknown Meryl Streep, are lit up with conviction, and Cimino's radical story structure, which dawdles lovingly over life in the steel mill town and jump-cuts through the horror of Vietnam, still surprises purposefully.
The famous, hair-raising torture scene in which the Vietcong force American soldiers to play Russian roulette (back when the film was released, there was a lot of criticism that nothing like this ever actually happened), remains a potent metaphor for the whole Vietnam experience. Is this film as great today as it seemed to many in '78? Maybe not. It's still very good, and still important.
BADLANDS
Producer/director/writer Terrence Malick is a master ironist, and though he has only directed two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, both rely heavily on the same timeworn, and essentially literary, device that lesser filmmakers cannot pull off successfully: an expressionless voice reads dead-on narration of the very events we're watching. This is the key to how Malick manages to distance the viewer from the hyped-up, borderline cornball melodramatics of his story lines.
Though Badlands is the horrifying saga of a pair of misfits who go on a cross-country killing spree, the 1973 film takes on a cooly comical tone thanks to Sissy Spacek's line readings on the soundtrack of such asides as: "We had our bad moments, like any couple. Kit accused me of only being along for the ride, while at times I wished he'd fall in the river and drown, so I could watch." Spacek's character is both romantic and stupid; Badlands is neither. As entertaining as it is bleak, the movie clearly expresses Malick's frightening worldview--average Americans are capable of, literally, anything--and the filmmaker underscores the fear behind the notion that teenager Spacek has run off with psycho Martin Sheen because there's nothing better to do by laying the thinnest veneer of "normal" behavior over the pair's later, monstrous acts. In one of the many wry, yet nightmarish scenes in the film, when Sheen shoots a good friend and the man is dying, Spacek asks, "Is he upset?" This will make you shiver, if you don't burst out laughing.
HAIR
Milos Forman's imaginative, smart and sweet-spirited Hair bombed at the box office in 1979. The disinterest with which it was greeted might have been a problem of timing: by 1979 the high hopes and ecstatic exuberance of the '60s, of which the 1968 Broadway production Hair was a signal expression, had been so thoroughly eviscerated that looking backward was just too galling and depressing for most people to handle.
Too bad, because Forman came up with a terrific strategy for adapting the stage musical, giving it a simple, effective little plot and a corps of endearing main characters, as well as bringing in the brilliant Twyla Tharp to choreograph the hippies through the trippy tumblings and fallings and wheelings of the revivified musical numbers. As someone whose own country, Czechoslovakia, had experienced a period of liberation that was brought to an end by a Soviet invasion in 1968, Forman was able to invest his telling of the complicated popular/political/spiritual uprising of the '60s in the United States with far more perspective, insight, and moral authority than any American filmmaker could have.
Ultimately, Hair succeeds on its visual magic, which conveys the great joy that allowed everybody to get so fatuous and caring and narcissistic and selfless in the '60s. The zingy dada of the lyrics to Hair's addictive score is supported by such memorable images as police horses breaking into dance in Central Park, lead hippie Treat Williams swinging on the chandelier at a stuffy Connecticut debutante party, and pregnant bride Beverly D'Angelo walking on air in country boy John Savage's first acid trip. Best of all is the exquisite, heartbreaking rendition of "Easy To Be Hard" by Cheryl Barnes, a solo that points up the pain that was caused when hippies skipped out on their responsibilities in pursuit of "fun."
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.
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.