The Beguiled (1971)

The original version of The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel, is deeply, delightfully perverse and much, much queerer than the Sofia Coppola remake, which I liked a lot. But it’s unfortunate that she tamed the rough edges of this strange story. This film insists upon the weirdness. (Coppola apparently thought that this Don Siegel movie was too invested in sensational topics like incest and lesbianism? Sign me up! That’s what made this so fun.)

Also, y'all, Clint Eastwood in the 1970s was a fox.

Le Mans

Le Mans is a classic for a reason. It’s unlike any car-racing movie I’ve ever seen… I think because it isn’t interested in the race itself so much as it is interested in the men doing the racing. Which is not to say that this isn’t a nail-biting race movie, because it still manages to be that. Lee H. Katzin's direction is brilliant.

Two from Jerzy Skolimowski

I’ve been watching Skolimowski’s stuff since last year’s Io was so wonderful and because I’ve never seen any of his work. Moonlighting (1982), however… is not great. It feels like it’s tied down and is never going to get anywhere. And then it sort of just doesn’t. To make matters worse, the central character is very difficult. He’s nervous the whole time, but he’s sort of impossible to identify with because of how Skolimowski tells his story. I found Deep End and Rysopis much more successful than this movie.

Deep End (released in the US in 1971) is fun, and then the ending is not fun, but it has some gorgeous shots in it. 

The Music Lovers (1971)

Ken Russell's The Music Lovers is a really bananas film – with surreal sequences and much of the film set to Tchaikovsky's music without dialogue. Glenda Jackson is out of control, but then she's playing an insane nymphomaniac trying to make the homosexually inclined Pyotr Tchaikovsky love her. It doesn't work. 

Russell's film compares poorly with Igor Talankin's film Tchaikovsky (Чайковский) from 1970 (1972 in the U.S.), which is sumptuous but which I found cold and uninterested in Tchaikovsky's actual life. Russell's version of the Tchaikovsky story really tries to figure out who the man was, but The Music Lovers winds up being a kind of overwrought melodrama

The Decameron

Il Decameron is delightful. Totally fun and very much captures the spirit of playfulness and cleverness that is such a hallmark of Boccaccio's great novel. (I adore this novel, for the record. It's enormously long and I couldn't put it down!) Pasolini's film is sexy and fun, and even though I saw it more than a week ago, I haven't stopped thinking about it. I watched it on the Criterion Channel ... and I had meant also to watch Pasolini's Canterbury Tales, but I ran out of time and now it's no longer playing on the channel. Guess I'll catch the Chaucer one some other time.

Shaft

In many ways, Shaft is great. Everyone in it is very very cool, and the screenplay is really delightful. I love a crime film, as you know, and Shaft is a great character.

But Shaft's plot doesn't really have much to it, all told, and director Gordon Parks doesn't build tension very well, so it is never really clear when we're supposed to be afraid, when we can relax, when we ought to pay closer attention. Even the action scenes, while great on paper, don't really pop the way they ought to.

The score, by Isaac Hayes, is superb, of course. And Shaft has a gay sidekick in a bar down the street who actually says he's gay in the film. It's kind of an amazing moment. He's talking about a woman who wants to sleep with him and he says, "I told her I'm gay and she said she'd change me. It's not enough that I'm beautiful, now she wants me to play character parts!"

Hoa-Binh (1970)

Hoa-Binh is one of those films that was nominated for an Oscar like 50 years ago that I never thought I would ever get to see. I've never seen it on DVD or an any streaming service, and I had basically given up on it. Color me surprised, then, when this movie suddenly became available on the Cave of Forgotten Films. I watched it the day it did.

I have been wanting to see this forever, and it's wonderful. It's an unsentimental portrayal of the effects of war on a family in Vietnam during the war, and the central performance is amazing. I really liked this film.