The Seven-Ups (1973)

A solid police–gangster crime thriller made special by a truly stellar car chase sequence. This has one of the great movie cat chases of the 1970s. It’s French Connection level (a movie produced by the director of The Seven-Ups, Philip D'Antoni). Anyway this is worth a watch. It’s nicely plotted, boasts a good central performance by the always excellent Roy Schneider, another by the wonderful Tony Lo Bianca, and that car chase is great.

The Last American Hero (1973)

The Last American Hero is fun for a while, but it has an undertone of disappointment and inevitable darkness that felt very odd to me. I guess it’s the 1970s lonely man thing, but it was weird to see it in a movie about such a young person. Honestly, this doesn’t make The Last American Hero bad in any way, just unexpected given its mostly Smokey and the Bandit yee-haw sensibilities. Jeff Bridges is, of course, quite wonderful, and this movie comes between The Last Picture Show and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (his first two Oscar nominations).

Johnny Corncob (1973)

Psychedelic Hungarian animation? Sign me up. János Vitéz is nationalist and outright racist at times, and I didn't love it quite as much as I loved Marcell Jankovics' later film Son of the White Mare, but this is very cool.

Blaxploitation but Make It Revolutionary

The Spook Who Sat by the Door is one of the coolest movies I've seen in a while. It's a 1973 film about a revolutionary who is trained by the CIA and then uses his training to bring down the United States. It's made in the style of a blaxploitation movie, but it's based on a novel, and it's incendiary and pleasurable to watch. I loved this.

Theatre of Blood

Theatre of Blood is amazing, delightful campy fun. Vincent Price is a terrible actor who devises a series of murders based on Shakespearean deaths as revenge on the critics who refused to recognize his genius. Each murder is more insane than the last. It's hilarious. This is a must for any Shakespeare fan. It's also delightfully gruesome. I had a blast.

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Messiah of Evil is weird for many, many reasons. It's a zombie horror film made by the screenwriters of... American Graffiti?? It also stars openly gay actor Michael Greer in a very strangely butch performance. (The whole movie is, of course, quite campy, since it is a horror movie, so Greer fits right in.) But the real star of this film is the amazing art on the walls in the main setting of this film – which is an artist's studio. The art on these walls is stunning and constantly takes over in many of the film's shots. It's the best performance in the movie.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

Moshé Mizrahi's movie I Love You Rosa (אני אוהב אותך רוזה) is no great shakes, but it is charming in its way. Like Mizrahi's subsequent film The House on Chelouche Street, I Love You Rosa focuses on a small boy. In fact, this purports to be a kind of feminist tale about freedom and liberty, in which a young woman decides to choose for herself and convinces the man in her life to let her choose, whereupon she chooses (and this is never in doubt) precisely the thing everyone wishes for her to choose. I found all of this to be a bit of a red herring. And the film is much much more interested in the young man than it is in Rosa herself, no matter how much it claims to love her. The film is also bookended by a completely superfluous framing device. Still, it's a likable picture.
(Apparently this movie is available on DVD in a dubbed version. But I watched it in Hebrew on an ancient VHS copy with English subtitles.)

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

Tonight, I accomplished an odd sort of task I had set for myself in 2011. For some reason, after Oscar season ended in March of that year I started watching all of the films that had been nominated for Oscars in 1973. Of those I hadn't seen there were something like 12. These were strange films, most of them, now mostly neglected, and it was very hard to get ahold of many of them. Most of them are now just curiosities, and watching them all was a bizarre experience of movie history. (I've been playing a similar game with myself for the year 1970, but these remaining films are proving even harder to track down.) In any case, The Pedestrian (Der Fussgänger) is an odd little movie. A kind of memory piece (these were popular in the 1970s) told from two perspectives. An old man who is responsible for having killed many many women and children in Greece during the second world war remembers his crimes. And a group of tabloid journalists working on a story that attempts to expose him. It's an intriguing film with several fascinating formal devices, including a bizarre conversation between eight or nine old women about men and violence, and a television interview that frankly discusses the ethics of the film's subject matter. Totally worth watching but now available only on VHS. For other films nominated for the year 1973 you can click on the tag.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

Hall Bartlett's film Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen in my life. First of all, this is (as you might have gathered) a film about a seagull. But it's a film about a seagull who flies farther than any seagull has ever flown. It's interspersed with New-Age pseudo-Buddhist philosophy and three or four soaring songs by Neil Diamond. The whole thing seems impossible, actually, and it doesn't quite work, if you're worried about that sort of thing. But none of that mattered to me. JLS is earnest and beautifully, gorgeously shot. We follow Jonathan all over the ocean and the mountains and high up into the skies and the whole thing is breathtaking. I pretty much loved it.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

Well this is a little weird. I don't know if you know this, but Sony Pictures is releasing films on DVD-R on a manufacture-on-demand basis. These are movies that the studio cannot really afford to release on DVD to the general public (there is not enough of a demand for these films). So what they are doing instead is allowing people to order the DVD for around $20 and then they burn the movie onto a DVD-R and send it to you. Universal is doing this too. They're calling it the Universal Vault Series. You can actually buy these movies via Amazon.com, so the whole thing is very very easy. And we all have better (if a little expensive) access to hard-to-find films. And if you really want to see these movies, $20 is not so bad.

So I ordered Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams a few months ago when I was watching all of those movies from 1973. But I only watched it a couple days ago.

The movie is odd – a smallish sort of melodrama about a woman who is emotionally disturbed and can't seem to find her way in the world, her relationship with her husband, her children's lives, her mother's death, etc. I was interested in this film because I love Joanne Woodward and because it is about her dealing with her son being gay (evidently a big deal in 1973, oh yeah, it still is in 2011).

I don't know. It is not a film to get excited about, really. The acting is wonderful from all involved, and it is interesting in a museum-piece kind of way. I am glad I saw it, but that's about it, I think.

The weird thing is that after keeping this flick on my shelf for a few months and then finally watching it, the film's director (who was also the producer of the Academy Awards show for many many years) died suddenly. So strange how the universe is: I watch my first Gil Cates movie (no one watches his movies anymore) a few days before he dies. It's all just such a fluke.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

This poster is for a movie called The House on Chelouche Street, which I thought was good. I didn't love it, though, and one of the reasons I didn't love it was that it is a coming-of-age story about a fifteen-year-old boy. I think that I might be losing patience with coming-of-age narratives, or at least coming-of-age narratives that deal with young people with very little self awareness. The main character of this film is so young that I found it hard to identify. It's not that I'm exclusively interested in films about adults, now, but films about young people have been difficult for me to drop into these days.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

I wish that I could like Luchino Visconti, but I guess I just don't. I liked Romy Schneider and Trevor Howard in Ludwig, and literally every shot could be framed and put in a gallery. It's that gorgeous. But the film is just so boring. And I am really interested in Ludwig II and in Richard Wagner, whose life and work have always fascinated me, but I feel like Visconti just drains all energy out of his films. This is sacrilege, I know, but I feel it is time to be honest about this.

There is one sequence in Ludwig that I liked and that has real emotional impact: there is an extended sequence (every sequence is an extended sequence in Visconti) where Romy Schneider takes a tour of all the castles that Ludwig has built. The castles are all empty and unbelievably sumptuous. At the end of the sequence, Schneider throws her head back and laughs. I loved this sequence, but for me that was the film's only scene of merit.

Also. I do not understand what it was with the Italians from this time – Fellini and Visconti in particular. Why are all their films dubbed? I fail to understand it. Helmut Berger, as far as I can tell, was speaking English in the film. But instead of listening to him speak in English, I listen to someone else speak over him in Italian and then read an English translation of that Italian in the subtitles. I am sure there must be an explanation for this, but whatever Visconti's reasoning (and Fellini's and René Clément's) the dubbing works to distance me from the emotional impact of the film.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

This is a Sherman Brothers musical (the gents behind the near-perfect Mary Poppins), but this film is rather awful. The kids are cute – particularly little miss Jodie Foster as Tom Sawyer's love interest – and I love Celeste Holm as always, but for some reason the film isn't underscored and so must of the time Tom Sawyer doesn't actually feel like a musical. The songs, in addition, are unmemorable – and that's generous.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

I have not read the book on which Bang the Drum Slowly is based, but the film manages to capture a very interesting tone. This manages to be a very funny comedy about Hodgkin's Disease while also being a very moving story about a friendship between two men. The film is laugh-out-loud hilarious plenty of times, and alongside that humor, the film is quite poignant. It's a true directing achievement, if you ask me. De Niro's character is sort of thick and Moriarty's is streetwise and clever. The following exchange is one of my favorites from the movie and is indicative of how Mark Harris's very simple dialogue manages to achieve profundity.

De Niro: They're only nice to me because they know I'm dying.
Moriarty: Everybody knows everybody's dying; that's why everybody's nice to everybody else all of the time.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

This movie is great! It's a movie about an assassin out to kill President Charles de Gaulle and the man trying to catch him. Suspenseful, exciting, and sexy. The Day of the Jackal follows the inscrutable, heartless assassin much more than it does the police, and we get to see all of his tricks and plans and ways of not getting caught. It was fascinating.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

I love love loved this movie. It is dark and moody and has that classic 1970s anti-hero feel with a protagonist that is totally at a loss for direction. (I am thinking of movies like The Conversation and The French Connection and Serpico – anyone reading this blog could probably name another five quite easily – the kind of movie George Clooney and Tony Gilroy tried successfully to revisit with Michael Clayton). In Save the Tiger, Lemmon is absolutely superb. His performance is astounding. I was blown away. And, frankly, I was blown away by John G. Avildsen. I've always had a hard heart toward him because the average Rocky won the Best Picture Oscar over Network, probably the best film of the decade; as it turns out, though, Avildsen is a real talent: he directs this hard-hitting, bleak picture without pulling any punches. Save the Tiger is fantastic.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

I was just talking about childhood, wasn't I? I have to admit to being totally underwhelmed by this picture. It was good... sort of. American Graffiti is a movie that is actually about nostalgia; in other words, the picture attempts to give us an idyllic picture of life as it used to be, to revive something that the film always already assumes is lost. (That makes sense, right?) I don't do very well with either so-called main-street values or with nostalgia, so I didn't really like this movie very much. It was cool to see Harrison Ford looking so young and pretty, though.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

The movie was the absolute weirdest. George C. Scott plays this scientist (who is not a mad scientist) who has – and I mean this quite literally – taught a dolphin that he calls Alpha to speak English.

That's all well and good, really, except that The Day of the Dolphin is not a children's comedy. Instead, the movie is a rather intense political-style thriller. The dolphin and his dolphin girlfriend (you guessed it: Beta) are kidnapped... and then trained to kill the President of the United States.
You know, everyday stuff.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

This movie manages to figure black people as both primitive and (somehow also) villainous. But, I love me some Yaphet Kotto, and he was great in this picture, and, well – truth be told – more than anything else Live and Let Die is interested in

A) Roger Moore's upper body

&

B) crocodiles 

I rather enjoyed it, liking, as I do, both crocodiles and shirtless men.