Give 'Em Hell, Harry! (1975)

Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! is a filmed evening at the theatre (it's TheatroVision), watching James Whitmore in his celebrated role as Harry S. Truman in Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! and there’s nothing cinematic about it. It’s clearly filmed for television, in fact, with blackouts timed helpfully for commercial breaks. Whitmore is great, of course, and the play is filled with the kind of generic liberal political ideas that most people agree with across the board. The whole idea is a kind of no-nonsense politics that at least feels reasonable. The audience in the theatre loves the show and applauds throughout at various clever stories in Samuel Gallu’s play. It’s a one-man show, though, and that can make for tiring viewing. Once I realized the gist of the thing about 20 minutes in, I got rather bored. It’s a clever note, but there’s only one note.

I don't think you can watch this film anywhere...? I watched it on a bootleg DVD, and I'm sort of surprised to find it's not streaming and there is no DVD.

Lies My Father Told Me (1975)

Lies My Father Told Me was not for me. It’s one of those told-from-a-child’s-point-of-view things, but this child is especially annoying. This film also involves way more yelling and screaming than I enjoy. These folks yell at each other the entire movie up until the very last moment. I was exhausted.

Bite the Bullet (1975)

I wanted to like Bite the Bullet. It’s a kind of disaster film mixed with a western mixed with Grand Prix. But also I didn’t care about any of these characters. And interesting characterization seemed to have been the film’s only real raison d’être. So that’s puzzling. Anyway I guess I was kinda bored.

Birds Do It, Bees Do It (1974)

This is very interesting. It starts out with the sex lives of various animals. That’s about 70 minutes or so. Then the last 20 minutes are a chilling, truly perverse explanation of the ways humans have reorganized the reproduction of animals we eat so that we can better produce them in factories. It’s clever, and its point of view is archly sardonic. It doesn’t say that factories inseminating cows and surgically removing fertilized eggs from sedated heifers is horrible, but the film shows it, and the conclusions are easy to draw without saying anything.

The Wind and the Lion (1975)

Why does The Wind and the Lion insist on being so silly? It describes war, excesses of masculinity, and numerous senseless killings. But it is rated PG and is much more interested in joking and good-naturedly shaking its head about the politics of colonialism and the horrors of war. I was not charmed.

The Man in the Glass Booth (1975)

I gotta tell you... I don't get it. Now listen, I love Maximilian Schell, but this was stagey, and the emotions and dialogue feel like very overblown theatre at all times. For me this did not work.

Why did I watch this? Good question. It was a part of a series in the 1970s of plays made into films that played a very limited run in theatres. But Schell was nominated for an Oscar for this (in the same year Glenda Jackson was nominated for her performance in Hedda and James Whitmore was nominated for his performance in Give 'Em Hell Harry! – both of which are also plays and neither of which I've seen) so I'm getting started on watching these 1975 performances, especially now since The Man in the Glass Booth, after being unavailable for many years, appeared on YouTube recently.

Tommy: the Movie

Honestly, I don't get it. This is very Ken Russell, and I like Ken Russell usually, but this annoyed me. You know... I think I'd feel differently if I liked the voices in this, but the only song that really worked for me were the Elton John number and the Tina Turner number. I like all of these actors, but I didn't like any of their voices in Tommy.

Female Trouble (1974)

Female Trouble is ok, but I got bored after awhile. It is, in many ways a retread of Pink Flamingos but without the quick pace of the earlier film. And Female Trouble has waaaay too much dialogue. Divine spends most of the film screaming. Mink Stole, however, is excellent in this. She had me cracking up with her Hare Krishna stuff.

Australian New Wave III

Am I obsessed with the Australian New Wave? I might be.  

Sunday Too Far Away is another – less well known in the United States – Australian New Wave film, and this one is excellent. I absolutely loved it. It's so smart and so affecting. 

This is not a film about a strike – despite apparently every synopsis of the film online – although, there is a strike late in the film. Instead Sunday Too Far Away is about labor and laborers as such. We follow a group of laborers led stunningly by Jack Thompson. This is a superb film from start to finish, brilliantly directed by Ken Hannam. The tone is really balanced perfectly between adventure, mourning, Marxist observation, humor, and sublimity. I have nothing but good things to say. 

It deserves to be considered alongside the great films about labor and unionizing from this same period in other parts of the world. I am thinking of films like Actas de Marusia (also 1975), I Compagni (1964), Blood on the Land (1965), La Venganza (1958), Ådalen 31 (1969), and The Molly Maguires (1970).

And Jack Thompson truly is brilliant. I am glad Hollywood got Mel Gibson and Sam Neill and Judy Davis out of the Australian New Wave, but we really deserved to get Thompson too. He's just so damn good in this.

Actas de Marusia (1975)

Actas de Marusia is a powerful, very, very violent epic about a massacre in Chile in 1907. It's a film about Chile made in Chihuaha by Chilean director Miguel Littín (who also made films in Nicaragua). This is a dark film about labor and organizing – along the lines of I Compagni, La Venganza, Ådalen 31, or Blood on the Land. As I've noted before, this topic was an important conversation in cinema across the globe, as you can see by the range of locations in these titles – movies coming from Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Greece respectively.  

Actas de Marusia also is clear to mark the racism/colonialism that fuels this violence. The soldiers see themselves as killing Indios, not Chileans like themselves. 

Finally, Actas de Marusia is also about contemporary violence in Chile in the mid-1970s; it includes torture sequences that seemed to me to reference Pinochet. There's even an intriguing moment where the military men talk about how they're being funded by the U.S. government! In any case, this film is epic. It's extraordinarily made, it must have cost a fortune, and its politics are decidedly leftist and anti-racist.

Mahogany (1975)

This movie is iconic. Diana Ross looks incredible in every single scene in the film. She's dressed fabulously, and she is every inch the dynamic movie story. Ross is absolutely a joy to watch. Mohogany is campy, obviously, but goddamn is it perfect! There's even a scene in which she drunkenly yells I'm a winner, baby at Billy Dee Williams, a phrase RuPaul quotes constantly on her show. Understandably. We should all be quoting this film. And Miss Ross did the fashions herself? Come through. Legend.

The Magic Flute (1975)

Trollflöjten is a simultaneously weird and breathtaking Magic Flute. It feels totally un-Bergman, but there are also some gorgeous moments, particularly the quiet scenes off-stage between acts one and two. The costumes are also very cool, and the art direction is lovely.

Donkey Skin (1970)

Peau d'Ane (Donkey Skin) is insanely whimsical. The art direction and costume design alone are enough of a reason to watch this Jacques Demy take on a Grimms Fairy Tale. The costumes are iconic and wonderful, and that may be all that anyone needs to know about this weird film.

Night Moves (1975)

Night Moves is trying to do the kind of neo-noir thing that Chinatown did so very well and that was imitated (also in 1975) by Farewell, My Lovely. The latter is probably slightly better than Night Moves (mostly because of a superb performance by Sylvia Miles), but Night Moves tries hard and it has a good script. Jennifer Warren, who hasn't really made many movies since this one (and is kind of a poor man's Jane Fonda) is really quite good in Night Moves, and so is Gene Hackman, of course. Still, this movie never really gets going in any real way. It feels sort of stalled the whole time, as though it's waiting for something exciting to happen but nothing materializes.

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

I really disliked The Sunshine Boys, and if I'm honest, I'm not quite sure why I watched it. I generally like Neil Simon – I at least think his shtick is funny, but that is not true of The Sunshine Boys. Where are the jokes? This film is just grumpy old men crabbing at one another as an exasperated (but always cute) Richard Benjamin tries to wrangle them. Walter Matthau was nominated for Best Actor for this and George Burns (and this is insane) won a Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in this. His performance is almost nonexistent. I tell you I am baffled.

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

Farewell, My Lovely is a kind of copycat Chinatown without – it seems to me, at least, any stakes. In the first place, Robert Mitchum is doing a voice-over, and he tells us way more than we need instead of the filmmaker just showing us. Sylvia Miles is excellent in a small role, but this mostly never picks up any momentum, even when Sylvester Stallone is murdering a lesbian madam in a Hollywood cathouse.

The Man Who Would Be King

This came very highly recommended. Someone – I forget who – told me years ago that this was his favorite film.

But I don't know. Watching two drunks (Caine and Connery) make fun of the military and the government of the British Raj was funny, but watching these same two assholes become kings in Kafiristan did not inspire affection or even, if I am perfectly frank, interest.

Plus, The Man Who Would Be King has a bit of a strange narrative frame that I didn't really understand, so when we returned to that after the main narrative, the film's ending left me totally cold.