Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

Holy shit! Looking for Mr. Goodbar is pretty incredible. It’s so intense and intriguing. It’s a fascinating character study and a pretty extraordinary portrait of female freedom amid a deeply misogynist world. It also has truly great performances from Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Tuesday Weld, William Atherton, and Tom Berenger. 

 The ending is… shocking and kind of insane and I feel completely stunned. 

 Honestly this is good. I know a movie like this could basically not be made today, but that’s what makes it so interesting. I am not at all sure why Goodbar is out of print, but you can't find it streaming anywhere and it's never been released on DVD.

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Well, Smokey and the Bandit is a delight from start to finish. I loved the screenplay. I loved Jackie Gleason. I loved all of the car stunts. I had a great time. And this is so funny.

A Little Night Music (1977)

I frequently complain about today's Hollywood musicals and frequently say how much better they were a long time ago. But... I am not sure the 1970s was the time when they were better. Harold Prince's 1977 version of Sondheim's A Little Night Music is rather flat. In the first place, it stars Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Rigg, neither of whom can sing, and in the second place the whole thing is filmed without miuch energy. I suppose this makes sense for the deflated egos of a majority of the characters but even the upbeat songs feel slow as captured by Prince's languid camera and the milky lighting that is such a hallmark of the 1970s. The costumes are gorgeous, but the film really could have been livened up by more interesting production design. Len Cariou feels as though he is on his game, and he and Laurence Guittard and Lesley-Anne Down – all three of whom are in good voice – seem to know that they're in a comedy, but... well maybe it's Prince that is trying to make something other than a comedy. The comic scenes just don't really work here. 

Or perhaps it's Taylor's fault. She plays the whole film in much the same way – it's a rather sad and desperate performance. It's even very moving when she gets to "Send in the Clowns", despite her inability to sing the song. But she doesn't lean in to the character's schemes or her silliness, and if she calls for clowns she never lets us laugh at her. She asks only for pity.

I want to say something about the theatrical frame that Prince gives to the whole thing. We begin in a nineteenth-century Austrian theatre, and the story is introduced to us onstage before we move in and find ourselves in the real world. We end onstage as well, and the actors take bows as the credits roll. This is a fine device, and Ingmar Bergman himself (A Little Night Music is based on a film of his) had used it just two years earlier for his film of The Magic Flute. But Prince does nothing at all with this theatrical frame. We never return to it in the course of the movie. The characters never talk directly to us; the falseness of it all never breaks through. In Bergman's Flute, for example, we spend a short intermission with the actors, who smoke silently or play checkers or flirt. It's a stunning little section in that film. In A Little Night Music we get nothing like this, and there is no point at all to the frame except perhaps to remind us that the entire thing might have been better onstage.

I read on Wikipedia that reviews of this film were mostly negative and that critics made a lot of hay about Elizabeth Taylor's apparently wildly fluctuating weight from scene to scene. I saw none of this. She looked great throughout the film. These critics perhaps proved one of the central theses of A Little Night Music: that men are pigs, and that an older man easily thinks himself entitled to a younger woman while simultaneously imagining that an older woman is entitled to nothing. How dare they.

Tomorrow I'll Get Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977)

Zítra Vstanu a Opařím Se Čajem (Tomorrow I'll Get Up and Scald Myself with Tea) is an absurd time-travel comedy of errors that I found completely and totally hilarious. 

This movie involves a plot in which Nazis in the future have taken anti-aging pills to keep themselves young and now are going back to Germany in 1944 to take Hitler a Hydrogen bomb so he can win the war. In order to get back to 1944 they hijack a tourist time-travel vehicle that takes people back to various places in history for tours – things like going to see the dinosaurs or visiting Pompeii – but instead of going back to Waterloo they go back to Berlin in the 40s. 

This comedy of errors is compounded by the fact that everyone in the film doubles and triples as times get crossed. It's positively Shakespearean (or Plautine, depending on how far back you'd like to go in your theatre history).

Tomorrow I'll Get Up and Scald Myself with Tea is totally insane and I loved it.

House (1977)

Insanity. House (ハウス) is understandably a classic. It's like this film is from another planet altogether – or the mind of a child making up a story.

The Deep (1977)

While it is obviously true that the poster for The Deep rips off the poster for Jaws, and even though The Deep is based on a novel by Peter Benchley, the same novelist who wrote Jaws, and although The Deep stars Robert Shaw, who played the shark hunter Quint in Jaws, and while certainly that means that this 1977 film was attempting to capitalize on the 1975 masterpiece's success, The Deep really has nothing to do with the terror of the deep or the terror of the ocean as such, and it certainly isn't a monster movie like Jaws is.  

The Deep is just an action–adventure film. There are violent criminal villains, to be sure, but The Deep doesn't have any of the existential philosophy or stare-into-the-abyss poignancy of a more serious-minded film. And I don't say that as an insult in the least. This movie is an action movie, and it does its generic work fairly well. Nick Nolte is sexy and fun, and Jacqueline Bissett is more sexy and more fun. There's a terrifying moray eel, a great shark scene, and at least one really good fight sequence. I had a good time. 

It is also worth discussing the two rapes in this film. There are two sequences in The Deep that are filmed like rapes, and I think one of them is worth analyzing. Neither of them is a rape per se, but they both use the filmic language of rape (I analyze this language in my book The Violate Man, which, maybe will be published at some point, who knows – that's another story).

In the first of these sequences, Louis Gossett Jr., the film's villain kidnaps Nolte and Bissett and takes them to some little cabin. They search them for a little piece of glass that contains morphine or something (this is sort of immaterial), but it's a small piece of glass and so they're looking everywhere for this glass. They don't strip-search Nolte but they threaten to strip Bissett, and she is clearly terrified. When Gossett orders his henchmen to strip her, she defiantly says she will do it herself. We watch the sequence with a closeup on her face, a medium shot of her back as her brassiere comes off, and a shot of Nolte as he watches helplessly. In fact, the Nolte shot is a copy of a shot from Deliverance (1972), in which Jon Voight helplessly watches a violent man rape his friend. There is no rape here, but the camera doesn't show Bissett's breasts. In other words, the camera does not take the viewing position of the villain. We are not complicit with him in his activities. So what we see instead is the film's villain forcing Bissett to strip for him. He sees her breasts but we do not, and she is terrified. It's an emotional sequence, and then he tells her to put her clothes back on.

The problem with all of this is that we have already seen Jacqueline Bissett's breasts. They are, in fact, a showcase of the film's very long, silent, underwater opening sequence. We see them clearly through the tight white t-shirt she wears as she swims in the deep. (There was even a poster that featured them! I refuse to link it here, but you're free to Google it.) It's a stunningly sexy moment of near-nudity with which to open the movie, and it was one of the film's notable features upon its release. Producer Peter Guber has said that "that white t-shirt made me a rich man". What I think is interesting here is the way that the film actively frames the baring of breasts as an act of rape – and The Deep's citation of Deliverance makes that intention quite clear – in the context of a black man forcing this white woman to bare her breasts, while in the same film, the same actress bares her breasts for the audience, and this is understood as sexy, as titillation, and most importantly as non-violent. Now, of course, within the context of the movie itself, Bissett's character doesn't know she's being watched in the first sequence and is being treated violently in the second sequence, so all of this is understandable. But in the context of the film's performance it works differently. The narrative functions to make the audience's witnessing of her bare breasts into an innocuous, pleasurable act, and then the narrative functions to avoid identification with the black man who forces Bissett to perform the exact same action. One of these is shown to us as a racialized act of rape; the other one – the one in which we take part – we don't even notice.

The Spy Who Loved Me

If Barbara Bach had been a better actress, this movie would have worked much better. The chief villain, too, leaves a bit to be desired (he's not very scary), but his number one henchman is very strange, and so he is quite interesting, and The Spy Who Loved Me turns out to be a fun Bond movie, with a great Bond girl (as scripted), a killer theme song (but then, we already knew that) and plenty of fun travel.