Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
The closer we get to the decade in which I started watching movies as a live viewer (I do remember some movies from the 1970s in theaters, but very few ), the harder these choices are becoming. I had to exclude a lot of titles that would have made a broader top 10 or top 20 of the decade. Here are some of the titles I considered, but didn’t choose: Deliverance (1972), The Day of the Jackal (1973), The Exorcist (1973), Amarcord (1974), Chinatown (1974), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Jaws (1975), Nashville (1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s Men (1976), Taxi Driver (1976), Annie Hall (1977), Autumn Sonata (1978), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Star Wars (1977), and Midnight Express (1978). Now, let’s crack on with the final five.
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Stanley Kubrick’s cautionary tale looks at extremism on two faces of a coin. There are those who commit violence and those who punish for that violence. Whenever one side or the other goes to extremes, it can lead both to the behavior that starts the picture or to the behavior that ends it. From one extreme to the other, the audience is guided through Alex DeLarge’s (Malcolm McDowell) journey from ultra-violent punk to government experiment through a program designed to remove all violent thought from the criminal’s mind.
Kubrick’s film was the second film with an X-rating ever nominated for an Oscar. It would also be the last. The violence, both physical and sexual, is intense and it’s no surprise the film carried that rating or that it was banned in several nations, including Kubrick’s adopted home of the United Kingdom. It’s intensely written, visually stunning, and presents fascinating commentary on the desire to alter others’ behavior to the point of using the most criminal behaviors to do something equally criminal. For while Alex is extremely violent in his actions, the tortures inflicted on him as part of the brainwashing process might be even more horrific.
Cries and Whispers (1972)
Some directors start their creative output so strongly that their latter years are littered with disappointments. Ingmar Bergman was one of that rare lot whose films either stayed at the same level of quality their entire careers or improved. Cries and Whispers might well be his greatest late-career work with Autumn Sonata a close second. The film is a melancholy look at a family whose internal distance and lack of emotional cohesiveness has driven them each towards questionable actions.
As they reflect on their misdeeds as their sister Agnes (Harriet Anderssen) lay dying, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann) individually and in tandem discuss the coldness of their own lives and the miserable events that have characterized them. What lays unsaid between them is that their distant mother fostered in each of the siblings a sense of detached isolationism that may lay at the heart of all of their issues. It takes Agnes’ maid Anna (Kari Sylwan) to show them what genuine companionship can look like, but they are perhaps too old and removed from their lives for it to have much impact. Bergman’s film is draped in fiery reds as a symbolic counterpoint to the characters’ withdrawn attitudes. Each actor gives perhaps the best performance of their storied careers in one of the great Swedish films of the 1970s.
The Godfather (1972)
Speaking of directors whose late careers were marred by disappointment, Francis Ford Coppola had a great start with films like The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather, Part II, and Apocalypse Now, but who hasn’t given audiences a genuinely great film in over three decades. The Godfather was an auspicious attempt to modernize the once-popular mob drama. By blending the kinds of epic, generation-spanning narratives that David Lean popularized and applying them to the sprawling tale of the Corleones, Coppola created an all-time great film.
Marlon Brando plays the head of the Corleone crime family whose decision to put his son Michael (Al Pacino) in charge has a deleterious effect on their operations. Brando, Pacino, and James Caan have the largest roles in the film and each deliver career-defining performances. It was unexpectedly symbolic as a passing of the torch between one of the greatest actors of his generation, Brando, to one of the greatest actors of his generation, Pacino. The lavish sets and period costumes helped pull audiences into the opulent and dangerous world of organized crime while Nino Rota’s wonderful score underlines the film in a moving and evocative way. There are few elements to this film that couldn’t be considered perfect and that includes setting up the perfect follow-up in the similarly near-perfect sequel The Godfather, Part II.
Suspiria (1977)
It’s easy to make the connection between Coppola’s genre-redefining instant classic The Godfather and Dario Argento’s horror-redefining genre piece Suspiria. While Coppola’s career was just ramping up, Argento’s seemed to be hitting its crescendo. The Italian giallo master built on a strong career in the niche subgenre prior to releasing this film, which exists as a perfect embodiment of that subgenre and the future influence it would have on horror from filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven.
The film follows a young dancer (Jessica Harper) arriving at a prestigious German ballet academy where strange occurrences begin to unravel the the viewer’s sanity as the film progresses. While the viscera was kept to a minimum, the film was awash in reds, drenching the scenery with a harsh and urgent visual tone. Add in the music by Goblin and the film was a haunting, frightening film. The minimalism was a clear inspiration on John Carpenter’s Halloween where music and tension were built organically rather than through a use of an excess of blood. While it might not be as influential as some of the other 70s horror flicks, it certainly deserves its reputation as a genre classic.
Alien (1979)
Redefining a medium is a challenge and few directors have successfully done so. The 1970s were characterized by numerous filmmakers refining their chosen genres and turning in exemplary work. Steven Spielberg, Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Carpenter, and Argento were able to refine what could be done with the medium. Add to that list Ridley Scott. Sci-fi-horror as a combination genre had been the purview of B-movies for much of its existence. A few minor examples exist, but it wasn’t until Scott’s Alien that both science fiction and horror got new tools for their arsenal of frightening and challenging the audience over the next two decades.
Alien is set in the future when space travel has been perfected, and human stasis enabled crews to travel vast distances with minimal input into ship operations. An unusual transmission from a nearby moon awakens the astronauts and they go to investigate only to discover a strange alien creature that infects its host and ultimately invades their spacecraft. The film stars Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto as the crew of the Nostromo. Whether you suffer from claustrophobia or, this film will certainly amp up your anxiety of what is to come with the frightening situations keeping viewers on the edge of their seats. This film would launch Scott into the stratosphere where he’d burnish his sci-fi bona fides with Blade Runner, but for sci-fi and horror fans, this film is one of the greats.
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