Favourite films lists are inevitably slightly arbitrary.
Even your best-est film ever can be revisited so many times that fatigue sets in,
and it begins to lose its lustre. Or, a picture you once loved no longer seems
all that. And vice versa. I thought I’d kick-off a run of annual Top 10s by beginning
with the year I winked into existence. Of course, this means that most of those
named from this decade will have been retrospectively seen. And the selection
process will also rely on recall of a number of pictures I may not have looked at in
two decades or more. It’s all very fallible. But also part of the fun. I’ve
been reading some of Pauline Kael’s reviews from the period lately, and one
refreshing thing is seeing her mauling of some films that are now sacred cows
(and bestowing honours on others that have been all-but forgotten). Certain
acclaimed movies will have failed to impress me, which may explain glaring
omissions from my list. Alternatively, I
simply might not have seen the thing.
1. A Fistful of Dynamite (AKA Duck! You Sucker)
The
story goes that Sergio Leone approved Giancarlo Santi, his assistant director,
to helm A Fistful of Dynamite but stars
James Coburn and Rod Steiger, who signed on believing the maestro would be
calling the shots, demanded he take charge. Whatever the precise nature of the
circumstances (it is also said the Peter Bogdanovich was first choice), this might
be the director’s most giddily enjoyable movie. Coburn is certainly the most
charismatic of Leone heroes, and Steiger’s Mexican bandit ploughs a furrow that
Eli Wallach trod before him (Wallach was offered Steiger’s role first).
Coburn’s IRA explosives expert is caught up in the Mexican Revolution but ends
up learning a thing or two from Steiger’s simple peasant. It’s a very funny
(the initial duelling between Coburn and Steiger recalls Eastwood and van Cleef
street gunplay in For a Few Dollars More)
and very sad picture, and a sterling buddy movie. It is also blessed with a
hilarious Ennio Morricone score (“Shon
shon shon shon”), interminable yet sublime slow motion flashbacks, and Antoine
Saint-John as a fearsome egg-sucking general.
CHOICE
LINES
Juan Miranda: I know what I am talking about when I am talking about
the revolutions. The people who read the books go to the people who can't read
the books, the poor people, and say, "We have to have a change." So,
the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books,
they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk
and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? They're
dead! That's your revolution. Shhh... So, please, don't tell me about revolutions!
And what happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!
2. Silent
Running
Douglas
Trumbull, the special effects star of 2001:
A Space Odyssey, delivers his directorial debut. It’s a
humanist/environmentalist message movie that couldn’t be further from Kubrick’s
clinical, impersonal vision. Bruce Dern, deservedly rising to the status of
leading man, is hippy gardener Freeman. He works in vast space greenhouses that
preserve the last of the Earth’s plant life. When the orders come to extinguish
even these preserves, Freeman takes drastic action. The film is steeped in the
era of its making, with Joan Baez’s mournful dirges straining over shots of
Bruce attuning with nature and attending the flora. But for all the
earnestness, the script pulls no punches in showing the fall-out of Freeman’s
choices on his mental health (which must have really messed with his diagnostic abilities, as a two-year old
could have solve the problem with his garden more quickly). Made on a low
budget, Silent Running continues to
impress visually, although some find its overt proselytising slightly
off-putting. Robot drones Huey, Dewey and Louie, are adorable, forerunners to
the mechanised anthropomorphism of R2D2 and Wall-E.
CHOICE
LINES
Freeman Lowell: On Earth, everywhere you go, the temperature is 75
degrees. Everything is the same; all the people are exactly the same. Now what
kind of life is that?
3. Play
It Again, Sam
This
may be the only Woody Allen classic he stars in but does not direct. And that’s
because he wrote the play on which his screenplay is based. Herbert Ross handles
megaphone duties competently (lest we forget, this is the man who served up My Blue Heaven), but it’s Allen’s words
and scenarios that deliver. This is Woody’s prototypical relationship comedy,
in which his hapless film critic, marooned by his departed wife, attempts to make
a go of the dating circuit. Combating his neuroses (Woody and neuroses go
together like peaches and cream) is his imaginary tutor in the ways of women; Humphrey
Bogart (a note-perfect, lip-clenching Jerry Lacy). There’s much amusement as
Allen (playing Allan) embarks on doomed meet-cutes (“Yeah, I’m fine. I snapped my chin down onto some guy’s fist and hit
another one in the nose with my knee”), but it’s when he falls for best
friend Dick’s (Tony Roberts) wife Linda (Diane Keaton) that the plot finds focus
and the Casablanca referencing
asserts itself. This is the first screen collaboration between the Allen/Keaton/Roberts
trio, although they had appeared in the stage version together. The piss-take
of the hard womanising Bogart persona is spot-on (“I never saw a dame yet that didn’t understand a good slap in the mouth
or a slug from a .45”) but elsewhere the film shows its age with
uncomfortable rape gags. Nevertheless, it’s one of Allen’s most consistently
funny affairs, filled with fantasy sequences and quotable lines (“You have the most… eyes I’ve ever seen”).
Allan: She was a lovely thing. I used to lay in bed at night
and watch her sleep. Once in a while she would wake up and catch me. She would
let out a scream.
4. The
Godfather
An
unassailable classic, such that there seems little point trying to say anything
brief but meaningful about it. I mean it in a good way when I say that the film
never seems quite as unsurpassable in my memory as does when I actually revisit
it. The Godfather is one of a handful
of the films that redefined popular cinema during the surrounding decade (a process
that had been gathering momentum since the release of Bonnie and Clyde five years earlier). It momentarily made the
gangster movie poetic and elegant, elevated Al Pacino to stardom, was nearly
the last time Brando could be bothered, and featured the most memorable equine
appearance since Mister Ed. And, for
a brief period, Francis Ford Coppola was the hottest director in Hollywood.
CHOICE LINES
Don Vito Corleone: A friend should always underestimate your virtues and
an enemy overestimate your faults.
5. The Offence
Sidney
Lumet’s most feted films during the ‘70s saw him pair with The Godfather’s crown prince, Al Pacino. But before that he made a
trio of features with one-time, two-time, three-time 007 Sean Connery. Two of
those are under seen gems. The Hill, released
at the height of his Bond-dom, saw
the Scot endure the punishments of a military prison. In The Offence he is a detective sergeant who tips over the edge while
interrogating Ian Bannen’s suspected child molester. It’s a gruelling
experience, much of it a two-hander between the actors, and it might be the
best performance of Connery’s career (his work during the early to mid-‘70s is generally
much underrated) as we realise the rage he reserves for Howard is a reflection
of the dark thoughts he nurses within. I’ve seen it suggested that Lumet somewhat
overcooks the imagery, but I ‘d argue that he renders the stark grey environment
and fractured mind-sets with consummate skill.
CHOICE LINES
Kenneth Baxter: Nothing I have done can be one
half as bad as the thoughts in your head.
6. Sleuth
There
isn’t a whole lot of levity on this list, but Joseph L Manckiewicz’s big screen
version of Anthony Schaffer’s play is the closest thing. Both a class comedy
and a dissection of the crime thriller genre, it’s also a highly enjoyable clash
between two wildly different acting styles; ultimate ham Laurence Olivier,
fittingly required to behave like an ultimate ham, and naturalistic Michael
Caine, called on to represent working class stock (less said about his
likeliness as the son of an Italian immigrant the better). Both actors received
Best Actor Oscar nominations for their troubles. Manckiewicz does nothing to
supress the theatrical tone, and accompanies it with a larky score from John
Addison. But this seems altogether appropriate to the knowing, playful plot of
deadly games as it self-consciously ensnares the viewer in multiple twists and
reveals.
CHOICE LINES
Andrew Wyke: There's nothing like a little bit of mayhem to cheer
one up.
7. Deliverance
John
Boorman’s survival movie is embedded in moviegoer consciousness by the sequence
that triggers events; Ned Beatty’s traumatic bout of pig-squealing (one need
only glance at the imdb boards to witness the way in which this has become a
celebrated cause of defensive knee-jerk male jokery). Even before that, the Duelling Banjos is more discussed than
the main thrust of the piece. Boorman inverts assumed roles as Burt Reynold’s
Alpha-Male finds himself incapacitated, leaving unlikely fellow businessman Jon
Voight to lead. It’s a claustrophobic movie, a horror film in all but genre
category, and one that preys on metropolitan fears of the depraved lawlessness lurking
in the wilds (Peckinpah was in territory not very far from this with Straw Dogs). There is a dread of unseen,
uncivilised forces poised to dispatch our protagonists at any moment. Boorman
revels in the ambiguity of these primal forces, such that the vow of the
survivors to keep events a secret cannot disguise that none of them have a full
picture of what happened. It also inspired every movie ending Brian De Palma
ever (there is only one).
Lewis: Sometimes you have to lose
yourself 'fore you can find anything.
8. Aguirre Wrath of God
Mad
Werner Herzog and madder Klaus Kinski team for the first time in this, loosely
based on fact, tale of incipient madness on a trip down the Amazon river. Ostensibly
we follows 16th century Spaniards on a quest for El Dorado, but the
focus quickly settles on the destructiveness of unrestrained power and
obsession. If Kinski’s Aguirre is compellingly deranged, this is simply because
Kinski himself is compellingly deranged. Herzog’s imagery is striking and
hallucinatory and feeds directly in another waterborne journey into insanity, Apocalypse Now.
CHOICE LINES
Aguirre: That man is a head taller than me. That may change.
9. The Candidate
An
early demonstration of Robert Redford’s political facility (he was an
uncredited producer on the project), The
Candidate finds his would-be senator transition from idealism to cynical
electioneering as the race for votes hots up. And then flips the perspective again.
Another 35 years would pass before a mainstream Hollywood satire tackled party
politics so shrewdly (Warren Beatty’s Bulworth,
with which this makes a fine double bill). It was written by political speechwriter
Jeremy Larner (he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar); director Michael
Ritchie had also worked on campaigns, so the insights into the marketing machine
and malleability of scruples are likely all first-hand. For a while there it
seemed that Redford would be making a sequel (during the late ‘90s) but it
seems to have got away from him.
CHOICE LINES
Bill McKay: So vote once, vote tuh-wice, for
Bill McKay... you middle-class honkies.
Solaris
Soviet
science fiction isn’t an especially prolific movie genre, but Andrei Tarkovsky’s
languorous epic is undoubtedly its foremost specimen (ironically, as the
director reportedly wasn’t that keen on the genre). It is oft lazily labelled
the Russian 2001. A psychologist
travels to a space station orbiting the titular ocean planet to investigate the
mental aberrations experienced by its crew. Less sci-fi-ey than the Stanislav
Lem novel on which it is based, Solaris
preoccupies itself with the human condition; it explores themes of perception,
memory, grief and the very philosophical underpinnings of our existence and
reality. If Tarkovsky could occasionally have done with an editor, crossing the
line from meditatory to bloated, Steven Soderbergh’s unnecessary remake accelerates
in the opposite direction and eschews the nuance and atmosphere. I’d more
vigorously recommend the director’s later return to the genre, Stalker, but if you have three hours and
concentration to spare this is well worth discovering.
CHOICE LINES
Dr. Snaut: We don't want to conquer space
at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want
a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish
position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man!
And then there were...
Best Picture Oscar
The Godfather
It won, of course. 10 nominations and three wins (Picture,
Brando, Adapted Screenplay).
Deliverance
Three nominations (Picture, Direction, Film Editing), but it
went home empty-handed.
Cabaret
The big winner, Bob Fosse’s musical has always left me a
little cold. Out of 10 nominations, it won eight (Director, Liza Minnelli as
Actress, Joel Grey as Supporting Actor, Adapted Score, Sound Mixing,
Cinematography, Film Editing).
Sounder
One I haven’t seen; a Depression-era drama starring Paul
Winfield and directed by Martin Ritt.
The Emigrants
Another that has passed me by; also a period drama, a Swedish
picture about émigrés to US in the 19th century. Curiously, it was
nominated as Best Foreign Language Film the year before (imagine the stink that
would cause now).
Top 10 US Box Office
1. The Godfather
2. The Poseidon Adventure
3. What’s Up, Doc?
4. Deliverance
5. Jeremiah Johnson
6. Cabaret
7. The Getaway
8. Lady Sings the Blues
9. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)
10. The Valachi Papers
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