ILX Best Films of the 1970s

it also seems kind of snide and condescending, like altman wanted to make a renoir-style ensemble film but completely lacked renoir's wit and generosity.

>The President's Analyst

late '60s.

(Network is my #6.)

Yeah, this is one of my favorite movies.

The speculative fiction line i totally agree w/ also, though it's brilliant (to me) b/c it never verges on impossibility or the territory that sci-fi works with...honestly, i am again and again hard-pressed to come up with a smarter screenplay ever written (hyperbole, but you get the idea).

Yes, all the women in the first "Godfather" -- Kay, Mama, the topless Sicilian bride -- are pretty much stick figures, which is one reason men love the movie so much.

Because ppl were just so damn shallow til Reagan was elected?

>long before we had a disdain for TV news<

Sorry, TV news was held in contempt by many literate folk loooong before Network.

Jonathan Rosenbaum hits about the right median, I think, esp re its misogyny:

Good campy fun from the combined talents of Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet; Chayefsky was apparently serious about much of this shrill, self-important 1976 satire about television, interlaced with bile about radicals and pushy career women, and so were some critics at the time.

1970
M*A*S*H
Tristana
Walkabout

1971
Death in Venice
The Last Picture Show

1972
Aguirre, Wrath of God
Cabaret
Deliverance
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
The Godfather
Solaris
Viskningar och Rop

1973
Badlands
Day for Night
Don’t Look Now
Mean Streets

1974
Chinatown
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
The Godfather Part II
Lacombe, Lucien

1975
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Picnic at Hanging Rock

1976
All the President’s Men
Network
Taxi Driver

1977
Annie Hall
Star Wars

1978
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Days of Heaven
The Driver
The Marriage of Maria Braun

1979
Alien
Being There
Manhattan
The Tin Drum

Quite an idiosyncratic list there -- the only Altman being MASH? (which is a dumb football comedy for most of its last third)

i don't want to privilege the CW too much, but when you're contrarian about the most C of the CW and without any attendant explanatory content, you appear to disrespect criticism and audience.

I think Rosenbaum is usually otm (though I'm not quite in the same place as him politically or aesthetically), and I don't completely discount the criticisms of Network - an adolescent favorite that I never regarded as taking itself more seriously than it does on its face (hello? "sybil the soothsayer"?) - but those who are quick to criticize its misogyny I think are missing that 1) Faye Dunaway's gender is not the second or even the third most important element of her character (but what, they should add another man to the cast? and write out the love interest?), and 2) the movie spends a fair amount of time viewing her through the eyes of an older man with whom it does not entirely sympathize

he's the most annoying film critic in america. i can't think of anyone else who's so utterly humorless about the movies he doesn't like.

Basically, Kay is just The Girl. All the women get more spine in II (FFC even turns 'his' sister into a Borgia by III), but Molly Haskell remarked on the movie's chavinist appeal at the time.

Critics who are offended by films that are mistaken for good / great impress me. (Another disser of The Godfather: Stanley Kauffmann.)

"When The Godfather measured its grand finale of murder against the liturgy of baptism, Coppola seemed mesmerized by the trick, and its nihilism. A Bunuel, by contrast, might have made that sequence ironic and hilarious. But Coppola is not long on those qualities and he could not extricate himself from the engineering of scenes. The identiication with Michael was complete and stricken."

The baptism/slaughter sequence is sledgehammer-obvious, but brilliantly edited. If you're looking for irony (tho not Bunuelian), that's where "Goodfellas" comes in.

Kauffmann was particularly dismissive of Brando tho ("pudding in his cheeks... moves stiffly... hailed as great acting").

Anyway, I don't think of multi-Oscared movies like these when I think of '70s cinema (Godfather II aside).

1. The Creeping Flesh (dir. Freddie Francis, 1973)
2. The Optimists of Nine Elms (dir. Anthony Simmons, 1974)
3. Chinatown (dir. Roman Polanski, 1974)
4. House of Mortal Sin (dir. Pete Walker, 1975)
5. Radio On (dir. Christopher Petit, 1979)
6. The Shout (dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978)
7. The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973)
8. Breaking Away (dir. Peter Yates, 1979)
9. Death Line (dir. Gary Sherman, 1972)
10. Get Carter (dir. Mike Hodges, 1971)
11. Picnic at Hanging Rock (dir. Peter Weir, 1975)
12. O Lucky Man! (dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1973)
13. Eskimo Nell (dir. Martin Campbell, 1974)
14. Sweeney! (dir. David Wickes, 1976)
15. Jubilee (dir. Derek Jarman, 1977)
16. 10 Rillington Place (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1970)
17. Walkabout (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1971)
18. House of Whipcord (dir. Pete Walker, 1974)
19. The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
20. Eraserhead (dir. David Lynch, 1977)

You will note something of an anglocentric bias (I am at the moment working on a dissertation on British cinema of the seventies), and an attempt to broaden the sort of films getting in. It's more of a favourite than necessarily a 'best' list, but certainly strongly felt. There are some very underrated films, awaiting rediscovery, in this decade... and plenty of emphasis in the twenty above upon corruption and collapse. The 'devil's decade', indeed. Something of an Indian Summer for British horror, I would argue... which very sadly petered out mid-way through the 1970s.

"Network"... good film, certainly, but rather flawed. I mainly remember it for Peter Finch, who is marvellous; reminds me, I need to see "Sunday Bloody Sunday".