The Year in Review: 1972

Summary: I rashly predicted that 1971 would end up as the strongest year of the Boffo project, but 1972 quickly proved me wrong. With four 10 ratings and a conspicuous lack of genuine stinkers, 1972 rode all-time great The Godfather to an insanely high 7.53 Boffo per-week average (see below). Part of the glory of 1972 was that the top-rated films were also among the most popular: Fully 23 weeks saw a 10-rated 1972 release at the top of the list.

(0058) The Getaway

December 31, 1972 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A brutal thrill ride.

What did I get? Is The Getaway a brilliant jape, a comedy so black it masquerades as a niftily shot thriller about a busted heist? A movie that gives every principal the finger, with a leading man whose pointlessly staunch affect anticipated the stardom of Leslie Nielsen by nearly a decade? Sadly, I think not — although there are occasional glimmers of such a possibility, which admittedly is a delicious one. Assuming it isn’t, then The Getaway is best understood as a diseased movie, a polished morsel of cynical entertainment injected with a healthy heaping of bile.

(0057) Jeremiah Johnson

December 24, 1972 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A strong “new” western of the 1970s type, possibly emphasizing pacifism or nature or something.

What did I get? I am fond of both Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford, truly, but my expectations for them have a strict upper limit. In that spirit, I expected Jeremiah Johnson to be a stimulating nature-western, but well short of greatness. So I was not prepared for the accomplished and resonant movie that Jeremiah Johnson is. Without reexamining their respective resumes, it surely ranks among the best movie either man has ever made.

(0056) The Poseidon Adventure

December 17, 1972 | 6 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A big, tacky, star-studded adventure about an ocean liner.

What did I get? With The Poseidon Adventure, we are firmly in the era of the disaster movie. Yes, there was Airport, but Airport was more of a stalwart melodrama in which the “disaster” was merely one of a number of elements. It’s impossible to summarize Airport in a coherent sentence, but you can express everything about The Poseidon Adventure in four words: A big ship capsizes. A hair better than Airport, it’s still overweeningly earnest and saturated in sodden silliness.

(0055) 1776

November 12, 1972 | 4 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A starchy, prosaic musical about our Founding Fathers.

What did I get? Two friends of mine recently mentioned in passing that they just cannot watch 1776. I take this to mean that, regarded purely as a musical, it’s far from anything special. Musicals are supposed to be buoyant, to transport, to elevate; even I can glean that 1776 by this measure is pretty clunky. The limitations of the songs are plain to see (hear) and it does traffic in an inexcusable quotient of tedium, but I confess that I find it a difficult movie to dislike. It appeals to my starchy, prosaic mind, I reckon.

(0054) Lady Sings the Blues

October 15, 1972 | 5 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? An enervating Billie Holliday biopic.

What did I get? Lady Sings the Blues has an unusual mix of strengths and weaknesses. At once exploitative and heartfelt, penetrating and glib, it lurched into new territory for black audiences, possibly with more filmmaking polish on hand than they realized. So despite the movie’s rather high quality, it was obliged to rely on strategies that are beneath it, and the whole isn’t really convincing. Lady might be most profitably approached as a pure work of fiction — by leaving the historical Billie out of it. Then it becomes a credible and resonant tableau of the black entertainment world in the 1930s and 1940s.

(0053) Sounder

October 1, 1972 | 2 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A heartbreaking story of racial injustice, or something. With a dog.

What did I get? A confession: It took me a couple of viewings to really “get” Sounder. The self-consciously “virtuous” nature of the story of a struggling, African-American sharecropper family in the South set my teeth on edge right off the bat, for I instinctively resented the overt manipulation of being made to feel obliged, for reasons of political correctness, to gush about a movie that didn’t really excite me too much. However, if you can manage to clear your head of racial politics, as I eventually did, what’s left is a gentle and beautifully told story.

(0052) Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)

August 13, 1972 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? A sketch movie by and with Woody Allen, with varying results.

What did I get? Comedy depends on surprise, so comedy tends to date. The problem is actually worse than that — since comedy has the effect of discombobulating our pompous, complacent selves, really potent comedies often make themselves obsolete. If a comedy does its job too well, it renders widely held pieties ridiculous and unimaginable, unfortunately denying to posterity the possibility of understanding why a given gag once possessed the spring mechanism needed to achieve its effects. As a buffet of morsels, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) hasn’t aged particularly well, but it was once a satisfying smorgasbord.

(0051) Deliverance

August 6, 1972 | 7 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? A harrowing drama about a boating trip gone awry.

What did I get? The only canonical man-rape movie, Deliverance is also the ultimate men’s masterpiece. Women might be exempt from its charms — I’d love to hear some female perspectives on this — but for the Y chromosome set at least, it cuts so deep and is so economical about its subject matter that it almost plays unfair, targeting an emotional place most movies won’t go. On their own merits, the core events of the movie flirt with exploitation or even slander; the overarching theme of man’s wanton destruction of the river valley transforms Deliverance into a penetrating (sorry) and wise work of art.

(0050) Fat City

July 30, 1972 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? I had no clue what this movie is about.

What did I get? I’d heard Fat City touted before; in the context of John Huston’s long and illustrious career, it seemed a curio, an outlier. It is startling how thoroughly Huston, an old master of the studio system, was able to absorb the bracing, risky tenets of the New Cinema emerging at that very moment. Set in unglamorous Stockton, California, Fat City is an exquisitely undemonstrative and unsentimental character study of two semipro boxers as low in the rankings as they are on the social scale. It feels even more finely observed and “true-to-life” than, say, Five Easy Pieces; indeed, had someone insisted to me that Bob Rafelson had directed it, I would’ve bought it in a heartbeat.