March 12, 1972 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? Honestly, a misfire. Something like High Anxiety, maybe.

What did I get? Wow. Just— wow. What’s Up, Doc? clocks in as the biggest surprise of the Boffo project thus far, by a wide margin. I’m not crazy about Barbra Streisand, I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for Peter Bogdanovich’s previous movie, The Last Picture Show, and the whole idea of a screwball comedy set in the early ’70s…. well, I wasn’t optimistic. But I must give Bogdanovich and the cast and the screenwriters their due: This movie is a wonder to behold.

What’s Up, Doc? recapitulates the Hepburn/Grant dynamic of Bringing Up Baby, but Bogdanovich and Co. wisely chose not to mimic any of the particulars of Hawks’s masterpiece. Predicated on four identical plaid suitcases vitally important to four different parties, the plot is much closer to traditional farce, albeit one that spills out into the vertiginous boulevards of San Francisco. The script, by Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton, shows impressive quality control in the dialogue (always snappy and clever) and in the logistics of the four bags, and Bogdanovich apparently didn’t let the exacting nature of the material bog him down. Those who’ve seen Bogdanovich’s 1992 attempt at farce, Noises Off, are familiar with the ways that a farce, even one that works so gloriously on the stage, can became a joyless exercise primarily about actors hitting their marks. Miraculously, What’s Up Doc? shows not the slightest trace of this problem.

What’s Up Doc? is a testament to the importance of follow-through. A lot of comedies start with a fever pitch of hectic hysteria, and then either the energy lags or it stays sky-high and becomes irritating. What’s Up Doc? has three or four extended set pieces of hilarity and maybe a half-dozen smaller scenes mostly involving Streisand’s mischievous verbal mayhem — in every case, the scenes cash in on the expectations they set up, and the movie has remarkable sustain. There isn’t a single scene that seems overlong, or out of place, or forced, or off-balance — even though the whole movie is about being off-balance. The last set piece, a loooong car chase through San Francisco, is simply a marvel — several times I gasped in admiration or surprise.

Streisand is charming, witty, sassy, unruly — very, very good in the role. I especially like that, even though Streisand’s Judy occupies the role of the daffy, dizzy dame, Judy’s gimmick is that she’s spent her life being expelled from various universities, so she’s studied archeology, veterinary medicine, advanced geology, and so forth; her edge over people is unexpected resources of knowledge. Perhaps this was a reaction to women’s lib, but whatever the reason, it’s a wonderful conceit and runs counter to the Jean Arthur strain of screwball comedy, which wouldn’t have worked as well in 1972. Ryan O’Neal, as Howard the Iowan musicologist, has just the right air of stifled exasperation and also the physicality for the role — he’s surprisingly like Cary Grant’s paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby, which is definitely the right aspiration to shoot for. O’Neal and Streisand work together wonderfully, and Madeline Kahn, as Howard’s fiancee Eunice, is a fabulous foil. I kind of love Madeline Kahn here, her Eunice is deliciously put-upon, but it doesn’t make you cringe. Her howls and squeaks of agitation or barely suppressed rage show phenomenal control, nuance, and variety.

What here smacks of 1971?  Well, plenty. Streisand’s garb, the interior of the San Francisco airport, Streisand’s “strong” personality seems quite in keeping with the times, in a way that Hepburn’s may not have (Hepburn also shrewdly underplayed the role at certain moments).

IMDB score: 7.6

My score: 9

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Writers: Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton

Starring: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn, Austin Pendleton, Michael Murphy, Kenneth Mars, Phil Roth, Sorrell Booke, Stefan Gierasch, Mabel Albertson, Liam Dunn, John Hillerman, Randy Quaid, M. Emmet Walsh

IMDB synopsis: Two researchers have come to San Francisco to compete for a research grant in Music. One seems a bit distracted, and that was before he meets her. A strange woman seems to have devoted her life to confusing and embarassing him. At the same time a woman has her jewels stolen and a government whistle blower arrives with his stolen top secret papers. All, of course have the same style and color overnight bag.

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February 13, 1972 | 4 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A really good musical about the Nazis.

What did I get? If anything, I underestimated it. Cabaret is a fantastic movie, every bit as good as its reputation. I’ve always had an aversion to Cabaret, its pretensions to seriousness, its apparent reveling in kicky perversity… the whole thing never appealed to me at all. I knew it was about the rise of the Nazis, but it never occurred to me that it could have anything worthwhile to say about the subject. Boy, was I wrong about that.

For one thing, the movie is structured quite differently than I had supposed. I had assumed that the movie was really about the cabaret, the Kit Kat Club, and that the Nazi stuff was essentially local color, albeit of the most world-historical sort. It was about (so I imagined) this sinister and seductive “Emcee,” played by Joel Grey, who, simpering and vamping, lures Sally Bowles, full of the inexplicable hopes common to starlets, into some den of iniquity — prostitution, drugs, or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. What makes the movie so fascinating and original is that it’s really a straight drama about Nazi Germany, studded with these musical numbers, all of which (with one very notable exception) take place at the club, which properly speaking has little to do with the plot at all. Nothing of any importance ever takes place in the club, except the musical numbers, which are there to comment on the drama and (while we’re at it) chillingly remind us of the tragedy inherent in the eventual fate of these supposedly “worldly” and “naughty” and “knowing” Weimar scenesters, all of whom turned out to be as woefully naive as everyone else — innocent, even. Now that is a mean trick for a mere “musical” to pull off.

If the whole idea of Grey’s “Emcee” repelled me, so too Liza. The very qualities that make her so effective as Sally and that cemented her star status — a certain overripe vulgarity, shall we say — are not ones that appeal to me much, and in all honesty they still don’t. But she is very well cast in Cabaret, and she did a terrific job. It sort of bugs me that “Sally Bowles” is such an ineffably British name, they so clearly altered her nationality to suit Minnelli’s abilities. But it’s not important, she’s excellent in the role. Given that I don’t instinctively like Sally or the Emcee, I suppose I identify with the diffident, intellectual Brian (Michael York).

Cabaret is the most mature and probing musical I have ever seen, by far, and the best demonstration of this is the beer garden scene. As I said earlier, all of the musical numbers but one are almost hermetically sealed within the Kit Kat Club, the poison in their satiric barbs powerless in the face of History, capital H and all. But one song does not happen in the club and is not orchestrated by the Emcee. It’s a small scene, in a way, but so powerful — Liza and her pals, out in the German countryside, devil-may-care, stop in at a moderately crowded beer garden. It’s a lazy weekend afternoon, and plenty of beer and Schweinsbraten (or something) has already been consumed. A fresh-faced young man rises and begins to sing what is clearly a German Volkslied of some sort — mind you, given that this is an American movie, he’s singing in English. The song is lovely, and unmistakably German (even as sung in English), and appropriately stirring, and eventually it coalesces into the sinister (under the circumstances) refrain “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” By song’s end, every patron in the garden (except for our protagonists) is standing and singing along, in beautiful, chilling harmony. The young man is finally revealed as a member of Hitler Youth, and he caps the song off with a Heil Hitler salute.

Let me say: my name is Schneider, my father came from Swiss stock, my mother was born in Austria, during the war. I myself have lived in Austria, been to Mitteleuropa countless times. I visited Austria just a few months ago. To say that I’ve given the German identity some thought would be putting it mildly, and I likewise have noticed the American tendency to lampoon German-ness, to make a stock villian of warlike or humorless Germans, to imply that somehow the Nazi era explains everything one needs to know about Germany. I’m not crazy about these simplifications, often meant humorously. And yet (to say the least) events have certainly established that there is plenty of proximate cause for such broad, even crass dismissals of Germans, Germany, German-ness.

Having said all of that, I must now assert that I have never seen an American movie address the question of what exactly was behind the rise of the Nazis with as much intelligence and delicacy as Cabaret, especially in that exquisite beer garden scene. It would have been so easy, so crowd-pleasing, to depict ordinary Germans of the 1930s as the stock villains we all know them to be — but Cabaret doesn’t go that route. Instead, it tries, honestly, bravely, ambitiously, to depict the positive, attractive pull the Nazi ethos must have had on ordinary Germans. As I said earlier, for a “musical” to attempt such a feat — it floors me. Bravo.

Even on its own natural terrain, in the relationship between Sally and Brian, the final scenes show precisely the same maturity, frankness, and intelligence, so seldom seen in American movies, or any movies for that matter. I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that the movie never stops treating Brian and Sally as fully rounded human beings, attempting quite successfully to depict what they would actually do, if they existed, as opposed to “movie characters” who are required by the plot to do this or that.

In an odd way, Cabaret has some striking similarities to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Surely someone’s commented on this before, it’s so obvious. Both movies are set in the early 1930s, albeit in very different locations. Both movies feature a vaguely sinister emcee figure. In both the songs are an ironic comment on the drama, which touches on the desperate yearnings of ordinary folks in hard times. Just real similar, somehow. In my view, Cabaret shows up the flaws of Horses, its oversimplified, haranguing picture of human nature. Which isn’t a knock on Horses, it’s a terrific movie too, it’s just a bit obvious sometimes. Cabaret, on the other hand, never lacks for nuance.

What here smacks of 1972?  Fosse’s choreography — indeed, his sensibility.

IMDB score: 7.8

My score: 10

Director: Bob Fosse

Writer: Jay Presson Allen

Starring: Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Joel Grey, Fritz Wepper, Marisa Berenson

IMDB synopsis: Sally Bowles, an American singer in 1930s Berlin, fall in love with bi-sexual Brian. They are both then seduced by Max, a rich playboy. Sally becomes pregnant, and Brian offers to marry her… All the characters are linked by the Kit-Kat club, a nightspot where Sally sings.

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January 30, 1972 | 3 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? A comical heist movie.

What did I get? The Hot Rock is sort of the Ocean’s 11 of 1972. A heist movie whose comic elements tend to sap the movie of its tension, it has an uneasy relationship to the “gritty 1970s New York” school of movies of which it must be counted a part. It’s “gritty” only because New York is gritty; the movie could have been moved to Tampa or Denver intact. The Hot Rock traffics in most of the countercultural tropes of the time without seeming to understand any of them — or care, much. The four guys who perpetrate the crimes dress down, have shaggy hair, and never sweat the details of the jobs we see them undertake. They qualify as antiheroes only insofar as there’s nothing heroic about any of them.

The idea of The Hot Rock is that, having successfully executed the diamond heist for which an African diplomat has hired them, our felonious foursome is obliged to commit further break-ins in different locales, as the diamond finds its way around the city. It’s a setup that seems to play into the counterculture’s supposed affection for “losers” — we root for them as they fail and fail again. The book was written by Donald Westlake, whose Dortmunder novels are heavy on shaggy wit; compare Gregory McDonald’s Fletch series or the works of Carl Hiassen. This kind of story mostly works better on the printed page, as anyone who’s seen Fletch Lives or Striptease will surely attest. (Admittedly, Michael Ritchie made it work quite marvelously in Fletch.)

To some degree, the movie’s flabby sense of rhythm might be the fault of Robert Redford, as Dortmunder; I’d wager he regarded this as a breezy little project that wouldn’t do his image any harm. (He was right.) Redford, an actor I find compulsively watchable, uses his trick of flaring his nostrils for “intensity,” but here he’s a cipher. The Hot Rock opens with his release from prison (he is a serial planner of heists), but you never believe for a nanosecond that he’s ever spent any time in prison; he looks like he’s ready to be photographed in an advertising spread.

As an actor, Redford’s greatest asset is that he’s endlessly legible. He was a “movie star” for urbane people who read good novels (or at least good spy novels, close enough); it’s no coincidence that his reign as box-office gold happened during American cinema’s most intellectual and ambitious period. His three co-conspirators can be described without much distortion as “three Jews” (George Segal, Ron Liebman, and Paul Sand), which I note only because such casting would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier, and the trio’s juxtaposition with the WASPy Redford eventually comes to seem an unconscious leitmotif, or comment, or something. The movie’s big star turn belongs to Zero Mostel, whose name in the credits is appended with “as Abe Greenberg”; other than that, the movie never comments on the distinctly Jewish feel to the cast. Segal is fluent in his own way, but, much as in The Owl and the Pussycat, to ambiguous effect. Liebman and Sand are a good deal more entertaining.

What here smacks of 1972? The sprightly saxophone score.

IMDB score: 6.7

My score: 6

Director: Peter Yates

Writer: William Goldman

Starring: Robert Redford, George Segal, Ron Leibman, Moses Gunn, Zero Mostel, Paul Sand, William Redfield, Topo Swope, Charlotte Rae, Robert Weil, Christopher Guest

IMDB synopsis: Dr. Amusa approaches Dortmunder about a valuable gem in a museum that is of great signifigance to his people in Africa, stolen during colonial times. Dortmunder assembles a crack team of cat burglars and hatches an elaborate plan for stealing the gem. Despite their care and experience, circumstances and plain bad luck keep the gem just out of their reach.

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January 16, 1972 | 2 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A western, about cowboys. In other words, not much to go on here.

What did I get? Ah, now I see! The title, “The Cowboys,” in a bit of wordplay that doesn’t quite work, is meant to throw the emphasis on “boys.” Because it’s all about preadolescent ranchers, you see. But “cowboys” doesn’t mean “ranchers who are children,” does it? Nobody ever intends it to denote fresh-faced fourteen-year-olds, I don’t think. Anyway, that’s a quibble. The Cowboys is a canny piece of entertainment in which Wil Andersen (John Wayne) plays stern papa bear to a ragtag group of tweens who, in a pinch, help him transport his cattle a few hundred miles. It’s a pretty brilliant setup for the older Wayne, and the movie is pretty darn effective. It’s not what I would exactly call a good movie, but it does its job tolerably well, and it’s very enjoyable.

As the word “ragtag” above suggests, The Cowboys isn’t very different, in structure, from The Bad News Bears. The juxtaposition of gruff John Wayne and all of these cute moppets is well-nigh irresistible, and events turn predictably comical or poignant as required. Naturally Andersen imposes on the kids discipline and hard work, under which they all prosper, and Wayne has a few moments designed to demonstrate that there’s a tender heart behind that rough exterior. The kids love him all the more — and so on. The best thing in the movie, by far, is Jebediah Nightlinger, played by Roscoe Lee Browne, who is the older black man who signs on as cook for the cattle drive. Jebediah’s great presence is the product of Browne’s incredible, one might say Shakespeare-worthy, speaking voice — he’s the no-nonsense mama to the group, if you will.

Much as Harry Callahan does in Dirty Harry, Andersen is shown making decisions that require a lot of integrity but are basically untenable, such as turning away sorely needed ranchers because they played a little fast and loose with the facts in a job interview. In both cases, I suppose, the idea is to showcase a character who does what his code requires — come what may. It’s easier for me to see the appeal of this in The Cowboys rather than Dirty Harry; in fact, The Cowboys helps me understand why Dirty Harry is so popular.

There’s a great bit in the middle with a young stutterer whose inability to call out for help nearly leads to the drowning of one of the other boys. Exasperated, Andersen hollers at the stutterer that “if he wanted to badly enough,” he’d be able to speak just fine. During their heated exchange, the boy begins to curse Andersen out and (of course) loses his stutter — because Andersen was the only one who cared if he stuttered or not. It’s almost futile to point out the fallacies operating here — but it wouldn’t it be lovely if the world were like that?

What here smacks of 1972?  The main heavy’s name — “Long Hair.”

IMDB score: 7.2

My score: 6

Director: Mark Rydell

Writers: Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., and William Dale Jennings

Starring: John Wayne, Roscoe Lee Browne, Bruce Dern, Colleen Dewhurst, Robert Carradine, A Martinez, Slim Pickens, Richard Farnsworth, Allyn Ann McLerie

IMDB synopsis: When his cattle drivers abandon him for the gold fields, rancher Wil Andersen is forced to take on a collection of young boys as his drivers in order to get his herd to market in time to avoid financial disaster. The boys learn to do a man’s job under Andersen’s tutelage, however, neither Andersen nor the boys know that a gang of cattle thieves is stalking them.

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Summary:

Looking over 1971, it’s composed almost entirely of good movies; Kotch and Summer of ’42 are the only real stinkers. It might have been expected that 1971 would betray all manner of incoherent doubt, rage, and frustration. But far from incoherence, movies instead grappled with difficult subjects with stunning narrative assurance. Number 1 movies are accessible by definition, but this group presented audiences with difficult subjects and flatly refused to take the easy way out.

Not even the most doggedly genre-bound of movies were exempt: Escape from the Planet of the Apes pondered the old Hitler time-travel dilemma, while Big Jake weighed the monetary value of a child’s life. Looking over my ratings, the year was studded with 7s and 8s, with four exceeding even that high benchmark. If I was unkind to Shaft and The Last Picture Show (I don’t think I was), then I may have been too forgiving to Escape from the Planet of the Apes and the Bond movie; it all evens out.

Klute and The Last Picture Show made a powerful and lasting impression on a large viewership that was clearly hungry for more complex fare from filmmakers, while Fiddler on the Roof may be the most powerful and mature movie musical of all time (although 1972 will feature a possible contender for that title, as we shall see). Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft seemed to demonstrate the existence of an enduring black audience; 20/20 hindsight, alas, reveals that it would be many years before that audience would receive its due attention from Hollywood on a consistent basis — we’re still not quite there yet.

After a full year off, hard-nosed crime reestablished its proper place in the ranks of the popular, with Get Carter and Dirty Harry and The French Connection and Shaft. When it comes to comedy, 1970 had M*A*S*H and little else; 1971 saw the emergence of perhaps the two most influential comedy geniuses of the postwar era: Woody Allen and Monty Python.

1970, by comparison, positively wallowed in the past: to its 10 period movies, 1971 offered only 4. (As in 1970, there was one movie set in the future.) If 1970 was New York-centric, 1971 divided its focus between the two coasts: New York hosted 4 movies, but Los Angeles and San Francisco provided the setting for 6. (Movies found time to visit Texas, Iowa, Las Vegas, Nantucket, San Marcos, Ukraine, and Newcastle too.)

1970 seemed riven by the young/old divide; 1971 seemed more successfully integrated, lionizing inclusion over exclusion — inclusion, after all, translates into cash. Movies weren’t free from agenda (Dirty Harry, Cold Turkey) or ethnic niche (Shaft, Fiddler), but overall they seemed to want to present an intelligent perspective to a varied audience.

Academy Awards: Three of our movies were nominated for Best Picture: The French Connection beat out The Last Picture Show, Fiddler on the Roof, and two other nominees, which worked out the same way for Best Director (Friedkin). Gene Hackman (French Connection) and Jane Fonda (Klute) won deserved Best Actor/Actress statuettes, with Topol’s Tevye offering the only plausible alternative as well as the only other actor from our group. The Last Picture Show gave us both winners for Actors in a Supporting Role, in Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman. Jeff Bridges (The Last Picture Show), Leonard Frey (Fiddler on the Roof), Roy Scheider (The French Connection), and Ellen Burstyn (The Last Picture Show) were the other Supporting nominees from the year’s #1s — I myself would have gone with Burstyn over Leachman. Summer of ’42‘s treacly score was recognized with an Oscar, and the ten combined Best Screenplay nominees included Summer of ’42, Klute, The Last Picture Show, and the winner for Best Original Screenplay, The French Connection.

My ranking:
Klute (10)
The French Connection (9)
Fiddler on the Roof (9)
Get Carter (9)
Bananas (8)
Play Misty for Me (8)
Cold Turkey (8)
And Now For Something Completely Different (8)
The Last Picture Show (7)
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (7)
Dirty Harry (7)
Big Jake (7)
The Omega Man (7)
===== 6.5 =====
Diamonds Are Forever (6)
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (6)
Shaft (5)
Summer of ’42 (2)
Kotch (2)

MVPs: Clint Eastwood, William Friedkin, Alan J. Pakula, Jane Fonda, Woody Allen, Melvin Van Peebles, Roy Scheider, Mike Hodges

Pleasant surprises: Cold Turkey, Play Misty for Me, Big Jake

Disappointments: Summer of ’42

Weighted IMDB average for weeks in which 1971 releases were #1 (45 weeks): 7.07

Weighted Boffo average for weeks in which 1971 releases were #1 (45 weeks): 6.91

Notable movies that did not reach #1: 200 Motels, The Anderson Tapes, The Andromeda Strain, Billy Jack, Brian’s Song, Carnal Knowledge, A Clockwork Orange, Death in Venice, Duel, Harold and Maude, The Hospital, Johnny Got His Gun, Little Murders, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Murmur of the Heart, The Panic in Needle Park, Straw Dogs, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, THX 1138, They Might Be Giants, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, Walkabout, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Further reading: Pauline Kael, Deeper Into Movies; J. Hoberman, The Dream Life

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December 26, 1971 | 3 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A brutalist police movie with an agenda.

What did I get? Hooooo, boy. In Dirty Harry entertainment and politics have a fight to the death, and — well, in all honesty entertainment wins, in the world at large anyway. But here at Boffo politics is going to get its day in court — big surprise. I also view Dirty Harry as a war between two fantasies, the revenge fantasy that the Bay Area understandably needed after the Zodiac Killer case, trumped by the more regrettable political fantasy of a world in which liberals have no sway. In short, this is a stirring, problematic movie.

Eastwood’s Harry Callahan clearly conforms to some kind of debased knight-errant or samurai archetype, and the movie should really be taken as an attempt, largely successful, at modern myth. It doesn’t work on me, but then it wasn’t designed to work on me. Indeed, it was pretty much designed to poke me in the eye over and over again. Point is, those mythic elements — which are also its propagandistic elements — are most present at the start and the end of the movie, and it’s precisely those elements that tend to bend the movie out of its natural shape. There are entire stretches in which Callahan is presented more or less “straight,” possessed of conventional charm and fallibility, just like any other nuanced, interesting character. Those parts of the movie are conventionally enjoyable, because they require no political agenda.

Problem is, agenda overwhelms the other parts of the movie, ultimately making it difficult to enjoy conventionally. If you have serious problems with the movie’s overt conservatism, it’s likely you won’t enjoy the movie much. It might be better to think of Dirty Harry not as a serious movie (it does have pretensions to seriousness) but as straight B-movie escapism that is cannily pursuing a place in the political conversation. Dirty Harry is a conservative fantasy that answers a powerful need in the audience to express its displeasure about the crime problem; that is its function, not any actual solutions or program it might provide. But in its zeal to address that need, it puts its thumb on the scales.

The two things I would say to conservative (or, for that matter, apolitical) lovers of Dirty Harry are (1) it seems highly unlikely that the Scorpio Killer would have been released in the circumstances presented; and (2) Harry Callahan is crazy reckless!

Let’s hit the second one first. Harry is depicted (SPOILER ALERT!) firing rounds at criminals in the presence of many innocent bystanders, and at the end of the movie he dispatches Scorpio with his famous .44 Magnum, while the killer is holding a small child hostage, literally using the boy as a shield. I think anyone taking the movie seriously enough to think, “See, liberals are pussies” etc. should really take a moment to ponder whether a cop like this is really what we want on the streets — a cop who doesn’t have the scriptwriter making sure his choices come out okay. Enough said on that point.

As far as Scorpio’s Miranda and Escobedo rights are concerned, I am very skeptical that the liberal emphasis on criminal rights achieved protections as rock-solid as presented in Dirty Harry. Scorpio is holding a young woman captive in a secret location, who (he claims) will die if she is not attended to within a short while. Meanwhile Scorpio has also been leading Callahan all over the city as part of his ransom arrangements. It seems to me that this must fall under “probable cause” or “exigent circumstances” or something — but I’m not a lawyer. I tried to discover via Google what the relevant statutes were in 1971, but (surprisingly) I could not find this out. Insofar as the movie is flatly lying about this, it’s a problem, especially if the movie could have used an almost equally disturbing example of liberal overreach by representing the facts faithfully — as I suspect is probably the case. But when you’re busy creating a filmic syntax for upending liberal pieties, overdetermination is simply going to be involved.

Beyond that, Dirty Harry operates in a reality-free zone, especially when it comes to the media and the internal workings of the police. In so many movies, the chief of police is beholden to the press, which would serve as a powerful incentive to apprehend Scorpio no matter what the attorneys would say — that never comes up in Dirty Harry. And similarly, we’re all familiar with the practice whereby police officers like Callahan are protected by a willingness to falsify official accounts of criminal pursuits — to “hush up” this or that unpalatable act — again, that possibility is never raised. Inclusion of such elements would have made the creation of mythic Dirty Harry difficult, so they left them out.

Clearly Dirty Harry is a work of escapism, and to a certain extent, I just have to accept that. The way I look at it, escapism and fantasy are fine right up to the point that a movie asks to be taken more seriously — and in making such a pointed critique of the legal system, Dirty Harry asks to be taken more seriously. But that logic only goes so far — Dirty Harry isn’t explicitly a political movie, it’s an entertainment, and its popularity speaks to the appetite among the public for tougher attitudes on crime.

Even in the sections that feel more organically honest, a lot of the elements feel concocted to achieve the proper manipulative effect. For example, Callahan is presented as harmlessly racist/not-racist in that “I hate everyone equally” way that conservatives love so much. A fellow cop on the force exuberantly explains to Harry’s new college-educated, Hispanic partner Gonzalez that Harry “doesn’t play any favorites! Harry hates everybody: Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Niggers, Honkies, Chinks, you name it.” Gonzalez sensibly inquires as to Harry’s attitude about Hispanics, and Harry, standing nearby, responds jovially, “Especially Spics,” and winks to his friend. The whole thing is sheer genius: Harry is shown to flirt with racist attitudes but deep down, he is established as entirely non-racist but merely contemptuous of politically correct conformity. Later on, after he is wounded, Gonzalez earns Harry’s respect — showing that Harry is flexible enough to admire even a college-educated know-nothing under the right circumstances. As a character, Gonzalez is consciously engineered to defuse liberal complaints about Harry while showing his fealty to conservative mores, all of which serves to fuel Harry’s iconic status among conservatives as well as among the down-trodden apolitical audience that dislikes crime and liberals to varying degrees.

The best moment in the movie comes in a snatch of conversation with Gonzalez’ wife, as they depart after visiting her wounded husband in the hospital. Gonzalez has just explained to Harry that he’s thinking of leaving the police force, for which Harry admirably does not judge him (see? Harry’s fair!). Gonzalez’ wife inquires why Harry is so driven to take risks in fighting crime, what he gets out of it. Harry mutters inarticulately, “I … don’t know.” It’s the best, most honest moment in the movie — and by the way also serves to bolster Harry’s mystique as a modern samurai or whatever.

Treated strictly as a movie, Dirty Harry is very effective and exciting, but it has two notable formal flaws. First, Siegel botches just about all of the nighttime action, of which there is more than a little; you simply can’t see much of anything. And second, the script’s understanding of Scorpio’s psychology is pretty faulty. Scorpio is presented as a homicidal maniac who is highly interested in the ransom money and also willing to maim himself in order to frame Dirty Harry, none of which hangs together very well. You’re either a maniac or a calculating career criminal; the two don’t blend well. I found that slapdash and unconvincing, anyway. Andy Robinson is extremely well cast as perverse and annoying Scorpio; he really gets on your nerves in just about every frame he’s in.

What here smacks of 1971? Well, the liberal hegemony of the legal system, of course, and the conservative frustration that brought the movie into being.

IMDB score: 7.8

My score: 7

Director: Don Siegel

Writers: Harry Julian Fink, R. M. Fink, and Dean Riesner

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Andy Robinson, John Vernon, Reni Santoni, Harry Guardino, John Larch, John Mitchum, Mae Mercer, Lyn Edgington, Ruth Kobart, Woodrow Parfrey, Josef Sommer

IMDB synopsis: In the year 1971, San Francisco faces the terror of a maniac known as Scorpio- who snipes at innocent victims and demands ransom through notes left at the scene of the crime. Inspector Harry Callahan (known as Dirty Harry by his peers through his reputation handling of homicidal cases) is assigned to the case along with his newest partner Inspector Chico Gonzalez to track down Scorpio and stop him. Using humiliation and cat and mouse type of games against Callahan, Scorpio is put to the test with the cop with a dirty attitude.

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December 19, 1971 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? A good late-Connery Bond movie.

What did I get? Pauline Kael deprecated Diamonds Are Forever on the grounds of insufficient suavity. She was on to something — it’s a relatively rough-hewn and low-key Bond movie — but I say she had it upside down. The test of a Bond movie is whether it would hold up as a good movie if you removed all the de rigueur Bond tropes and unmotivated globetrotting; by this standard, Diamonds Are Forever comes out looking pretty good — it can almost bear scrutiny as a regular movie. It’s very entertaining, and it admirably ignores many of the canonical James Bond tropes. More interestingly, it’s also a piece of lighthearted propaganda about the stupidity and worrisome might of the United States of America. That I was not expecting.

I won’t go into the plot — who cares — but Diamonds Are Forever is often appealingly analog. Bond is extricated from a sure-death situation in a crematorium because someone else happens to find him; no derring-do at all. Later on he is rescued from a pipeline in the most prosaic manner imaginable. About halfway through there’s an extended car chase in which Bond eludes several police cars, which end up piling on top of each other. Admittedly it’s all a bit “beneath” the expected razzle-dazzle of a Bond movie, but I appreciated the willingness to mix it up. My favorite bit of business might be the brief altercation with Bambi and Thumper, set in a swanky swinger’s pad; for a surreal minute or two, the movie resembles an outtake from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

After a scene or two in Amsterdam, Bond makes his way to Las Vegas, where the movie really takes place. Most of the American characters are uncouth or cloddish, and there’s even a Howard Hughes figure named Willard Whyte, an obscenely wealthy and scientifically inclined recluse who is said to exert more influence than the President. (His casino and hotel, where he lives in the penthouse, is called the Whyte House.) As I mentioned, Diamonds Are Forever seems to have it in for the U.S.A. — it got me thinking that 1971 may have been a bit like George W. Bush’s second term, when our foreign entanglements made it wholly acceptable for the international community to denigrate America. Diamonds Are Forever is ostensibly an advertisement for Las Vegas (just coming out of its pokey phase), but it doesn’t take much squinting to see it as a critique of the place.

Neil Armstrong had gone bi-orbal only two years earlier, and the emphasis here is firmly on the space race. Blofeld’s nefarious plan involves a laser mounted on a satellite — the offending satellite, diverted by the unctuous megalomaniac, emanates from a missile with the words “United States” on it; I think it was supposed to read “Cautionary Tale.” There’s even an uncommented-upon scene involving some people shooting footage of a faked moon landing — Bond absconds with the moon buggy, which turns out to be just as useful in the deserts of Nevada.

Either the stock nature of Bond’s helpers was not yet set in stone or (my fervent hope) the filmmakers simply elected to use them more creatively. Bond encounters Moneypenny in a different setting than usual (no coat rack in sight), while Q does not supply Bond with his usual pocket dei ex machina. Instead, Q more organically joins Bond in Las Vegas, where he does a passable impression of an actual team member/movie character. Even the climactic mayhem is resolved without a big synchronized, perfectly timed undoing of the mechanism — some might call it lazy; to me it feels relaxed.

What here smacks of 1971? A weird answer, but: the buttons inside the elevator. (Look for it — you’ll see what I mean.)

IMDB score: 6.7

My score: 6

Director: Guy Hamilton

Writers: Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz

Starring: Sean Connery, Jill St. John, Charles Gray, Lana Wood, Jimmy Dean, Bruce Glover, Bruce Cabot, Putter Smith, Norman Burton, Joseph Furst, Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewelyn, Lois Maxwell

IMDB synopsis: James Bond’s mission is to find out who has been smuggling diamonds, which are not re-appearing. He adopts another identity in the form of Peter Franks. He joins up with Tiffany Case, and acts as if he is smuggling the diamonds, but everyone is hungry for these diamonds. He also has to avoid Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, the dangerous couple who does not leave anyone in their way. Ernst Stavro Blofeld isn’t out of the question. He may have changed his looks, but is he linked with the heist? And if he is, can Bond finally defeat his ultimate enemy.

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November 14, 1971 | 5 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A really Jewy musical.

What did I get? Despite its considerable popularity, I was expecting Fiddler on the Roof to be a pill, not candy. Shows you what I know. Fiddler is a remarkably appealing movie, a truly cinematic musical à la The Sound of Music, only with more gravitas and stylistic coherence. The songs are really good, and the movie’s great warmth prevents the subject matter from becoming distancing. Compliments to the writers behind the original musical, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, Joseph Stein; to the director, Norman Jewison; and to the lead actor, Chaim Topol. Those five people, more than any other, are responsible for the highly enjoyable movie experience that Fiddler is.

My trifling researches yielded the surprising information that Jewison, despite his name, is not a Jew. (This is apparently a common misconception; Jewison is a Protestant.) When I learned this, Fiddler began to make a bit more sense. When you’re making a movie steeped in the culture of a specific people and especially when that people has an obvious historical grievance at hand, it can be salutary to have an outsider to the group serve as director. It’s easier for an outsider to see when it’s “too much” for those who do not already have a stake. I suppose it’s also true that Jews are obliged to think about these things more than most ethnic groups.

That line Fiddler toes to perfection. Odd to say about a movie that dwells so much Jews and Jewishness, but it wears its ethnicity and religion lightly, mostly because of the incredibly engaging presence of Topol, as Tevye. Given to grumbling to God, Tevye’s impiety leavens the material and adds humor; once events take a darker turn, he assumes the Everyman qualities of maltreated peasants everywhere.

Jewison filmed much of the movie outdoors, made sure to work in the landscape, and the browns and greens and golds of rural life became a sturdy palette from which the movie never deviates. This gave Fiddler its marvelous evenness of tone; you really feel that the movie emanated from a single consciousness.

The Holocaust, a fresher nightmare in 1971, supplies Fiddler‘s subtext, and it permitted the filmmakers to elide graphic representation of the horrors Russian Jews experienced around 1905. Nobody is killed or raped; very little property is damaged; the main Cossack is benign. Acutely aware of the tragedies in store for the Jewish people, viewers can fill in the blanks for themselves. I find myself unconsciously crediting Jewison for this strategy, but obviously Bock, Harnick, and Stein were the ones who made that call.

What here smacks of 1971? In a certain way, a lot. This may be the most legible and mature of the big studio musicals in the post-Sound of Music lineage, and the midcentury middle-class audience that allowed it to come into being didn’t stretch very far beyond 1971. So there was only a small window when this movie would have made any sense.

IMDB score: 7.8

My score: 9

Director: Norman Jewison

Writer: Joseph Stein

Starring: Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon, Paul Mann, Rosalind Harris, Michèle Marsh, Neva Small, Paul Michael Glaser

IMDB synopsis: In the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Jews and Orthodox Christians live in the little village of Anatevka in the pre-revolutionary Russia of the Czars. Among the traditions of the Jewish community, the matchmaker arranges the match and the father approves it. The milkman Reb Tevye is a poor man that has been married for twenty-five years with Golde and they have five daughters. When the local matchmaker Yente arranges the match between his older daughter Tzeitel and the old widow butcher Lazar Wolf, Tevye agrees with the wedding. However Tzeitel is in love with the poor tailor Motel Kazoil and they ask permission to Tevye to get married that accepts to please his daughter. Then his second daughter Hodel (Michele Marsh) and the revolutionary student Perchik decide to marry each other and Tevye is forced to accept. When Perchik is arrested by the Czar troops and sent to Siberia, Hodel decides to leave her family and homeland and travel to Siberia to be with her beloved Perchik…

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November 7, 1971 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A creepy thriller.

What did I get? I had my forebodings about Play Misty for Me. I don’t always react well to movies that depict intense mental states or anguish, and I was worried that the movie would put its audience through the ringer somewhat. I needn’t have worried — Clint’s first feature as a director is a very intelligent, enjoyable, measured movie with only a few stray moments of hysteria, which, given the subject matter, is only fair. The poster is markedly more lurid than the movie itself.

It took Clint a long time to earn his due respect as a top director, and in retrospect it’s difficult to see why; all the evidence you need is right here on the screen. After all, how many directors pretty much invent a genre — in this case, the stalker movie — on their first try? I did a little research on stalker movies, and almost all of the good comps come later. The original Cape Fear isn’t too far off. So give Clint credit for identifying a valid social issue and inventing a filmic syntax for it. It’s probably no coincidence that it was a movie star who first understood the subject’s potential for the movies. And Play Misty for Me is really much better, more human and relatable, than most of the ones that came after it, Single White Female and so on.

Jessica Walter does a terrific job as the cute and playful but disturbingly fixated Evelyn, drawing on the same battery of passive-aggressive manipulations that served her so well in her portrayal of Lucille Bluth on Arrested Development. And when her obsession necessitates physical violence, such as with Eastwood’s housekeeper, she never becomes inexplicably omniscient or some implacable force of nature; she always remains a normal human being. That aversion to narrative hyperbole is one of Clint’s trademarks as a director, and probably as an actor too. Walter communicates education and refinement while also harboring some serious boundary issues, and there’s no contradiction there; indeed, it works a little better because we have to look past the apparently mature exterior to see the unbalanced stalker within.

The object of Evelyn’s mania is Bay Area DJ Dave Garver, whose aggrieved victim status makes the role a tricky one to play. Garver has to be attractive enough to become obsessive about but not become caddish when insisting on his independence from entanglements from the likes of Evelyn. It would have been all too easy for Garver to become a dick, but in Eastwood’s unfussy performance that never happens; we identify with his sensible wish to be left alone (it helps that Evelyn is truly unhinged).

The “Misty” of the title — and by the way, what a great title — is an Erroll Garner classic, and Eastwood, a jazz lover, not only makes Garver a jazz DJ but sets an entire sequence at the Monterey Jazz Festival for no good narrative reason. There’s plenty of jazz in the score, and it has a soothing effect on the movie, keeps it on an even keel. This material could so easily have turned frantic, in that Psycho way. Everything in Clint apparently resists that impulse, for which I for one am grateful.

IMDB score: 7.0

My score: 8

What here smacks of 1971? Widespread jazz popularity.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Writers: Jo Heims and Dean Riesner

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Jessica Walter, Donna Mills, John Larch, Jack Ging, Irene Hervey, James McEachin, Clarice Taylor, Don Siegel

IMDB synopsis: Disc jockey Dave Garver attracts the amorous attentions of a demented fan named Evelyn Draper. Evelyn lets Dave pick her up at a bar; later at her apartment Evelyn admits that she is the cooing caller who repeatedly asks Dave to play the Erroll Garner classic “Misty.” From then on, the film is a lesson in how one casual date can turn your whole life around. Evelyn stalks Dave everywhere, ruins his business lunch, assaults his maid, mutilates his house and all of his belongings, and finally threatens to butcher his girlfriend Tobie Williams. You’ll never be able to hear that song again without looking over your shoulder.

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October 24, 1971 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? A flawlessly dreary drama about 1950s Texas.

What did I get? I’m impervious to the well-documented allure of The Last Picture Show. There can be no question of the quality of the filmmaking or the ambition of the enterprise, but it just does not do much for me. The movie’s precise, black-and-white cinematography is simply gorgeous to look at, intelligence and taste are everywhere evident, but the characters are not involving enough, there’s too much unremitting misery (with hardly a thing in any other emotional register), and the lofty intentions of the filmmakers constantly drown out the activities of the characters. It may be a great movie, but it’s just not for me.

I can’t deny that The Last Picture Show is an important movie. The movie acted as a kind of broker of neorealist and nouvelle vague technique for American audiences, and the realism it injected into our conception of “the West” was surely necessary. The impulse was revisionist, and the impulse was good. To Bogdanovich’s credit, despite the influence of Rossellini and Truffaut and those other continental guys, The Last Picture Show does feel distinct from its European analogs and precursors, it’s got that flinty objectivity. Bogdanovich’s obvious immersion in and love for American movie history as well as the authentically western setting guaranteed that it would feel different.

Bogdanovich may have been too certain of those “truths” he was unleashing, too cocksure about rejecting the complacent narrative fudges in the B-movies of yore as fakery. Bogdanovich took “the West” and methodically stripped it of every affectation and mannerism imaginable — but then that very thing became its affectation and mannerism. The characters’ lives are relentlessly drained of all elation and solace, resulting in a distortion of a new kind. Bogdanovich is always making sure you notice how terribly “real” it is — and no doubt there was much truth in this self-consciously humdrum depiction of rural Texas life — but the possibility of rich, nuanced characters is lost in the process; they’re all object lessons in despondency. You can hardly hear them over the din of the strong directorial agenda. What some surely characterized as much-needed deromanticization ends up feeling like the bloodless working out of a thesis.

America in 1971 was ready for a mature cinema, and Bogdanovich duly became its poster boy. I comfort myself with the delusion that I would have been immune to its charms at the time, but that’s probably not true; its overweening reputation derives from its necessity. The Last Picture Show has dated well, but not quite well enough, prompting the interesting thought that, just maybe, La Notte and Persona, to name two random Euro classics of the time, today feel more than a bit mannered in their own right.

I know I’m at least a little wrong about The Last Picture Show, but I can’t talk myself into embracing a movie as pretentious and joyless as this, no matter how impressive — and it is very, very impressive. But something deep in its core repels and annoys me. C’est la vie.

What here smacks of 1971? The cinematic ambition.

IMDB score: 8.1

My score: 7

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Writers: Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich

Starring: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Cybill Shepherd, Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager, Sam Bottoms, Sharon Taggart, Randy Quaid, John Hillerman, Noble Willingham

IMDB synopsis: In tiny Anarene, Texas, in the lull between World War Two and the Korean Conflict, Sonny and Duane are best friends. Enduring that awkward period of life between boyhood and manhood, the two pass their time the best way they know how — with the movie house, football, and girls. Jacey is Duane’s steady, wanted by every boy in school, and she knows it. Her daddy is rich and her mom is good looking and loose. It’s the general consensus that whoever wins Jacey’s heart will be set for life. But Anarene is dying a quiet death as folks head for the big cities to make their livings and raise their kids. The boys are torn between a future somewhere out there beyond the borders of town or making do with their inheritance of a run-down pool hall and a decrepit movie house — the legacy of their friend and mentor, Sam the Lion. As high school graduation approaches, they learn some difficult lessons about love…

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