The Year in Review: 1970

Summary: A strong year, even if it did peter out towards the end. A fine way to start the 1970s — and this project.

Two years after the Summer of Love, the hangover had arrived, and that hangover was embodied most thoroughly not by Five Easy Pieces or Woodstock but by Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. 1970′s #1 movies had something to offer youthful audiences (Five Easy Pieces, Woodstock) and less youthful audiences (Chisum, Airport, The Cheyenne Social Club). Forty-one years later, the former category, to no one’s surprise, has held up better.

(0021) Love Story

December 20, 1970 | 11 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? What else? A self-consciously vapid … love story.

What did I get? Love Story is so soothingly innocuous and was once so incredibly popular (11 whopping weeks at #1) that it’s a challenge to write about it without some powerful elitism kicking in. It’s the kind of movie that prompts questions about the validity of mass taste, which at other moments has given a big fat kiss of approval to Shakespeare, the Beatles, and The Simpsons. What annoys the discerning isn’t that Love Story is “bad” — it’s not “bad, it’s fairly “good” in certain identifiable ways — but that it’s “wrong.”

(0020) The Owl and the Pussycat

November 15, 1970 | 5 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect?  A winsome romantic comedy of some sort.

What did I get? Another puzzle. Was the tolerance for belligerent assholes a lot higher in 1970? Judging from this movie alone, you would have to conclude that it was. The Owl and the Pussycat is one of the most obnoxious movies I have seen in a long time. Imagine a Neil Simon comedy (I generally dislike Neil Simon to begin with), only subtract all attempts to make the characters in any way likable or relatable and replace them with long bouts of aggressive and implausible hollering. That’s what The Owl and the Pussycat is like.

(0019) Scrooge

November 8, 1970 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A slightly poleaxed musical version of A Christmas Carol.

What did I get? How fortuitous that this post appears on December 21, of all days — would that I could recommend it more forcefully. This sprightly musical adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was strongly influenced by the previous year’s smash hit Oliver! — but it has not held up well. In a world devoid of any other portrayals of the Christmas classic, this would serve honorably as an entertaining version for all ages and types. The existence of the indelible 1951 movie starring Alistair Sim as Scrooge, however, shows its flaws in stark relief.

(0018) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

November 1, 1970 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A conventional, possibly substandard Sherlock Holmes adventure.

What did I get? I didn’t like it too much, but it’s a difficult movie to assess. The involvement of Billy Wilder raises expectations, and it should be said that the movie is intelligent but not very resonant. According to AllRovi.com, this must be regarded as a tampered, incomplete version, one that was initially intended to be three hours long (!). The strangest aspect, however, is the “private life” mentioned in the title. Admirers of the movie appear to think that the movie succeeded in showing a new side of Sherlock Holmes. I think the idea fails — and in fact was a bad idea in the first place.

(0017) Trog

October 25, 1970 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? An almost unwatchably bad and schlocky horror/sci-fi movie.

What did I get? For reasons I don’t fully understand, Trog comes in for an unusual amount of abuse. The 3.2 IMDB rating only begins to express the glee with which viewers trash this movie (check out some viewer reactions). It was an unfortunate note for the illustrious Joan Crawford, who has nothing else like this on her resume, to end on. It’s hard to tell how much sentiment toward Crawford herself affected the reaction — she was not the most likable presence in her later years, and perhaps this movie was seen as her comeuppance.

(0016) Tora! Tora! Tora!

September 27, 1970 | 4 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? I’d seen it, and I remember thinking that it was a decent war epic.

What did I get? Poor Tora! Tora! Tora! I wanted so much to like it. It’s an honorable attempt at intelligent popular entertainment on a grand scale, but it just doesn’t work. It’s hard to imagine a war epic being more prosaic and lifeless than this one. It has no flow, it’s just a series of events.

(0015) Five Easy Pieces

September 13, 1970 | 2 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? As mentioned, I had seen this before. It was many years ago, and I may have been slightly too young to really get it. My expectation was that it would be very good but just a touch overrated.

What did I get? Boy, was that expectation all wrong. Five Easy Pieces is a sublime piece of work. It turns out that its status as a culty touchstone for a thriving generation of gritty and realistic American moviemaking is richly merited. It’s a great American movie.

(0014) Diary of a Mad Housewife

August 23, 1970 | 3 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? Had not heard of it. Something comic and strident, perhaps.

What did I get? Now here is a truly interesting movie. Based on a 1967 novel by Sue Kaufman (anyone out there read it?) and never for a moment losing the ineffable stamp of an adaptation, Diary of a Mad Housewife is that rare “issue movie” that manages to transcend its issue. At once broadly satirical and finely true-to-life, the movie sometimes makes nonsense of its ostensible message — that the problem with Tina Balser’s life is the men in it — and frequently smuggles in oodles of resonant footage involving authentic human beings. No mean feat.

(0013) Chisum

August 2, 1970 | 3 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A typical John Wayne western.

What did I get? Chisum, a somewhat underdeveloped John Wayne western, is based on a true and oft-retold story in which John Chisum, verily the “1%” of 1878 Lincoln County, New Mexico, protects his vast holdings against unscrupulous newcomer Henry Tunstall. Chisum‘s deployment of the various obligatory classic western movie tropes is awfully complacent. It was a significant hit at the time, but no less a personage than President Nixon took time out of his busy schedule to observe that the movie was pretty ordinary). I’m with Nixon! I puzzle over its popularity as well.