(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.”

(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.

(0003) Airport

March 8, 1970 | 7 weeks at #1

Seen by Martin before? No

What did I expect? A big, ungainly, self-important melodrama about an airport.

What did I get? Exactly that. If you want a sense of Airport, all you need to do is call to mind the 1980 ZAZ classic Airplane! and subtract every one of the laughs and puns and self-consciously absurd touches. Seriously, Airplane! is a lot like Airport, it’s remarkable how close the movies are visually and tonally, although played straight in one and played preposterous in the other. It’s impossible to watch Airport today without thinking of Airplane! There’s a moment about halfway through when Jean Seberg says to Burt Lancaster, “Mel, they’ve been pressuring me about that transfer to San Francisco….” — the absence of mockery from the filmmakers seems thoroughly incongruous.