Released during the 1970s

Murder by Death (1976)

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
★★★★★

No pulse, no heartbeat. If condition does not change, this man is dead.

This is Neil Simon’s attempt to do a Mel Brooks number of the genre of detective fiction and it’s probably for the best that he tackle it, because I think that the director of Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety would have wielded too blunt an instrument to make it work. Even with Simon’s slightly more sophisticated touch, Murder by Death is comedy in broad strokes, but even if you’re not a fan of murder mysteries, enough jokes score to make it a diverting 90 minutes.

Murder by Death

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Director:  | Released:  | 94 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , 

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Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
★★★★★

I don’t think I want to know you very well. I don’t think you’re going to live much longer.

Never complain too much when it’s your turn to get lunch for your coworkers, especially when you happen to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. It might save your life when someone decides to exterminate you and your coworkers.

Robert Redford; Three Days of the Condor

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Director:  | Released:  | 117 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , 

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Rollerball (1975)

Thursday, May 19th, 2011
★★★★★

Don’t try to frighten me. You don’t know how.

Rollerball is one of those movies that, once you dig down past the disco-era cheese, you might find very thoughtful and prescient science-fiction. On the other hand, you might just find another layer of that cheese. Norman Jewison’s 1975 fable of full-contact sports gone insane dares you not to take it seriously, to dismiss it as merely a more cerebral cousin of Logan’s Run.

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Director:  | Released:  | 125 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , 

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Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

Saturday, December 1st, 2007
★★★★★

I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant fill him with a terrible resolve.

Think of this movie like a long, slightly boring lecture in history class, only with explosions. This attempt to do for the attack on Pearl Harbor what The Longest Day did for the D-Day invasion of Normandy succeeds on so many technical levels that it’s a shame that it fails to engage the audience emotionally in its subject matter.

Tora! Tora! Tora!

However, while it was initially a failure at the box office, I wonder if the film ultimately managed to recoup its budget through royalties from licensing pieces of the film as stock footage. It’s hard to find a movie about World War II in the Pacific over the next twenty or thirty years that doesn’t reuse at least a few shots from Tora! Tora! Tora!

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Director: , ,  | Released:  | 144 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , 

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The Last Waltz (1978)

Sunday, November 18th, 2007
★★★★★

You won’t make much money, but you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.

On Thanksgiving Night in 1976, the legendary rock group known simply as The Band said farewell to touring with a party at San Francisco’s legendary Winterland Ballroom. 5,000 turkey dinners were served. There was ballroom dancing and a poetry reading.

Stage Fright

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Director:  | Released:  | 117 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

Theatrical and director’s cut: ★★★★★
1980 Special Edition: ★★★★★

They can fly rings around the moon, but we’re years ahead of ’em on the highway.

What was it in the water in 1977 that directors of classic sci-fi movies couldn’t leave well enough alone? Long before George Lucas had turned the words “Han Shot First” into a fanboy battle cry, Steven Spielberg had already done a major facelift on his landmark UFO film. When Close Encounters was in production, Spielberg was aiming for a summer, 1978, release. Columbia Pictures, on the verge of bankruptcy, forced him to finish the movie for the fall of 1977, leaving unfilmed several of what he thought were key scenes.

I envy you.

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Director:  | Released:  | 135 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

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A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

★★★★★

Patton will lead the assault. I would prefer Montgomery, but even Eisenhower isn’t that stupid.

This movie serves as both an unofficial sequel and thematic bookend to The Longest Day. It has an undeserved reputation for being overlong, ponderous and dull. It’s none of those things but I can understand how it could appear that way to people expecting a more conventional war movie.

Hail Mary, full of grace

A Bridge Too Far details, at great length and in exacting detail, the Allied debacle known as Operation Market Garden, an over-ambitious plan by General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery to end World War II by Christmas, 1944, by kicking down the undefended back door of Germany. The main problem with the battle plan was that it depended entirely on Murphy’s Law being repealed. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 175 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , , 

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Taxi Driver (1976)

Monday, August 20th, 2007
★★★★★

Someday a real rain’ll come and wash all this scum off the streets.

This story of a lonely man isolated from the millions of people around him could have been told in any city but Martin Scorcese’s movie could only have been made in New York City, and only in the city of the mid-seventies. Travis Bickle is as much a product of that time and place as he is a creation of screenwriter Paul Schrader’s imagination.

Taxi Driver

The New York City of Taxi Driver is definitely not today’s “Disney-fied” city. This is the pre-Giuliani Big Apple, the domain of pimps and drug dealers. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 113 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Friday, August 17th, 2007
★★★★★

I’ve never expected metal ships.

Remakes are rarely a good idea. Remakes of classics are even less likely to be a good idea. They rarely improve on the original and more often, to be blunt, they suck. But up with it I’m willing to put if it means that, from time to time, we get a remake like this one, which takes everything that was good about the original and turns it around so it is relevant to the present.

Body Snatchers

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Director:  | Released:  | 115 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , 

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Jaws (1975)

Monday, July 30th, 2007
★★★★★

I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.

Many of you might not be old enough to recall but Jaws effectively invented the concept of the summer movie as we know it today. Two years before Star Wars, it was the first film to really demonstrate the power of all those teenagers, recently freed from school, to generate an ass-load of money at the box office.

Jaws

Of course, this was also before the modern marketing machine was fully geared up, so in order for a movie to become a mega-blockbuster, it depended on a lot of word-of-mouth to get people’s butts into the seats. In those days, it still required that the film not suck. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

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Director:  | Released:  | 124 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , 

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The French Connection (1971)

Thursday, July 19th, 2007
★★★★★

I wouldn’t be infringing on your coffee break if I thought it was a nickel-and-dimer.

William Friedkin’s The French Connection is a lean, uncompromising example of filmmaking without a single gram of fat on its bones. Nothing unnecessary to telling the story is on screen, allowing Friedkin to tell a fairly complex story within a surprisingly compact running time of 104 minutes. Gene Hackman’s balls-out performance as unconventional and obsessive narcotics cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle elevates what was already a superior film to the level of a classic.

The French Connection

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Director:  | Released:  | 104 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , , 

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1776 (1972)

Saturday, June 30th, 2007
★★★★★

This is a revolution, dammit! We’re going to have to offend somebody!

If the rest of American history would have had such great musical numbers, I might have gotten better grades. Okay, this adaptation of the hit Broadway play wasn’t exactly letter-perfect history but it is remarkably faithful to the facts for, you know, a musical. It’s also extremely entertaining if you allow for its stage bound origins.

1776

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Director:  | Released:  | 166 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , 

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