Monthly Archives: June 2021

Sorcerer
Directed by William Friedkin
Written by Walon Green from the novel The Wages of Fear by Georges Arnaud
1977/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Scanlon: Where am I going?
Vinnie: All I can say is it’s a good place to lay low.
Scanlon: Why?
Vinnie: It’s the kind of place nobody wants to go looking.

This movie was billed as a remake of H.G. Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953).  Though it’s an excellent action adventure,  it’s quite a different animal from the French masterpiece of suspense.

In the first act, we meet our protagonists and observe them committing major crimes in different corners of the globe.  The American Scanlon (Roy Scheider) serves as a getaway driver from the robbery of the proceeds of collection plates from several churches in a diocese.  Unfortunately for everyone involved, the priest that is killed during the heist is the brother of a crime lord.  Most of the robbers are killed in a car accident but Scanlon survives and gets away.  His friend owes him one and arranges a fake passport and a berth on a freighter headed for Latin America.  Other criminals include a Frenchman (Bruno Cremer) who is facing jail time for a financial fraud and an Arab (Amidou) who has escaped after blowing up an Israeli marketplace.All of these people end up in a Latin American hell hole beset with corrupt police, revolutionaries, and squalor.  Escape is possible but only at a high cost.  The fire resulting from explosion of an oil rig up country can only be stopped by destruction of the source with dynamite.  The only dynamite available is highly volatile, is located 200 miles away, and must be transported through the jungle over the roughest possible terrain.  The pay will be handsome and our fugitives are willing to risk their lives for a ticket out of dodge.

The journey will test these men to their limits.  Adventures with revolutionaries and native Indians add to the danger.

Unlike The Wages of Fear, this is a film full of bloody violence and non-stop action.  It has none of the slow build-up and “you are there” feeling of Clouzot’s tense suspense thriller. The performances are excellent and the staging of the elements is convincing.  It has William Friedkin written all over it.  If you are a fan, I can recommend this movie.

The Goodbye Girl
Directed by Herbert Ross
Written by Neil Simon
1977/US
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Paula McFadden: Be tactful.
Lucy McFadden: What’s that?
Paula McFadden: Lie!

This Neil Simon romcom has not aged well.

Paula McFadden (Marsha Mason) is the single mother of a precocious ten-year-old girl, Lucy (Quinn Cummings).  The girl’s father was an actor and so is the man she is currently living with.  Everyone is excited about moving to California where the boyfriend is scheduled to make a movie.  At the last minute, boyfriend leaves Paula via a Dear John letter.  To add insult to injury, he has sublet their apartment and Paula has no money and nowhere else to live.  She determines to stand her ground.

The sub-lessee turns out to be Elliot Garfield (Richard Dreyfuss) who has moved to New York to star in an off-Broadway production of Richard III.  He has nowhere else to go either.  After a huge bruhaha, Elliot offers to let Paula and Lucy stay.  Paula and Elliot make lousy roommates.  He is a health-food-eating, meditating, midnight guitar playing bundle of nerves.  She is a heartbroken actor-hating dancer who retired and is now out of shape. But Elliot and Lucy adore each other so there is that.

Romcom is the genre and there will be no surprise ending.

I am not a fan of Marsha Mason and Neil Simon is hit or miss with me.  I laughed really hard at Dreyfuss’s performance on original release and it is still the best part of the movie. He is required by the Richard III director to play the hunchbacked villain as a flaming queen  despite Elliot’s pleas that this will ruin his career.  He attempts this any way with hilarious results.  Everything else felt too talky and pat on this viewing.  I don’t know that a movie would be able to get away with such outrageous gay stereotyping these days.

Dreyfuss won the Best Actor Oscar.  I would have been more inclined to honor him for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress,  Best Supporting Actress (Cummings), and Best Original Screenplay.

Hitler: A Career (Hitler – Eine Karriere)
Directed by Joaquim Fest and Christian Herrendoerfer
Written by Joaquim Fest
1977/West Germany
IMDb page
First viewing/Netflix streaming

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. — Adolf Hitler

I’ve watched a lot of Hitler documentaries on this journey.  They are making me increasingly anxious about the world in which we live.

This documentary covers the life of Adolf Hitler from birth to ignominious death, with an emphasis on his rhetoric, political tactics, and psyche.  Copious use is made of newsreel footage.

This documentary is unique in my viewing so far in that it was made by Germans and contains a lot of footage I had never seen.  A lot of the other ones draw again and again from Triumph of the Will and Eva Braun’s home movies.  Some of the psychology seemed a tad facile to me.  I have to accept that I will never understand Hitler and I will never understand many of my fellow humans.

The film is currently streaming on Netflix (US).

A Special Day
Directed by Ettore Scola
Written by Ruggero Mascale and Ettore Scola
1977/Italy
IMDb page
First viewing/Criterion Channel

Gabriele: Today’s a very particular day for me, you know. It’s like a dream where you want to scream but nothing comes out.

An outstanding film about loneliness set to the background of Hitler’s state visit to Rome in 1938.

I came to the film knowing nothing about it except this blurb on the IMDb page. “Two neighbors, a persecuted journalist and a resigned housewife, meet during Hitler’s visit to Italy in May 1938.” I think it works best that way so I’ll only summarize the basic set up.

Antonietta Taberi (Sophia Loren) is the exhausted mother of six children. Her husband is a womanizer and an official in Mussolini’s government.  The entire family, minus Antonietta, is attending a grand parade in honor of the visit.  As she is doing her chores, her pet talking mynah bird escapes.  It flies near the window of Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni), her neighbor across the courtyard.

Gabriele helps Antonietta capture her bird.  The two could not be more different.  She is an uneducated woman who supports Mussolini without thinking about it much.  He is a sophisticated former radio announcer.  He tries to cheer her up.  She cannot help being attracted to him.  I will leave it right there,

I loved discovering this movie.  The acting is superb.  The whole thing is exquisitely shot in sepia tones with muted dashes of color.  The soundtrack combines a beautiful score with the constant blare of a radio broadcast adulating the two dictators and describing the parade.  Highly recommended.

A Special Day was nominated in the categories of Best Actor and Best Foreign Language film.  Mastroianni richly deserved his nomination and possibly the win.

Pumping Iron
Directed by George Butler and Robert Fiori
Based on the book “Pumping Iron” by George Butler and Charles Gaines
1977/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime (free to members)

You have to remember something: Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Don’t know whether body building is a sport.  If it is this is one of the great sports documentaries.  If not, it’s a vaey interesting psychological study.

The setting is Pretoria South Africa in 1975, where the Mr. Universe (amateur) and Mr. Olympia (professional) body-building championships are to be held.  We watch various competitors training and talking about their competition.  The film focuses on two contenders for the Mr. Olympia title – 5-time winner Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou (“The Incredible Hulk”) Ferrigno.

Ferrigno is a taller,  bigger man than Schwarzenegger.  He trains under the guidance of his father, which may be a blessing or a curse.  Both are utterly determined to defeat Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger has not a worry in the world.  It is a amazing how much charisma can be packed into the massive body of a big jerk.  He frankly admits to spending much of his time giving bad advice to his opponents and otherwise psyching them out.  But this ruthless man has a big smile on his face the whole time and you can see how he would be able to do almost anything he set his mind to.

I have never found muscle bound men particularly attractive and am not a fan of body building.  You don’t have to be to enjoy this film.  It made a household name out of Schwarzenegger and the rest is history.  If the topic appeals, go for it.

George Lucas’ space opera Star Wars, made for $11 million, was released in theaters in mid-summer and grossed nearly $200 million on its first release, topping Jaws as the highest earning film to date and generating an astoundingly lucrative merchandising campaign.  The sci-fi film featured the first use of an animated 3-D wire-frame graphic, and extensively used CGI.

Director John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever  created a disco-dancing craze, popularized disco music, made a star of John Travolta, and the extremely popular songs by the BeeGees encouraged the future popularity of movie soundtracks.

Andre Blay established the first video distribution company to license, market and distribute half-inch videotape cassettes (both Betamax and VHS) to consumers. He offered the first group of fifty best-selling movies to the public through a direct-mail sales operation called the Video Club of America.  The first three films to debut on home tape were The Sound of Music (1965), Patton (1970) and M*A*S*H (1970) – expensively-priced at about $50-$75 per cassette tape copy.  George Atkinson of Los Angeles began to advertise the rental of 50 Magnetic Video titles of his own collection in the Los Angeles Times, and launched the first video rental store, Video Station.  Atkinson was threatened with a lawsuit for renting the videos, but quickly discovered that U.S. copyright law gave him the right to rent and resell videos he owned. Within five years, he franchised more than 400 Video Station stores across the country.

43 year-old Polish director Roman Polanski had sex with a 13-year-old girl following champagne (and allegedly, quaaludes) in actor Jack Nicholson’s hot tub in his LA home. Polanski pleaded guilty to a single count of unlawful sexual intercourse with the minor but fled to France in February, 1978 before his sentencing.

We said good-bye to several icons of the silver screen: Charlie Chaplin; Elvis Presley; Groucho Marx; Howard Hawks; and Joan Crawford.  We also lost Henri-Georges Clouzot; Peter Finch; William Castle; Roberto Rossellini; Jean Hagen; Zero Mostel; Bing Crosby; and Jacques Tourneur.  Roberto Begnini, Mel Gibson, Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver made their film debuts.

The Atari 2600 gaming system and the Apple II computer were released.  The U.S. turned the Panama Canal over to Panama.  President Jimmy Carter pardoned Viet Nam draft evaders.  The Trans-Alaskan Oil Pipeline was completed.  Spain held its first elections since 1936 just before the Spanish Civil War began.

Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” was named the number one song of 1977 by RPM Magazine. The Shadow Box by Michael Christofer won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  There was no Pulitzer for Literature awarded.  Time Magazine’s Man of the Year was Anwar Sadat.

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The list of films released in 1977 that I will pick from is here.  Suggestions and warnings are welcome.  There is a lot of strength at the top but I find it suspicious that so many of the List films are not highly rated.