Our First Glimpse Of The Me Decade

By 1970, film was changing.  I guess it had been changing before then, but by 1970, even Hollywood felt the difference.  Movies new in style and content, like Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy, had been hits. Then in 1969, Easy Rider, practically incoherent, made a ton of money, while many big-budget spectacles flopped.  The studios figured maybe these kids know something. (They didn't--Hollywood made hipper films in the next few years, but very few were the big hits.)

Jesse Walker is now up to his top ten films of 1970.  I generally agree with the list.

1. Five Easy Pieces
2. MASH
3. Gimme Shelter
4. Hospital
5. Bed and Board
6. La Rupture
7. The Conformist
8. Le Cercle Rouge
9. Claire's Knee
10. Woodstock

I haven't seen #6.  The rest of the films I like. (Jesse says MASH is the great football movie ever. I'd put it behind The Freshman and Horse Feathers.)

Five Easy Pieces is rated a bit high.  A little anomie goes a long way.

I agree, Gimme Shelter is a better film than Woodstock.  In fact, a lot of Woodstock is tough to sit through.

Bed And Board is decent Truffaut, but not great.  I wouldn't be surprised to find most Truffaut fans prefer his other film of the year, The Wild Child.  Claire's Knee, on the other hand, may be Rohmer's best.

Here are Jesse's honorable mentions.

11. Chicken Real
12. Donkey Skin
13. Wanda
14. Deep End 
15. Tristana 
16. Dad, Can I Borrow the Car?
17. Little Big Man
18. Patton
19. Hi, Mom!
20. Husbands

I'm a little embarrased to admit I haven't seen #11 through #14.

Tristana may not be amog Bunuel's best, but it's from his final flowering, when everything he made was special.

Little Big Man has some interesting things, but overall is a screechy film that doesn't really go anywhere.  Might have seemed brave revisionist history for Hollywood in 1970, but that aspect hasn't dated well.

Patton has the great opening, and a wonderful lead performance, plus an interesting ambiguity in its attitude toward the man, but I've never really loved it.

Hi, Mom! is one of those hip, shaggy films that were starting to show up.  It's not great, but the Be Black, Baby sequence is astounding, and really overwhelms the rest of the film.

Husbands is actually one of Cassavetes better films, but it's also another example of why I admire him more than like him. (And Jesse, if you like this so much, why don't you love Mike Leigh?)

Jesse also notes a few films from 1970 he hasn't seen: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Little Theater of Jean Renoir.  They're certainly all worth seeing.  However, though Renoir is a master, I don't worship every trifle, which the last title definitely is.

Here's where I usually list films that would have made my top ten list that Jesse left out.  For the first time, I can't definitely say any single film would definitely have made that list.

However, there are a number of films from the year I like that Jesse didn't list:

Airport (The first of the disaster movies, and actually fun, though I don't think it made anyone proud), The Boys in the Band (some would say the politics is dated, but I think the drama still holds up), Even Dwarfs Started Small, Joe (tells you more about the hippies than the hipper films), Let It Be (the depressing side of A Hard Day's Night, with worse music), Multiple Maniacs, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, Start The Revolution Without Me, The Twelve Chairs, Where's Poppa? (uneven, but the fun stuff makes it worthwhile)

And there are quite a few other films of interest, some good, some not so hot, and quite a few of them the sort of navel-gazing hippie-slush that can be intriguing if you don't have to watch another film like it for a while:

Alex in Wonderland, The Angel Levine, The Aristocats, The Baby Maker, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (Patton isn't a cross between The Godfather and Planet Of The Apes, this is), Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (cult film that doesn't deserve it, and Ebert's script shows why he should stick to criticizing his betters), Bloody Mama, The Boatniks, Brewster McCloud (any Altman in the 70s is worth something), The Butcher (so The Breach makes it but not this one), Catch-22 (clunky and huge, and beat to the market by MASH, which did it right), Chariots of the Gods, The Cheyenne Social Club, Chisum, The Christine Jorgensen Story, Le Cochon, Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Cromwell, Darling Lili, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Dirty Dingus Magee, Elvis: That's the Way It Is, The End of the Road, Entertaining Mr Sloane, Getting Straight, The Go-Between, The Great White Hope, Hercules in New York, The Honeymoon Killers (another overrated cult film), House of Dark Shadows, I Love My Wife, I Never Sang for My Father (as I've noted, a very important movie for sitcom writers), I Walk the Line, Kelly's Heroes, The Landlord (the beginning of an amazing decade for Hal Ashby), The Liberation of L.B. Jones, Little Fauss And Big Halsy, The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World, Love Story (the year's biggest hit, even bigger than Airport), Lovers and Other Strangers, Loving (a lot of annoying, modern filmmaking from Kershner, but a great ending), The Lustful Vicar, A Man Called Horse, Le Mans, The Music Lovers, Myra Breckinridge, Ned Kelly, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Only Game in Town, The Out-of-Towners, The Owl and the Pussycat, The Penal Colony, Performance, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (some auteurists have tried to blow this up into a late masterpiece from Wilder, but it's pretty weak), Pufnstuf, Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, Rabbit, Run, Rio Lobo (no auteurists have tried to blow this up into a late masterpiece from Hawks because it's a piece of crap), Ryan's Daughter, Scrooge, Sometimes a Great Notion, The Strawberry Statement, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, ...tick...tick...tick..., El Topo (ground zero of overrated cult films), Tora! Tora! Tora!, Trash, Two Mules for Sister Sara, WUSA, Watermelon Man, What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, Which Way to the Front?, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Zabriskie Point