Summer’s here, and the time is ripe . . . for our annual “Fifty Years Ago” best of list. As always we play by the Wally and Andre rules—and rarely have those admonitions been so vital. At with 1971 and 1972, 1973 was another banner year for the New Hollywood, and for the movies more generally. So much so that, unlike some previous lists, in which we would open with some throat clearing bemoaning a few favorites left on the cutting room floor, this time we conclude with another Top Ten list – the ten best films not included in our Top Ten – and then another list of notables beyond that! It almost makes you want to break out the time machine. Of course, then you’d have to relive some other less fun things.
But for the movies . . . what a year. And here they are, in alphabetical order, the best of 1973:
Don’t Look Now As a rule we viscerally avoid children-in-jeopardy movies, and spooky films tend to fall outside our sweet pot. But this singular masterpiece falls into that incongruous “exception that proves the rule” category. Stunningly shot by director Nicolas Roeg (a reminder that he started out as an accomplished cinematographer), Don’t Look Now, based on a story by Hitchcock favorite Daphne Du Maurier, boasts outstanding performances by New Hollywood legends Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Infamous for its envelope-pushing sex scene, often lost in those “did they actually do that?” conversations is the essential narrative integrity of that passion, and the brilliant way in which Roeg (in something of trademark) fractures time during that encounter, something that works in the moment—and subtly foreshadows what will follow.
Day for Night François Truffaut’s film gets our nod for “the best movie about movies”—which is very high praise when you consider the competition. As with half the entries on this list, we’ve written about this one before (another testament to the strength of this year at the movies). With Truffaut’s long-time alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud, here stepping into his own shoes, the rich cast also includes Jacqueline Bisset, Nathalie Baye, Alexandra Stewart and Truffaut himself as, um, the director. (And don’t underestimate the participation of co-writer and key Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman). Day for Night is both enormously entertaining and has plenty to say. Not least of which is this gem: “Shooting a movie is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. At first you hope for a nice trip. Soon you just hope to reach your destination.”
The Friends of Eddie Coyle A brilliant character study and marvelous caper film, we can’t resist repeating our favorite joke—“spoiler alert: they’re not his friends.” Probably Robert Mitchum’s greatest performance (wow), and undoubtedly Peter Yates’ finest film. With a stellar supporting cast that includes Peter Boyle and Richard Jordan (each never better), the Boston-based Eddie Coyle offers a clinic in Yates’ talent for location shooting (well supported by cinematographer Victor Kemper), and draws on – and improves upon – the nifty novel by George Higgins. (Evergreen advice: “One of the first things I learned is never to ask a man why he’s in a hurry.”) And it’s very seventies out there – this is indeed one of the great and representative films of the era, with an appropriately devastating and in retrospect inevitable ending.
The Last Detail Hal Ashby’s road picture, written by Robert (Chinatown) Towne for his friend Jack Nicholson, captures, without calling attention to the matter, the despairing ennui of the decade. An indictment of American institutions not so much as evil but fill-out-the-forms indifferent, the nominal story follows two cynical navy lifers (Nicholson and Otis Young) as they escort a naïve young sailor (Randy Quaid) from Norfolk Virginia to Portsmouth New Hampshire, where he is staring down hard time for committing a petty theft. Shot with New Hollywood darkness-and-documentary style realism by Michael (Taxi Driver) Chapman, The Last Detail is so bleak that even its whorehouse is listless—but look there for a very fine Carol Kane.
The Long Goodbye The first of what would become the holy trinity of New Hollywood revisionist noirs (followed by Chinatown and Night Moves) Robert Altman’s deconstruction of Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe was, especially to Chandler purists, controversial in its time. Lost on those critics was the fact that Altman, who did generally revel in his iconoclasm, actually made a picture that was deeply reverent towards the fictional detective’s core values. (Leigh Brackett also wrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep (1946) – a straight, landmark Chandler adaptation with Bogie and Bacall – she knew what she was doing.) Beautifully shot by Vilmos Zgimond, Elliott Gould carries the movie, well supported by Nina van Pallandt and Mr. Sterling Hayden. (NB: Regarding that long, seemingly unmotivated opening sequence: actually it summarizes the key point of the entire film.)
Mean Streets In 1972, a young Martin Scorsese, who had been scuffling along at the fringes of the business for several years without much traction, released the depression era girls and guns quickie Boxcar Bertha (which has its fans). He screened the film for John Cassavetes, who told him “you just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit,” and urged him to make a personal film that he believed in. Scorsese dropped his next assignment and returned to the screenplay for what would become Mean Streets, featuring Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. How did that go? Pauline Kael’s rave review described it as “a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking,” with an “unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range that is dizzyingly sensual.” And as Roger Ebert observed: “The key words in the movie are the first ones, spoken over a black screen: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. All the rest is BS and you know it.” The voice belongs to Scorsese.”
The Mother and the Whore This elusive landmark is now making the rounds in a newly restored print, which offers hope that a long-overdue special edition will be forthcoming in the near future. The signature film of writer-director Jean Eustache features Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun, and follows the modest travails of its young Parisian protagonists over the course of its 219 minutes. But we’re going to get out of the way and let Amy Taubin explain this one: “this fairly autobiographical work (shot in the director’s own apartment) is full of à clef references to New Wave directors with whom Eustache felt bitterly competitive, and grounded in the malaise that followed May ’68. But it also shares and bares the anxiety about masculinity that fuels American films of the ’70s from Carnal Knowledge to Taxi Driver, not to mention John Cassavetes’s oeuvre—an anxiety exacerbated by the so-called sexual-liberation movement and the subsequent rise of feminist consciousness.”
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) is generally seen as his masterpiece, but we lean towards the (restored version) of Pat Garrett. With James Colburn and Kris Kristofferson (Bob Dylan had a featured part and did the music), it is the ultimate anti-western—a rumination on the ruthless, criminal expansion of wild-west capitalism, and its essential partnership with ambitious politicians and compromised institutions of authority. And as with almost all late westerns, it offers a melancholy perspective about the closing of the frontier, and the passing of a certain unfettered way of life. In Hollywood’s Last Golden Age, we offer the interpretation that, in the film, Pat and Billy are best understood as two versions of the same person, which makes the conclusion all the more tragic.
Payday Journeyman director Daryl Duke’s intense, observational character study (with the tag line “36 hours in the life of a madman”), elbows its way onto this list on the strength of the bravura performance by Rip Torn, a reminder that there was a time when he was justly considered one of the great actors of his generation. With much to say about the benefits (and costs) of being almost famous, Payday shows more than it tells, with smart observations about most of its characters (all of whom have their flaws), but it is Torn who simply soars here. His performance, in the words of one critic. “is one of those incarnations so complete they make one fear for an actor’s future career; he virtually disappears into the role.”
Scenes from a Marriage We don’t have much new to say about this one . . . because we’ve said a lot about it here. But to reprise three crucial observations: This is one of Ingmar Bergman’s great achievements—and not what you might think of when imagining one of the many Art House masterpieces from this often-severe auteur (Scenes is vivid, animated, and very contemporary). Its interrogation of a modern and by all accounts happy, even envied, marriage was immediately a who-saw-that-coming cultural touchstone on both sides of the Atlantic. And, most important, to quote Molly Haskell, “there are almost no words for the subtlety and the intensity and the range of Ullmann’s and Josephson’s performances.” Originally a six-part mini-series, it was subsequently edited for theatrical release—both are excellent, but seek out the long form version.
Finally, as I noted at the outset, what is remarkable about this Top Ten list (and thus about 1973 in cinema), are the films that are not on it. Such as Orson Welles’ exhilarating, radical essay film F for Fake; Badlands, the sensational debut of Terrence Malick with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek; Jerry Shatzberg’s Scarecrow (that Gene Hackman and Al Pacino road picture took home the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival); Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love (George Segal, Susan Anspach and Kris Kristofferson); Serpico (Lumet); Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick; American Graffiti (Lucas); Breezy (Clint Eastwood – look it up); Paper Moon (Bogdanovich); and Victor Erice’s stunning, haunting The Spirit of the Beehive.
And, as they used to say on late night TV—but wait, there’s more! Indeed, 10 more, that might have gotten more love in a less spectacular year: The Laughing Policemen (two-thirds of a great policer, with Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern); Sisters (De Palma); Woody Allen’s Sleeper; The Last of Sheila (a hugely entertaining movie featuring a party of favorites), Lumet’s The Offense, with Sean Connery; Claude Chabrol’s Wedding in Blood; Fellini’s Aramacord (which took home the Academy Award for best foreign film); Friedkin’s The Exorcist (nominated for five); Joseph Losey’s A Doll’s House, with Jane Fonda; and The Hourglass Sanatorium (which in one recent survey ranked as the fifth greatest Polish film of all time).
And to think you’re still waiting for me to mention The Sting. What a year.
