Once again, it’s time for the Best from Fifty Years Ago. This is our ninth such list (having previously “bested” 1967 – 1974), and we approach 1975 with mixed emotions. Why is that, you ask? Good question—glad to see that you are reading with care and not just skipping ahead to the list. Well it’s like this: last year, I shared this thought about 1974: “The New Hollywood, which only had two big years left ahead of it, wasn’t just hot, it was incandescent.” The same holds true for 1975: Wow . . . what a year for the New Hollywood. And, sigh, next year’s list will be the last one from the era that the New Hollywood was in its full glory, the last year before the blockbusters ate the business model, and the arid eighties loomed in the visible future.
But let’s not get too gloomy. (After all, you’ve got the American slide into fascism to worry about—didn’t you come here for a little respite?) So let’s remember that even after our New Hollywood heroes are shown the door, great movies will always be made. Always. It’s just that sometimes you have to look harder to find them. Not in 1975, however, where great movies were . . . everywhere. In fact there are so many first ballot Hall of Famers here that there is a good chance your favorite didn’t make the cut (and so the management kindly directs your attention to the addendum at the bottom of this post).
Here the are, in alphabetical order, MCC’s Top 10 from 1975:
Barry Lyndon If memory serves, Mad Magazine dubbed this “Borey Lyndon”—and, ya know, if that’s your reaction to a three hour, shot by candlelight adaptation of “a fairly obscure” nineteenth century novel, I’m not going to blame you. But don’t sleep on Kubrick (talking to you, ABS), who never made the same film twice, and whose movies invariably improve with each viewing. It’s an exaggeration to say that every frame of Barry Lyndon is a work of art—only most of them are. Just as important, as one Kubrickian suggested, this is “an intensely personal project that offers rare insight into the director himself.”
Dog Day Afternoon Al Pacino and John Cazale directed by Sidney Lumet in a way ahead-of-its time, Big Apple, bank robbery gone wrong pic? Yes, please. It’s as good as it sounds, actually it’s even better. Lots of valuable hands of deck in this collaborative effort, but we’re going with hat-tips to supporting player Charles Durning, and seventies cinematographer Victor J. Kemper. Beyond that, we’re going to hand it over to our friend Heather.
Innocents with Dirty Hands Not everybody shares our love for this one, which we situate as one of the highlights of Claude Chabrol’s second wave. (“Innocents is a great film on its own merits, but it also looks back, providing something of a summary statement of the entire period.”) With Romy Schneider, Rob Steiger, and an utterly irresistible supporting turn by the marvelous Jean Rochefort, Chabrol, an MCC favorite, delivers the combination of sure-handed suspense, subtle social observation, and understated humor that was his trademark.
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum Co-Directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, Lost Honor is another stunning fifty year old film that plays as if it was made last week. Angela Winkler (Katarina), shines as a young woman who holds her own despite being in the crosshairs of an irresponsible, sensationalist media, and a security obsessed surveillance state. As Amy Taubin put it, “more than taking the temperature of its time, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum acutely measured the dangers of the near future, which is now fully upon us.”
Nashville Robert Altman’s masterpiece, which is saying something. As the signature statement from one of the iconic figures of the New Hollywood, we’ve praised this one to the stars here and here, and we could not be more excited about this forthcoming study. Savvy New York Times political columnist Tom Wicker described Nashville as a “cascade of minutely detailed vulgarity, greed, deceit, cruelty, barely contained hysteria, and the frantic lack of root and grace into which American life has been driven.” Well summarized. Who knew it would get worse?
Night Moves Taken for granted at the time of its release, Arthur Penn’s neo-noir, starring Gene Hackman, is, with four other entrants of this list, one of the landmarks of the seventies film. One of our favorite movies, and boasting a bevy of breathtakingly brilliant lines by writer Alan Sharp, I’m extremely pleased to have a forthcoming feature about a new special edition of this one in the summer Cineaste. A link to that will be posed to Books, Essays and More when it becomes available—but here’s a teaser: The “new 4K restoration from The Criterion Collection will only enhance the standing of Night Moves as one of the great achievements in that extraordinary decade of American filmmaking.”
The Passenger Antonioni directs Jack. We just wrote about this one, so I’m going to hand it over to Manohla Dargis: “Locke, played with a stunning admixture of emotional lethargy and sexual heat by Mr. Nicholson” is “a man on the run from himself.” “Locke’s escape from himself is predicated on the belief, one of the foundations of modernity, that there is a self from which he can flee.” “Arguably Mr. Antonioni’s greatest film,” “it dazzles from first shot to last.”
Shampoo It is not a coincidence that we have written about so many of the movies on this list previously. If Kubrick had designed the ad campaign, it would have gone like this: Beatty. Ashby. Towne. (Which is not to minimize the contributions of New Hollywood maestro László Kovács or the outstanding supporting players.) Shampoo takes place over a twenty four hour period, in which George (or is that Warren?) beds four women. And then Beatty complains that “Nobody understood that it was about politics.” The weird thing is, he’s right.
Three Days of the Condor Well, we put this one on our 2022 Sight and Sound ballot as one of the ten greatest movies ever made. Sydney Pollack’s film, from an outstanding, subtle script (Lorenzo Semple Jr. as polished by David Rayfiel) showcases great New York City location work by way cinematographer Owen Roizman—but here we’re going to go: Redford. Dunaway. Von Sydow. For a feature in Cineaste, we concluded with “Three Days of the Condor dusts off its seat as one of the great films of the 1970s, and, with The Conversation and The Parallax View, comprise the holy trinity of the paranoid thrillers of that extraordinary decade.”
The Traveling Players The most remarkable thing about The Traveling Players is that it is both one of the ten best movies of 1975—and not even one of our five favorite movies by Theo Angelopoulos. One of the singular voices in the history of cinema, his characters can move seamlessly through not only space but time in one of his characteristic long takes. Commonly steeped in the tragedies of Greek history, The Traveling Players follows the experiences of a nomadic theater company during the politically fraught years from 1939 and 1952. Christina Newland offers a refreshingly personal take on movie that has “been breathlessly called one of the most important films of the 20th century.”
Addendum. As promised, few words about some omissions. 1975 was such a strong year, especially for the New Hollywood, that, as in the past, we could have extended the discussion with some honorable mentions. And there were ten movies, not on this list, that would have easily been among the ten best in many other years. But the best here are so, um, bestest, we’ve decided to leave them peerless. (Which is probably a good thing, as my next ten still might have left off many beloved darlings. After all, it was a year in which MCC favorite Bertrand Tavernier won César Awards for best director and best writer for Let Joy Reign Supreme; and it would have been irresistible not to give shout out to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s still obscure but brilliant and (sigh again) all-too-relevant-today Curriculum Vitae. And as for the absence of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which was anointed “the greatest film of all time” by Sight and Sound in 2022. Um, no. Not even close. Don’t get us wrong . . . Akerman made the list in 1974, and, in addition, as Dodgers fans used to say in the 1950s, wait till next year!!