7 Days in the 70's

One of my favorite films, and a film that I watch again nearly every year, is the film that elevated director William Friedkin to the level that Warner Brothers would entrust him with another literary treatment, a horror story called “The Exorcist”. But that’s jumping ahead. In October, 1971, the film version of a best-selling non-fiction book (yes, studios used to go to books for ideas, rather than just remaking old films, imagine that) called “The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy” by Robin Moore splashed across screens around the world and introduced the world to Popeye Doyle, a hard-nosed detective who wouldn’t stop just because it was time to clock out.

“The French Connection” epitomizes, for me, what filmmaking in the 70′s was all about. It’s gritty and harsh, but you can still identify (and laugh with) the main characters. Gene Hackman plays Popeye Doyle, in a performance you’d have a hard time finding an equal to in his long career, and is joined by Roy Scheider as his partner, “Cloudy” Russo. The film was shot entirely on location on the streets of New York, and often, shot on-the-fly with an Arriflex, without shooting permits, wherever and whenever they could get shots, at one point even causing a traffic jam to fit a plot point…

When I was growing up in the seventies, everything was “The Godfather”, and rightly so, as the film has taken its place as one of the best American films ever made.

I recall reading in “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” by Peter Biskind, how William Friedkin rode past Francis Coppola and his friends on the street after winning his Oscar for “The French Connection”, waving the statue out the window, shouting. I don’t know if this served directly as an impetus to Coppola to make the best movie he possibly could, but he did.

Unlike “The French Connection”, “The Godfather” is pure Hollywood. The camera is fixed or moves only very slightly most of the time. Coppola is filming a grand opera and he holds no bones about it, right up to the grande finale with organ music blaring amid the many deaths of the families that have dared back the Corleones into a corner. It’s widely been said that Coppola didn’t want the job, his close friends George Lucas and Martin Scorsese were making the kind of arty films that he wanted to make, but there seems to be a struggle within Coppola between the filmmaker and the businessman. The businessman won over in the case of “The Godfather”, but the filmmaker emerged when it was time to shoot. If “The Godfather” is the result of Coppola’s laziness, all filmmakers should be blessed with this kind of laziness, for his style is completely effortless, the way he methodically and meticulously plows through very complex material. Not bad for a guy who used to work for Roger Corman…

If ever there was a movie in the history of movies that didn’t need a remake, it’s “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”. Despite this, a second remake is already underway. Let me clarify my position, once and for all: I don’t get the point of remakes. Sure, I can see how there can be some reward in doing an updated version, like if the original was a silent film, or if the filmmaker is adding something new to the mix (setting or casting or something inspired) or doing a more faithful version of an original novel or play, but in the case of something like this classic seventies film, I just don’t see any point. I really don’t.p

There is just so much from this film that can’t be improved or duplicated and I think the 1998 Toronto-filmed TV remake already proved that. Joseph Sargent (“Colossus: The Forbin Project”, “MacArthur” and “Jaws: The Revenge”), sure, isn’t among the names on the top of your list for greatest directors the world has ever seen, but the cast that’s assembled for this adaptation of the John Godey novel: Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw and Martin Balsam, just cannot be beat.

The story is very straightforward, it’s basically what “Airport” would look like if it took place on the New York subway system. Matthau is the cranky Subway Commission cop who has the bad luck to be on duty the day that Robert Shaw and a team of cohorts, including an ex-subway employee, Martin Balsam, take a subway car hostage. Denzel Washington is playing the Walter Matthau role in the latest remake. I’ll just let silence pass at this point while that sinks in…

You know, watching the trailer at the bottom of this page makes me want to watch this film again, even though I watched it last only little over a month ago. I guess this is not only because it’s a well-made film (against all odds), but cracking good fun as well.

By this point, in the 1970′s, I was starting to get to the age where I could sneak into PG and R rated movies on my own, so a lot of my favorite films come from the 1974 – 1976 era. I guess, trying to cash in on the lines-around-the-block stir that “The Exorcist” caused only a couple of years before, Universal pulled out all the stops on the hype and tie-ins. I think I had every conceivable piece of shark paraphernalia, including several Doodle Art posters (older readers will remember those … they were basically an excuse to sell replacement pens). I even made this terrific dinner plate, as part of a school project, that showed a guy being bloodily eaten by a great white. Mmmmmm.

What I didn’t realize, at my young age, enjoying the film merely as entertainment, was how new and different a voice Spielberg was to filmmaking at the time. I can certainly see, looking back now, how serious filmmakers would look down on him, since he seemed to be the genius culmination of years of television and film as a basic diet. He wasn’t making “film”, he didn’t seem to care about making “film”, he was making “movies”, like the ones he enjoyed when he was growing up, only better, much, much better…

Before the age when all movies needed a deafening wall-to-wall music soundtrack, there were movies like “Dog Day Afternoon”, which, apart from the opening title track (“Amoreena” by Elton John) which fades into a car radio as the story begins, there isn’t a single note of music for the rest of the film. The story is left to the script, and the director and the performers.

Based on the real-life story of John Wojtowicz, Al Pacino, who’d become a huge boxoffice star after “The Godfather”, its sequel, and “Serpico”, plays Sonny Wortzik, who attempts a very misguided bank robbery which ends in a 12-hour siege and media sideshow.

The script, by Frank Pierson, is incredibly simple, taking place mainly inside the bank and its surrounding buildings, but once the film is over, you feel you have been through a massive ordeal. It’s not the the film is an ordeal, it’s a pleasure to watch, and it’s not that it’s all gloomy and tense, more than anything, the film plays as a tragic-comedy with serious actors in a very serious situation than anything else. What director Sidney Lumet did was to rehearse and improvise with the actors, using the script as a backbone, then had Pierson incorporate what worked into the final version. The result is so realistic it comes off in parts like a documentary…

When “Taxi Driver” first came out in theatres in 1976, I remember seeing the ads on TV, and I remember my parents heading off to see it: the most talked-about film of the year. It didn’t really interest me at the time, although, for some reason it made me think of “Psycho” and I didn’t know why.

Since then, I’ve seen “Taxi Driver” countless times, on home video, on DVD, in rep theatres. It’s just one of those films that hits me in the right spot, and I could probably watch it a couple of times in a row without getting bored of it. For me, it’s like a really good song. It’s not a particularly pretty song, but it’s a good song nonetheless.

Paul Schrader, who apparently wrote the screenplay in less than a week (a loaded gun on his desk the whole time, for inspiration), has said that the story is partly autobiographical, having felt isolated and angry at a certain point in his life. He wasn’t sure if there was anyone else in the world who would be able to connect with the story, but, giving it to Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro to read, they both said they “got it.” The film truly shows itself as a labor of love on the part of Scorsese. After many, repeated viewings, I can’t find a single frame out of place (except maybe the scene where “Sport” [Harvey Keitel] dances with Iris [Jodie Foster] toward the end of the film … because it’s not from Travis’ [DeNiro] P.O.V., it just doesn’t seem like it belongs in the story)…

It was mid-June 1977 by the time the new sci-fi fantasy movie, “Star Wars” rolled into the small town where I grew up. I’d seen the TV ads (see video at the bottom of this post) and some Ralph McQuarrie pre-production art in Starlog magazine (bunch of stormtroopers standing around in a hallway). A horror and sci-fi fan from an early age, in 1977 what you had was Saturday morning TV, periodic “Planet of the Apes” marathons at the drive-in, schlock like “The Frogs” and “Empire of the Ants” and mainstream science fiction movies like “Silent Running” and “Future World”. I didn’t know what to expect from this “Star Wars”. More of the same, I suppose.

I was late to the matinee. My mom insisted that I take my sister with me, and she wasn’t ready in time. So, by the time I got her popcorn and got settled back in my seat, C-3P0 was saying “This is madness!” What is madness? Did I miss something? Despite being completely lost, only minutes into the film, I enjoyed it as much as any kid growing up in the seventies did. That summer, I expect I saw “Star Wars” at least 30 more times, and then another 10 the next time it rolled through town. I’d not considered it before, but maybe this was why my parents were unable to pay may way through film school…