Steve’s Selections #14 – Rollerball (1975)

Steve Honeywell at 1001plus and I agreed to continue to do a monthly review of a film the other picked for us.  We did 12 in 2015 and we will do 12 more in 2016.  The second one this year is Rollerball – the original version from 1975, not the 2002 remake.  It’s also on the list of the 101 Sci-Fi Movies You Must See Before You Die, and I am slowly working on those entries.  I saw the remake of Rollerball back when it came to DVD and I honestly can remember nothing about it other than it had Rebecca Romijn and LL Cool J in it, so I will not be comparing/contrasting the two films in this post.

Movie – Star Wars (1977)

Science fiction films are sometimes referred to as “space operas”, not unlike westerns sometimes being called “horse operas”.  The reason is that there are often similarities in the kind of stories being told; it’s only the setting that is different.  I wrote in the parent post for this category, “Consider the following story: farm boy from the boondocks meets an old gunslinger who shows him the ropes.  After riding into town where all the bad guys and action are they join up with a disreputable criminal with a heart of gold and later a fancy woman out of her element.  Farm boy wants to get revenge on the man who killed his father.  And that man is the former protégé of the old gunslinger who was once very close to him until the protégé betrayed him.  If that’s not a western, I don’t know what is.  If you haven’t figured it out already, I just described Star Wars.”

Movie – Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Despite the year and the title, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul has nothing to do with Muhammad Ali (in case you were wondering.)  It’s a German film from writer/director/producer Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  At the center of the movie is a marriage between a 60ish white German woman and a 30-something Arab immigrant.  The two meet by chance, get married almost by accident, and then receive the collective condemnation from almost everybody they know.  This film avoids most of the clichés about this either bringing them together or driving them apart.  Instead, what has a bigger impact on their relationship and marriage is that both seem lost at where they are at this point in their lives and neither really seems to know what they want.

Movie – The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

My first experience with The Rocky Horror Picture Show was not a positive one.  When I was in college VHS tapes of movies were exploding in popularity, but the people who owned the rights to this film refused to release it in order to keep people going to the theaters that were showing the midnight movies.  Somehow my college got the film and showed it on campus one evening.  I went in knowing NOTHING about either the film or the audience participation.  When it started and people were yelling “lips!” I thought it was a little funny.  I soon caught on that the people who did know the movie had all these rituals.  Unfortunately, I knew none of them in order to play along, so I just sat there kind of irritated because I couldn’t hear any of the dialogue or the songs.

Movie – F for Fake (1973)

Orson Welles made many different kinds of films over his career.  Citizen Kane (1941) is the acknowledged best of the bunch.  After that opinions differ, but Touch of Evil (1958) is probably the one I see most often mentioned next.  I would agree with those two rankings.  After seeing F for Fake, though, I have to say that I would put it very close to, and possibly even with, Touch of Evil in terms of how good it is.  It’s a puzzle box of a movie that may or may not be a documentary, may or may not be Welles stroking his ego, and may or may not be Welles having a tremendous joke on everyone.  I feel it’s quite possibly all three.

Movie – Young Frankenstein (1974)

How about the year Mel Brooks had in 1974?  He directed what are now known as two genre spoof comedy classics – Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.  While the sendups of western clichés and the “meta-ness” of Blazing Saddles are fun, I prefer Young Frankenstein’s take on the monster movie genre in general and the Frankenstein’s monster movies in particular.  Brooks and the film’s star, Gene Wilder, co-wrote the film and you could tell they had a blast making it.  They received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, but lost to The Godfather Part II.  “Adapted” is a bit of a reach.  There’s not a lot of connection between this film and Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, other than the concepts.  Young Frankenstein actually is closer to the Frankenstein movies that it is making fun of.  Regardless of what it is based on, it is a very funny movie.

Movie – Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

Tora! Tora! Tora! is a big budget war film made during the height of the Vietnam War.  As you might expect, it did not do well initially at the American box office.  Probably adding to the alienation of audiences at the time is the fact that both the Japanese and American sides are given equal time in the film, right down to all the Japanese scenes being in their own language and therefore subtitled for American audiences.  As an American I am familiar with many of the things that led up to the attack, of course, but I still learned quite a few things that I did not know.  The movie states right at the beginning that even though this is a re-creation, every person and event is factually correct.  I ended up liking this film quite a bit more than I expected.

Movie – Charlotte’s Web (1973)

I may be wrong, but I am almost certain that Charlotte’s Web is the very first movie I ever saw in a theater.  For reasons now unknown to me my elementary school class was taken to see it.  I remember all of us kids running in and immediately heading right down to the front row.  I didn’t actually know why we were there (never having seen a movie in a theater before), but I could sense the excitement from the other kids.  I was surprised when the movie started, but quickly got wrapped up in it.  I remember all of us kids both laughing at some of the antics, especially those of the rat (whose voice I recognized as Paul Lynde from Hollywood Squares), and crying at a scene at the end.  At some point years later I did watch this again as an adult, but my memories of having seen it as a child are actually the ones that are more solid in my mind.

Movie – MASH (1970)

This review is going to be about MASH the movie, not the long-running television series.  If you didn’t know that the TV show originally was a movie then you may be surprised by what you see.  Both were originally based on the 1968 “Richard Hooker” novel of the same name.  (More on “Hooker” a little later, including why I have the name in quotes.)  The year that MASH the movie (hereinafter known simply as MASH) came out, the film Catch-22 also came out.  The latter was expected to be the more successful of the two, based on the people making it, but MASH proved to be the one that had more lasting success.  Both show the craziness of war, Catch-22 for World War II and MASH for Korea.  I like both films quite a bit.  (You can read my review of Catch-22 here.)  Of the two, MASH is the more realistic film, having been based on the author’s real experiences during the Korean War.

Movie – Jaws (1975)

As I mentioned in my recent Casablanca review, sometimes movies are not the result of careful pre-planning, but rather a series of serendipitous occurrences.  Jaws is one such movie.  Filming went so far over schedule, and there were so many problems with the mechanical shark built for the film, that director Steven Spielberg had to change many of the shots he had planned.  In addition, some of the most famous lines from the film were not in the original screenplay, but were adlibbed or written by the actors.  Not bad for a film, that when it finally came out, scared the crap out of moviegoers and that is now widely credited with single-handedly inventing the summer blockbuster.

Movie – What’s Up, Doc? (1972)

The movie What’s Up, Doc? is a love letter to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s.  Co-writer/director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) sets this film in San Francisco and makes inventive use of a number of famous locations in the city, most of them during an extended and very funny chase scene involving dozens of characters.  This film touches on, or even reproduces, many of the events from classic screwball comedies.  But by making the movie in the 1970s Bogdanovich was able to get away with some jokes that would not have been allowed back in the 1930s.

Movie – American Graffiti (1973)

American Graffiti is probably the first “nostalgia” movie ever made about the early rock and roll era.  Even though it is set in 1962, it is really an ode to the 1950s when teens spent their evenings riding up and down the strip in their cars, listening to rock and roll on the radio.  Originally the studio didn’t even want to release the film, sitting on it for six months and requiring director George Lucas to cut some scenes, but when they finally did it became very popular.  It also received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.  (After Lucas became big from Star Wars, American Graffiti was re-released in Lucas’ original version.) 

Movie – Vanishing Point (1971)

Vanishing Point is pretty much the definition of a 1970s cult movie.  It features counter-culture and racial subplots in dealing with the people in power (i.e. the cops and the media).  It also features a white 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T with a 440 cubic inch V-8 engine that becomes the true star of the film as the driver of it evades the police across multiple states.  (For those folks who don’t speak “car” that’s a really fast and powerful machine.)  The result is an interesting movie that is as much about the times as it is the car.

Movie – Cabaret (1972)

Question:  Which film was the most honored at the 1973 Oscars – The Godfather or Cabaret?  Answer: It’s not even close.  While The Godfather had eleven nominations to Cabaret’s ten, The Godfather won only three (Picture, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay).  Cabaret won eight (Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Editing, Music and Score, Art Direction, and Sound.)  In the seven categories where they went head to head, Cabaret won five of them.  In fact, its loss to The Godfather for Best Picture has made it the film that has won the most Oscars without winning the biggest one.

Movie – Class of ‘44 (1973)

Class of ’44 was the sequel to the very popular Summer of ’42.  Like many sequels it did not achieve the same success as the original.  In this case it was for other than the usual reason.  Many sequels are just rehashes of the exact same thing as the original and therefore people grow bored with them quicker.  Class of ’44 was a completely different kind of movie from Summer of ’42.  This was a disappointment to people at the time because they wanted to see more like what they had just seen two years earlier.  If you go into the movie knowing what not to expect, though, I think you will like it better.

Movie and Book – Summer of ‘42 (1971)

Summer of ’42 played movie theaters during the spring and summer of 1971.  It is an autobiographical tale of a boy’s coming of age one summer on Nantucket Island.  Both it and the book that accompanied it were very popular with audiences.  The movie was nominated for four Oscars, winning for Best Score.  The book became one of the best selling novels of the 1970s.  As it happens, I read the book and saw the movie when I was just about the same age as the main character (15) and they rang very true for me.

Movie and TV – Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979) (1979-1981)

Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century was a reboot of the sci-fi serial character from the 1930s.  It was released as a theatrical movie in the spring of 1979 and based on its box office returns it was turned into a TV series in the fall of 1979.  The movie was edited and turned into the two hour pilot for the show, which ran two seasons before being cancelled.  It was campy fun in the tradition of the shows like the original Battlestar Galactica and the original Star Trek.

Movie – Catch-22 (1970)

The movie Catch-22 is based on the 1961 bestselling novel of the same name.  It dealt with the insanity of war.  It grew in popularity as the 1960s went along and the Vietnam War increased in intensity.  Responses to the novel soon followed with Dr. Strangelove (1964) about the Cold War, this movie about World War II in 1970; the novel (1968), movie (1970) and TV show (1972-1983) M*A*S*H about the Korean War; and finally Apocalypse Now (1979) about Vietnam.

Movie – Dirty Harry (1971)

The movie Dirty Harry didn’t invent the maverick cop genre (Bullitt is an earlier example), but it sure cemented it in the public consciousness.  Harry Callahan is a cop who has little patience for politics or legal procedure.  Anything that prevents him from getting scum off the streets is bad in his book and he will often disregard it.  He also carries a .44 magnum gun, which is much too powerful for use on the streets.  After this movie came out a “Dirty Harry” moment or act became part of the language.  The list of movie and TV references on IMDB is a mile long.  This movie also has the famous “Do you feel lucky?” quote, which is one of the most misquoted lines in movie history.

Movie - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

This movie stars Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher.  Nicholson needs no introduction.  Louise Fletcher has worked constantly in both movies and TV since winning the Oscar, but she never again had a role like this one.  Trekkies/Trekkers will recognize her as Kai Winn on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It was directed by Milos Forman, who went on to do Amadeus.  It was adapted by Lawrence Hauben, who never wrote another movie, and Bo Goldman, who went on to write Scent of a Woman.