Review of the 70s

The 70s - Blockbusters, Masterpieces, Underdogs and the shape of things to come....(if only!)

I think the 40s is still my favourite decade for films in general - but when it comes to Best Picture Winners then the 70s is the ultimate decade. Most of these films are considered to be absolute classics and are watched regularly around the world today (and so are most of the forty other nominees). I really like all of them except Patton - and I'll concede that Patton had some great things going for it (especially George C Scott and the soundtrack).

There's a real shift in film-making this decade - or at least in "critically-acclaimed" film-making - away from high-budget glamour and whimsy and towards gritty realism. We saw a bit of this in the 60s (In The Heat of the Night, Midnight Cowboy) but, with the arguable exceptions of The Sting and Annie Hall (both still a bit gritty and realistic....) the 70s gives us intelligent, thought-provoking and (sometimes) disturbing drama. There are no more musicals (even near-miss Cabaret is a very different sort of musical) and, apart from the De Niro scenes in G2, every film is set within 50 years of the time it was made. All the films are American (both technically and in spirit) and are set, at least partly, in the US (Patton's speech in front of the flag just about qualifies as a US setting). At least half of the films are strongly connected to contemporary New York.

Also, a lot of these films (and many of the other nominees) are shot mainly or partly on location, rather than on big Hollywood lots. There are several examples of scenes that were shot very early in the morning on city streets (possibly without the proper permits), and glimpses of bystanders who were probably quite surprised to find they ended up in an Oscar-winning film. (The French Connection and Rocky are probably the best examples of this....).

I have really enjoyed this decade - if enjoyed is the right word for some of these films. It is with great reluctance that we move on to the 80s, where flashy capitalism and an increased reliance on personal therapy looks set to derail a lot of what the 70s gave us!

My Top Ten (as they stand today!) is as follows:

1. The Godfather
2. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
3. The Sting
4. The Godfather Part II
5. The Deer Hunter
6. Rocky
7. Annie Hall
8. The French Connection
9. Kramer vs Kramer
10. Patton

Best Picture

Nominees:   

The Godfather
The Sting
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
The Godfather Part II
The Deer Hunter

And the winner is.....

The Godfather

I know it's obvious, but it's that good. Better than the sequel (although the De Niro parts of the sequel match it well). I've seen it half a dozen times now and it gets better every time I watch it. It's long, serious, hard-hitting, violent and grim in parts - but always compelling and (weird but true) very enjoyable. It's right up there on my all time list!



Best Director


Nominees:   

Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather 1 and 2)
George Roy Hill (The Sting)
Milos Forman (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest)
Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter)

And the winner is.....

Francis Ford Coppola

Two Godfathers - no contest!


Best Actor


Nominees:   

Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest)
Robert De Niro (Godfather 2, The Deer Hunter)
John Cazale (Godfather 1 and 2, The Deer Hunter)
Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter)
Paul Newman (The Sting)
George C Scott (Patton)


And the winner is.....

Jack Nicholson

It's a tough category - hence six nominees (and no Pacino). But Jack gets it because he acts his socks off all the way through Cuckoo's Nest without ever getting in the way of the other great performances. Even though he has often over-acted his way through the last four decades, when he gets it right he gets it very right indeed.


Best Actress

Nominees:   

Diane Keaton (Godfather 1 and 2, Annie Hall)
Talia Shire (Godfather 1 and 2, Rocky)
Meryl Streep (The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs Kramer)
Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest)


And the winner is.....

Louise Fletcher

Actually not as rich a category as I thought it would be, as most of the great female performances of the 70s were in non-winning films. The winners in this decade were not female focussed films. Three women - Keaton, Shire and Streep - had significant roles in more than one winner, and were good in those roles (although I still can't work out what Talia Shire did in G2 that was worthy of a nomination over Diane Keaton!).

However, I'm giving this to Louise Fletcher. Playing against Nicholson in *that* role and holding her own. Her performance is a masterclass in restraint - she acts more in what she doesn't do than what she does.


Best Non-Winning Picture

Nominees: 

Cabaret
Star Wars
M*A*S*H
Dog Day Afternoon
(I could go on - lots of great films in the 70s!)


And the winner is.....

Cabaret

This is probably sentiment as much as anything, but I love this film. I'm not saying it should have won - I don't think there are many examples in this decade of the Academy getting it spectacularly wrong. Clearly The Godfather was the right choice that year, but Cabaret ran it a close second!

Worst Picture

Nominees:    

Patton

And the winner is.....

Patton

There's only one dud in the whole decade. And even in Patton, I rate the acting very highly - just don't really like the film.

Kramer vs. Kramer 1979

The Film:

This is a film I've seen before, quite some time back. In fact, I think I got the DVD for £2 in the Woolworths closing down sale. I remember liking it - I like Hoffman and Streep (far more than Andy does!) and I'm always happy to watch a family drama, particularly if it's also a legal drama.

I don't remember being blown away by it though, and I'm guessing that it's going to suffer a bit from being slightly on the ordinary side - possibly because there were so many similar films (some with Hoffman or Streep in them) throughout the 80s that may have served to render this one far less special to me than to 1979 US audiences.

It's interesting how each film that won in the last year of a decade somehow seems to fit more with the following decade - Broadway Melody was the sound of things to come, Gone With the Wind was a 40s-style tecnicolor blockbuster, All The Kings Men was a very 50s style social drama, and Midnight Cowboy belonged very much in 70s realism. Everything I remember about Kramer vs Kramer puts it in a very similar bracket to so many 80s films, especially ones directed by the likes of Mike Nichols - things like Heartburn, Regarding Henry etc. It will be interesting to see how it holds up to these films!

The Ceremony:

Very little difference from last year - same place, same month (14th April this time), same host - slightly shorter running time. Here's Carson's opening monologue - with a joke about the length of the ceremony that references the Iranian Hostage Crisis......which we'll be coming back to in about 30 films' time.....

Other Notable Winners That Night:

Oscar liking Sally for the first time!

The Kramers pretty much swept the boards, certainly with the big awards. If it wasn't for Meryl (rightly) winning for a supporting role, then it would have won the Big Five. 

It didn't though, and Best Actress went to Sally Field for Norma Rae, the first of her two wins (and not the one with the infamous acceptance speech - that's still to come!)

79 year old Melvyn Douglas won Supporting Actor, for Being There. He was 70 years older than fellow nominee Justin Henry - the biggest age gap up to that point (and not surpassed until 2013)

Among the other winners there was an award for the Visual Effects in Alien - with one of the team being H R Giger. Their award was presented to them by Harold Russell who was still using very similar prosthetics to those he had in the 1940s. I bet Giger could have designed something fabulous for him!

Best Song:

Sorry Oscar, wrong choice again this year - choosing Jennifer Warnes (singing this song from Norma Rae) over the masterpiece that is Kermit the Frog's signature song, The Rainbow Connection. Thankfully (in this category, at least) the 80s are on their way....

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

Sheen Snr in 'Nam (Sheen Jnr is coming up in a few films' time!)

The other nominees were Breaking Away (a "coming-of-age-drama" that I know absolutely nothing about), Norma Rae (see Sally Field above!), All That Jazz (weird but wonderful) and the next big Nam film after last year's two classics, Apocalypse Now.

It probably should have been Apocalypse Now. It's a bit of a marmite film, but put up against Dustin and Justin making eggy bread it's definitely got a lot more going for it. I'm guessing the Academy felt they needed a change after the double-Nam domination at the previous years' awards.

(Of course, it was also the year of Alien - but everyone failed to recognise quite what a classic that would become, and the Visual Effects award was its only win out of two nominations.)

Our Verdict:

Father-Son bonding over eggy bread

I'm actually really glad that KvK didn't get the Big Five. It really doesn't deserve to be put on a list with those films that did. There's nothing really wrong with it - and there's a lot that's right with it - but, watching it in 2018, it's really nothing special. As I said above, I think that's partly the fault of the 80s. It sort of suffers from being the first of it's kind. And, for the record, I'd say it was better than Heartburn but not as good as Regarding Henry (which, technically was a 90s film, but only just!)

Single parent determination

So, to the plot - Ted is a workaholic who is married to Joanna and they have a young son, Billy. One day Joanna announces that she's unhappy in the marriage and leaves. This then leads to the first half of the film showing Ted trying to cope with his job and his new responsibilities as a single father. The job gets lost fairly quickly and he has to battle to get a new one and start again far lower down the career ladder. Meanwhile his relationship with Billy takes some time but becomes gradually stronger. This is where some of the best scenes happen - Justin Henry, playing Billy, is very good indeed and plays really well next to notoriously intense method actor Hoffman. The way their changing relationship is shown through successive mealtime scenes is subtle and effective.

Oscar nominated crying

The second half of the film starts when Joanna returns, more than a year later, and starts a custody battle with Ted. This shift quickly heightens the tension, leading to courtroom scenes where, if you didn't know the outcome, it would be difficult to call it.

There's a fair bit of shouting, rather a lot of crying - but ultimately none of it is unrealistic given the characters and the situations they find themselves in. Meryl Streep apparently pushed for changes to Joanna's character to make her more sympathetic. She lost, but I think she was probably right. I know that we are supposed to be championing the cause of the single father, but I think we end up doing it too much at the expense of sympathy for why Joanna felt she had to leave. This would have been handled very differently even only a couple of years later and would have made for a more even handed story.

Oscar winning crying

As both of us watching have a legal background, we were particularly harsh critics of the court scenes - having to stop and remember that this was the US legal system 40 years ago. Actually, when you look at it in this context, the film was quite radical in showing the changing parenting roles and different family setups. Also, ten years later the UK still enshrined in law the idea that, in a custody battle, a child would be better in the care of their mother unless there are very clear reasons to show otherwise. We know what Ted and Billy have been through, a situation that Joanna deliberately caused when she left the home - but the legal odds are very strongly stacked against Ted.

Overall, the story of the Kramers doesn't do very much for us in 2018. As a film it showcases some very good acting (particularly young Justin Henry) but, whilst the general story is a fairly timeless family drama, the historical social context of it makes it really dated. Something that isn't true of Apocalypse Now or Alien.

The Deer Hunter 1978

The Film:

This is one that I've never seen. I generally don't choose to watch war films - which this challenge has shown (with the exception of Patton) to be a bit of a mistake. I've seen a few Vietnam-based films but they tend to be films about the people left behind (ie. hippie films with cool soundtracks) or things like Forrest Gump. This one has always been filed in my head in the same place as Apocalypse Now (one of the first, very serious etc) with a "must watch later" label on it. Well now is my chance....

My only other frames of reference for this film are quite possibly going to slightly spoil one or two scenes with unfortunately inappropriate associations.

Firstly, those of us of a certain age who were brought up in the UK with the help of the BBC will always associate the theme music - "Cavatina" - with Tony Hart's gallery and someone signing their apologies that no pictures can be returned.....

Secondly, there was an advert for chocolate Revels many years back that was based around the Russian roulette scene - playing on the idea that you never know which flavour you're going to get. I'm guessing the film would have a very different outcome if they were playing with Revels, not bullets!

The Ceremony:

April 9th at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Hosted by Johnny Carson and running to 3 hours 25 minutes.

It included a segment, sung by Sammy Davies Jnr and Steve Lawrence called "Oscar's Only Human", which highlighted lots of great songs over the years which didn't even get a nomination for Best Song. There was some controversy about the song, but the segment was kept in when Jack Haley Jr threatened to quit as Producer and take Johnny Carson with him!

The ceremony was the last public appearance for John Wayne, who presented the Best Picture award. He died two months after. It was also the last appearance for Jack Haley Sr who presented the Best Costume award. He died later that year.


Other Notable Winners That Night:

Jon and Jane

The Deer Hunter took the big two, and a supporting Oscar for Christopher Walken - but the main two acting awards went to Jon Voight and Jane Fonda for rival film Coming Home. Maggie Smith took the other acting award for California Suite.

Only the two 'Nam films and Midnight Express got more than one award, with everything else shared out between a wide range of different styles of film.

Among the Honorary Awards was one for Laurence Olivier and a special award for the visual effects in Superman. (It can't be long now before the "technical" awards categories start multiplying to accommodate new technologies....)


Best Song:

We're deep into Disco at this point - so here's Donna Summer with "Last Dance" from Thank God It's Friday. 

It beat Hopelessly Devoted To You from Grease (nope, I don't know why that one got nominated either!) and, more to the point, my favourite Barry Manilow song (I'm not a big fan, so there's not much choice) from a film I loved when I was much younger, Foul Play. I love this song - here it is in all its glory with the fab opening titles!

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

Hanoi Jane and Jon Voight (who still has his legs, btw!)

The other nominees included Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express and An Unmarried Woman (which I'd never heard of, but apparently was quite a big film at the time - a comedy drama about a strong, liberated woman that doesn't appear to have stood the test of time).

However, it was always going to be a two horse race between the two 'Nam films. It was inevitable that The Deer Hunter and Coming Home were going to be compared. The comparison even crept into Friends - "John Savage was Deer Hunter - no legs. Jon Voight was Coming Home, couldn't feel his legs" (Not for the first time, Ross was wrong and Richard was right!). I've not seen Coming Home - but it was the one that was favoured by those of a similar political persuasion to me. Supporters of Coming Home (and particularly Jane Fonda herself) were very critical of what they perceived as a right-wing glorification of the US - if not of the war itself - in The Deer Hunter. Read on to find out whether I agree with that or not. As to which is the better of the two films, I'll let you know what I think when I've seen Coming Home - but don't hold your breath. With Platoon on it's way soon, I've no great desire to add another 'Nam film to my watchlist at the moment!

Our Verdict:

The second film this decade to start with a
very long wedding scene....

It's been a few weeks now since we watched The Deer Hunter and I'm glad I've given it a some time before writing this - as it's taken several weeks to stop thinking about it. We got as far as Amadeus before anything touched it (not even Ghandi). Part of me doesn't really want to put myself through watching such a harrowing film again for quite some time - yet part of me wants to go right back to it and see what else I can get from it.

The basic plot is just as much human interest / family drama as it is war film - which I wasn't expecting and was very pleased about. It starts with a wedding (a good way to introduce a community, as Coppola will tell you!) and then follows the fates of three friends from a steel town who sign up for Vietnam, along with those they leave behind.

Here comes Meryl Streep - don't worry, she'll be back!

The film is very clearly in three acts - before, during and after. The "before" section is social drama (and includes the titular deer hunt). It looks at how the war is affecting their families, their relationships, their jobs etc, including how it affects those who are left behind - particularly the women, and non-soldier Stan (John Cazale in his last role, literally weeks before he died of cancer).

The "during" section is violent and harrowing. The centrepiece here is the famous Russian roulette scene, which is very well filmed and incredibly tense. The actors all look very shaken (including the extras) - apparently some of their reactions weren't acting. (And, no, I didn't think about Revels even once!)

The big metaphor....

The "after" involves De Niro's character, Mike, returning home and trying to pick up his life as best he can. This includes a developing relationship with Linda (Streep) and, more centrally, trying to track down his two friends, who he lost contact with following the Russian roulette. He finds Steven (Savage) in a veteran's hospital and, through him tracks down Nick (Walken) to somewhere far more worrying.....

He got the coffee flavoured Revel.
It was all downhill from there.

"Like" is probably not the right word for a film like this, but it was really, really good - I rate it far more highly than I thought I would. The acting is superb - particularly De Niro and Walken. The cinematography is beautiful, especially during the deer hunt scenes. Above all, I liked the fact this wasn't really a war film after all. It was a film about the effects of war on a community of people and some of the individuals in it. That's what drew me in.

Being of the wrong generation and nationality, I can't really make fair comment on whether Jane
was right about The Deer Hunter being right-wing propaganda. Apart from a cloyingly patriotic moment at the end, it didn't feel like it to me. It definitely wasn't pro-war and I don't even think it was particularly pro-America. It was ultimately just very sad and very moving.