WHEN IT RAINS, THE RAIN FALLS DOWN

A review requested by Jonathan Storey, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The title of the magnificent 1975 Warner Bros. release Dog Day Afternoon gives the game away: whatever else it's about, and there's a lot of things we could say it's specifically about, it's about how fucking hot it gets. 22 August, 1972, the day the true-crime story that screenwriter Frank Pierson turned into a screenplay (and which director Sidney Lumet and his cast then extensively revised through improvisation, though Pierson is the one who ended up with the film's solitary Oscar), was 81° F (~27° C) with a dewpoint of 59° F (~15° C), which is to say it was actually a rather pleasant day by late-August standards in New York City. But Dog Day Afternoon does not dick around with weather reports: it knows that the best version of its story comes from presenting a city torn against itself at a thousand fissure points, baking in the merciless sun that beats down on the asphalt and doesn't let up even when it drops below the horizon: the characters are even sweatier and more ragged at night than they were during the day. It forms one of the smallest subgenres ever with 1989's Do the Right Thing: movies in which the atmospheric oppression of summertime in the city can magnify everybody's impatience and readiness to blow up at exactly those fissures between the people keeping society propped up and the dispossessed. Spike Lee's film called upon Public Enemy to chant "Fight the Power", Lumet's finds Al Pacino nervously and angrily sputtering "Attica! Attica!" at retreating police to the delight of a crowd of bored onlookers, and it's all just another way of saying "fuck this bullshit". Or as Lumet's next film potently frames it, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore".

At its core, the story (massaged away from reality and with the main character undergoing a name change) is a good old-fashioned slice of Americana: the chestnut about criminals who make every possible mistake while regarding themselves as cool, smart operators. On that August day, Sonny Wortzik (Pacino), Sal Naturale (John Cazale), and Stevie (Gary Springer) plan to hold up a bank in Brooklyn, in and out in just minutes. The first problem is that the bank has no money - the criminals just barely missed the daily cash pickup. The second is that Sonny's impromptu backup plan involves setting the bank register on fire, and the smoke catches the attention of the cops, who quickly surround the bank. With little else to do, Sonny and Sal simply claim all the bank employees as their hostages (Stevie having jumped ship almost immediately), leaving the slightly baffled Sgt. Moretti (Charles Durning) to negotiate in the face of Sonny's increasingly colorful behavior and weird demands, all catching the attention of the media, who turn the fraught situation into a gaudy circus, dragging in Sonny's devasted mother (Judith Malina), his ex-wife Angie (Susan Peretz), and his new wife Leon (Chris Sarandon), a trans woman whose costly gender reassignment surgery, it turns out, was the motivating factor in Sonny looking to rob a bank in the first place.

With that last detail, we plunge headlong into the film's defining trait, its interest in the lives and needs of the kind of people typically left of the mass cultural narrative, but it's become clear long before that plot thread shows up (it is, in fact, presented as something of a twist, though not in the least bit prurient about it) that Dog Day Afternoon either possesses its own streak of anti-establishment energy, or it finds those who do to be thoroughly fascinating, with no moral judgment supplied. The famous "Attica!" scene doesn't come from the clear blue sky; that's not even the first reference in dialogue to the 1971 Attica State Prison riots, one of the great flashpoints for the early-'70s left-wing intelligentsia. But even more than in its specifics, the whole film brims with characters who are fed up and know that things aren't going right for them. Sonny, in his many squawks of petulant outrage, shows off his knowledge of a full list of cultural touchstones, some more absurdly wielded than others, all of which reinforce the sense that he's as much a symptom of urban helplessness as a person in his own right; this is certainly why he so quickly becomes so fascinating to the news media that latch onto the crime like lampreys, and to the crowd of people outside.

Dog Day Afternoon holds back from actually serving as a left-wing polemic; its satire aims in all directions, against Sonny's enthusiastic dimness as well as in tandem with his outrage. And its anti-police sentiments were tempered considerably by casting Durning in the role of the police representive whom we see the most of; in contrast to the spitfire Pacino and the wary, wired Cazale, Durning's calming tone of voice and relaxed features make him instantly likeable, even if he is the film's main emblem of The Man.

The main thrust instead is twofold: first , the film provides a comprehensive snapshot of a segment of the underclasses of New York at a certain moment, more of an act of gonzo journalism than a message film about social ills. Many of the best films in Lumet's career (and this is very much one of the best - among the handful of films I'd say jostle for the #2 spot in his filmography, behind his exemplary theatrical debut, 12 Angry Men) are holistic descriptions of some broad aspect of that city filtered through one colorful individual, and Dog Day Afternoon is more overt about it than most: before we meet any named character, we've been treated to a montage of the city's working class in all their aspects, set somewhat incongruously to Elton John's "Amoreena".

The other thing it does is, simply, to present a remarkable collection of human beings behaving under stress. Pacino certainly dominates the film and its subsequent decades of appreciation, and he earns that: its one of his best performances, from the moment he explodes the film's quiet, whispering opening scenes with his prattling, to the extraordinary scene where he recites his will, dripping with sweat and wearing a flat, distant look. Bbut Durning and Cazale aren't far behind him in terms of how much depth they weave into there characters with just expressions and body language - in Cazale's case, frequently doing so when he's not even in focus within the frame. The miracle of it, and where Lumet's impossibly giving direction most clearly manifests itself, is in the full sense of we get of the characters who aren't even "supposed" to matter - the bank employees, who emerge one by one out of an amorphous mass of victims to be unique personalities, worrying about their loved ones, giggling and chatting as they try to stay cool while the night marches on.

Insofar as the film is a tribute to messy, vital society, it's the way that it gives all of the hostages fully-realised personalities, leaving us with the sense that any of them could just as easily be the focal point of this exact scenario as Sonny is, that most insists on that tribute: there are no "side characters" here, just a bunch of human beings all mixed up and trying to muscle through an awful situation: awful because they're all beat down by The Man in their own way; awful because of the hard, flat sun that cinematographer Victor J. Kemper allows to blow out the windows in so many shots, and the glossy sheen of perspiration they're all wearing by the end of the movie. For all its "down with everybody" rhetoric and its willingness to caustically mock the behavior that happens within it, Dog Day Afternoon is tremendously interested in its humans, and almost generous towards them, given a very curious definition of generosity.

I have more thoughts on this one that I'm particularly proud of, in this 2012 entry in Hit Me with Your Best Shot.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: NEW HOLLYWOOD HORROR - LORD HELP THE MISTER

One of the main unifying traits that connects nearly all the filmmakers who were part of the New Hollywood Cinema period (not every last one, of course) was their knowledge of cinema. For most of them, this was the result of having gone through film school rather than come up as an apprentice, the way most film artists prior to the early 1970s had done; they were the first generation trained in cinema history and to have absorbed the theories of the French critics in the '50s and '60s as an academic truth. They were, in short, the first American filmmaking generation as to be on the whole cinephiles, in the sense that we now use that word.

This meant different things in different individual cases, but I bring it up now because we're about to set our sights on Brian De Palma, who presents one of the clearest examples of "film buff as film director" in the history of the medium. I suspect that the one thing people know about De Palma if they've heard of him at all, is that he's the director who made all of the Hitchcock pastiches. This is unfairly reductive - you can count on one hand the number of De Palma films that are primarily Hitchcockian - but the lines of influence are clear and unmistakable.

So with that, let us turn to 1973's Sisters, De Palma's seventh feature in five years, and also one of those primarily Hitchcockian films. In fact, so consciously was the director looking towards the great Hitch for his cues that he used an assortment cuts from Bernard Herrmann's scores for Hitchcock movies as his temp track, before talking the actual Herrmann out of retirement to write the "original" score. And those scare quotes aren't optional - there are moments, right from the very beginning, where the music isn't riffing on Psycho and Vertigo, so much as directly lifting from Psycho and Vertigo with a couple of notes switched here or there to make it at least slightly unclear what's up (sometimes, it dives into electronic music that sounds nothing remotely like any of Herrmann's work with Hitchcock) But it works in its new context, and really that's the only thing we need to be particularly worried about.

As for De Palma's story, which he turned into a screenplay with Louisa Rose, it's superficially quite a blast of Hitchcock in its own right: the first act plays the same "false protagonist who suddenly dies" card as Psycho, and the second act steals "sometimes apartment dwellers can see terrible crimes being committed across the way" straight from Rear Window. That film also supplies a number of individual story beats, and many of the individual shots and story ingredients crib from some Hitchcock film or another, right up until a final scene that works as both homage to and parody of the final shot of Psycho, the one with the car housing a corpse being dredged up from the swamp.

The important thing to note in all of this is that Sisters isn't simply an exercise in remixing classic thrillers for the sake of showing off De Palma's knowledge of film history. Which I confess had been my impression for many years, and was the major reason I've put off watching till now. It's craftier than that; it starts at Hitchcock and then pushes forward, making a fantasia on Hitchcockian themes with the angry energy of the new. For all its nods towards classicism, Sisters is a vigorously '70s movie, in its psychosexual raggedness (long before "psychosexual" had become the most clichéd way of describing any kind of thriller), and the ugly frankness with which it depicts the streets and buildings of New York. And its primary mode of tension and horror is forward-looking as much as it's conservative - there are moments whose staging and conception anticipate David Cronenberg more than the look backwards to Hitchcock or anyone else.

And all of that misses a pervasive truth of Sisters that I expected not at all, and was delighted to find: it's a funny movie. Perversely, darkly funny, sure - the opening credits are photographs of human fetuses, delicately positioned to stare at the camera with dark scowls of murderous rage, and it's as discomfiting as it is hilarious. But there's also room for the grand absurdity of the fake game show where we enter the story, Peeping Toms, something like a sexualised Candid Camera, in which hidden camera capture victims in awkward situations, with a panel of players asked to guess how they reacted to their situation. Our particular game concerns Phillip (Lisle Wilson), who's stunned to see a gorgeous blind woman, Danielle (Margot Kidder, who dances nimbly at the edge of comedy with a big ol' Québécoise accent) wander into the men's locker room and start changing. He has the good grace to leave quietly without watching or humiliating the woman - who is, of course, an actress, and can see just fine - and so wins two dinners at a fancy restaurant. After the show she suggests that he takes her out on a date with his prize, during which meal they're interrupted by her intense and frightening ex-husband, Emil Breton (William Finley). It's not enough to dissuade her from inviting Phillip back to her place on Staten Island, where they have sex after tricking Emil into thinking they were parting for the night.

The next morning, Phillip overhears an argument between Danielle and her identical twin sister, Dominique - by this point, we've already seen the enormous scar on Danielle's right hip, as accompanied by an electronic sting on the musical score that is much too freaked out the scar and much too anxious to make sure we absolutely pay all of our attention to it, so we've got quite a head start on figuring out exactly what kind of twins they are - after which Danielle emerges and asks if he'd be so kind as to pick up her pills, while also idly mentioning that it's her and her sister's birthday. On the way home from the pharmacy, he decides to use this information to play a nice surprise, buying the twins a cake, and this proves decisive; the delay in taking her medication sends Danielle into a writhing fit on the floor. By the time Phillip gets back, Danielle is nowhere to be seen, and Dominique is asleep on the bed; when Phillip rouses her, she grabs the knife he brought to cut the cake, cutting him in each of his femoral arteries (or, cutting him twice in the same femoral artery; there's bad continuity racing throughout the film, and some of it is clearly intentional, but this is one of the places where I think it probably isn't), letting him bleed out.

This is witnessed from across the alley by Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a columnist with a local paper who has managed to get herself in trouble with the local police thanks to an article titled "Why We Call Them Pigs", among other attempts to rouse the populace in radical anger, from her tiny little soapbox. "Yes, the Grace Collier, I wrote that story" she sighs on the phone with the cops, in a beautifully petulant comic line delivery that I wish I could bottle and listen to every time my spirits were low. She eventually convinces them to come over to check things out, at which point things start to get interesting as all hell: to sell her story, she starts piling on details that we know to be true, because we were in the room when Phillip died. But Grace wasn't, and she could only see a fraction of the killing from her apartment - this we know because we see the image as she sees it, and it's even put into a zoom backwards to make sure we notice just how circumscribed the angle she has into the room is.

The police find nothing, so Grace persuades her paper to let her do some investigative reporting, which they'll only do after assigning her a private detective, Larch (Charles Durning), to help. What they find is at times not remotely surprising (Danielle and Dominque were conjoined twins, a fact the movie tries so little to hide that it shows up in the ad campaign), and is some places enormously surprising, and at some places is surprising primarily because the movie made one twist that doesn't happen seem incredibly obvious, so we were looking the other direction while a different twist altogether sneaks up on us. It would be shabby to give away more - this isn't a Psycho, where it has become such a carved-in-granite classic that everybody knows how it ends. Let us leave it with: the things you expect to be revealed are all cleared off the deck early enough that the film has enough time left over to go into places that I did not see coming at all, tranforming flawlessly from a horror-tinged mystery about shady Québécois doctors going to extraordinary lengths to hide their professional and personal sins from the world, into a surrealist nightmare about having one's identity pulled out from below, and one that revises the question of who these people are so definitively that the ellipses and confusing loose ends the film was teasing us with earlier turn out to be nothing but its most dramatic sleight-of-hand.

It's an extremely unsatisfying conclusion, but it's hard to imagine one that would fit better; even the fact that it's unsatisfying plays off the film's depiction of the limits of what we perceive and how we interpret it; sometimes you just don't fucking know what's going on, and Sisters is, among other things, a big tease in stretching out our pleasant misery at not being able to solve all of its mysteries. Really, it's mostly a game in perceptual exercises overall, from its deliberate employment of continuity errors to its fun use of split-screens: at one point the film shows Danielle and Emil's desperate attempt to clean-up after Dominique (another Psycho nod) in one half while Grace's frustrated attempt to get the cops to god-damn go upstairs already plays in the other, a nifty way of building tension through style that mere cross-cutting wouldn't be able to achieve, while also making demands of our attention that we're of course not quite able to meet, and so the film once again points out that stuff is going to happen and we can't figure it all out.

There's an attempt at social commentary here: the brutishness of cops towards women and minorities is an obvious point the movie wants to touch on, though it does so only glancingly. It's more sustained in looking with horror at the abuses of power by authoritative men, with its final twenty minutes a sustained flurry of sucker punches that manage to show how such abuses can continue on in the world even after the abuser is dead. But the things that are most lingering about Sisters are generally stylistic: it's the flair with which De Palma stages his imagery that lingers more than what those images denote. A bright red spot on a sofa there, shallow focus to make it all the clearer how much the film is preventing us from seeing there, and plenty of skillful lifts from Hitchcock. It's a bit more surface level than it entirely wants to be, and the wackiness in the performances from Kidder (inadvertent) and Salt (deliberate, or at least successful) don't serve to give it any more depth, though they do make it quite a bit more fun. And when that fun suddenly flashes to sharply-honed cruelty, the film packs a hell of a lot of punch for something that's basically an insubstantial genre exercise. It's a terrifically smart piece of craftsmanship that keeps slithering out of your grasp; maybe not a great cinema by the usual standards, but I found it a compulsively addictive viewing experience.

Body Count: 2, and its surprisingly unambiguous about that number, considering how much else it's ambiguous about.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: NEW HOLLYWOOD HORROR - THE DEVIL INSIDE

1968, the bright dividing line between contemporary and classic horror - in the autumn of that year, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead brought terrifyingly explicit violence and gore to the genre and things change forever. But that groundbreaking horror classic was beat to theaters by a few months by a film whose seismic impact on the genre was just about as different as it possibly could have been. Rosemary's Baby - for of course that is the earlier release to which I refer - is subtle, classy, refined, and restrained in all the places that NotLD is raw, loud and punishing, but it too showed that horror could be something nobody had tried since at least Val Lewton's tenure at RKO: it is a horror film that's also a smart, urban drama for and about adults, a deliberate consideration of human behavior under extreme stress that just happens to involve a coven of Satanist witches. It is the movie that triggered a generation of smart horror by smart filmmakers invested in psychological realism and character-driven storytelling - without Rosemary's Baby, it's that much harder to imagine The Exorcist, and without The Exorcist, the subsequent history of grown-up horror looks massively different and largely empty. It's not overreaching to claim for Rosemary's Baby that it belongs in the company of the natal films in what would later be called New Hollywood Cinema - it has their pessimism and their grounded sensibility, even if unlike all of the other important New Hollywood seedlings, it lacks a home-grown director.

It was the first American production helmed by Polish émigré Roman Polanski, though it very nearly wasn't, and it is one of the most fascinatingly awful "what if?" exercises in cinema to daydream about what Rosemary's Baby might have looked like. For not only did it very nearly find itself directed by a true-blooded American, that American was none other than William Castle, the great huckster who'd made a name for himself in the late '50s and early '60s with horror movies that hinged on a single, highly ludicrous interactive gimmick that cropped up in the last act. He'd evolved out of that phase of his career by the mid-'60s, and not for the better; a Rosemary's Baby under Castle's direction would be competent at best, and the worst is best not to contemplate. Paramount felt the same way, and bought out the option on Ira Levin's novel that Castle had snatched up when the book was still in galleys, leaving Castle the dignity of staying on as the movie's producer, the most incongruous title in his entire filmography.

And so the studio brought in Polanski, who had left the Communist bloc behind to make a trio of horror or horror-esque movie in the United Kingdom, starting with 1965's Repulsion. That film was surely the primary qualification for getting him Rosemary's Baby; both movies are psychological thrillers about a woman's growing feeling of confusion and paranoia centered on the threatening physical space of her apartment. The primary difference being that Repulsion is ultimately about unreliable self-awareness, while Rosemary's Baby presents its threat as entirely real, and its protagonist's mental disintegration is shown as the result of the abuse she receives from others.

Almost a half-century of influence later, there's no reason to be precious about the film's plot: this is the one where a meek housewife is impregnated by Satan, as facilitated by a coven of Manhattan witches. She's Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), late of Omaha, Nebraska, and with her ineffective actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes), she's newly arrived in the Bramford, a gorgeous old New York apartment building overlooking Central Park. It's a building of grim and violent history, none of which bothers the Woodhouses overmuch when their previous landlord and good friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) tells them all about it with enormous relish, though we know better - we heard the freakishly minor-key lullaby with a mindless female vocal la-la-ing over over it in the opening credits (Krzysztof Komeda's score is all variations on that lullaby, and it is creepy as all hell), and we've been noticing the pile-up of broken, erratic compositions that Polanski and cinematographer William A. Fraker use to film the interiors of the Bramford, starting with a disorienting tilt down to the floor of an elevator. And when the thin walls dividing the Woodhouses from their next-door neighbors, the Castevets, let the young couple hear some manner of guttural chanting late at night, we're not as quick as they are to dismiss it.

Meanwhile, the septagenarian Castevets, Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) start to insert themselves as very present members of the Woodhouses new life, not entirely welcome. That starts to shift when Guy becomes infatuated with Roman's wild tales of a long life, well-lived, which happens right as his acting career starts to pick up following a bizarre accident that leaves an actor friend of his blind and Guy with the other man's part. At this point, the Woodhouses begin to seriously talk about having a baby, and on one of their target nights to conceive, Rosemary blacks out - following too many drinks, says Guy, but the conspicuously chalky-tasting mousse that Minnie made for the couple earlier in the night says otherwise. That night, Rosemary has a peculiar series of bad dreams, one involving a surrealist boat excursion, the other involving a cluster of nude people - including both of the Castevets and Guy - gathered around as a black figure with talon-like hands and reptilian red eyes rapes her. A month later, she's pregnant - Guy having sheepishly confessed to fucking her during her intoxicated night - and the Castevets arrange for her to get a phenomenal deal from their good friend, New York's finest obstetrician, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy). And all is well, if you don't count the lancing pain that Rosemary constantly feels in her abdomen, or the way that she loses weight in her body and face, her skin growing pale and damp until she looks like a pregnant skeleton padding around. And this starts to convince her that maybe, possibly, her neighbors and husbands have some seriously ulterior motives regarding her and her unborn child.

Polanski adapted Levin's book himself, the first of his movies from a published source; the rumor goes that he wasn't aware that he had the legal right to actually deviate from the source material, which led to Rosemary's Baby being one of the most faithful adaptations in cinema history. And this leads to the only significant flaw I can point to in the entire movie: the pacing isn't great. It's well past the 40-minute mark that Rosemary finally has her demonic encounter, and almost an hour beyond that before she starts to openly wonder if there's something paranormally wrong with her. The film ends up at 136 minutes, and they are not boring minutes by any means. But there are places where the point has been made, and it would be nice if Polanski trusted that we knew what was going on. Because it's not really hard to figure out what's going on.

That being put out of the way, I have not a single meaningful complaint about one of the best-shot, best-scored, and best-acted supernatural thrillers ever made. Long before anything has happened in the plot that's plainly threatening (the first "scary movie" moment is the sound of the black mass being chanted in the Castavets' apartment, 16 minutes into the movie; the next isn't until her rape nightmare), the way that Polanski frames the inside of the Bramford has given the movie all its necessary horror bona fides. The shot of Gordon sitting on a bed, half-obscured by a doorframe, is well-known; but it's merely one of a countless number of shots of doorways in the film, all of them used to present half-seen and obscured spaces, to make the geometry inside the Woodhouse and Castavet apartments feel both sprawling and discontinuous. The interiors are deeply unsettling, without any need to fall back on typical haunted house design or lighting. It's just wrong, in a way that we can detect because of how Polanski shows it to us; Rosemary, can't see things the way we do, which explains and excuses how long it takes her to notice the terrible things around her.

Despite or because of her limited perspective, Rosemary is the film's not-at-all-secret weapon, one of the great protagonists in all horror; and Farrow's performance is one of the great marriages of character and actor in the genre. Set in 1966, the film is cosmopolitan enough for Rosemary to already be a bit of a throwback: a perfect doormat who allows herself to be guided by everyone around her, anxious to put her husband forward as the locus of her identity (she chirpily recites "He was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross, but now he's doing television and commercials" enough times for it to qualify as her mantra), and interested in nothing but having Guy's babies. This isn't as transparently a feminist parable as Levin's The Stepford Wives, but there's no missing the subtext of a movie in which a pathetically cheery woman relies entirely on the wisdom of her husband, her doctor, and her older friends, only to find that they are all working actively against her. The first sentence out of Guy's mouth is a lie (inadvertently, but still); Minnie Castevet blows past Rosemary every time the younger woman tries to open her mouth - the energy differential between Gordon and Farrow is astonishing and drives so much of the film - Sapirstein barks orders at her that resemble cult indoctrination, and even her first and less-Satanic obstetrician, Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin) dismisses all her believes and hands her over to the the official men in her life. The horror of the film is hardly "the Satanists have put a grotesque Satan-baby in my body", which is appalling enough, it's "in my moment of need, all the people I have trusted to keep me safe and emotionally well have turned out to be exploiting me," which is decidedly worse on account of being more grounded and everyday. This is an early example of the beloved '70s genre "you can't be too paranoid to stay ahead of the people trying to kill you", but with a specifically gendered twist that makes it even more sociologically acute.

None of this is necessary to appreciate the film on its basic level as a visceral depiction of an out-of-sorts world. The claustrophobically tight compositions of the backs of heads and too-small doorways, the alarming contrast between Minnie's garish clothes and the brown-grey-black palette of the majority of the film, the blasts of electronica on the soundtrack, and Farrow's effortless ability to diminish herself in the frame, to look ever smaller and more damageable, all build terrifically to creating a constant sense of wretched rottenness in the world. And yet, there's also a rich variety of tones that Polanski employs in putting the terror across: chatty melodrama and pungent black comedy (mostly in the last scene and the strait-laced goofiness of the Satanic ritual in the rape sequence) both interrupt the pressure-cooker tension of the horror. It keeps Rosemary's Baby varied enough that it never really goes slack or loses focus across its undeniably overlong running time, and makes it one of the most compulsively watchable of all horror films, in addition to being one of the most urbane and intellectually precise.

Body Count: 2, with the admission that "How many people die in Rosemary's Baby?" is a question that really does not need the asking.

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SOMETHING WILD

A review requested by Scott D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I say this as someone born 12 years later, but it's probably not possible for anyone who wasn't around in 1969 to genuinely grasp the enormity of The Wild Bunch upon its initial release. We can bone up on the state of the Western and Hollywood filmmaking generally prior to that, and appreciate what a massive gap there is between that tradition and this film, but we can't truly appreciate what an unprecedented step forward it was. Thanks in great part to this very film, the "Death of the Wild West" genre sprouted up all over the 1970s up to the point where most Westerns made in the last 45 years explicitly or implicitly make that their subject, so we can't be quite as amazed by this film's angry and full-blooded commitment to what was, at the time, a fairly unexplored time period; screen violence has gone beyond even the maddest excesses of director Sam Peckinpah's blood-soaked career.

And yet, even as a spectacular victim of its own success, The Wild Bunch retains a primitive, raw, vulgarly masculine power that leaves it powerful in all the right ways, and surprisingly un-dated. But then, that's not necessarily a coincidence. One of the most important developments in the history of American film was the abandonment, in 1968, of the old Production Code in favor of the MPAA rating system. It was the end point of an evolution that stretched from Otto Preminger provocatively stuffing that filthy word "virgin" into" 1953's The Moon Is Blue, through Alfred Hitchcock's structurally audacious murder of Janet Leigh in a show in 1960's Psycho, up to the storm of bullets that closed Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. In the wake of that film, the MPAA basically gave up and conceded that adults would make films for other adults no matter what the censors had to say about it. Exactly where we set the line that divides "modern cinema" from "classic cinema", assuming we want to be that arbitrary, is debatable, but the first wave of films to fully take advantage of this previously unimaginable freedom in 1969 are fully and truly Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. And The Wild Bunch was not merely part of this wave, it was arguably at the vanguard of it; it was the sacred avatar of Movie Violence, even as Midnight Cowboy, released in the same summer, was the avatar of Movie Sex.

That is to say, we have in The Wild Bunch the film that taught the American film industry how to depict violence. And oh! oh! the skill and intensity and creativity of that violence cannot possibly be overstated. It is as bold and radical an expansion of the climax of Bonnie and Clyde as that film was from a Three Stooges skit. Gunshots beller on the soundtrack with confusing, hectic rage; editor Lou Lombardo dashes from shot to shot in some of the most feverish editing that had been seen anywhere in the world up to that point, cutting between images with no clear intention, passing by exploding squibs so quickly that all we can register is the bluntness of the red, barely allowing us to get a sense of which characters are where. The film practically opens with one such scene, and it effectively closes with another; the second is still a jaw-dropping sequence even generations later, going on for what seems like an eternity of noise and visual chaos and death. In later years, as the film became a lightning rod for controversy, Peckinpah clarified that he'd intended for the sheer volume and intensity of the violence to be a disorienting turn-off, his way of re-acquainting an audience that watched Vietnam on the nightly news with the fleshy, bloody hell of gunshots and killing; he also conceded that he plainly had failed in that goal, given the widespread adoration of the action in The Wild Bunch as exhilarating by those who loved it, and condemnation as exploitative by those who didn't. But this is, I think, an example of the audience failing the film and not the other way around - the way that the gun battles are slashed together, with the fury of a whirlwind and an angry focus on explosive moments of death and suffering, is nothing so much as the film itself twisting and writing, trying to rip itself into pieces before our eyes. Obviously it is possible to find all of this exciting: people have been since 1969. But for myself, I can only find it hellish and brutal.

Those are the two best adjectives to describe the bulk of The Wild Bunch, which notwithstanding its reputation as the movie with the violence, is mostly a character study of an old gunslinger, Pike Bishop (William Holden), the gang he's working with on the One Last Job they pick up while hiding out in Mexico, and his former partner, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), hired by the railroads to track Pike's wild bunch down and bring them back. Preferably dead. Antiheroes being the hot new thing in 1969, it's not surprising that Pike is a rather bleak and nasty fellow, without even the charisma that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway brought to Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker; Holden was more than capable of playing a vicious bastard when he had to; it was maybe even what he was best at, going as far back as his coming-out year in 1950, with the sardonic asshole he played in Sunset Blvd. registering far more deeply than his charming newspaperman in Born Yesterday. Here in The Wild Bunch, he barks and snaps, fixing his leathery face in a perpetual grimace - when he laughs giddily in one scene, it's stunning and almost grotesque, even in its warmth - and asks for none of our sympathy. He even rejects it, perhaps, when he takes glee in musing about how money is more important than family, or when he treats the usual Western topics of being true to your word and having dignity as a man by shouting the words out in a bullying rage.

There are other great performances in the film that persuasively argue that it's an indictment of the era whose death it depicts, and nervous condemnation of the kind of men who drove it; Ernest Borgnine, as Pike's second-in-command Dutch Engstrom, seems congenitally incapable of wearing a non-threatening expression for virtually all of the film. But Holden is the film's heart; its flinty, curdled, black heart. He is our Great Western Hero, with a fixed moral code and a thousand-yard stare of haunted nobility, and no matter how clearly Peckinpah prefers his killers to have a strong sense of duty, instead of the randomly violent gangs that implicitly take over (the film begins with children in an act of capricious, needless cruelty - animals were harmed in the making of this movie - and that sense that the Old West is giving way to a generation given to more barbarism, not less, echoes over the whole thing); no matter how much depth and nuance is granted to Pike and Deke in the flashback scenes that were cut after the film's premiere and not restored until 2002; through it all, Peckinpah remains clear-eyed about the basic brutality of his protagonists and the lives they lead. He sympathises with them as men without forgiving them their sins.

The overriding sense of The Wild Bunch is not, however, nihilism; nor moral outrage. It is a sense of profound weariness. The longueurs between action, the drooping faces of the cast, the sand-blasted color palette in Lucien Ballard's cinematography, all of these contribute to that sense. This is a film about something old and exhausted collapsing and passing away, presented objectively and without sentiment in either direction. Some Westerns eulogise this passing as a sorry loss of a braver and more manly sensibility; some sweep away the old order as the savagery that had to be abandoned if civilisation was to take over. The Wild Bunch does neither: it bluntly supposes that the violent nature of men continues to perpetuate itself, even as one generation's particular form of violence gives way to the next. It's not a comforting film in the least, nor is it hopeful. But it reflects a society that hadn't all that much reason to hope, and it does so with a potency that still hits hard almost a half-century later.

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THE DEVIL'S MUSIC

A review requested by Travis Neeley, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

By 1974, Brian De Palma had seven features under his belt, with the seventh, 1973's Sisters, having kicked off his legendary run of Hitchcock riffs. So we cannot possibly call Phantom of the Paradise, the director's eighth feature, made when he was 33, the work of a fresh and untried voice. But that's kind of exactly the way it feels: like an explosive volley from the id of some mad, unfocused genius who wanted to puke up some kind of incredibly personal and idiosyncratic new cinema onto the screen without formal training or any sense what he could and couldn't get away with. When that kind of untrammeled creativity meets with the relative classicism and polish of someone with De Palma's professional background, the results are formidable indeed: it's one of those miraculous "only in the '70s" movies that required the full faith and backing of a major studio despite how transparently the massively strange product was going to be a flop. Which it was, everywhere, except for the city of Winnipeg.

The title clues us in that this is to be, at some level, a dressed-up adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera; it's also clear within minutes of the film's start that it's going to combine that story with the evergreen Faust legend (and this is does fairly well, though there's a stretch in the second act where the Phantom elements feel rather indifferently tacked-on). We are told in an opening narration by none other than Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame that the music world, circa 1974, is totally dominated by the machinations of Swan (Paul Williams), a genius label owner and manager with the power to create or destroy any music artist he wants. His current favorites are the immensely popular '50s throwback boy band the Juicy Fruits, whom he plans to use as the main act at the opening of his extraordinary new club, the Paradise. And one day after a Juicy Fruits rehearsal, he hears exactly the piece of music he wants them to play at that most august event: an ambitious cantata adapting the Faust legend into the modern day, written by earnest nerd Winslow Leach (William Finley). Swan has his hatchet man, Philbin (George Memmoli) promise a recording contract to Winslow, in order to acquire the music, but this is a fake-out; when Winslow shows up demanding an audience with Swan, he's framed as a drug dealer and sent to Sing Sing.

Eventually he escapes, and in an attempt to disrupt Swan's plans, he falls afoul of a record press, mangling his face and vocal cords. This doesn't slow down his attempts to stop the Paradise from opening; he steals a costume and skulks around, sabotaging whatever he can from the shadows. Swan quickly assumes it's easier to join forces than fight this phantom, and offers Winslow a contract, larded up with curiously Satanic passages about the ownership of souls. Given the chance to regain control of his Faust, Winslow leaps for it, and also uses it as an opportunity to give the pretty back-up singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper) a chance to have her wonderful voice give life to his music. But Swan, being the Devil, has plenty of double-crosses left to play, and the opening of the Paradise will still be on his terms, no matter what control Winslow thinks he has.

Recasting Phantom - or at least the 1943 Universal pictures adaptation of the book - as a satire of the 1970s music industry is already a bit batty, and it's the most levelheaded thing that De Palma's film ever does. Phantom of the Paradise is equal parts compendium of the director's interests as a cinephile - Touch of Evil and (naturally) Psycho are among the classics to be explicitly referenced - and showcase for the young Turk's visual flair. That same Touch of Evil homage doubles-down on Orson Welles by including two long tracking shots, presented side-by-side in split-screen, and occasionally showing the same action from different angles; it's the moment that most expressly looks forward to the De Palma of the future in a film that otherwise feels more like some unimaginable combination of Ken Russell and Peter Bogdanovich. Throughout, the director and cinematographer Larry Pizer favor extravagantly wide lenses, giving even the most innocuous moments a bulbous exaggeration that leaves the whole thing feeling utterly demented.

It doesn't take camera trickery to make Phantom of the Paradise look demented, though; the film's design is, as a whole, thoroughly crazed, creating a world of weird interior spaces that have one foot in reality and one foot in an acid trip, populated by some dazzlingly colorful make-up and costume designs slapped onto the game actors. And some of the actors don't even need that: in the central roles, Finley and Williams look like caricatures come to life, with the former's wild-eyed expressions and the latter's compact build and scrunched-up facial features (not to mention his snake-baby voice) making instant, profound impressions even before the plot kicks in.

The oddball imagery fits perfectly with the loopy sense of humor that De Palma uses to bring his unclassifiable hybrid of horror, parody, satire, and head comedy to life. It's probably not fair to say that Phantom of the Paradise is as-such funny; the closest it comes to outright jokes are the songs generously scattered throughout it, all of them written by Williams in a series of pastiches on '50s dead boyfriend anthems, surf rock tributes to cars, theatrical glam rock, and moony singer-songwriter ballads (and then there's the matter of the end-credits tune, "The Hell of It", a menacing combination of acerbic character assassination and jaunty piano riffs from out of the Old West) - a delightful soundtrack all told, one that's proudly campy and sly.

But I was about to talk about the comedy in the film, or anyway the lack of it. Phantom of the Paradise isn't really comic; but it's unstintingly absurd, far too random and lighthearted to function as any sort of horror, no matter how hard the images and plot nudge us in that direction. It's impossible to pin it down to genre, so even as the plot clicks out in exactly the way you assume it will (until it goes Surrealist in the last third), there's never a chance to get out ahead of the film. It always darts in its own direction, and watching it is a constant effort to keep up with its inventive insanity.

It's bravura cinematic spectacle with just enough literary antecedent and social commentary that it doesn't come across as shallow as the word "spectacle" implies. But the spectacle is still pretty wonderful: it's as wild and yet consistent in its aesthetics as anything I've seen of De Palma's (which is, to be fair, not very much), and certainly more exhilarating than some of his more iconic but also more containable efforts. It is silly and stylish in exactly the right measures, a hugely fun exercise in demented excess that launches acidic critiques at everything it can, without ever feeling the slightest bit sour. If it sometimes allows its twitchy weirdness to serve as its own justification, well, it works hard to earn that weirdness, and it's enormously satisfying to watch it sprawl out over the film's unrelenting 92 minutes.

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YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD

With what I can only call the most admirable clarity, the monumental biopic Patton, Best Picture Oscar winner of 1970, opens with a kind of thesis statement that lays out everything the rest of the film is to contain. I don’t refer to the main body of its legendary opening scene, in which famed World War II hero Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. (George C. Scott) stands in front of an enormous U.S. flag to deliver a rousing message to the unseen troops about the inherent nobility and bravery of the American fighting forces. It’s less a patriotic harangue than a revival meeting centered around the religion of blood and killing. That is a great scene, and it does perfectly set the stage for all that comes after, but it’s not what I’m referring to.

I refer to the short beat that precedes his speech. We see Patton emerge in a long shot, a tiny black blip against the field of red and white, followed by a series of cuts that swiftly bring the camera in closer, after which several seconds are spent cutting metronomically from one visual element of this man’s heavily polished exterior to the next: his ivory-handled pistol, his medals, the insignia on his helmet, his rigid salute, his pristine boots. In this moment, director Franklin J. Schaffner and editor Hugh S. Fowler (both Oscar winners for this film) aren’t merely communicating that these are the elements that go into making this man; they’re arguing that these elements are this man, that he is defined entirely as individual components of perfect military bearing. That matters more, to him and to the viewer, than anything to do with his internal humanity. And only once we’ve quickly absorbed all of that does the film move into its legendary opening monologue, where he clarifies that first impression with his impassioned hymn to being the biggest, toughest sonofabitch you can be. Not, in any sense, to being the finest human being.

Scott, according to at least one story, was nervous about this opening, concerned that it was so potent that it would overwhelm the rest of his performance. That at, least, doesn’t happen, but he was almost right; the opening does tend to overwhelm Patton the movie, which has the somewhat unfortunate characteristic of having told us, in its opening and strongest scene, exactly what it’s going to be about for the rest of the film. And at 172 minutes total, the rest of the film is quite long to feel like it’s only ever providing variations on a single theme that’s never clearer than when we start off. There’s a kind of weirdly academic texture to the screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola (who would have much better success directing a three-hour Best Picture winner just two years down the road) and Edmund H. North, which plainly yearns to be a complete and thorough study of an all-time fascinating real-life human, using war less as its plot than as the prism through which its central character is refracted. And it even manages to be that, but Coppola and North are so successful at quickly sketching an outline, and then filling it in with smartly implied and gracefully stated exposition, that we have learned virtually all we will ever learn about Patton before the film is even a third of the way through.

I find much about the film - its expansive length, its focus on psychology during wartime, the central position of a title character who wants above all else to be thought of as a warrior, not a man - to evoke Lawrence of Arabia, then eight years old. That film carefully danced around its protagonist, peeling him like an onion, so that we kept learning new things about him all the way till the end; Patton ends up having to repeat itself, constantly, to hoist itself up to a running time that seems preposterously out-of-place. There is no fact about Patton that we only learn one time. There’s even an entire subthread of scenes taking place in the offices of the Nazi army command dedicated solely to demonstrating that the Germans realise the same things about Patton that the viewers already know. If there had been no other change to Patton but to surgically excise all the scenes involving Germans, it would be infinitely more focused and tight. For not only do the Nazi command scenes serve no meaningful function, they also don’t fit a movie that’s intently concerned on the way that American military men perceive the world.

That all being said, and no matter how reliably Patton leaves me feeling exhausted and, if I must be honest, quite a bit bored, the fact remains that the character it studies is a genuinely fascinating, remarkable figure, one of the most interesting subjects in the history of the biopic. Partially, this is because Patton himself was such a profoundly strange man, colorful and brazen and full of messy self-contradictions. A devout Christian who believed in reincarnation and worshiped the great military minds of the pre-Christian world, a martinet and bully who almost scuttled his entire career for abusing a shell-shocked soldier, an orator who carefully laced blunt profanity into his speeches as a way of making himself seem more erratic and giving his words more memorable tang, and a demented war-hungry genius whose refusal to slow down or play by the rules proved decisive in helping the Allies win the war in Europe. The writers, in pinning this man down on paper, prove to have an immensely ambivalent and confused attitude towards him, which ends up being one of the film’s best strengths - uncertain whether to condemn his bloodlust and my-way-or-the-highway braggadocio, or to cheer for his rebellious instincts, mystified by his adoration of classicism, anxious to praise him as a hero, but alarmed at supporting unchecked American militarism while Vietnam was still burning, Coppola and North never decide on a single approach to the character, which frees Patton from having the simple “you should think this” moralising that tends to make so many biopics so bland and harmless. No doubt, the fact that they were working mostly with the accounts of Gen. Omar Bradley, a bitter rival of Patton’s and eventually his commanding officer, led to this split between hero worship and anti-hero condemnation (it also likely explains why Bradley - played with level warmth by Karl Malden - comes off as so damn humane and reasonable throughout the film, in a way that strikes me as a bit intellectually and ethically questionable).

Its overall ambivalence crops up in many ways: Schaffner’s direction, which keeps the war itself at enough of a remove, and always privileges people talking about strategy rather than executing it, and thus silently reminding us that Patton, great warrior man, was still a general and thus still kept himself back from the heart of fighting; Jerry Goldsmith’s score - one of the few Oscar nominations the film lost, and one of the few it unambiguously deserved to win - which presents rousing military marches that feel like more fully-orchestrated fife and drum tunes from the Revolutionary War, punctuating them with a repeated motif of echoing horn triplets that feel entirely out-of-place and mournful. Though the film was seen as the moderate, middlebrow champion in the year that MASH was a more robustly anti-war Oscar nominee, and Richard Nixon adored it, Patton feels more of a piece with the New Hollywood than its bloat and aesthetic conservatism imply - it has the same lack of clear moral authority and obsession with the ways that men express themselves within a culture where they don’t fit that are typical of more showily radical American films of the same time.

And, like many of those films, it demands a lot of its main actor and relies on him to provide complexity and richness that an only be indicated by the script. So it works out well that George C. Scott came along and gave such an absurdly strong performance. Really, take out the actor, and Patton is much less insightful, and its bloat becomes unforgivable; but put him in, and suddenly even the most logy moments hum with dramatic tension. Scott is a marvel, vanishing completely into the role, and building a rock-solid foundation for Patton’s endless self-confidence and violent certitude that leaves his every action feeling like the inevitable extension of that mind into the wrong time and place, where he is nevertheless able to thrive. Never a small man, Scott towers over everyone and everything in the film, physically and emotionally; he has no little moments, but finds a way to make even quiet reflection the burly explosion of a volatile personality (the famed "2000 years ago... I was here" scene, in particular, is at once spiritual, self-consciously mythic, and presented with an aggressive "fuck you, I dare you to tell me I'm being weird" bullishness). And in his big moments, he exudes crushing, giant emotions with terrifying splendor, as in his wrathful verbal assault against that shell-shocked soldier that Scott turns into Lear-like scream of defiance against a world where things exist that Patton does not approve of.

Scott makes for such an unstoppably watchable Patton that, even though the script offers him little chance in the middle hour to do anything he didn't already do in the first, and only lets him start to project introspection towards the end, he makes every single onscreen moment feels like the most vital thing you have ever seen in a movie. Patton, on the whole is handsome prestige cinema that's executed well enough, looks swell - Fred J. Koenekamp's cinematography, the second and last film shot in the Dimension 150 format, lends a faded beauty that speaks to the subject's mythic stature and his behind-the-times attitudes alike - and has plenty of smart writing (just too damn much of it), but when Scott is added to the equation, it suddenly turns into a genuinely great character study. Not "Best Picture of 1970 or any other year" great, but far better and more involving than it easily might have been.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1980: In which the New Hollywood Cinema dies of autoerotic asphyxiation

The classic version of the story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ruined everything, just absolutely every god-damned thing, when they released their big ol' popcorn movies Jaws and Star Wars in 1975 and '77, and made all the studios go "Whoa! We don't want to keep making little movies about the lives of real people anymore! We want to make big dumb movies about paper-thin stereotypes that make umpty-jillion dollars!" Which isn't true for a lot of reasons, one of which is that Jaws itself fits pretty comfortably into the New Hollywood Cinema wheelhouse (and Star Wars actually kind of does too, depending on what part of it you're looking at, and what angle you're looking at it from), that plenty of movies that weren't at all part of the New Hollywood made huge piles of cash throughout the '70s, and that Star Wars probably wouldn't have set records that nobody even dared to dream existed to be set if there wasn't a wide desire among the audience for some big, glitzy, largely mindless adventure cinema as a palate cleanser from all those severe stories of people on the edge getting made by the film school brats. The Age of Blockbusters was surely going to happen sometime around the turn of the '80s; Star Wars just made sure that it took a very specific form, perhaps a somewhat more openly mercenary and merchandising-driven one than it would have otherwise done.

It is, unfortunately, much easier to blame the death of the New Hollywood filmmaking generation on its own increasingly deranged sense of importance. The thing is, we like brave filmmakers to get all the resources they want; we like seeing what happens when they can work without limits. We, however, aren't fiscally responsible for those filmmakers. And far from being the fault of Lucas making the GDP of any randomly-selected half-dozen African nations combined for his one space picture, the end of the greatest period in auteur-driven American filmmaking was the result of those same auteurs losing all sense of proportion. The costly, showy failure of Martin Scorsese's New York, New York in 1977, right at the same time that Star Wars had people waiting in line for hours to see it, put a huge dent in the notion that American directors were indestructible visionaries whose work spoke so profoundly to the audience that was a moral obligation to support their work; and while 1979's Apocalypse Now made quite a lot of money (though not an amount that was so very exciting, post-Star Wars), it only did so after a legendarily awful production where Francis Ford Coppola shat away enormous amounts of money and time while devastating his own health and the health of many people around him. The timing was becoming perfect for somebody to slip up big, and prove to an increasingly nervous industry that the self-styled artists of the '70s need to be reined in, and hard. And that proof came in the form of one of the most notorious bombs in the history of the motion picture, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, a Western epic that cost $44 million - in 1970s dollars, mind - and made a grand total of $3.5 million between two releases in 1980 and 1981, effectively destroying United Artists, where all the boldest of the bold filmmaking happened in the '60s and '70s.

It's not hard, on the face of it, to see why Cimino would be trusted with such an ambitious project. His The Deer Hunter is one of the very best counter-arguments to the "Star Wars ruined everything" argument, making a very robust sum of money during its 1979 box office run (it opened in 1978, and won the Best Picture Oscar for that year). And this despite being New Hollywood to its bones. So when you are the forward-thinking studio for whom Cimino just made a great big basketful of cash on the strength of a three-hour movie about normal people living hardscrabble lives and fighting in Vietnam, all of it accomplished without a trace of gloss or romance, surely you give him the keys to do it all again. And that is perhaps the biggest reason that Heaven's Gate scared the moneymen and called an end to the New Hollywood game: its failure was built in to the auteur system that had been so vibrant over the preceding decade, and it was totally unpredictable. At least from the start - by the time of its November, 1980 premiere week, in a 3 hour and 39 minute cut (that was already shorter than Cimino's dream version by longer than a full hour) that was poisoned by the widespread reporting of the film's ballooning costs and out-of-control shooting schedule, it was clear that the film was DOA. And by the time of its wide release in April, 1981, at a condensed and incoherent 2 hours and 29 minutes, it was all over but the weeping.

I would consider it appropriate to keep this review from getting as wide-ranging, sprawling, and exhaustively long as Heaven's Gate itself, so with the history lesson out of the way, let me get right to the good stuff: I pretty much love this movie. That's no real bravery on my part; by the time I first had a chance to see it, the film had very clearly entered the "rapt critical re-evaluation" phase that eventually lended it a berth in the Criterion Collection, about as close to an agreed-upon canon as anything that doesn't have the words "Sight" or "Sound" in its name. While there are, as with any film, the cluster of people who still regard it as a failure - and by all means, there are plenty of obvious reasons why one would find Heaven's Gate a failure, such as like how it has about 35 minutes of plot stretched across the 217 minutes of its current incarnation (the 1980 premiere version without the intermission card and music, basically) - it's no longer a cultural joke. By this point, there are probably as many people who regard it as an all-time fantastic portrait of Americana as those who think it a colossal, ass-numbing botch, with the greater majority coming somewhere in between. As happens.

For now, let's go ahead and try on "all-time fantastic portrait of Americana", just to see how it fits. Certainly, it's what the film wants to be: an almost entirely fictionalised retelling of American history - the Johnson County War of 1892, in particular (the film sets it in 1890) - that both pays full tribute to the richness of history as a living, sloppy thing, making a strong statement about the immigrant experience in America (one of the thematic spines in The Deer Hunter, as well), while also drawing oblique but fervent and angry connections between that period and the recently-concluded era in American history in which Vietnam and Kent State and Watergate and police crackdowns of protesters and all had created the first major generation gap. I wonder if that, in part, explains the film's inability to find any kind of respect when it was new: the social wounds Heaven's Gate speaks to so potently were finally starting to heal themselves, the country had just loudly signaled a desire to retrench from the social upheavals of nearly 20 years by electing Ronald Reagan to the presidency in a lopsided election, and Cimino standing there with his enormous slab of cinema demanding that we all grapple with the ugliness and violence of America was hardly what audiences wanted. In the same year, it was possible for Martin Scorsese to smuggle his own indictment of American violence with strong critical support in his great Raging Bull, a remarkable transition out of the New Hollywood while Cimino stood roaring while the New Hollywood crumbled around him, because he disguised it with genre trappings and unusual aesthetics and a personal story that acted as proxy for social critique. Cimino was, comparatively, blindingly anti-subtle: the length of his movie, the story within it, the way it was filmed, the way it was structured, all essentially force the audience into submission. I love Heaven's Gate, but I don't deny that it's an enormous bully of a film.

Enormous - slow, long, taken up to something like three-fifths of its running time with luxuriant wide shots that find the director and no less a cinematographer than Vilmos Zsigmond using a painterly lighting and framing aesthetic like battering rams against the viewer's eyeballs. That is to say, enormous, but also gorgeous in its enormity: unnervingly so, given the desperation and cruelty that make up the story, but it never feels like Cimino and Zsigmond and production designer Tambi Larsen (whose re-creation of what feels like the entirety of the American West is as picturesque as anything in the dust-soaked, silhouette-heavy, exaggeratedly soft cinematography) are aestheticising depravity or suffering, but instead dramatically presenting the central conflict at the heart of a national myth: the beauty and perfection of the continent as a physical place, with its enormous range of ecosystems and natural resources, and the multiple centuries of almost uninterrupted violence it took to wrangle that physical place into the United States of America.

It is a film that invites pretension, as you can see.

Granted limitless resources and virtually no oversight thanks to a remarkably indulgent contract, Cimino and his crew were able, over the course of a maddeningly perfectionist shoot that left the director with the reputation of a mad visionary dictator, to create one of the most exciting depictions of the West as a living, sweaty, bloody, sexed-up place that has ever been filmed, while also depicting it in such a consciously constructed way that it manages to feel stylised and remote - a living, breathing world, but not our world at all, as attested to by the geometrically claustrophobic images and the oddball cast that includes, besides Christopher Walken as a charismatic hitman and one-third of the love triangle that gives the film its general dramatic shape for most of its middle, no performances that feel really natural and unforced. And when Chris Walken is giving a film's most relaxed performance, you know something's up. I wouldn't go so far as to say that people are bad - an ensemble containing John Hurt, Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, and Brad Dourif is certainly incapable of being bad. But in the leads, Kris Kristofferson (a singer-songwriter who has done a great deal of acting, some of it truly wonderful, but has more of a natural screen presence than what we might necessarily call "acting talent"), and Isabelle Huppert (who obviously does have acting talent, but there's a reason she's only made just a handful of movies in English, which is that her accent could be used to mortar bricks together), however much of an impact they make as psychological presences don't feel like people you could meet walking down the street on a weekend afternoon. They are abstractions, and they fit perfectly as the anchors to a film that exquisitely brings life back to history, but does not also bring that history up to the modern day to meet us. The only film that I can immediately think of that works in a similar way, for similar ends, is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, from which Heaven's Gate is taking so many of its lighting cues that I take it for granted that Cimino & Co. must have seen it.

There are indelible moments galore: the prologue, set at Harvard's graduation in 1870, ends in an outdoor waltz where the sheer fact of moving human bodies takes on a force that lingers simply as an expression of kineticism, color, and shape, and a later dance sequence (the most notorious part of the film) does much the same, stopping the film cold for nine straight minutes of just plain watching and listening to human activity in a moment of pleasant repose. There are shots that use impossibly deep staging with Wellesian élan. Walken's introductory shot, through a whole he's just blasted in a bedsheet hanging to dry, is as iconic a moment as you could ever want to find in a Western. And there are moments which are indelible for being bad, to be fair: the violent death scene that closes out the main story is embarrassingly staged, a knock-off Bonnie and Clyde with none of its impact, only schmaltziness.

But in general, the sense lingering after Heaven's Gate isn't of its moments, but of its entire, bulky self: the very last scene, a coda set on a boat outside of Rhode Island in 1903, suggests that the whole thing has been as much a dream as a reality, and like a dream it's easier to remember it as a shifting series of impressions than as a specific chain of events of development of ideas. The only idea that matter is American History In Motion, and as Heaven's Gate has, itself, receded into that history, I find it has become easier to appreciate it than when it had the inappropriate patina of the new clinging to it. It's hard to say that by any objective standard, it's a masterpiece - other than a vague sense that it would lose its richness and lived-in feeling if it was shorter, I can't imagine how to explain why I think it earns that running time - but it's essential cinema no matter what "good" or "bad" judgments we lay against it, and if it had to destroy a studio and a generation of filmmaking for that one mad genius filmmaker to have that much power at that moment, I would consider that a fair price.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1980
-The Blue Lagoon becomes a huge hit on the strength of its implication that you get to see teenagers naked and screwing
-In slightly more dignified sociological news, 9 to 5 is an even more enormous hit that tells women that it's OK to be self-reliant, and tells men that it's not OK to be chauvinist dicks
-Disco is ruthlessly murdered by the epic failure of three of the most gloriously shitty musicals in history, Can't Stop the Music, Xanadu, and The Apple

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1980
-After many years wandering in the wilderness, an aging, ailing Kurosawa Akira has his first major hit in more than a decade with Kagemusha
-From out of nowhere, South Africa's film industry suddenly scores a major international hit with the comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy
-In Italy, director Bruno Mattei and writer Claudio Fragasso tag-team on Hell of the Living Dead, which if you put a gun to my head and asked me, might be my pick for the worst film I've ever seen

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1976: In which we are mad as hell, and are not going to take it anymore

One of the grandest clichés in the critics toolkit is to refer to a classic work of satire or social commentary as being "ahead of its time", with the passage of years not serving to blunt the impact of a film's satiric insight but to make them seem less like satire at all, and more like docudrama. In truth, I can only think of two movies where this really seems to apply: 1998's The Truman Show, whose excoriation of what was then the new form called "reality television" seemed like fantasy at the time and now feels like something that could happen tomorrow if they figured out a way around the legality, and 1976's Network, in which the gorgeously erudite writer Paddy Chayefsky spun a tale of how the news media at its worst is a whorish sinkhole in which the most wretched and violence impulses of humanity are turned into exploitative nonsense to get you good and bloodlusty before the dish soap and car insurance commercials.

It is very probably the case that there is, at this point, nothing left to say about Network, one of the most beloved and iconic of '70s American films, with its all-star cast (William Holden! Faye Dunaway! Robert Duvall! Peter Finch! Ned Beatty! More than half of whom were Academy Award nominees, and Dunaway and Finch won, on top of it, as did Beatrice Straight in the shortest performance ever honored with Oscar gold), and its glisteningly literate script, possibly the most pridefully written thing in Chayefsky's justly legendary career, and its famous "mad as hell scene", the kind of moment that so perfectly grabs hold of a cultural moment that it remains famous even among people who've never seen the film, even among those who aren't aware what film it's from. If there's anything I can possibly do with Network, it's mostly to point out, somewhat against tradition, that actually director Sidney Lumet and cinematographer Owen Roizman, production designer Philip Rosenberg, and to a smaller degree costumer designer Theoni V. Aldridge and editor Alan Heim, actually did quite a lot to make the film what it is, too. It's not just the Chayefsky show, though I concede that it took me three, four, God knows how many viewings before I'd figured that one out on my own. It definitely has the propulsive dialogue, frequently laid out in exorbitant long patches for which the word "monologue" is insufficient, and spoken with rich, chew élan by actors clearly adoring the experience of saying those words in that order, to feel like the kind of movie where all the film crew wants to do is to keep out of the script's way, and given the primacy of the spoken word in many of the film's most important, memorable scenes, the film crew hasn't necessarily gone out of their way to dissuade us of that notion.

But Lumet was hardly a slouch, and Network is tremendously well-directed film, though frequently in a very small way that doesn't try to pull focus from Chayefsky's fireworks. Sometimes not: the film's most conspicuously "made" scene also happens to be a barnburner, coming late in the film as Beatty's Arthur Jensen, owner of an enormous media conglomerate, confront's Finch's insane newsman Howard Beale, and lays out a new religion of the post-national world of unfettered corporatism. Beatty is framed deep in the middle of a frame so black that you just know that Roizman spent hours studying Gordon Willis before he lit it, flanked by two rows of unearthly green desk lamps, all of it in crystal-clear deep focus, a pathway to Hell that's staged with gorgeously Expressionist flair, and intercut with close-ups of Finch at his clammiest and most most terrified. And just to make sure we got it, the scene later transitions to shots of Beatty illuminated from a hard sidelight and nothing else, rendering him as little more than an insinuating silhouette. No '20s German could have done it any better.

Mostly, though, the visuals in Network are of a subtler, though hardly less crafty or impressive register. It is a film about TV production, and it takes inordinate delight in reminding you of that fact, with its obvious litany of shots that have televisions in the background, at least a few of which have the audacity to stage the main action on those TVs while the activity in the foreground is merely human busywork: the famous early scene where a recently-fired network news anchor Beale announces his intentions to kill himself on air is one example, with the gag (and oh, is it a funny one) being that all the people milling around are so focused on the myriad technical jobs that have to be done every minute to keep a news program running that it takes several aching moments before any of them register what he just said, and the staging and sound mixing mostly trick us into doing the same thing. And then there is the less obvious but even more common trick of staging scenes in offices with giant windows and behind glass partitions and any other way that Rosenberg and Lumet can come up with to suggest to us a world of glass boxes: not everyone in Network is on TV, but everyone is defined by TV, and that leaches out into the world they inhabit, which is frequently and deliberately shot with the flat staging of a '70s TV show on top of everything else.

In other words, no, let us not throw all the credit at Chayefsky, even if he undoubtedly deserves an enormous chunk of it, and Network is his movie if it's any one person's. It is, like all of his best work, driven by ideas, and by people communicating those ideas, and by people using a lot of excess verbiage to specifically not communicate those ideas. I hardly see the need to bother recapping the plot, but for the benefit of those who've never seen it, the short version is that Beale's suicide threat suddenly revives the fortunes of the ailing UBS evening news program, causing old-school newsman Max Schumacher (Holden) a great deal of pissy dismay, and new-school programming whiz kid Diane Christensen (Dunaway) something very close to literal orgasms. The soul of the network, and the sanity of Beale, who is quickly made the centerpiece of an indescribably gaudy revamp of the news, are batted back and forth between these and several other players over the course of two hours, during which Chayefsky gives voice to some of the most acrid, cynical satire that has ever been filmed: nobody in the film comes off as a remotely decent human being besides Schumacher's dumped-on wife (Straight), with even the weary truth-telling that Schumacher indulges in feeling more like resentful sniping and unimaginative defensiveness than Albert Brooks in Broadcast News-style moral wisdom. And the thing that comes off worst of all is the concept of corporations, TV as a business, and turning information into entertainment, with everyone from Communist ideologues to the ranting, fearless mad prophet Beale ultimately giving in and playing the game.

That most of what Chayefsky says is demonstrably true (and, I imagine, was almost as obvious in '76) doesn't stop Network from peering over the edge of the abyss that would make it a ghastly, curdled nightmare of unpleasantness; what does that is how stunningly funny the movie is, something I don't think it gets enough credit for. The man was a damned good writer of elaborate quips and marathon-length putdowns, and the temptation to start rolling through a list of the film's funniest lines is difficult to resist. But he was also in this case blessed with an unusually good cast, full of people who weren't simply able to read his convoluted words and make them feel like thoughts coming out of human heads, but also put a lively, comic spin on them. Dunaway is the best at this, by far: in a great cast, she's the obvious best in show, and while I haven't seen every one of her important performances, I cannot imagine that this isn't the best acting she ever did. Her take on Christensen is as a merciless predator, but far too upbeat and happy to be constantly winning to ever be anything but chipper and charming and pleasant, and the gap between her buzzy, smiling delivery (only a step or two removed from a '30s screwball performance, in places) and the rancidity of what she says and does gives the film a great jolt of absurdist, even manic comic energy. It's her work that shows us how Christensen has replaced her sex drive with a quest to get bigger and bigger ratings; it's her matter-of-factness and easy pragmatism that makes the film's nihilistic final gesture hilarious instead of cruel. Other people are great, of course: seeing Classic Hollywood stalwart Holden in a part that lets him drop so many f-bombs is funny all by itself, and Beatty and Straight's tiny performances are so potent that it never seems even slightly inappropriate that they nabbed awards attention for such limited screentime. But Dunaway shows up, and there's no looking away from her. Can't be done.

Network is so smart, so funny, and so surprisingly believable in its human element, thanks to the cast, that it's easy to overlook some of its really considerable flaws: for me, it lives in the weird space of being a film I absolutely love to watch, and have always thought was overrated. The biggest problem, bar none, is the romantic subplot that brews between Schumacher and Christensen: it offers some great writing and great acting, sure, but it feels so completely at odds with what the film is actually trying to do, and it's hard to square with the characterisation of Christensen seen elsewhere, and it offers up the one place that Chayefsky completely overplays his hand: Schumacher icily deriding Christensen for slotting human beings into clichéd spots in a TV drama, a metaphor he trots out twice. Nothing about Network ever fails to be obvious: as satire, it's a roaring hurricane of outrage about social developments that it obscures not whatsoever. With that being the case, there's simply new good excuse for Chayefsky ever feeling like he has to spell anything out, and when he does - here, a couple of other places - the film suddenly feels very juvenile in its outrage, and not so much thrilling and witty and smart.

Complaining about it's not hard; it holds nothing back, and that leaves some wet, raw patches that almost beg you to poke at them and observe where the film is being crazily undisciplined. But why bother? Network is a pure, primal scream that takes all of the drunken psychic fallout from the '60s, as refracted through an increasingly disgruntled world of Nixon and 'Nam and a worsening economy - the film obligingly does its own job of positioning itself culturally, so we don't have to - and to hem it in any would be to blunt that scream to an unacceptable degree. Sometimes, satire needs to be cunning and deadly to be its best self; sometimes, it just needs to be angry, so fucking angry, with just enough humor to make the medicine go down. Network rages, but there's poetry to the words and and elegance to the visuals that make it feel not so blunt and ugly, and that's enough to make it an endlessly rousing, exciting satire, if not always the most perfectly focused and sophisticated.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1976
-The decade's trend of paranoia thrillers reaches its arguable peak with All the President's Men
-Don Siegel directs John Wayne's final film, the elegaic Western The Shootist
-The Stephen King Movie Machine gets its start with Brian De Palma's direction of a luminous Sissy Spacek in Carrie

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1976
-Moustapha Akkad directs Mohammad, Messenger of God with Anthony Quinn, the first big-budget epic produced in the Muslim world
-Tinto Brass makes perhaps the most famous of all Nazi sexploitation flicks, the Italo/Franco/German Ingrid Thulin vehicle Salon Kitty
-The Brazilian Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands becomes the biggest native hit in that country's box office history, a record it holds for 35 years

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1973: In which fresh cinematic modernism is used for rampant nostalgia, and all the New Hollywood kids are pals with each other

The posters and trailers for the 1973 release American Graffiti, one of the first (if not the first) American movie marketed almost solely on the basis of pandering to its target audience's nostalgia, challenged that audience to remember, "Where were you in '62?" For the film's director and co-writer, George Lucas, the answer to that question is that in 1962 he was involved in a terrible racing accident at the age of 18, which short-circuited his professional interest in cars and sent him on an alternate path that eventually went through film school. This was important for the obvious reason that Lucas's subsequent career in cinema redefined the commercial realities of the film industry more than any other individual filmmaker before or since, and while I suppose that somebody in the late '70s would have made a movie with the impact of Star Wars, that person probably wouldn't also have seen the wisdom in retaining the merchandising rights to that theoretically blockbuster. So calling Lucas irreplaceable in film history is perhaps rather more literally true than for most other people who might get tagged with that irresistible bit of hyperbole.

This is not, though, the moment to talk about the much-rehashed story of how Star Wars and its waterlogged buddy Jaws ruined everything glorious and artistic about the '70s (which, like most much-rehashed stories is a skyscraper-sized pile of bullshit, but it's not the moment to talk about that, either). We are here now for American Graffiti, which was the other important outgrowth of Lucas's '62 accident. It is a film about the car culture of California teenagers, and it does one of those things that all movies about young people want to do and only a couple have ever really done very successfully, which is to be about one extremely specific time and place that only existed for a fraction of a moment, and through the sheer force of that specificity, manages to be about something much more universal (using that definition of "universal" common in cultural criticism, viz. middle-class, white, and male. But like any other subject, there's nothing wrong with making movies about middle-class white males if you make them very well, and Lucas did that here). It is one of cinema's greatest high school coming-of-age movies, in which the idiot fun of driving around listening to music and doing a piss-poor job of trying to hook up with members of the opposite sex at some point has to give way to becoming a Grown Up. It is a conservative film in this respect, particularly compared to its most obvious descendant, Richard Linklater's shaggy and rebellious Dazed and Confused from 20 years later; in fact, with its unambiguously conformist, "real men go to college or start families" message, it might be the single most conservative great American film of the 1970s.* This has earned it some backlash here and there, and it's really quite an odd standout in the context of the essentially counter-cultural New Hollywood Cinema, but there's so much obvious, unmistakable honesty to it that I frankly don't think its ideology matters. And that honesty comes from Lucas's own life experience, I think, where the culture that his film praises, eulogises, and abandons, in that order, was very nearly responsible for killing him. If any experience is going to make it okay for an artist to say, "you know what, kids, you actually should turn into your parents", that's the one that will do it.

It's a very nice, non-confrontational film, both of which tend to sound like insults rather than terms of praise; but Lucas, compared to virtually every one of his significant peers, was a nice, non-confrontational man. And American Graffiti is a film practically born out of niceness: it was conceived when Lucas, off the cool performance of the acerbic sci-fi parable THX-1138, decided to make his sophomore feature a movie that would give normal people pleasure to watch. It exists because of a kindness: Francis Ford Coppola, the icon of all the film school brats of the late '60s and early '70s but a particular mentor to Lucas, used his enormous post-Godfather clout to do a favor to the young director. Lucas, and his married co-writers Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, treat the characters - whom they obviously like very much - nicely as well, gently nodding at their mistakes without a molecule of judgment. The only thing that's not nice is the final moment, a cold bucket of water that reminds the audience that the film's lovingly depicted Kennedy-era sweetness (sometimes called "innocence", but the film is too salty and sexed-up for that word to make any sense at all) led directly into Vietnam. And I think the casual coldness of that last gesture - unquestionably the most aggressively New Hollywood detail in the whole thing - does a lot to counterbalance the film's apparently rosy, uncomplicated view of a more optimistic time (Katz and Huyck, incidentally, found it tasteless that Lucas only told us the fates of his male characters, not his women; but it's really hard to imagine how the pacing could possibly be maintained if they were added, and it would be disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that this movie ever cares about its girls as much as its boys).

American Graffiti depicts the end of summer: it's the last night in town for teenagers Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve Bolander (Ron Howard), who are set to go out east for college in the morning. Meeting up with their friends Terry "The Toad" Fields (Charles Martin Smith) and the older guy John Milner (Paul Le Mat), they start dinner at dusk at a drive-in restaurant before parting ways to spend the evening soaking up the sounds and atmosphere of an unnamed Modesto, California, engaging in the local custom of "cruising", tooling around aimlessly through the commercial district in cars bantering with other similar auto enthusiasts. John ends up saddled with the much younger Carol (Mackenzie Phillips), who humiliates him and cramps his style, but also ends up proving a pleasant conversation partner; Terry lies his way into impressing a gearhead blonde, Debbie Dunham (Candy Clark), and continues having to prove his masculinity despite being a fearful nerd; Steve keeps picking fights with his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams), behaving rather bullying and chauvinistic and superior; and Curt experiences a full-on Long Night of the Soul, trying to decide whether or not he's ready to move on to whatever the hell happens when you go to college. Throughout, the trappings of 1962 are depicted with intense sociological focus mixed with real enthusiasm for the place, the songs, the attitudes, and oh, so much the cars (which Lucas's camera caresses with the same rapt awe that he'd later use for Star Destroyers); and the characters themselves, especially the morbidly backward-looking John and the deeply unsettled Curt, engage in mini-nostalgia of their own, trying to remember back to when things were simpler and more beautiful. The film's way, perhaps of admitting that it knows it's presenting an admiringly whitewashed depiction of the past, for reasons of emotional truth rather than historical mercilessness.

That all being said, I will confess that my love for American Graffiti - which I think to be Lucas's clear pinnacle as a director and maybe the best film about teenagers ever made - isn't entirely about it's mixture of romantic nostalgia and pensive awareness of what that nostalgia might be clouding up about the presence, nor its tragicomic insight about what happens when adolescent boys start to realise that adolescence is speeding towards its close. It's actually about its fucking gorgeous impressionistic soundtrack: this is one of the most audio-driven films ever made. The sounds and music don't merely create a very precise, living, lived-in, organic world for the movie's story to take place in (say whatever we will about any of Lucas's films as director: every one of his movies takes place in a magnificently well-build world), but also providing the emotional spine for a film whose script purposefully keeps away from clean, flowing structure as it shifts from plot to plot and frequently abandons all of them for a shot or two of life in Modesto just spilling out. At which point I might well mention the names of Walter Murch, the sound editor, and Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas, the film editors, all of them critical collaborators in shaping the movie's texture and rhythms.

Famously, American Graffiti includes no fewer than 41 pop singles on its soundtrack, virtually all of them appearing diegetically: performed by a band at a school dance, blasted out of car radios. The way the are placed into the film, warping and fading up and down as cars move around the camera's physical location, is perfect, basically: it suggests with strident realism the exact way that the music would sound if we were actually in the place the movie positions us: echoing off buildings, sliding towards us from a distance, bellowing right in our ear. Nothing in the movie creates its tangible sense of place more effectively or immediately: within seconds of first stepping outside to hear the music coruscating around us, American Graffiti has defined its reality and never for the rest of the movie lets it go. It then falls to the sound effects to create atmosphere and mood, rather than create a sense of realism: an exact reversal of how these things usually work that gives the film a startling originality even four decades later.

The music also does function in the more conventional sense of commenting on the action, sometimes directly and ironically. In the latter category, we have things like the wonderful moment of Laurie and Steve, temporarily reconciled, dancing slowly while around them kids are hectically bobbing to a live cover of "Louie Louie". In the former, we have songs like "The Great Pretender" coming on just in time to drive home Curt's feelings of dislocation. And some songs are just songs, just the thing that happens to be on the radio. As part of its general sense of things getting more ragged and vague as the night moves on - it is a film where the draggy fatigue of being out all night having fun hits hard and ends up giving its half-mythic dawn climax a downright hallucinatory feel - the moments where the songs openly describe the action start to come more and more, neatly suggesting the way that a trivial pop song can seem really perfect and emotionally correct for the moment you're hearing it, the more suggestible and defenseless you become. For that is very much the arc the film describes: growing more frazzled and confused as the long night of the soul keeps marching on.

It's never subtle, not really, but it's so effectively executed that "subtle" wouldn't be a merit and "unsubtle" plainly isn't a flaw (there's nothing remotely subtle about being a teenager, after all). The film is an unabashed crowd-pleaser from the mind of a man who would spend literally the entire rest of his career chasing audience dollars rather than feeding his artistic muse, and it rewards the idealised viewer's love of being a teenager in 1962 with outright shameless pandering. But married to the sloppy authenticity of the high-grain cinematography, the docu-realist setting, and the flickering awareness that, for all the fun they're having, these kids are still going to have to change and become different people, either because they're ready to, or because the shattering cultural upheavals of the next decade will do it for them. Friendly and ebullient and romantic, but never, as a result of all those things, blindly stupid, American Graffiti is pretty much terrific all around: one of the most formally adventurous movies of a bold age, one of the most accurate depictions of teen psychology put to film, and a remarkable snapshot of a culture that existed, as such things go, for hardly the blink of an eye. It's by no means one of the most "important" New Hollywood films, but it's unstintingly great cinema, or I don't know what.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1973
-The Exorcist explodes at the box office, setting of a new trend in religious-themed horror
-The failure of Columbia's Lost Horizon finally kills off the mega-musical as a genre
-Terrence Malick makes his debut film, the poetic nature tribute/crime thriller Badlands

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1973
-A collection of Czech refugees working in France create the animated political parable Fantastic Planet
-European-style realism and native African cinematic traditions are combined in the Senegalese Touki Bouki, by Djibril Diop Mambéty
-The anti-prolific Spanish director Victor Erice makes his debut with the fantasy-tinged drama of childhood Spirit of the Beehive

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