1972 @ 50: TOUT VA BIEN (EVERYTHING'S GREAT!)

Jacques and Susan, a Franco American couple, go to a meatworks for a journalistic investigation and are immediately involved in a workers' occupation, thrown into an office as captive with the boss. The fourth wall is broken by addresses from the boss who sees the action as a minor inconvenience, a union rep who calls it counterproductive, and the workers themselves who set themselves apart from both parties who consider them invisible outside work hours. In the first of two major Godardian setpieces, we watch as the camera tracks sideways back and forth along a cross-sectioned factory building as we see the time of the occupation passing and the seemingly ineffectual action of the workers.

After the occupation, the boss is fired (with the assumption that someone identical will replace him) the workers are no better off (possibly worse that they've fallen foul of the union) and Jacques and Susan, stunned, walk away with mixed feelings that lead them to confront what their lives have become.

In case anyone in the audience of the film when fresh missed it, the spectre of May '68, the near two months of demonstrations, strikes and occupations that gave rise to solid hope that the toughening rightist rule in Europe might be on the verge of collapse. But the big guys won again and things went back to the way they were only with a lot more readiness from above to keep the pressure downward. For French people of the left, academics and artists, the event remains one of both anger and hope.

Godard and Gorin's four years later look at where France had gone in the interim is both rich with the kind of subversive cinema that Godard had led in fierce independence away from the warmer and fuzzier New Wave as his film practice grew increasingly radical, artistically and politically. While Godard in the wake of May '68 had dived deep into the Marxist Leninist ethos that opposed the auteurism that had made him famous and the films he directed grew more obscure and difficult (including gems like One Plus One and British Sounds) Gorin had been nurturing his own film experiments in the USA, coming back to France to co-steer this epic of incredulity.

The prologue is a discussion between a male and female voice about the making of a film, how to set up a production, what it should be about, the kind of characters to use, over images of social groups, locations and cheques for elements like cinematography and score and so on. This is par for the course for the '60s Nouvelle Vague which often began its films with self-reflexive commentary. The casting of the central couple who seem to have made a journey of many pre and post May '68, is intentionally similar to that of Breathless with established stars Yves Montand and Jane Fonda as Jacques and Susan. 

Everybody here has come a long way. The couple each have their story of youthful activism followed by the needs of careers followed by comfort. Jacques still thinks of making documentaries (he accompanies Susan to the meatworks for this purpose) but these days is really only making tv commercials. Susan, having worked her way from lighter fare now has become a foreign political correspondent for an American service but feels increasingly stagnant in the role. In the accounts given by the meat workers we see them as workers on the lines and at the machines working as described. The experience of the occupation at the factory doesn't so much radicalise them as remind them of what they left in the wake of the massive action four years before, right down to questions they have about their marriage.

Agreeing to separate, he helms another ad while she goes to write a piece from a supermarket. In the second extraordinary setpiece of the film the camera again sideways tracks back and forth, this time from behind the checkouts at the shop. Customers load the conveyor belts with masses of products as a man with a table of red covered paperbacks preaches revolution with the French Communist Party. At first he could be mistaken for a radical actor but then he just seems like another hawker like someone with a tray of samples. While on one of the slow tracks we see a group of student-types running in along an aisle and begin undercutting the current of retail, first subverting the Communist bookseller and then persuading the shoppers that everything they load into their trolleys will be free. It looks situationist like the ones in May '68 but it also looks organised. It's not on the factory floor and it's far from the campuses, it looks and feels like action in real life. The gendarmes turn up with their shields and clubs because they do that but now it's after the knowledge that this can happen.

To avoid a charge of political naivete, we then return to Jacques and Susan who meet up again at a cafe, a turn with reversed roles each, who we are told agree to try and work things out without false ideals but real cooperation. In the end we are given the gaudy Godardian title: THIS IN AN ACCOUNT FOR THOSE WHO DIDN'T MAKE ONE.

How does it look in 2022? Well, apart from needing to go Google May '68, fresher viewers might well recognise the same need for a return to values that uphold the collective good. You don't need the flags or the uniforms but you do need to bring your voice and mix it in. Yes, I'm an auld lefty of decades' standing. This film is difficult to find and more difficult to get through if you are used to the faster fare in cinemas and streamers but, if you do come upon it, try it. Some of the characters preach but the film doesn't, all it says is think about it.

Viewing notes: I saw this on my old Criterion DVD and it's in a great need of an upgrade. I was surprised at the subpar video quality for something from that label but there it was. Checking on Criterion's site I find that not only has there not even been a Blu-Ray but that the DVD has been deleted from the catalogue. This doesn't mean that the film is no longer available but that Criterion no longer has a licence to release it. Just checked , there's a UK Blu-Ray.

1972 @ 50: CABARET (some spoilers)

After a series of white on black deco titles we open on what looks like a reflection in a beaten metal surface. An audience hubbub and a slowly rising roll on the snare drum as the black and white image takes on colour. We move across the surface to a distorted face in heavy makeup. Pulling back we see it's the MC of the Kit Kat Club with an infectious grin. He welcomes the audience in several tongues as a strident jazz age piano vamp starts under his voice. "Leave your troubles behind," his piercing voice offers. "Here, everything is beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful." Behind him a band of women in silhouette breaks into a brisk ragtime. And there we are in Berlin at the crumbling end of the Weimar Republic, sitting at the cabaret for some risque fun, surrounded by figures straight out of Otto Dix or Georg Grosz. So, drink your sekt and watch the show, the bad stuff outside can wait. This story is how that bad stuff got through the door and came to stay.

As singing star Sally Bowles takes the stage among the heavily choreographed dollfaced dancers we also see young Brian Roberts slight from the train and breeze through the streets in search of cheap accommodation so he can take his Cambridge studies further still. These two meet at her rooming house when they stumble through some misdirected niceties and he learns the drill of the house and goes on a tour. His room is poky and grey but it's across the hall from hers and her sparkling life force. He takes it.

She shows him how Berlin works in the streets and at the club and we get a lot of wicked wit from the stage in the form of expert moves, arch lyrics and acts that tell the times with the distilled accuracy of burlesque. Brian takes on students who bring their own subplot and both he and Sally are swept up by omni-hungry aristocrat Maximillian whose house and estate in the country is only outsized by his appetites. He's fun, they're fun, and everything empties like a bottle of Heinkel Trocken. Their last encounter reminds us that Maximillian has figured that once the increasingly visible Nazis on the streets will erase the communists only to be erased by the remaining decent folk like him. They stop at a country pub where a Hitler Youth boy sings the only song in the musical that takes place away from the Kit Kat Club. Tomorrow Belongs to Me starts out all nature and Julie Andrews until its symbols of ancient rights and reclaiming history stir up the crowd as they join in. It's the polar opposite of the Marsellaise scene in Casablanca. Young women, middle aged men, children, all take voice to a deafening chorus of impassioned shared hatred. If you aren't freezing in your seat you need help. The scene holds extraordinary power and it's strengthened by the returning shot of the ancient man who keeps his seat beside his beer who can only gaze into the light before him with a weariness that outweighs him.

From there it's a downhill roll as Sally and Brian declare a doomed marriage plan, English language students Fritz and Natalia commit to a union immeasurably more doomed, and the next version of the opening pan over the reflection in the metal, following the defiant last gasp of the title song, and we see that every other audience member's arm is ringed with a swastika armband. The exhilaration of the message of life as a cabaret is roughly contradicted by a symbol that tells us that it won't be sassy or funny or even much resembling humanity for many, many years.

I saw this as a late night movie on a commercial channel on the black and white tv of my student house in 1980 in Brisbane. Queensland was a corrupted state at the time and anyone who didn't buy into the monoculture was an easy (often visibly so) target for the attention of the worst of the populace and its politicised police force. This film's theme of snarky fun going on at the expense of the regime and how the stronger force from the top was not going to give in or forget opposition without drastic action, hit right home. In more ways than one Brisbane substituted for Berlin with very little effort. Tomorrow Belongs to Me was a kind of joke state anthem among opponents, a sour joke but sometimes that's all you can get. Seeing it again brought those years back for me and I was again struck by the tightness of the narrative and central concept of stage/offstage life and how the Nazi anthem breaks that scheme the way the Nazis themselves did for real.

The pallet has the rich tones of the cinema of the day and feels more European than American and will, almost by itself, remind the adventurous viewer of the look and feel of other continental callbacks to the past that was starting to free itself from grief and anger to be examined at the cinema. The Damned, Salon Kitty and so on live in the same colour realm.

Broadway maestro Bob Fosse's choreography is machine prefect but warmly sassy and perfected through cinematic angle choices and tight editing. He's a little less even when it comes to performances but then he doesn't always have the material. Marissa Berenson's third act confessional dialogue with Fritz Wepper feel stagey despite, in one case, taking place on the running board of a moving car. Berenson, a career model, was cast for her beauty and if her Cherman accent is more comedy sketch Sveeedish than Wepper's real one it is surrounded by such commitment to be politely overlooked.

Michael York was also being cast for looks first as at this point in his career he struggles to emote. In his case, though, this does come in handy as he is meant to be tight laced, mumblingly coy about his sexuality and barely capable of handling the slightest deviation from his expectations of normality. When Sally challenges him to a cathartic scream under the train tracks his attempt falls kilometres short of her larynx-tearing explosion. Is it a poor performance if most of it probably comes from the actor's own guardedness? Is that any less of a thing than overstated method acting? York ends up being one of the features of the film and a welcome presence for us as we'd rather have him than us deal with Sally.

Sally is a handful from the word go and if you were iffy about Liza Minelli's four on the floor assault of it then this is not the movie for you. Springing from the legacy of a famous and infamous mother into her own showbiz persona, Liza Minelli took every role up to this and beyond to slam a flag on every project. But she's not just playing big. Between her and Fosse she knows to ride the hyperbolic actory onslaught so that while it can be irritating that feels intentional and it is never quite pushed to fulsome. York's self conscious Englishness comes in handy here but Minelli is clearly working nuance. When Sally is discovered in dark disappointment after her father stood her up on a dinner reunion we understand the pain that the high flamboyance masks and when that returns on high with Maximillian in the picture we know that it will have to be called on at the end of the thrill. This is Minelli's film to lose and she never lets go of the lead.

Deserving of his own paragraph is Joel Grey who took his celebrated and award winning role as MC to the screen and immortalised himself by his turn. Entirely caked in greasepaint and highlighter, having no dialogue beyond his hectoring addresses to the audience, he speaks in song and dance and is bawdy, charming, conspiratorial, pathetic, and sometimes even frightening, and always magnetic. His presence survives one of the film's triumphs in the number If You Could See Her Through My Eyes. He sings as a dancer in a gorilla costume lopes in his arms. At first it's an ugly girl joke aimed straight into the audience's imagined bigotry but it pushes it right to the ends with the final line whose chill is delivered without accompaniment: "If you could see her through my eyes she wouldn't look Jewish at all." If there had been ambiguity about the club's attitude to the steadily infiltrating Fascism it is abandoned here. The performance goes from an uncomfortable joke to a slap in the face and it is Joel Grey's expert delivery that carries us through it. It might be Liza's show but it would collapse without him.

Cabaret continues to delight. Made with warmth that doesn't neglect precision and a world building that makes us want to walk its streets and get a table at that club, every night of the year. And that despite what we know (more than the characters) about what the loony right wingers in their boy scout uniforms were going to do to the world. So, do we still need reminding that the Nazis were bad guys? Look around.

PS - I am aware that the source material for the play and this film was a number of short stories written by Christopher Isherwood based on his own experiences but my concern was the film itself rather than the development of its text.

Viewing notes: I watched this on Warner Brothers stellar Blu-Ray with deep colour and an immersive 5.1 audio track. I would advise you to do the same if you can't find an anniversary cinema screening.

1972@50: DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING

A number of child murders in a small Italian village brings a media circus to town, in the wake of some hot shot detectives from the city. The killings fire a population both disturbed by them and ready to obey their superstitions, leaving some local characters vulnerable like the crazy witchy girl Maciara and debauched urban siren Patrizia. Too many suspects and too many doubts. One news photographer teams up with the dodgy Patrizia when it looks like the cops are at their wits' end.

Plot twists and sudden swerves, red herrings lead to a climax that is both unpredictable and unsurprising. Add some very nasty violence and you've pretty much got any Giallo movie. These bloody and intriguing adaptations of crime fiction speak for generation of Italian cinema ('60s-'80s) and number more than a few high points along the timeline from the likes of Mario Bava, Dario Argento and, here, Lucio Fulci.

Lucio Fulci's rap sheet lists a lot of movies from the '50s to the '90s and they're a big mix of genres; westerns, comedies, Gialli, etc. However, what he has become known as a horror director for the bunch of  titles in no genre but that made between the late '70s and early '90s. A major reason for this is that when he turned his hand to horror he brought a signature surrealism to the tales. Very few, if any, play like straightforward genre pieces and fewer still offer much attention to plotting. Even Zombie/Zombie 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Woodoo, though it replaced the magic/religion that Romero had famously removed in his own influential Dead films, this one still plays like a nightmare rather than a survival tale. From there he put zombies of increasingly strange powers into other acid-gothic films like City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. But back when his next job was whatever genre was on offer he made Giallo films with precision and force.

Duckling begins, middles, and ends the way all Gialli do but Fulci, up against a formidable field, adds a compelling eye, way with deep focus, magnetic colour pallet and performances that survive the awful growling English dub on my old Anchor Bay copy. If these thrillers put violence forward, Fulci delivers ghastly chain whippings and their results on the human body, a shiveringly spectral light to the victims when they are discovered, the toughness of the knotty landscape that looks like it's resisted argiculture from the Etruscans on, canny hiring of a composer for a solid score and a strong sense of lens placement and motion. The scene where Maciara is hunted down by the local dog squad is told largely at canine level and comes across as a hunt rather than an arrest. A later scene sets some extreme violence to some bland soul hits on the radio in an ironic juxtaposition that Tarantino would have noted in letters of fire when he most certainly saw it.

Gialli don't have to do any more than show violent crime and its detection but many do take on social or political themes. Duckling aims squarely at credulity, here, not sparing local folklore nor the mighty Catholic Church itself whose power was felt strongly by his immediate Italian audiences. The best of this in this film has to do with the equivalence of both streams, the household level of ancient magic and the reach of the Church.

In stark, raving contrast to this is one of the film's most notorious scenes which, even just described, might put many off. Patrizia the debaucher is introduced lounging in her loft completely naked (though posed on a lounge to conceal her pubic region. The son of her housekeeper is sent up a jug of orange juice she's ordered. The boy (about twelve) is confronted by the sight of the woman who playfully flirts with him. She remains gleefully uncovered, enjoying the effect on the child and even leaves him with a vague promise for the future which he takes with him down the stairs, never to part with its images.

Before you say something like, well, it was 1972 and things were different, you should know that Fulci was arrested over the scene on charges of endangering a child. He was able to prove that the boy was never actually in the same place as the woman while shooting, that he had used an adult actor with dwarfism for the two shots that contained both figures. Even so, what are we to make of this scene? Could Patrizia have teased the boy fully clothed? Of course, and it might have made for a more complex scene. But the bit about it being 1972 and things being different is that the shock value of her nakedness and creul glee would have outranked a subtler approach. The scene still feels edgy, pushing well up against the ick barrier. For me, it forms a depth-giving contrast with the character's later humaneness. In a later scene it makes one character's smile a crushing misconception. Her playfulness is cruel but there is no suggestion that it was the prelude to physical abuse. It is another tarry patch in a film pushing against its generic constraints.

The movie was blacklisted but not for that scene. The pokes at the Church meant more. Would this be reversed today if made anew? You don't have to be a humourless puritain to find the woman and child scene uncomfortable but, without onscreen nudity the cause celebre that it was, might the attempt itself feel desperate, old fashioned or just twee? Whatever, in the time capsule of this fifty year old movie, it does work, it's intentionally disturbing rather than leery and provides another aspect to the story of a series of particularly dark murders that the community on screen, for their religion and superstitions, have permitted.

1972@50: THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE

Large cruise ship sails along under the credits and then when they're done the executive crew on the bridge are all "steady as she goes" and "cork up the ballast, there" and in the midst there's a lounge lizard type in a normal suit who's giving the process a massive dirty look. Cue corporate stooge with his, "you might be captain but I own you" dialogue. 

On deck, in cabins, in ballrooms and the rest of the ship we get little vingettes to introduce us to our cast o' characters with the kind of keynote writing that everyone who's done a creative writing course has taken away: ex-cop with ex-sexworker bicker but it's out of love, young hip priest roars about God for the strong with a patient older priest who comes back with a loving God, little boy knows more about the ship than its designer ... you get the idea. You do this when you are building up a big shared experience like a seige, a hijack or in this case a shipwreck.

Disaster movies have as many cliches as any other genre and they're all here but most of them are here for the first time (or near, only Airport came earlier) to play social types against each other in the great tapestry o' modern humanity. Leslie Neilsen who plays The Captain (that's his name in the credits) went on to ridicule this genre in the Flying High (or Airplane) movies by playing things as straight as a die. But the array is on show here, as it must be for this newly fashioned epic. Someone to lead, someone who would rather lead, the old/infim/hysterical dragger who threatens the whole journey and either (if noble) sacrifies themself for the good of the many or (if narcissistic) will sacrifice everyone else for the good of the one. The way out of archetypes to prevent them from being a pageant of cutouts is done with casting. 

This was the beginning of the era of the starstudded poster as current A-listers were set in beds of know-the-face stars of previous decades. Gene Hackman leads the ensemble in a form fit role following from his hard boiled Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. He leads his dwindling flock upto the bottom of the hull of the upturned ship having to shed his God favours the winners approach to the religion of love as people keeping proving him wrong. Ernest Borgnine, tears his tough guy type from the air, managing to regain the heights of Marty, his impressive first starring role. Shelley Winters had reached the certain age and body type (as well deliberately putting on weight for the role) that would keep her in side roles for the rest of her career but she takes that and triumphs with it, mixing pathos with pragmatic heroism. Her self-awareness is disarming. Her swimming stunt was not a double. That goes for all of them, high or low, they did their own stunts. Recently when Tom Cruise held on to the wing of a plane as it took off for real it was a selling point of the film. Back in 1972? Eh, it's a living.

The art direction is stellar and serves as a constant reminder of the survival situation as well as the more holmilitic journey of descending for ascent. At the outset we have a cruise ship, mighty and dependable with lavish interiors here and cosy reassuring cabins as well as a clean and orderly bridge for the provision of order. But when the tsunami hits and the leviathan rolls over all of that order and finery rolls with it. The passengers escape the ballroom by climbing a metal framed Christmas tree and move, after a major poltical dispute with the Purser's faction who want to stay put, head into the fiery bowels of the ship where there is no silver cutlery but plenty of skin frying surfaces and shin shattering steel doorways. Ordeals await in every chamber, some infernal and deadly, others tests of human capacity, and the higher/lower they go the tougher, more refulgent and hostile it gets. The tagline on the poster was Hell Upside Down and that's what it looks and feels like.

John Williams provides a solid orschestral score as he would until he delivered bombast for Lucas and Spielberg and spawned generations of bombastic copyists. The tune he did write, though, was the one that became a hit single. It was the era of the movie hit song which also meant it was the era of the movie hit song taught in music class. I can clearly recall having to wrap the tonsils around Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head and One Tin Soldier and then, after The Posdeion Adventure, it was The Morning After. It was on the radio like those others and, while I was deeply into classical and early music at that age, I loved it and appreciated its baroque finish and remember noticing (without knowing the term) that it had a middle eight. In the movie it is voiced by Renee Armond and mimed by Carol Lynley. It was made a hit by Maureen McGovern who looks a little like a cover version of Carol Lynley.

If your American '70s at the cinema is led by the likes of The Godfather or Taxi Driver, the movie brats Coppola and Scorsese et al (aka New Hollywood), you might want to spare a thought for things like this. The big bucks mainstream might have felt challenged by Easy Rider but it stuck to its M.O. and kept churning out lavish productions that raked it in. Disaster movies became as much a theme as noir had been in the '40s or serial killers in the '90s, with entries like The Swarm, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno appearing regularly with fiery poster art and explosive taglines and ever more massive casts of extras and Hollywood luminaries. It's also the era where the war movie did the same, growing from the '60s epic The Great Escape, and even whodunnits like Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile had castlists that read like Who's Who. 

The big is beautiful end of town kept the snowball running as the money learned again to absorb. Disaster movies, though, began big, by definition and stayed big until they faded or morphed into action movies etc. If they also planed out into more basic cores than this one they also piled on the effects. On that, does the long shot of the Poseidon just look like a model in a swimming pool? Yes. Should that bother you? If you suffer from a lack of imagination it should outrage and strike your funny bone at once and you should never watch another movie again. I noticed without caring as I understood what it was meant to be without trouble. The scenes, however of the ship capsized in the water are terrifying enough for me not to notice. When they include sparking explosions blowing from the smoketacks my blood runs cold. And that's the point. The Poseidon Adventure shouldn't be a guilty pleasure but its insistence on the social basis of its survival story and delivery of such a convincingly hostile setting earns it points beyond what you might normally afford a blockbuster based on an airport novel. Works.

1972@50: DELIVERANCE

Macho Lewis picks a few of his friends to join him canoeing on a river doomed to be dammed. It's not immediately obvious why he's chosen those friends but in the first act it's clear he's picked people he can lead. Bobby's overweight, Drew's an insurance guy and Ed who's kinda nuthin much beyond being a young family man. Lewis is the "kind of man who reads Playboy" who wears his ribbed life jacket over his bare torso and prefers his deluxe bow and arrow over guns.

On the way to the river the crew stop for petrol and to organise some local drivers to transport their cars to the other end of the canoe trip. The city folk make light of the ramshackle houses but one of them, softly strumming his guitar, attracts the attention of a boy with a banjo and together they kick up a storm of bluegrass which became a brick in the culture and remains a moment of cinema more famous than the film it's part of. When Drew the guitarist goes to shake the boy's hand the latter turns away with a strange suddenness. The vibe ain't warm. With the drivers sorted the party makes its way to the river and the guys set to and soon are soaring o'er the water in their canoes. At one point two of them get to the bank and are met by two locals and things get very ugly very quickly, turn violent and then messy, very, very messy. What was a holiday adventure is now a survival story.

John Boorman's career was established by 1972 with a swathe of tv credits and a few feature films including one of the oddest rock movies of the British Invasion (Catch Us if  You Can). Point Blank was a spooky crime movie with leads taken form the likes of Antonioni and Nicholas Roeg. He would go on to the bizarre sci-fi of Zardoz, the watchable but overlong Excalibur and one of the more ridiculed sequels in history (Exorcist II The Heretic). Eclectic doesn't cover it. But early on in that string came this lean adventure in ethics which pitted civilisation against nature without a clear winner in mind.

This is pretty much the only time you will see Burt Reynolds this vulnerable. In his breakthrough role and before his trademark tache he looks every centimetre the action hero but as the scenes progress he's clearly only marginally more equipped than the others at what they are trying to do. He's just another city slicker. Jon Voigt was building his career with some early peaking highlights like Midnight Cowboy and as the unforgettable warzone capitalist Milo in Catch 22. Here he steps back and immerses himself in the film's most lengthy character arc from beige bloke to enforced action hero to bottled up citizen. Ned Beatty has yet to adopt his bellowing bluster in the authority figures he would progress to (like Network's astonishing single scene movie stealer as Mr Jensen) and gives us poignant depiction of post trauma. And then there's Ed Cox as Drew the moral centre, social conscience and dissenting voice whose dispatch is both elegant and eerie.

It's the casting of the locals that might cause the concern of the new viewer of the 2020s. These actors were found among the real locals of the location shoot but you could choose this type or that depending on what you wanted to create. Boorman's team chose the toothless, mumbling and disfigured, the suggestively inbred and savage. Deliverance deals its narrative in the spaces between the archetypes (Lewis' vulnerability, Bobby's courage etc.) and while the lokels are afforded some sympathy at the wrong end of the cheap quips of the city folk they present as arcane throwbacks. Are they like this because they are closer to the nature that the sophisticates are pretending to conquer? I don't get the idea that the film is telling us that this is what life in the woods does to you or that everyone who lives outside the city limits is a hawg-molestin' bad ol' boy, but I do get the intensity of the othering. Does a turn at Duelling Banjos fix that? No, but it doesn't promote it, either. I'll leave this one unresolved in the naive wish that those who watch it now will add the context of 1972 and allow the caricatures and distortions into the way of the world as it was. If you are new to the film you might consider this just as confronting as the atrocity at the heart of the conflict.

This essay in masculinity against and with nature remains a potent one and the lean touch in its execution educative. If we can accept the notion of the alienation as being part of the persuasion of the story we might see a clear way to adding some understanding to the art before our time and find even the difficult bits instructive. Personally, I think they add potency to Deliverance and from a director whose grandest epic statements could leave him awkwardly naked this one's minimalism impresses. Deliverance was a massive hit at the time and has come down to us without need of even the mild coddling I've supplied here. It's one of those instances, though, that gives us pause to wonder at its great success. I dont' mean it's a bad film (it's a great one) I mean it's hard to know why millions love it.

1972@50: ROMA

Roma is, on the surface, an exercise in nostalgia but a closer examination reveals a warning. Revisitation stories usually do this and end up just joining the chorus: you can't go home again. But this isn't really one of those. Federico Fellini was a country boy and it's his awe at the Eternal City we are watching. This is less a revisitation than a series of reintroductions and whether it's the Etruscans or the Fascists or the Holy See we will be repeatedly informed of the fleeting nature of eternity. It's like a view from the other end of the microscope he used to make 8 1/2 but instead of Marcello Mastroianni and a delirium he plays himself and the figures onscreen are either real or Breughelian exaggerations. The version of the title with his name on it becomes increasingly more accurate.

The first of several entrances to the city is made in the opening shot as two figures with bicycles move through a moonlit landscape with grotesque trees and a ruined ancient roadsign that says Roma 4K. One of the figures carries a scythe. The next entrance is by a teacher who is talking his class through the crossing of the Rubicon. He fords the stream barefoot and the boys remove their shoes and follow him across as he repeats Julius Caesar's quote about the die being cast. A monstage of school life in the fascist years. Then we see the young Fellini as played by an actor arriving by train to a boarding house which seems to contain all forms of human life, up to the gigantic bedridden and godlike Matriarch. The next entrance is a massive traffic jam around the Colusseum with cars as far as the eye can see and the rained in drivers and passengers functionally indistinguishable. And so on. All roads might lead here but some are a lot tougher to negotiate than others.

We are taken to a music hall with a rowdy crowd, chaotic dinner in the piazza, brothels for soldiers and other ones for officers. We follow an archeological team called in when the underground rail project breaks into a sealed ancient chamber with frescos on the walls. The crew marvel at the paintings and the statues before the air that's been rushing in from the broken wall attacks and erases all of it. An aging princess hosts a futuristic fashion parade of styles for nuns, monks, priests and above which starts quaint turns silly and then horrific. All the circular motion might be dizzying but Fellini keeps a firm hand on the tiller, ensuring the constant threat to his audience's stability is kept the right side of chundering over the side. And through all the blurring, the seventies haircuts over forties suits, the ancient and contemporary in the same frame state and restate Fellini's tireless awe at the city of his choice. It blurs, the nostalgia doesn't get a chance against the sense memories of ugliness and brutality. You get a lot of everything because Rome is everything. By the time you are gliding along with the dreamlike motion of the motorcycles in the final sequence as they roll around the curves and create a lightshow between headlights and architecture you might have already forgotten the moment that Anna Magniani begs off being in the film as she tells Fellini she doesn't trust him (nor should she as she wouldn't be there if he was trustworthy).

So, his ranging happy youth was lived in a police state and the hippies that take up every square millimetre of the mansion and the fountain could look like an occupation or an infestation. Flamboyant author has almost the literal last word when he is discovered among the diners at another piazza. He says he lives in Rome because he is nothing to the Romans and like them he might as well be an illusion.

I saw this and the more directly nostalgic Amarcord on late night tv in Brisbane when I was an undergrad. The tv was an op shop special, an old black and white piece of furniture from PYE or AWA or whoever put their wood with gold trim pieces into the showrooms of the sixties. My brother Michael, like all my family, was a film buff and would alert me to anything worth my time that came up on tv and this was one of the first. It was certainly the first Fellini film I saw. The next year I saw it at Griffith University's cinema, big screen and in colour. I became a fan for life but only much later did I find the earlier films, the ones you're meant to revere like La Dolce Vita or La Strada. Wonderful stuff but none of them carried the thrill of that first touch. I had done the same thing with Beatles albums as a teenager, going backwards until the reissues allowed further exploration. Roma, like the White Album, has felt fresh to me over decades. What better can be said of a retrospective?

1972@50: SOLARIS

In a future setting psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the distant planet Solaris with a mission to shut it down and bring the trio of scientists left on the space station orbiting the weird ocean world. He watches a filmed account of a pilot who had flown over the surface of the planet, describing bizarre and frightening visions that the pilot swears are real (though his film of the incident shows only clouds). Kris doesn't buy the visions story which upsets the pilot who leaves in a huff. But the strange reports persist and the notion that the planet's swirling surface is trying to communicate. Time to bring the boys home.

When he gets there it is to a reception of none of the three scientists. Did I say three. Dr Gibarian, a personal friend of Kris's has committed suicide. The other two are aloof and unwelcoming, both are accompanied by human figures which they shoo away before Kris can get too nosey. Dr Gibarian's suicide recording is rambling and cautionary. Kris picks a cabin and rests. When he wakes it is to find his wife has joined him. He'd be pleased except she poisoned herself years before. He is already living in interesting times.

See, a plot summary of the opening of this extraordinary film does it no favours. When cinephiles utter the name Tarkovsky it is with such reverence that it should be set to Gregorian chant. The reason he deserves it has to do with something I saw him say in a filmed lecture where he put to his audience that there were two types of filmmaker: one who brings you the best version of the world around you and the other who brings you their own world. He cited Bresson as an example but then also included himself. He wasn't being immodest, just accurate.

As early as his debut feature Ivan's Childhood with its opening dream of flying and any number of scenes of warfare that seem to have been drained from a stunned reverie. If that upgrade of a neorealist war film wasn't enough, his next Andrei Rublev gave us a medieval Russia that was so barely earthly that it even started with a balloon flight and then took us through the kind of bare bones civilisation that Breughel was recording in Flanders. Already uncontainable, Tarkovsky's next feature tackled the universe itself, humankind's ambitions for it, our craving to fashion ourselves again among the starfield and the hopelessness of fighting with time. So, not quite This Island Earth, then.

Solaris begins on Earth with rich images of our natural environment, weeds underwater, a fallen bough sogging into fertilizer, happy children meeting each other in play, and rain, lots of rain. This contrasts stridently with the imagined future video, the gravity of the pilot's interrogation and the technology on show: tiny little pagers in breast pockets that light up small square screens and beep with high purpose; the video is controlled by a small console built in to furniture. A lengthy sequence of driving through tarffic which goes from sparse highways to a gigantic system of automotive veins might remind us both of the business of the human body and the interminability of space travel.

The space station itself reminds me of something it inspired, Peter Carey's short story The Chance in which an alien race invades Earth and rules by a gambling dependence, offering full body changes chosen at random by machines. Their machines are effective but sloppy with wires bursting out or repaired with gaffer tape. The beauty or terror they offered, though, by this chance is straight out of the mind of Stanislaw Lem who wrote the novel Solaris. So, corridors look unrepaired and are cluttered with casings and discarded packaging. The padding on the walls was lifted for Alien but the casual clothes of the scientists, and Kris himself, tells us that we shouldn't settle back for a joyride into future world; we've travelled across constellations to meet more like us.

In contrast, the restless waves and swells of the ocean of Solaris below change colour and even nature, now like seawater, now like liquified animal fat. The planet keeps its secrets deep beneath this tireless motion but it does seem to be trying to say something. With none of the budget of American sci-fi Tarkovsky knew he would be more effective epxloring inner space. So, when Kris's apparently resurrected wife Hari appears, she's just there, in a dress that looks like it could have been designed by Andrei Rublev. And their dialogue is the special effect. She reveals that she knows his name and that they're married  but everything else ... seems to have come from his memory: she has been made from someone looking at her. Like the other extra entities on board (often called guests) Hari is not considered human but a system of stablised neutrinos. If that doesn't make you head explode...

Most of the film is given to dialogue aimed at understanding what is happening on the station and what might. Hari (through some very unfortunate incidents) develops her own self and the result is subdued but eerie. Kris's difficulty of letting go of the Earthly original and being confused about this new one feeds much of this dialogue and whether it is in those messy corridors or rooms that look as Earthly as their wood panelling we are invited to think about what experience does to fashion us, what a rejection of it might do to change that and what Earth would feel like once back there.

The film that Solaris is most compared to is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddysey from four years prior. Solaris was meant to be the Soviet answer to the decadent running dog American popcorn fest (there is no shortage of the sci-fi in the glorious Sovyet Union!) but instead of that we got two great movies. Kubrick's adaptation of Clarke's morphing quest forward took his film into cosmic realms to get to the intimate level. Tarkovsky's vision started little and let the cosmos appear in shades of conversation until the gut punch of the ending gave us both at once.

I've said nothing of performance here as it can very easily bend under the weight of the dialogue but the sense of wonder, fear and curiosity all at once does allow a lot of expression. Also, whatever the rest of them are doing it is Natalya Bondarchuk who commands the attention of every eye that sees her. Her baffled awe at her sudden existence develops into such wise assertion that even though her exit if offscreen we feel as though we've seen it. In constrast, she is also playing the original Hari in home movies and memories which feed her copy with vital information that is then used as counter reference uh huh, heap big self and other going on). 

Tarkovsky is the filmmaker he described himself to be, a maker of worlds, his own worlds. Going from celebrity to rejection, defecting from the USSR in frustration to finally find a form of reverence in his final years, Tarkovky's life demanded the films he directed and the worlds he made with them. Are they long? Even the short ones feel long. Are they talky? Interminably. Are they beautiful? Dependably. IF you are curious about this one you may be relieved to know that presentations of it at cinemas and home video usually divide it into two parts which make it quite digestible. For my part most recently rewatching it, I found it far more engaging and narratively strong than I remembered. I had far less trouble following the often deep and dark exchanges than when younger. And, as I always do with Tarkovsky, I stepped into a strange world new again. You should, too. When you're ready.

1972@50: FRENZY

A press conference about a program to clean up the Thames is interrupted by the sight of a body floating in it. A naked woman who was strangled to death by the necktie still tight around her throat is brought to the bank by the current. Hitchcock, whom we've already seen standing dourly in the crowd, has not only kept his sense of humour in his second last film but has moved with the times. Anyone who suggests that he would have made Psycho II low on gore and high on suspense is only half right.

Ex-RAF officer down on his luck falls victim to a series of increasingly incriminating coincidences and circumstantial ghosts from his past as a friend of his continues his career as the Necktie Murderer. Jon Finch provides a believably flawed hero in Blaney whose post military life has been a series of missteps that have all but obscured his natural goodness. As his foil Barry Foster's Bob Rusk is all Cockney charm that ends as soon as his urges turn to frenzy. Between these points are the gang of hinderers and helpers that you'd expect from a Hitchcock movie plus one of his best police characters (Chief Inspector Oxford played by Alec McCowen). The cast also includes Samuel Beckett's favourite Billie Whitelaw, dependably severe and intimidating, and Anna Massey of whom more later. 

And the setting is the updated London of his earliest features but now updated if a little weary after its days of swinging. Scotland Yard has become the gleaming rotating sign and glass skyscrapers of New Scotland Yard. If Hitch's Londoners were always  on the grown-up side they now are more worldly and grumpy. It feels, if anything, like the London of 10 Rillington Place but there is another spectre hanging over it that needs a mention.

Psycho was released in 1960 so was, back in the U.K. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a violent and confronting serial killer film that drew on the building blocks of cinema itself. Psycho further consolidated Hitchcock's name and reputation. Peeping Tom damn near destroyed Powell (who sentenced himself to transportation and made a few features in Australia). As a fan of Peeping Tom and the extra mile it goes toward the gravity of its central monster and the disturbing origins of his condition I find watching Frenzy impossible not to compare the two. I don't mean in how far they go in depicting violence or sex crimes (both films feature sexually motivated murder) but in that icy worldliness. The masturbation joke by the shop keeper in the earlier film has a direct descendant in the sleazy rape joke in Frenzy. In both we get the other side. Peeping Tom's Mark takes the kind of photos that the newsagent sells to knowing customers as "views". That smirking rape joke is wiped off its teller's face when he beholds a victim in the morgue (it's subtle but it's clear). And I can't help but wonder if the casting of Anna Massey was intentional. She went to the edge as Mark's would be girlfriend and then has an extended acquaintance with sexual violence in Frenzy. There's even a very impressive long take in that moment that takes us from the scene to the murmuring everyday world which invokes the walking camera of the opening of Peeping Tom. What do I make of this? Mostly coincidence but I do like to fancy that it is Hitchcock's acknowledgement of his fellow cinemaster who took one for the team all those years ago.

As well, there is a great deal of Hitchcockian humour on show from the Inspector's wife's faddish and hideous culinary experiments (Vivien Merchant who gives us more than the screenplay would allow) and the near unbearable suspense of a ride in the back of a lorry to retrieve evidence among a mass of potatoes. Most unsettling is the continued rapport between the accused killer and the real one throughout; jolly friends but for that one divergent flaw.

Frenzy finds Hitchcock in the familiar territory of an innocent fugitive and a rounded villain as well as the physical territory of his own youth. His adaptability makes me think of other filmmakers who have not been so agile in the face of changing times. Scorsese's more recent efforts feel older fashioned than the '70s films that broke his name and I don't mean the period settings. Dario Argento has struggled with shifts in the culture since the '80s. There are more but these will do. Hitch could make it like today whenever today was. He even went out on a 'convincing '70s style black comedy with Family Plot. Frenzy feels less dated than the work of those he influenced. Says  lot.

1972@50: THE GODFATHER.

As a lavish extended family Italan American wedding is in progress the Patriarch of the Corleone family is observing tradition by hearing the requests and grievances of members of the greater community. Eldest son Sonny is busy chasing a woman into a place of privacy. Youngest son Mike, war hero recently returned from service, is introducing his wasp girlfriend to the peculiarities of his clan. Petitioners come and go, some empty handed, others chastised, and eventually Don Corleone's daughter is wed and order reaches its circular end.

The reason that that's almost all the plot you're going to get is not because this grey eminence of modern crime films is light on plot or even that spoilable but that the events peppering the timeline are far less important than the sense that if one turn of the wheel doesn't break it the wheel will turn the stronger into a chaotic and uncertain future. This is a tale of organised crime and the families that run it. More so, it's about the families themselves.

While there are many threads to follow in this epic the most compelling is that of Mike played by Al Pacino. His trek goes from family trophy with medals to be protected from "our thing" to having to act decisively at breaking points. These are some of the tensest and most compelling scenes and Coppola's conducting of his forces is not just masterful it goes right up to that final episode of The Sopranos which quotes it by the subtlest means. And as this is an epic in which Coppola is setting about inventing the mafia movie for the American audience his liberal debts to Italian post war crime thrillers and epics are paid in full. The sprawling opening setpiece, the assassination in the street, the narrative of the lawyer and the west coast producer and its effects, even the phrase "offer he can't refuse" are cinematic canon and are seen clearly in all this film's descendants.

So, is it any good? Well, first you have to remember that stuff about its long trailing influence. Is it good or bad that a big mafia celebration in The Sopranos looks pretty much like it does here? If Scorsese upped the ante on violence and then was outdone by Tarrantino and then was mainstreamed by The Sopranos the depiction of the banality of violence still stems from The Godfather. There is great care taken to provide depth so that these acts aren't simply vengeance spinning out of control and all that have followed ... have followed. "Leave the gun, take the cannoli." That's The Godfather. Even the opening petition scenes in which acts of extreme violence are discussed in casual code and presided over by a man who sounds like grandad as well as the coldest blooded Satan is a template. Mob bosses haven't just lashed out and fired away from this point, they always have to deliver the sermon, the joke, the shaggy dog explanation.

Is it good or bad? On the one hand nothing changes over decades, on the other the immediate depth of this example frees all its imitators to improvise and seek even further depth. Ever more imagination must be called upon to establish the mundanity of a contract hit. Well, it's not all Scorsese, there are mediocre to utterly cruddy gangster movies as well, it's just that those we recall and celebrate are those that inject the difficulty of the premise: family values and violence and extortion to uphold the family values. Hell, Mick Jagger sang about it: "Oh, the gangster looks so frightening with his Luger in his hand but when he gets home to his children he's a family man". If the Italian mob sagas admitted the issues Coppola put them centre screen. Michael's early actions are practical and intelligent but there's clearly a buzz in them that takes him to the next one, wiser and stronger and the more embroiled he gets, the closer to the centre, the more complete he is as a human. We don't like admitting that even as we hope he gets through but there's no escaping that we are witnessing the birth of a monster.

It's this mix of virtuoso cinema and ethical difficulty that thrilled audiences even as it sobered them. Painterly power and machine guns that look like pain (not just power). He imported a European aesthetic into an already established American film genre and made an epic art film that could be watched with a barrel of popcorn. Also, think of Brando's iconic performance: he was coasting at this time but after this he was about to have a great '70s. Al Pacino went from young and promising to the A-list. Ditto Diane Keaton. Robert Duvall entered the realm of dependable character actors which led to the apotheosis of his art in the same director's Apocalypse Now (see also Brando again). And Coppola himself went from a jobbing Corman apprentice to a capable feature director with a few artsy tools in the workshop to mainstream auteur number one. It was this success in profit and acclaim that put him at the top but also allowed the other movie brats, the Lucases, the Spielbergs, the Scorseses, through the gate to overhaul the old system and accelerate the change. I know, Easy Rider, but that just made the money men think it would all be low budget big returns, Coppola added budget and brains and warmth and so the '70s was born.

So, yeah, it's good.