Nifty at Fifty: Recommendations from 1973

To the casual viewer, the cinematic landscape of the early ‘70s might be defined by the dizzying achievements of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, with a few other classics dotting around before Spielberg would change the entire act of moviegoing with Jaws. 1973 in film, however, is much more than just a smattering of films sandwiched between Coppola’s two masterpieces; it’s a year with an identity all its own and offerings that are as influential as any other year. With my selection below, I isolated 22 films that represented all the industry had to offer, but even I came woefully short in what’s a fantastic year in film. My goal was to stretch across genres, languages, box office results, and awards recognition. That said, I found thematic similarities that I think speak to what audiences were looking for at the time.

There are charming con men in the Depression Era, attacks on Christian sensibilities, deconstruction of genres with atypically hapless protagonists, and memory pieces that lend insights about their creators. However, if I had to isolate one specific theme that all these caper stories, comedies, horror tales, dramas, and even documentaries have in common, it’s this: the typical authorities in society will offer no help and may only work to hinder. In a year where some of the most-watched stuff wasn’t in a movie theater but was the televised Senate Watergate Hearings of 1973 (85% of Americans watched at least a portion of them), that idea must have rung true.

Amarcord (A-)

Fellini is flexing all his storytelling muscles here in this episodic and memoiristic tale of a young man growing up in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, a society that he makes no judgment on one way or the other; this was his world, and it’s gone now. There’s a comedic bent to almost everything onscreen, and this light-touch approach pays off. The movie’s eccentricities, be they colorful characters, bizarre sexual encounters, or any other of Fellini’s oddball whimsies, might turn off some modern audiences but those who choose to hand themselves over to this legendary and influential filmmaker are in for a beautiful treat punctuated with a wonderful melancholy.

American Graffiti (A)

This movie didn’t just announce George Lucas as a major filmmaker to watch, it vaulted him into the spotlight when he received Oscar nominations for writing and directing this coming-of-age gem. Lucas’ ode to the baby boomer generation as they began to outgrow their hometowns and meet various fates is very tender but not shallow. The quadriptych plotting gives the four main characters opportunity to explore different parts of growing up including romantic jealousy, understanding that adults will let you down, and beginning to understand your own limitations and that time, one day, will pass you by. But for this one night, they’re still the kings of their small town, and the way that Lucas captures their last hurrah as high schoolers is just so wonderfully alive.

Badlands (A-)

Hailed by critics upon release but bombing at the box office, Terrence Malick’s feature-length debut Badlands has stood the test of time to remain one of the boldest takes on American violence and an engaging work of high art. Though I prefer Days of Heaven (the second feature he made before disappearing for 20 years, then re-emerging with The Thin Red Line), I was nevertheless swept up in the breathtaking scandal and beauty of this story. This movie is a fit among my 1973 selection by featuring a charming outlaw, but Malick doesn’t shy away from the chilling nature of Martin Sheen’s Kit Carruthers’ ability, or possible desire, to kill without remorse. Malick delicately doesn’t take sides in his telling of Kit and teenage lover Holly’s reckless and hopeless killing spree, and it was such a searing statement that the film’s trailer allegedly inspired the Zodiac Killer to resurface with a letter to the press.

Coffy (B-)

This selection might feel like a time capsule for modern movie fans might be able to because the “blaxploitation” – that is, grimy exploitation material featuring black actors primarily for black audiences and by black creators – isn’t really in style anymore. We don’t have much entertainment anymore, besides hardcore action or horror, where the salaciousness of the material is the entertainment, but if you’re down for the explicit nudity, language, drug use, and violence in this story you’re in for a treat. Star Pam Grier meets this material perfectly and taps into a righteous sense of vigilante justice as she seeks to punish wrongdoers. This movie has plenty to say about the ails of black urban life at the time and the lack of help from a mostly white power structure, just in a more titillating package. If anything, it's worth checking out to understand what made Quentin Tarantino into the filmmaker he is.

Day for Night (B+)

Francois Truffaut was one of the key figures of the French New Wave movement, born out of a love for film, and in 1973 he made a bittersweet, self-reflective ode to the industry of his calling. Day for Night is one of the great “movie about making a movie” stories featuring a brilliant cast – including Truffaut himself as the movie’s director – that lacks the interpersonal savagery of Godard’s Contempt but is still self-effacing about what it takes to make a movie and dubious of the enterprise’s effort but ultimately gives the film’s characters a warm treatment. If you love movies, you’ll want to check out this behind-the-scenes-docu-drama-comedy of a director trying to manage a production complicated by love, loss, and infidelity among cast and crew.

The Day of the Jackal (B+)

For having won 2 Directing Oscars, it still feels like Fred Zinneman isn’t well-known enough among casual filmgoers. He should have won 3, since he directed the magnificent High Noon, but the controversy around that movie prevented that from happening. This movie, an espionage thriller adapted from a 1971 historical fiction novel about a plot to assassinate Charles De Gaulle, is the work of a master who is unafraid to once again wade into controversy. Though De Gaulle had already died of natural causes shortly after his 1969 retirement, the release of this coolly detached and meticulous film was still timely; a modern comparison – controversy and all – might be Zero Dark Thirty. Edward Fox is terrific as the professional killer, and the film’s lone Oscar nomination for Editing is fantastic, but this movie remains excellent from top to bottom; it’s a must for any fan of espionage thrillers.

Don’t Look Now (A)

Esteemed contemporary critic Adam Nayman named this as his favorite film, so I wanted to save it for the last of my first-time watches and I was blown away. This self-labelled psychic thriller was groundbreaking and controversial upon release for its macabre subject matter featuring the parents of a dead child receiving warnings from beyond, a sex scene between those grieving parents that scandalized the ratings boards, and its editing style that flashes forwards and backwards in time and uses insert shots of details whose meaning becomes clear at the film’s conclusion. Director Nicholas Roeg doesn’t just wade into the complex, dour, and tragic emotions that power this story, he leads his cast and the audience headlong into them to powerful results. There are sequences in this movie that look and feel like movies today, and I can only imagine seeing this in its own time – if you’re interested in movies that matter and will refuse to age, this is also for you.

The Exorcist (A-)

This very nearly X-rated horror film grossed today’s equivalent of $1.04 billion on a budget of today’s equivalent of $82 million, making it one of, if not the, most profitable films ever. At the time, it absolutely scandalized the nation and allegedly caused moviegoers to faint, vomit, and walk out – all things that must have made people more interested. It has lost none of its power, and I’m not just talking about the scares; there is a disarming warmth in Jason Miller’s Father Karras. However, the film will still get under viewers’ skins just because of its supernatural elements or few successful scares or graphic imagery (which is spare but effective), but because watching a young girl go through all this and witnessing the possession’s effects on everyone around her feels too true, too real, and too wrong. With this film as overwhelming as it is, you might feel that director William Friedkin is reaching through the screen and possessing you.

F for Fake (B)

Welles explodes the documentary form, and the fourth wall, in his documentary about forgery and fraud. We move through footage into editing rooms with Welles seeming to leap in and out of the narrative in a disorienting manner through a story that’s even more convoluted, but to terrific effect. After an hour and a half of fact and fiction about Howard Hughes, painting forgers, fraudulent writers, Welles himself, and Picasso, the audiences’ minds are left swimming. If Citizen Kane is the work of a genius, this is an insight into a genius’s mind; then again, what’s the difference between a genius and a master trickster, after all?

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (B+)

This lowkey crime yarn is what I was talking about when I mentioned 1973 as a year that saw a few genres deconstructed. It was a stroke of brilliance to cast Robert Mitchum, one of the great 40s-50s tough guy leading men, as a lowlife who never really had glory years, but is certainly well past them. He’s the ultimate outsider whose loose associations are the closest thing to “friends” as he’ll ever know and is also the perfect point of view character for Peter Yates’ as-unglamorous-as-they-come underworld set in a wintry Boston. Car chases, heists, and murders occur with such little fanfare or sexiness that, combined with the perfectly bleak location filming, sinks the audience into a perfect feeling of bleak futility.

High Plains Drifter (B)

One of Clint Eastwood’s earlier directing efforts sees him dive further into the postmodern, post-Wild Bunch western’s moral gray zone with fascinating savagery and menace. Before it becomes clear that the town of Lago might not be as innocent as the towns of other westerns, Clint’s drifter is difficult to stomach; after the town’s corruption is revealed, the audience is thrust into exhilarating ambiguity. The nature of Clint’s character itself is ambiguous, as there’s a chance that he’s a legitimate ghost, but even if this figure is justified in seeking vengeance, the lack of any dignity and difficult to locate (though not absent) moral code in that pursuit is quite searing to behold in today’s media environment. It’s also an enthralling story that I’d recommend to fans of hard-edged punishment doled out by unshakeable hands.

The Last Detail (B+)

What a wonderful and bittersweet story this is, with a humanity that reaches right through the screen and grabs you. This movie is a tale of two Navy officers escorting a basic seamen to prison, but this is really a story of men at the bottom of a system they know to be unjust but can’t bring themselves to quit. This isn’t a story where a massive change of heart happens, but the impact these men have on one another is evident through three terrific performances bolstered by Hal Ashby’s restrained direction of a sharp script from the legendary Robert Towne. Jack Nicholson is delightful in his best archetype – a scoundrel with a good heart – but the real revelation for me was Randy Quaid’s convicted Meadows, who we come to realize never had a chance.

The Long Goodbye (A)

In my writeup of The Big Lebowski, I pointed to this masterpiece as a significant influence on the Coens in how it lampoons, updates, and celebrates the noir genre in a way uniquely reflective of its times, but even though at 50 it’s no museum piece. Its humor is still sharp while its moments of pure noir are still richly atmospheric. Robert Altman, the great master, is in full command while making the story’s happenings look spontaneous with his unique style. Altman and screenwriter Leigh Brackett bring everything, except the car and suit, of Private Investigator Philip Marlowe into a 1973 Los Angeles that reveals him to be as much a paranoid figure stumbling into a conspiracy that no one wants to unravel as a classic detective on the prowl, with some well-considered thoughts on how effective a figure like this would actually be.

Mean Streets (A)

Perhaps Scorsese’s first truly signature film is a grounded tale rooted in details of his own life that signal exactly where his career is going in more ways than one. The film stars wonderfully young Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, features expressive red lighting in bars full of criminals, slo-mo, a killer soundtrack, and brilliantly conceived camera movements. Thematically, his defining interests are here as well: the main characters are outsiders trying to get in with the local mobsters, and Scorsese spends the film tracking the cost, potential rewards, but ultimate futility of their wishes to do so. De Niro plays the hothead whose actions threaten not only his safety but also that of people around him, and this character type would continue to appear in Scorsese’s gangster films. Though they would get increasingly larger in scope, and potentially more accomplished, the handmade authenticity here is impossible to deny.

Paper Moon (B+)

Peter Bogdanovich followed up his beautiful, bleak, and devastating coming-of-age masterpiece The Last Picture Show with another black-and-white feature about a young person that brilliantly captures human connection and the unspoken longing for it, but that’s about where the comparisons end because this movie is a delight. Ryan O’Neal is perfect as the sleazy conman with the inevitably soft heart, but his real-life (and possibly onscreen) daughter Tatum O’Neal steals the show with one of the best child performances that side of Haley Joel Osment. Her character is wonderfully written and the relationship between the two leaps off the screen; I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a breezy watch with a beating heart.

Papillon (B-)

Though it was recently remade in 2017, this movie feels like it may have just aged the most compared to the rest of this year’s offerings because it is a high budget adventure film that dares to shoot on location, is patient in its pacing, and features protagonists who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty – you won’t find anything like it in the center of movies today. Steve McQueen, one of the kings of dialogue-free onscreen cool, is playing a hardened criminal who won’t hesitate to kill to defend himself or Dustin Hoffman’s Louis Dega but is also wrongly imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit. The photography in this film is gorgeous, and I’d happily recommend it to anyone looking for a hard-edged testament to the human spirit.

Robin Hood (B-)

This movie was a staple of my childhood, and so might just be the one I’ve seen the most on this list. It also signals the end of the classical Disney style of animation before the “Renaissance” kicked off by The Little Mermaid. It employs the same panel-based animation seen in Snow White to tell this version of a classic folk/fairy tale, but with a far more contemporary (for the time at least) folk-based soundtrack. That said, the animation featuring anthropomorphic animals taking the place of Robin Hood story characters is purely timeless, and as an adult I appreciate the great Peter Ustinov’s performance as a vain Prince John even more. Although, growing up as a quiet kid with glasses, I related most to Toby the Turtle.

Serpico (B+)

Master filmmaker Sidney Lumet, legend of New York filmmaking, crafted a gritty and gripping true-life tale of good cop Frank Serpico, who kept himself clean in a dirty unit (and by extension, entire department) and even testified against his former colleagues. Al Pacino is terrific in the title role, between stints as Michael Corleone, and he gives a very grounded performance that embraces his character’s oddity and outsider status amongst his colleagues. Even today, this film is still an engaging biopic and crime yarn, but most striking to me is the photography and sense of place – this might just be the most authentic New York you’ll see on screen.

Soylent Green (C+)

Perhaps most well-known for its iconic plot twist involving the makeup of the titular food, this increasingly paranoid and bleak dystopia has a lot to recommend in it but is banking too much on said twist for its power. Charlton Heston gives a strong leading performance and the society that filmmaker Richard Fleischer conjures up on screen feels well-realized, but few of the ideas lurking around the margins of this story meaningfully make their way to the front. Even when Heston makes his monumental discovery, it feels like the filmmakers are pulling a few punches on the depth of the horror in place of creating a (granted, excellent) sense of suspense.

The Sting (A+)

I don’t think it’s humanly possible to have a bad time watching this movie, or at the very least feel worse than when you started. It is a top-to-bottom joy to behold featuring extremely talented people doing what they do best. Director George Roy Hill makes fun visual choices to root the audience in the time of the story, which simultaneously ages the movie more aggressively but provides the ultimate escape for audiences then and now; David Ward’s script is as twisty as it is stylized; costuming legend Edith Head, and honestly every other technical contributor is on top form; but of course, a movie like this is nothing without genuine star power, and the whole cast but particularly the dynamic duo of Redford and Newman rise to the moment. If anyone reading this is looking for an older movie that exemplifies the joy of popular studio filmmaking that has just enough well-considered thematic weightiness that breeds one of the most satisfying endings you’ll ever find, then I’d recommend The Sting in a heartbeat.

Westworld (B)

This movie’s influence might be the most nominally obvious on the list given the recent TV show of the same name, but this movie has plenty to offer taken alone. It asks all the right questions – if a place like this existed where you could live and kill with no consequence, what would you do? Would you have what it takes to survive when things go wrong if you could even identify that was happening? My only gripe with this movie is also a credit to it, which is that it’s quite spare in its runtime. On the one hand, it produces a lean and mean watching experience, but on the other hand things escalate just a little too quickly. However, if that means we get more time with the rogue cyborg gunman brilliantly played by The Magnificent Seven’s Yul Brynner so be it.

The Wicker Man (B+)

This low-budget horror film did not earn very much at the box office but developed a steady cult following over the years, perfectly fitting the film’s subject matter. Quietly, it also became one of the most influential in its genre’s history. We’re still being served up “folk horror” as well as stories about cults with behavior so aberrant it makes our protagonist question their morality. This movie opts for slipping under the viewer’s skin instead of going for surface-level scares, but some of the imagery captured here remains impeccably disturbing. It has an all-time ending that I won’t spoil here, but it’s a perfect reward for those willing to embrace this film’s slow-burn nature punctuated with some exceptional and iconic weirdness.