1971: Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica

Though somewhat trashy in an Italian-film-from-the-1970s kind of way, the movie about a policeman and a DA with different approaches to fighting crime entertains throughout. (7)

1971: Straw Dogs

Goodness gracious! If you are looking for a film to make you really, really aggressive, I recommend this one featuring Dustin Hoffman as a nerdy American mathematician whom the locals in his new, English home village dislike. Of course, things get out of hand. Everybody involved certainly did a very effective job on this one - the screenplay in particular is well-constructed - but an enjoyable experience this is not. (unrated)

1974: The Odessa File

Yes, the screenplay makes suspension of disbelief hard at times, but it's a 1970s Hollywood thriller involving an upstanding journalist, old Nazis and Israel. Is it going to be entertaining? Of course it is! (7)

1970: Das Millionenspiel

Despite identifiable weaknesses such as a poor leading actor and some implausibilities, the German TV classic, about a game show in which a candidate can win a million if a bunch of killers does not manage to get him within seven days, manages to entertain thoroughly. (7)

1975: Love and Death

Woody Allen's very silly film about a Russian torn between war and females' loins, which plays endlessly on his betaness and is really very silly indeed, is by far the funniest of his films I've seen. That is all. (7.5)

1970: Patton

Never having read anything about the film's content, but having seen versions of the film's poster multiple times, I naturally had assumed that this was some anti-patriotic war comedy, sort of like M*A*S*H, but apparently, a man looking somewhat silly saluting in front of a giant national flag does not signify parody or satire in the USA.

No comedy then; rather, this is a biopic about an actual US general during WWII, co-written and well-made except for the fact that most of the indoors scenes look like having been shot in the studio. On the plus side: In the original (undubbed and mainly English) version of the film, all of the dialogue in German is delivered by native speakers, which is fairly unusual. (6.5)

1978: The Boys from Brazil

Josef Mengele, alive and well in South America, gathers nazi friends old and new to tell them about planned assassinations of 65-year-old fathers around the world; nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman learns of this plot. While this is still believable, the story will take a totally whacky twist later on. Filmed in the indiscriminate pale colours, the film features a dream opportunity for Gregory Peck who plays Mengele - look at his cutesy photo - but only manages a run-of-the-mill villain (written, one must add, in a run-of-the-mill villain way). Overall, a decent enough bit of seventies thriller entertainment. (6.5)

1973: Serpico

The film starring Al Pacino as the cop who won't take bribes, which is not making him particularly popular with his colleagues, is shot in the same generic 1970s New York cop movie style you'll also find in French Connection and Prince of the City, for example. Entertaining throughout, gripping for about three fifths. (7.5)

1972: The Candidate

Nothing much is to be said about the film starring Robert Redford as an idealistic Democratic politician trying to stay honest despite running for senate: A very decent showing all around. (6.5)

1972: Deliverance

When four friends go on a rafting trip, senseless violence finally strikes after a somewhat tedious 25 minutes or so, and after that things get ugly. Not badly executed overall, but I don't really need a film to tell me that civilization is only skin deep and you're never really save; after all, I do pick up a paper from time to time. (6)

1976: Obsession

Brian de Palma's film about a middle-aged man who meets a younger woman that is the spitting image of the man's late wife (who died in a car accident many years before) is often criticized as being merely derivative. But although de Palma's movie is clearly inspired by Hitchcock - he even got Bernard Herrman to compose the music - it tells a story that's quite distinct from the one in the 1958 masterpiece. Indeed one might argue that Vertigo's more important influence is stylistic, the beautiful score sometimes seeming to play endlessly to the painstaikingly composed frames depicting the man's, well, obsession with the young woman. An exercise in style that succeeds all the way. (8)

Roger Ebert sort of agrees.

1974: Phantom of the Paradise

If you think Tommy was an over-the-top 1970s pop opera, I'd like to refer you to Brian de Palma's glamrock take on The Phantom of the Opera (with a bit of Faust thrown in for good measure), in which a young songwriter has his material robbed by an evil producer, is thrown into not just any prison, but - wait for it! - Sing Sing, tries revenge, in the process of which his face get mutilated by a vinyl press, so that he takes to wearing a silver mask, which goes nicely with his metal teeth (don't ask), before things start to get whacky. The film, which may have been influenced by the consumption of cocaine, would have been even better if, as I had anticipated, at one point giant, winged penises would have flown onto the screen. Maybe in a director's cut. (7.5)

1977: Mort d'un pourri (The Twisted Detective or Death of a Corrupt Man)

There are a lot of bad things you could say about this flick starring Alain Delon as a righteous man in possession of a file that proves the corruption of many leading politicians: The desperately modern production design (the Delon character owns a digital alarm clock!), making the film look more dated than most of its contemporaries; the female lead not only played by Ornella Muti - Ornella Muti! - but the director making sure her character has a strong preference for white tops, so you can see her nipples in most of her scenes; occasional run-of-the-mill trashiness and, most of all, the film's naive bad world view, complete with truth-to-power sermons. But I liked this film a lot, and not because it's so bad it's good. Rather, the - overall mild - trashiness punctuates what would otherwise have been a pretty decent action thriller to make it more interesting. (7.5)

1978: The Deer Hunter

This is probably the best-known film I was going to see but hadn't yet, but even so I learned I knew very little about it: Though I was aware that the film started in the soldiers-to-be "real" lives in the US (which is a nice touch) I was surprised to learn it takes almost an hour before we get to Vietnam (which is too long, given that the "American opening" isn't all that interesting). This is the best section of the film, featuring a really gripping Russian roulette scene, but then, after another forty minutes it's back to the USA and then back to Vietnam and back to the US again.

During this whole in-out, accompanied by the kind of sensitive problem music Liberace might have come up with, we learn that the Robert de Niro character was really into shooting deer before he went to Vietnam but when he comes back, he refrains from doing so. This is meant to convey either that he has learned violence is no fun or that the Vietcong have antlers; I'm not sure which.

In the end they all sing "God Bless America". Amen to that: Let's hope that in the future America gives its Oscars to better films. (5.5)

1973: Badlands

Charlie Kaufman is right to criticize (in Adaptation) the advice sometimes given by screenwriting teachers to never use voiceover, but when watching Badlands, you can see where those people are coming from: It's 8th-grader-prose voiceover almost all of the time, to the extent that I kept wondering why they bothered to shoot any pictures at all - but then, the truly magnificent visuals are the one great redeeming quality of Terrence Malicks otherwise pointless boy-meets-girl-and-they-go-on-a-killing-spree story. (6)

1976: Halloween

It's set on the kind of America I think I have seen on the screen once or twice before: Everyone lives in the generic suburb, the boys play football, the girls are cheerleaders. The story: A dangerous madman escapes from an institution and proceeds to kill people in the suburb. That's it. No plot twists, no nothing. Great cinematography, but apart from that it's a bore, and I don't think that's because it has served as a template for so many films that came later. Oh, and, as usual, director John Carpenter wouldn't let anyone else compose the music. Bernard Herrman he is not. (5)

1973: Amarcord

For his memories of a small town in pre-war fascist Italy, Fellini didn't bother to come up with a plot, instead presenting a series of vignettes. Very well photographed by Guiseppe Rotunno, the film, though entertaining, ultimately suffers from the internal contradiction of trying to make a grotesque and a poetic picture at the same time. (7)

1971: Klute

The thriller about a private investigator and a hooker that's being threatened has a number of frames with great early 1970s looks in it, but also long stretches of unmotivated, fuzzy-looking darkness and suffers from slowness and, what's worse, characters it's hard to care about. (5.5)

1978: The Fury

Not the sequel to The Sound, hahaha!, but a Brian De Palma thriller combining the topics of secret government agencies and extraordinary psychic powers, culled, it seems from a million B-movies. The acting's o.k. and the movie's not too impressive visually, but it still manages to entertain: A tight script goes a long way! (7)

1976: Network

It has sometimes been said that Sidney Lumet's 1976 satire about a the inner workings of a struggling TV channel doesn't work as well as it used to anymore because by now actual TV has surpassed the satire. That's a fair point. If you compare, for example, the offerings of this muppet. . .



. . . with Network's fictional shows by Howard Beale, it is not clear which is the satire. However, there may be an entirely different aspect of current TV that takes away much more from today's experience of Network, namely that the idea to present interconnected lives of people who work together, and set much of what happens at the workplace, as Network does, is by now a standard strategy of many TV series.

Even so, a very well-done film definitely worth watching. Very weird cinematography, too, as though they'd drenched the celluloid in beige. (7.5)