By James David Patrick
In preparing for the Cinema Shame podcast about my first watches from 1972, I learned that I love to buy movies from 1972 but not watch them. In gathering unwatched discs from the year I already owned, I collected a stack of movies taller than my knee. I found three more this morning among my burn-on-demand DVDs. Much like the cinematic landscape of the time, my physical media library is similarly anarchic.
The early 1970s represented a time of great change and experimentation. The Production Code had only been officially abolished for a few short years and filmmakers grappled with unprecedented freedoms and inspiration from newly unchecked foreign influences. If I’m to generalize the period, because this is a blurb and not an opus, I’d say filmmakers created, without reservations, in a vacuum of regulation. The old rulebook of American cinema went out the window; innovators set about creating the new one. The New Hollywood was just over the horizon and young, daring filmmakers merged genres and manipulated standard tropes. No one could argue that it was one of the most exciting creative explosions in the history of American cinema.
The more movies I dug up from 1972, the more I wanted to watch. Even the movies I didn’t like brought something interesting to the conversation. (Except the ones that felt stuck in a disappeared studio system built for mass appeal. We won’t speak of them.) Arbitrary moviewatching limiters like years of release encourage deep dives that wouldn’t happen if left to my own whims. I’m thankful for these anniversary watchpiles because I’m forced to escape my comfort zones. I discover, unencumbered.
Before we get into everyone’s favorite segment, the sleeper picks… I present ‘My Subjective Top 5 from 1972’ (listed in alphabetical order):
Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)
The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, 1972)
What’s Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972)
Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Sergio Martino, 1972)
Time for the main attraction. The deep cuts. The sleeper picks that you can drop into conversations to sound like a true cinephile, movie snob—or lunatic, company dependent.
The Underrated Films of 1972
Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (Samuel Fuller, 1972)
Imagine giving the director of Shock Corridor (1963) a gig directing an episode of a popular TV police procedural with no strings attached. Film critic and writer/director Hans-Christoph Blumenberg offered Fuller the gig of directing the 25th episode of Tatort as a token of appreciation for helping Blumenberg secure interviews with Howard Hawks and John Ford.
As you might imagine, Fuller took substantial liberties with the show’s established production style. He excised a main protagonist to introduce a one-off American detective as the lead detective. He then filmed the episode in English and turned the starched show into an untethered satire of the American crime genre. (That’s so Fuller.)
The negligible story concerns an American PI investigating a blackmail scheme that got his partner killed. In many ways it’s Samuel Fuller’s The Long Goodbye (1973), without Robert Altman’s greater respect for the tropes that created the genre. Fuller’s not interested in commenting on the formal aspects of noir, but rather blowing it up and replacing it with desperate, directionless characters devoid of purpose. The film concludes with a prolonged slapstick chase that must have confounded regular Tatort viewers – even for your average Fuller fan, this one’s an entertaining, but odd sort of bird… and therefore essential 1972 viewing.
Private Parts (Paul Bartel, 1972)
And speaking of filmmakers and movies that rewrote the rules, I give you Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul) and his feature debut, Private Parts… not to be confused with that other guy’s Private Parts.
Bartel took inspiration from Peeping Tom (1960), the movie that essentially ended Michael Powell’s career; Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); and a heaping dose of Michelangelo Antonioni in crafting this perverse psychological comedic thriller about a teenage runaway that shacks up at a Los Angeles hotel populated by creeps and weirdos. She wants to be an adult and partake in adult responsibilities, but the dark side of maturity turns up and challenges her ill-formed concepts of sexuality and identity and… yeah, Private Parts is bold and entertaining and mildly uncomfortable, and you just need to watch it to see how the mismatched parts fit together like Frankenstein’s monster.
Evil Roy Slade (Jerry Paris, 1972)
On the lighter side of 1972, this broadly comic made-for-TV western (from the director of Police Academy III: Back in Training (1983), aka the best Police Academy movie) boasts wall-to-wall cheese, sanitized vulgarity, and an impressive cast of big- and small-screen personalities. John Astin, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Henry Gibson, Dom DeLuise, Edie Adams, and Pamela Austin all take turns chewing scenery and setting up gags (and delivering on most of them).
Gerry Marshall created Happy Days and Jerry Paris directed most of the episodes; together they wrote and directed Evil Roy Slade. For that alone, I’d recommend a viewing. If you’re a fan of any of these above mentioned talents, you’re bound to have a good time.
The Underseen Films of 1972
The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, 1972)
Robert Redford loves a good heist movie (see: The Sting, Sneakers). And few stars in the history of cinema were Robert Redford in 1972, at the height of his powers, the year in which he appeared in this, Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, and Jeremiah Johnson. The next year he made The Sting and The Way We Were. And I’m here to tell you that The Hot Rock might be the best one of the bunch. Might. The point is that even if you disagree, it’s in the conversation.
The Hot Rock has more going for it than just 1972’s Bobby Redford. Directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt, Friends of Eddie Coyle) with a screenplay by William Goldman (The Princess Bride)… based on a novel by Donald A. Westlake.
Released from his latest sting in prison, Dortmunder (Robert Redford) is approached by his brother-in-law (George Segal) about stealing a gem from the Brooklyn Museum. They get the gang back together and successfully perform the daring heist, however with each success comes some measure of embarrassing failure. A botched escape causes the gem to wind up in a New York City prison, a police station, and then a maximum-security bank. I refuse to dig too deeply in the plot synopsis because this is one that’s best left fresh for you to discover.
Peter Yates agreed to direct the film because he’d grown tired of the increasing sex and violence in mainstream cinema – “Everything was a downer,” he said. “I wanted to do an upper.” Redford and Segal’s terrific, mismatched chemistry coupled with the supporting cast of Ron Liebman, Paul Sand, and Zero Mostel turn a routine genre film into a laid-back, twisty all-time comedy. It’s pure fun – the kind of star-powered adult entertainment for the hell of it that studios would refuse to make or market or even bother to release in theaters nowadays.
Prime Cut (Michael Ritchie, 1972)
Michael Ritchie (The Bad News Bears, Downhill Racer) might be the most underappreciated American director, and Prime Cut might be his most overlooked film. This grimy little thriller cuts right to the meat of the thing, placing our anti-hero, played by Lee Marvin, in the thick of a heap of rural shenanigans. Sent by the old mobster guard in Chicago to rein in the newer, uppity mob contingent based in Kansas City who doesn’t think they’re indebted. The new mob, a country-fried contingent represented by Gene Hackman, doesn’t take kindly to the strong-arming and fights back.
Screenwriter Robert Dillon cut his teeth writing for William Castle and Roger Corman and the low-budget, conservation of dialogue and character development allows Prime Cut to focus on the moment-to-moment tension and pulpy thrills. Skin-deep characters resist depth or nuance, but there’s a sense of freedom to a movie that knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be.
This allows Ritchie to emulate Hitchcock with a beautifully orchestrated shootout in a sea of sunflowers and a chase by corn thresher. Just to give you a taste of this movie’s headspace it opens with Gene Hackman auctioning naked, abducted orphans like livestock. Among them Sissy Spacek (in her first credited role) and Angel Tompkins, who simultaneously appeared in Playboy to publicize the film. If that suggests to you that the film’s purely exploitative – you’d be wrong… and right. Like most Ritchie films, there’s more to it than that.
Trinity is Still My Name (Enzo Barboni, 1972)
At least 50% of this movie is Bud Spencer and Terence Hill consuming mass quantities of food. I've never seen a "western" so concerned with the gustatory foley work of chewing.
Oddly enough this movie is more concerned with under developing narrative. It certainly attempts something like a plot about a monastic conspiracy, but in the end it's another excuse to stage a 10-minute scene of slapstick fisticuffs/rugby with anti-violence religious types fighting alongside our protagonists (?) against a sea of – well, for lack of a better term – mean people.
Perfectly entertaining -- if you're into lazy (but not devoid of creative spark) spaghetti westerns with atrocious dubbing and no particular place to be. It's juvenile and silly, but its respect for the genre lends the journey of these two mismatched brothers an endearing innocence. And since this is the second of the Trinity movies, you might as well just rent them both for an amazingly laid back evening of Trinity abiding.
I’ll be talking about some of these movies and a lot more on the Cinema Shame podcast, sponsored by DVD Netflix. Subscribe to Cinema Shame on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher and Google Podcasts.
James David Patrick is a Pittsburgh-based writer with a movie-watching problem. He has a degree in Film Studies from Emory University that, much to everyone’s dismay, gives him license to discuss Russian Shakespeare adaptations at cocktail parties. He hosts the Cinema Shame and #Bond_age_Pod podcasts. You’ll find him crate diving at local record shops. James blogs about movies, music and ‘80s nostalgia at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.