Fellini Satyricon (1970)

I don’t know how exactly to describe Fellini Satyricon. It’s a visually stunning film that amazes a viewer with its unusual style, but it’s also very narratively confusing, given its episodic nature of storytelling. It’s enigmatic almost to the point at times of being impenetrable because of its very fragmentary structure that leaves out huge gaps of time and information between the vignettes that depict the journeys or adventures or what-you-will of two friends, who I assume are also former lovers. Encolpius is played by British actor Martin Potter; he’s the blond one. Ascyltus is played by Hiram Keller, an American actor with dark hair. I realize that’s a weak way to differentiate the performers and their roles, but it actually helped me sometimes. It’s quite the series of tales that we watch the two young men experience, and it’s also quite a gay-oriented story. Well, I guess the more appropriate word might be “queer.” There are so many almost-naked men and such short tunics in this movie and so much same-sex activity (implied and somewhat depicted) that it’s no wonder the great film critic and historical Parker Tyler called it “the most profoundly homosexual movie in all history.” The film starts with Encolpius and Ascyltus fighting over a young boy named Giton, who, frankly, isn’t appear to be worth all the fuss unless I’m missing something that wasn’t translated into subtitles. There’s some dispute as to whom he “belongs”; I couldn’t quite discern if the boy is a slave or just an object of lust, but Encolpius gets the boy back from an actor who farts a lot on stage. He and the boy spend some time together – I think you know what that means – but then the boy winds up leaving with Ascyltus anyway. Thus begins the wandering narrative of Encolpius. He meets a poet named Eumolpus, who takes him to a weird party with odd food and strange rituals and bad poetry. I was definitely not hungry after watching this sequence. Encolpius is later taken on a slave ship and married to a new master, who likes to wrestle his newly acquired slaves. The allegedly cute boy and Ascyltus are also on the ship, but how they got there is a mystery. Encolpius and Ascyltus next wind up at a house where a couple commits suicide after freeing all of their slaves. They have a three-way with a very beautiful woman, but here’s an example of where the skips in the narrative confound a viewer. We have no idea how they got to this house, nor they escape from it and get to the next place in the story, and the next place is very odd – which I realize is a matter of degrees when it comes to this film. Encolpius and Ascyltus help another man kidnap a demigod, Hermaphroditus, who heals people. Well, sometimes, they heal people. Most of the time they just seem sleepy and weak, which probably accounts for why the demigod dies from sun exposure so soon after being kidnapped. By the way, I didn’t realize that the word hermaphrodite came from the progeny of Hermes and Aphrodite until I watched this film, so I guess I did gain some cultural knowledge along the way. Up next for Encolpius is a battle with a minotaur. It’s some sort of joke the town plays on foreigners? I didn’t get the joke, nor did I understand why he’s forced to have sex with a woman who is rather condescending and nasty to him. He can’t perform with her – who could, really? – but then Eumolpus, whom I had assumed was dead already, shows up and takes him to the Garden of Delights to get his, um, equipment restored. If this sounds like a wild ride of a movie, you should understand that I’m skipping over a lot of moments that are just so bewildering that I am not even sure I understood what happened. I think a rich man basically challenges his heirs to cannibalize his corpse after he dies in order to inherit anything from him; apparently, the flesh was rather, shall we say, chewy? Not a pleasant image, to say the least. Contributing to the confusion is that only about maybe two-thirds of the film’s dialog had been translated into English subtitles in the print that I saw, and my Italian is, well, nonexistent. I think I’ll just remember the look of this film. The art direction, the makeup, the costumes – all are just extraordinary. I doubt the filmmakers were attempting realism of the time period of ancient Rome, so the outcome is just eye-popping. The visuals are just, well, visionary, like nothing you’ve ever seen on the screen before. No one’s movies look like those directed by Federico Fellini, and Fellini Satyricon is one of his most spectacular – in every sense of that word.

Oscar Nomination: Best Director 

A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1970)

 

The main plot of A Boy Named Charlie Brown involves Charlie’s winning his school’s spelling bee and preparing for the national competition in New York. He only entered the school bee because he was goaded into it by Lucy and her fellow “mean girls” Violet and Patty, who thought it would be funny to see him fail. He wins, though, and sets out on a journey to learn a lot of spelling rules before his big moment in the national spotlight. However, a lot of the movie isn’t really about spelling. Instead, it presents aspects of the Peanuts comic strip with which we are likely very familiar: Lucy yanks a football away from Charlie Brown at the list minute, he fails in his attempt to get a kite to fly and not get “eaten” by a tree, Snoopy goes ice skating both as a hocky player and as a figure skater, Schroeder plays Beethoven on his toy piano, Charlie Brown seeks help at Lucy’s psychiatric booth, etc. A lot of it may be common images to fans of Peanuts and the many TV specials over the years, but the presentation of these moments can sometimes come in moments of pure animated fantasy. For example, Schroeder has an astonishing flight of fancy while playing Beethoven; it’s startling and beautiful and amazingly abstract. During a sequence involving the Star-Spangled Banner, the screen first becomes red and white, then blue and white, then back again. There’s a stained-glass effect during a basketball game, a split screen during a football game – it’s just visually dazzling. My favorite character in the strip, Linus, is his usual stalwart self, Charlie’s best friend and confidante. However, when Lucy gives Linus’s beloved blanket to Charlie Brown for good luck in New York, Linus begins suffering dizzy spells. The dance he performs with his blanket after their reunion is truly joyous. As for the national spelling bee itself, well, Charlie Brown keeps getting works right, primarily because they’re all words about failure and incompetence, concepts which he knows well. However, in the most Charlie Brown-ish of actions, he misspells the word “beagle.” Astonishing, really, that he can’t spell the word that describes his own dog, but he wouldn’t be the Charlie Brown we know if he didn’t fail, would he? There was no category for Animated Feature Film in 1970, so the Oscar nomination that the film received was for its music, including the title song written and “sung” by none other than Rod McKuen. In perhaps an unsurprising result, though, the score for A Boy Named Charlie Brown lost to Let It Be by the Beatles.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song Score

I Never Sang for My Father (1970)

 

I Never Sang for My Father is a serious domestic drama that examines the ways that lingering resentments can be passed from one generation in a family to another. The focus is primarily on the father-son dynamic between Tom Garrison (Melvyn Douglas) and his son Gene (Gene Hackman), and the depth of these roles led to both actors being nominated for Oscars. Tom was abandoned by his father at a  young age, and most of his life has been spent ensuring that he exerted control over his family, perhaps in a misguided attempt to ensure that he was ever-present in their lives. However, unknowingly (maybe), he has just created a son who yearns to break free from his father’s influence and a daughter (played by Estelle Parsons, Hackman’s costar from Bonnie and Clyde) who married and moved halfway across to country to live her own life free from her father’s control. The death of Tom’s wife from a heart attack serves as the catalyst that brings to the surface many long-held resentments among the rest of the family, and the film is rather unsparing in its depictions of the pain that each member has been holding for years. It’s an emotional film that always rings true, and even though the acting styles of the lead performers are quite different from each other, it turns out to be a strength as it reflects a generational difference similar to the one that the film itself reveals. I Never Sang for My Father is primarily a character study that shows the difficult conflicts that can occur between one’s obligations to a parent and one’s obligations to one’s self. It’s small moments that stand out—the two men shopping for a casket or looking at old photographs, for example—and build the film’s emotional resonance. There’s no Hollywood ending here (nor should there be), and the limited use of stylistic flourishes (a few flashbacks and a couple of overhead shots being the two most obvious) keeps the emphasis on the performances and the interactions between the performances.

Oscar Nominations: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Melvyn Douglas), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Gene Hackman), and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

M*A*S*H (1970)

Nominated for Best Picture of 1970, M*A*S*H is perhaps best known nowadays for having spawned one of the most successful television series in history. I always loved the show and its dark sense of humor even in the days when the networks were still using laugh tracks to tell us when something was funny. The movie version is quite different, of course, particularly given that you don't have as much time to develop the characters the way that the show could. Still, it's an entertaining film, making some of the same trenchant observations on the craziness of wartime that the TV show did (but doing them first, of course).

Like most films directed by Robert Altman, this one has very little in the way of a plot. Two talented surgeons (Hawkeye, played by Donald Sutherland, and Duke, played by Tom Skerritt) are sent to work in a Korean War hospital, a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, to be specific. Neither one is fond of following orders, a trait that Army officers tend to disapprove of. They are joined later by a gifted chest surgeon, Trapper John (Elliot Gould). Most of the movie is devoted to individual scenes of the attempts by these three men to maintain a sense of their own sanity through the use of humor. They manage to rid themselves of the religious hypocrite Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), they ridicule and embarrass Burns' accomplice (Hot Lips, played by Sally Kellerman), and they even squeeze in a bit of golf now and then. And the football game that serves as the focus of the second half of the film is a riot, with each side engaging in increasingly dirty tricks. Rather than follow a single thread of a plot throughout the movie, what Altman and his screenwriters choose instead is to have a series of incidents that reveal who these people are and how they feel, especially the strength of their emotions about the military and its attempts to bring democracy to places like Korea. The episodic nature of the movie does not diminish its comedic (or any other) impact in any way.

M*A*S*H is, of course, a commentary on war itself and the insanity that surrounds war. Although the film is set in Korea, everyone knows that it is really about Vietnam and how the military was completely out of its element fighting that war. None of the military leaders in the movie seem to have a clue what is going on; they are a collection of bumbling, incompetent fools. You'd have to turn such a movie into a comedy or you'd likely face the wrath of the Pentagon. And the humor here is pretty cynical and bleak at times. Watch the doctors try to help the camp dentist commit suicide, and try to keep from laughing as they create a tableau reminiscent of the Last Supper. (That he's trying to commit suicide because he now thinks he's gay since he can't get an erection is really quite the stupidest of premises, to be frank.)

The film opens in the same way as the television program always did, with helicopters bringing in wounded. Those helicopters show up a lot during the movie, and Altman never spares us from the blood spilled during wartime. Numerous scenes take place in the surgical unit, and there's much more of an emphasis on the casualties of battle than you might think. It's an interesting juxtaposition the film makes of the moments of laughter and the time healing wounds, but perhaps that's meant to explain why the surgeons in the camp need to have some of their sillier moments such as trying to determine if Hot Lips is a "true" blonde, leading to a shower scene that's almost as famous as the recreation of the Last Supper mentioned above.

Only Gary Burghoff, playing company clerk Radar O'Reilly, also starred in the television show. The rest of the cast were replaced even though their characters retain most of their traits from the film version. I know some people prefer the film version, and others really enjoy the television series more. To me, they're so very different from each other. A film has to capture your attention and quickly give you a sense of the characters, and M*A*S*H does just that. You get a sense of just how iconoclastic these doctors are and how out of place they are in the military structure. Television has the luxury of a slower pace, revealing bits and pieces of characters over time, and the series accomplishes that as well. I still think the film and television versions fit together nicely, and I'm glad that the quality of the movie inspired a quality TV show. We've certainly seen enough examples in recent years that the reverse is seldom true.

Airport (1970)

Airport, nominated for Best Picture of 1970, was one of the first (if not the first) of the disaster movies that became so popular in the 1970s (well, at least among my family and friends). I have seen it several times over the years, and I've always enjoyed watching it. It spawned some pretty awful sequels, but the original is still a good example of just how wrongheaded Hollywood has become these days. Airport isn't one of the greatest films ever made, certainly, but it manages to use what was then a big budget to tell a story that draws viewers into it rather than spend the money on special effects to wow the crowds.

As I was watching Airport this time, I began to notice that most of the film was spent developing the characters and their relationships with each other. It's almost 100 minutes into the film (which only runs about another 30 minutes anyway) before the actual disaster itself occurs. So rather than a prolonged special effects bonanza, which I believe is the way it would be filmed today, instead what you get is a film about how interrelated our lives often are. It isn't as if we viewers don't know what's going to happen on the flight--that's abundantly clear as soon as we meet our future bomber (played by Van Heflin) putting together his briefcase--it's just that the film isn't merely about the bomb itself. It's about the people whose lives are going to be and are affected by the mid-air explosion. The suspense is only heightened by the fact that we first learn about the passengers and crew who are on board.

Just as an example, take the case of Dean Martin and Jacqueline Bisset. He plays the captain for the flight, and she's the head stewardess (that's the lingo of the day, not flight attendant). They've been having an affair even though he's married (his wife is played by Barbara Hale of Perry Mason fame). She reveals to him that she's pregnant before the flight takes off, and he's forced to deal with his emotions while simultaneously trying to keep the passengers on the plane safe. Martin's Capt. Demerest is also brother-in-law to Burt Lancaster's airport manager, and the two of them repeatedly clash over airport policy. Early in the film, for example, they haggle over how to handle the snow-covered runways. Knowing all of these details influences the way we respond to later conversations between the two men after the bomb has exploded; needless to say, they exchange some tense words, but you still have a sense that they each want to achieve the same goal. It also makes us empathize with Martin's captain when he must see his lover after she's been seriously injured by the blast. And all it takes is one look from Hale as Martin exits the plane walking with the gurney carrying Bisset to let you know how she feels. No one in Hollywood seems to write characters of such depth these days, people you could get to know and care about before the explosions begin.

So many famous character actors have small parts in this film. It almost becomes a game of "Isn't that so-and-so?" Helen Hayes, of course, won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as a stowaway who always seems to manage to get her way; she is terrific here. But there's also the great Maureen Stapleton as the wife of the potential bomber and George Kennedy as the guy you call whenever there's trouble and Jean Seberg as the head of public relations for the airport. And that's only the beginning. Each of these characters has enough of a back story for you to become involved in what happens to them all.

A few years ago, when I was teaching a film class at my college, I showed The Poseidon Adventure, one of my all-time favorite films. The students loved it, a reaction I was not expecting. For contrast, I also showed one scene from the film Twister. I then compared it to the scene in The Poseidon Adventure when Ernest Borgnine's cop and Stella Stevens' former prostitute reveal how much they love each other and what they've endured together. The "similar" scene in Twister between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton pales in comparison. Even the students could tell that from looking at just one scene. It seems that Hollywood, the big studios, at least, have lost their ability to tell stories like Airport or The Poseidon Adventure, where character is always more significant and important than special effects. Think of what we've lost as a result.

Love Story (1970)

I will confess that I had never before seen Love Story, a nominee for Best Picture of 1970. I had, of course, heard lots about it, most of it bad. The rap on the movie is that it was nominated because of its financial success, hardly a surprising or even unusual move by Academy voters. I can't say after watching it that I feel it truly deserves its nomination, but it is an engrossing film, competently made and even effectively acted at times.

Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw play students at Harvard and Radcliffe, respectively. He's the wealthy one, the "golden boy" (was anyone better suited to play such a character than the young Ryan O'Neal?), while she's the scholarship girl from the poor background. Certainly, it's a cliche, and it was even in 1970. You know she's going to ridicule him at times about his family's riches--she calls him "preppy" all the time--and you know he's going to sacrifice it all for love, just to be with her. They're going to struggle financially, but their love will pull them through their money troubles. His father is stereotypically overbearing, trying to live out his ambitions through his son, trying to force his son into making all of the "right" decisions. Her father is saintly and accepting, as was her mother before the mother's untimely death. Her father doesn't even understand their plans to wed, but he willingly goes along with their unconventional ideas about marriage because...well, because he's the good father, don't you see? You get the picture.

Despite the formulaic plot, the scenes in the first half of the movie where these two meet and slowly fall in love are pretty magical. You get a real sense of the beginnings of a relationship, how people begin to care for each other. So good are some of the outdoor scenes that the snow becomes almost a third character. I realize that I'm setting myself up for ridicule in saying that the scenes of them playing football in a blizzard or making snow angels are effective, but these moments work, at least for me (and, apparently, many others). You can certainly understand why so many people went to see this film; it is almost a perfect date movie.

I say "almost" because of what happens in the second half of the film. It does indeed become overly melodramatic and maudlin after McGraw's character is diagnosed with what is apparently leukemia. By this time, you have invested emotionally in these characters' lives, and you could certainly sense the urgency of a young couple being torn apart by one's impending death. However, the film just doesn't maintain, for me, the intensity of the earlier scenes of them as their love grows and they begin a life of their own. You know she's going to die almost as soon as the diagnosis is made, so you really have no reason to continue hoping that their romance will survive. It can't; the movie has already said so. And the dialogue in the second half is groan-inducing far too often. One example: when her father tells O'Neal's character that he "wishes I hadn't told her that I would be strong for you." Just cry already, Dad. We know you want to; you have even earned the right to. Your young daughter is dying; it's acceptable to cry when that happens. Only a poor screenwriter would keep you from shedding tears.

McGraw, in particular, has been criticized for her performance in the film. She will never compete in the ranks of Meryl Streep or Katharine Hepburn, but for the most part, McGraw acquits herself nicely. It's only when she's given some rather overwrought dialogue (including one of the all-time worse lines: "Love means never having to say you're sorry") that she falls flat. When she and O'Neal are looking at each other or having a casual conversation rather than a "serious" discussion, she's fine. And her looks--she was a model before this film turned her career to acting--are certainly appealing; you can surely see why O'Neal's character was attracted to her.

I wish I could recommend that you watch only the first part of the movie, but then you won't truly get a sense of what O'Neal's character is trying to say in the opening scene. And you would miss Ray Milland's best scene as well; he plays O'Neal's father, and his visit to the hospital is almost enough to make you tear up (if you haven't already). It's one of the few instances of an actor overcoming the writing in the second half of the film. Even if you stay for the entire film, you'll still manage to see a movie that manages even after a quarter-century to draw out emotions, some of them honestly.