Tag: 1970’s

Worst Movies of 1972

The Ten Worst Movies Of 1972 *
Vincent Canby
Jan. 7, 1973

Mary, Queen of Scots, directed by Charles Jarrott
what I recall about this film most vividly is its complete lack of urgency. It’s a Christmas card sale in January.

Young Winston, directed by Richard Attenborough
“Young Winston” is one of those movie biographies in which a character asks the great‐man‐to‐be: “What’s ever to become of you?”

The Man, directed by Joseph Sargent
According to a long‐popular myth, some movies are so bad they’re good. If it’s possible, though, I doubt it, you might describe “The Man” that way.

The Public Eye, directed by Carol Reed
It takes Topol, who gives what is positively the year’s worst performance as a lovable private detective, to reunite the couple. The film spends so much time sight‐seeing around London you might reasonably wonder if it was financed by BOAC.

Portnoy’s Complaint, directed by Ernest Lehman
Roth’s hugely funny, dirty, first‐person narrative becomes embarrassingly crude and show‐offy.

A Place Called Today, directed and written by Don Schain
This is my sentimental choice as the most horrible film of the year, one of the two soft‐core porn films of 1972 that, starred Cheri Caffaro

The War Between Men and Women, directed by Melville Shavelson
This was undoubtedly the year’s most peculiarly mixed‐up comedy, about a cartoonist (Jack Lemmon) who’s going blind and tries to keep it a secret from the decent woman (Barbara Harris)

Trouble Man, directed by Ivan Dixon
This stands out as one of the worst black rip‐off films of the year

Savage Messiah, directed by Ken Russell
No list of the most awful films of the year would be complete without something by Ken Russell

. . . . And Hope To Die, directed by René Clément
the story is about some underworld characters in Montreal and more than that ye need not know.

The Trial of The Catonsville Nine, directed by Gordon Davison
so full of self‐congratulations that you’re likely to wind up questioning your original admiration for the nine.

* Listed 11 by my count.

New York Times fiction best-seller list of January 7, 1973 – Gore Vidal on

Times Machine

Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach
The number one best-seller is called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It is a greeting card bound like a book with a number of photographs of seagulls in flight.

The Odessa File – Frederick Forsyth
At first glance The Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth, looks to be just another bold hard-hitting attack on the Nazis in the form of a thriller masked as a pseudo-documentary.

Semi-Tough – Dan Jenkins
I fear that I am not the audience Mr. Dan Jenkins had in mind when he wrote his amiable book Semi-Tough, but I found it pleasant enough, and particularly interesting for what it does not go into.

August 1914 – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
As a fiction, August 1914 is not as well managed as Mr. Wouk’s Winds of War. I daresay as an expression of one man’s indomitable spirit in a tyrannous society we must honor if not the art the author.

The Persian Boy – Mary Renault
Can your average beautiful teen-age Persian eunuch find happiness with your average Greek world conqueror who is also a dish and aged only twenty-six? The answer Mary Renault triumphantly gives us in The Persian Boy is ne!

The Camerons – Robert Crichton
Mr. Crichton has elected to address himself to characters that seem to be infinitely remote from him, not to mention his readers. A UK mining town in what I take to be the 1870s (there is a reference to Keir Hardie, the trade unionist).

The Winds of War – Herman Wouk
The Winds of War: 885 pages of small type in which Herman Wouk describes the family of a naval captain just before America enters the Second World War (there is to be a sequel).

On the Night of the Seventh Moon – Victoria Holt
On the Night of the Seventh Moon belongs to a genre I know very little about: the Gothic novel for ladies. But I do recall the films made from the novels of Daphne du Maurier, the queen of this sort of writing. In fact, I once wrote the screenplay for one of her most powerful works, The Scapegoat, in which the dogged (and in this case hounded) Alec Guinness played two people.

The Eiger Sanction – Trevanian
The Eiger Sanction, by Trevanian (just one name) is light years distant from Two from Galilee. For one thing, it is sometimes well-written, though hardly, as the blurb tells us, “vintage Huxley.” Actually The Eiger Sanction is an Ian Fleming byblow and of its too numerous kind pretty good.

Two from Galilee – Marjorie Holmes
Since the film Love Story really took off, what about a love story starring the Mother and the Stepfather of Our Lord? A super idea. And Marjorie has written it.

From the essay:
THE TOP TEN BEST-SELLERS ACCORDING TO THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES AS OF JANUARY 7, 1973
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal

Those Hipsters Might Have a Point

Q: How did the hipster burn his tongue?
A: He drank his coffee before it was cool.

Grundy was the big dividing line in the Sex Pistols’ story. Before it, we were all about the music, but from then on it was all about the media. In some ways it was our finest moment, but in others it was the beginning of the end.
…
The crowds were settling into a formula, too. Instead of thinking for themselves like they used to, the people who came to the occasional gig we did actually get to play seemed to have almost a code of conduct in their minds of how they should behave. They’d read that spitting and pogoing was the thing to do, so they fucking did it.

Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol
Steve Jones

Walk on the Wild Side

“Walk on the Wild Side” is a song by Lou Reed from his second solo album, Transformer (1972). It was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson and released as a double A-side with “Perfect Day”. Known as a counterculture anthem, the song received wide radio coverage and became Reed’s biggest hit and signature song despite touching on taboo topics such as transgender people, drugs, male prostitution, and oral sex.

The song’s lyrics, describing a series of individuals and their journeys to New York City, refer to several of the regular “superstars” at Andy Warhol’s New York studio, the Factory; the song mentions Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, Jackie Curtis and Joe Campbell (referred to in the song by the nickname “Sugar Plum Fairy”).

In 2013, The New York Times described “Walk on the Wild Side” as a “ballad of misfits and oddballs” that “became an unlikely cultural anthem, a siren song luring generations of people…to a New York so long forgotten as to seem imaginary”. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked “Walk on the Wild Side” at number 223 in its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_on_the_Wild_Side_(Lou_Reed_song)

Shattered – The Rolling Stones, Schmatta

“Shattered” is a song by the English rock band the Rolling Stones from their 1978 album Some Girls. The song is a reflection of American lifestyles and life in 1970s-era New York City, but also influences from the English punk rock movement can be heard.

wikipedia

Uh huh shattered, uh huh shattered
Love and hope and sex and dreams
Are still surviving on the street
Look at me, I’m in tatters!
I’m a shattered
Shattered

Friends are so alarming
My lover’s never charming
Life’s just a cocktail party on the street
Big Apple
People dressed in plastic bags
Directing traffic
Some kind of fashion
Shattered

Laughter, joy, and loneliness and sex and sex and sex and sex
Look at me, I’m in tatters
I’m a shattered
Shattered

All this chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter ’bout
Shmatta, shmatta, shmatta, I can’t give it away on 7th Avenue
This town’s been wearing tatters (shattered, sha ooobie shattered)

Location, location, location. If there’s an element of luck to my story, it’s that the Stones—Mick, Keith, and Woody—lived in the same place as me. If Picasso had a “blue period” and Orson Welles a “film noir period,” then this was the Stones’ “New York period.” They wrote songs about the city—their new album gave a shout-out to 8th Street—and became part of its fabric. When Mick sang about walkin’ Central Park and about schmattas on Seventh Avenue, he was drawing from experience. I mean, how many non-New Yorkers even know what a schmatta is? (Yiddish for “rag.”)

Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It)
Bill German
(Great book, by the way. Highly recommended.)

Gestalt Prayer

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.

The “Gestalt prayer” is a 56-word statement by psychotherapist Fritz Perls that is taken as a classic expression of Gestalt therapy as a way of life model of which Dr. Perls was a founder.

The key idea of the statement is the focus on living in response to one’s own needs, without projecting onto or taking introjects from others. It also expresses the idea that it is by fulfilling their own needs that people can help others do the same and create space for genuine contact; that is, when they “find each other, it’s beautiful.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_prayer

Highway to Hell – ACDC

Livin’ easy
Lovin’ free
Season ticket on a one way ride
Askin’ nothin’
Leave me be
Takin’ everythin’ in my stride
Don’t need reason
Don’t need rhyme
Ain’t nothin’ that I’d rather do
Goin’ down
Party time
My friends are gonna be there too

I’m on the highway to hell
On the highway to hell
Highway to hell
I’m on the highway to hell

No stop signs
Speed limit
Nobody’s gonna slow me down
Like a wheel
Gonna spin it
Nobody’s gonna mess me around
Hey satan
Payin’ my dues
Playin’ in a rockin’ band
Hey mumma
Look at me
I’m on the way to the promised land

I’m on the highway to hell
Highway to hell
I’m on the highway to hell
Highway to hell
Don’t stop me

I’m on the highway to hell
On the highway to hell
Highway to hell
I’m on the highway to hell
(Highway to hell) I’m on the highway to hell
(Highway to hell) highway to hell
(Highway to hell) highway to hell
(Highway to hell)
And I’m goin’ down
All the way
I’m on the highway to hell

Highway to Hell is the sixth studio album by Australian hard rock band AC/DC, released on 27 July 1979. It was the band’s fifth studio album released internationally and the sixth to be released in Australia. It was the last album featuring lead singer Bon Scott, who would die early the following year on 19 February 1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_to_Hell

Record City – Trailer

Bizarre and funny employees and customers pass through the popular Record City music store in Los Angeles during a live radio concert in the parking lot, hosted by a wild disc jockey wearing half a monkey costume.

IMDB

Dreamweaver – Gary Wright

From the youtube comments:

Aldo Uriel
All Movies That Come Out
Wayne’s World (1992)
Wayne’s World 2 (1993)
The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)
Trick (1999)
The Convent (2000)
Aldo Uriel (2002)
Daddy Day Care (2003)
Toy Story 3 (2010)
Ice Age: Collision Course (2016)
A Family of Killers (2018)

Ysckemia
how versatile a song can be, to be featured in so many different movie genres :’D

A Shaffer
This song encapsulates for me my last years growing up in Tehran, Iran (yes, that Iran!), in the late 70s. I would “borrow” my dad’s shortwave radio and sneak up to the roof of our house on those hot summer nights. There, most all roofs are flat giving a great view of the night sky. I would lay on my sleeping bag with the radio as my dreamweaver train, slowly scanning frequencies from around the world while gazing deep into the starry sky. I recall coming across this song frequently and would always pause to listen to whole song. While tracking a satellite slowly drifting across the night sky, or catching a fleeting shooting star, my mind would weave dreams of magnificent things and I knew then that my heart was on fire, my soul was like a wheel turning and my love was alive.

…
I’ve just closed my eyes again
Climbed aboard the dream weaver train
Driver take away my worries of today
And leave tomorrow behind

Ooh, dream weaver
I believe you can get me through the night
Ooh, dream weaver
I believe we can reach the morning light

Fly me high through the starry skies
Maybe to an astral plane
Cross the highways of fantasy
Help me to forget today’s pain

Ooh, dream weaver
I believe you can get me through the night
Ooh, dream weaver
I believe we can reach the morning light

Though the dawn may be coming soon
There still may be some time
Fly me away to the bright side of the moon
Meet me on the other side

Ooh, dream weaver
I believe you can get me through the night
Ooh, dream weaver
I believe we can reach the morning light

Dream weaver
Dream weaver

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Wright

Annie Hall Quotes

Pam: Sex with you is really a Kafka-esque experience.

Alvy Singer: Oh. Thank you.

Pam: I mean that as a compliment.
—

Alvy Singer: Don’t you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.
—

[Alvy questions an old man on the street about his sex life]

Alvy Singer: With your wife in bed, does she need some kind of artificial stimulation, like, like marijuana?

Old man on street: We use a large vibrating egg.

Alvy Singer: [walking away] Well, you ask a psychopath for advice, that’s what happens…
—

Alvy Singer: My grammy never gave gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.
—

Annie Hall: You’re seeing an analyst?

Alvy Singer: Just for 15 years. I’m giving him one more year and then I’m going to Lourdes.

IMDB