Eleven Ten-Best Films

...With a whole flotilla of comic eccentrics that bring the salad days of Preston Sturges to mind, this is a real treat...

...was amiability personified...

...Behind the Green Door—despite a lot of tries, most of them half-hearted, the pornographic feature film that can be unreservedly recommended has yet to be made...

...Though I couldn't resist including a couple of obvious choices of which I was inordinately fond, nearly all selections are films most people—for one reason and another—probably have not bothered with...

...All involved seemed to know they were doing the best comedy ever to appear on television, and consequently didn't hesitate to revel unashamedly in their daring and originality...

...With Roger Moore, the former "Saint," fine as Bond, it is a trifle chauvinistic, racist, and sexist, boundlessly entertaining, and one of the few films that can divert you beautifully for two-plus hours...

...Directed by George Lucas, who previously did THX 1138, and photographed by Haskell Wexler in his first major assignment since Medium Cool, it takes place in a California town on the night before the high school graduates of 1962 head off for college...

...Swastika—not yet in commercial release in this country, and perhaps doomed to nothing but museum and archive showings because of its unusual nature, this English-made documentary about Nazi Germany virtually defines the hoary phrase about "the banality of evil...

...By showing the Nazi leaders, and especially Hitler, in an extraordinarily human light—being nice to children, petting dogs—it forces us to see them as people quite like ourselves, not monsters who did things no ordinary human would or could...

...This half, dealing with the trials of Swedish immigrants in the American Midwest, is practically flawless, graced by lush photography and the great natural acting of Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow...

...Slither—an American comedy of the type one despaired of ever finding again, a Beat the Devil-type thriller-spoof that is quintessential^ low-key...

...In alphabetical order: American Graffiti—hardly an unconventional choice, but such a thoroughly good-time movie that no one can afford to ignore it...

...Now I recede into the sunset...

...The story of a country boy who goes to the big city to become a recording star and ends up with more than he bargained for, Harder benefits from its entrancing Jamaican reggae soundtrack and the fine sense of style of Jimmy Cliff, a recording star in his own right...

...p.s...

...Made by San Francisco's Mitchell Brothers, who have more than 200 shorter efforts to their credit, it stars Marilyn Chambers, the now famous "girl on the Ivory Snow box," as the ravishee in one great big orgy featuring large numbers of men, women, and even trapezes...

...Ten From Your Show of Shows—perhaps not a movie in the classic sense, this compilation of great moments from Sid Caesar's ill-fated television show is as funny as anything that comes to mind...

...For those who like to rise to the bait of critical displeasure, films I particularly disliked in 1973 for one reason or another—a list which, incidentally, comes to mind more readily than the favorites—include, again alphabetically, Billy Jack, Heavy Traffic, The Long Goodbye, A Touch of Class, and Your Three Minutes Are Up...

...However, Green Door is the closest anyone has come and, no matter what you have heard elsewhere, I assure you it is without a doubt the hardcore film to see if you are seeing only one...

...An unusual documentary—muted, slow-paced, and without narration —Swastika's most arresting selections are clips from the color home movies Eva Braun took at Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat, with the dialogue dubbed in with the aid of lip readers...

...The Great American Film, made, probably fittingly, by foreigners...

...The plot, involving the search for an embezzled $312,000, is almost a sidelight to the way former television director Howard Zieff gently coaxes unforced laughs...

...Totally untouched by traces of heavy-handed, bogus sentimentality, this is truly a film to wonder at, especially because one man—Jan Troell—was at once director, photographer, editor, and co-scriptwriter...

...They enjoy films as much as the next man, in fact they like some so much they are willing to garnish them with the crowning accolade: "One of the Year's Ten Best...

...Featuring Caesar and the superb supporting cast of Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris, the skits are remarkable for their sheer joyousness...

...Cast totally with unknowns and featuring an impeccable selection of rock from the 1950s on the soundtrack, Graffiti is conceivably the best film ever made about growing up in America...

...Though some would disparage these inevitable compilations as a waste of time and beneath the state of the art—would you vote for the ten best paintings of the year?—the "ten best" lists tend to flourish because critics feel that this annual pontification is a reward they have earned for ruining their eyes on a year's worth of eyewash...

...Despite its rough edges, a tremendous amount of honest energy flows from this film, enveloping you...

...A totally draining experience and a renewed tribute to the emotional power inherent in film, Walking Tall is nevertheless a more complex film than one might expect, showing Pusser—expertly played by Joe Don Baker—as at once more human and more deranged than your average law-and-order hero...

...Directed by Paul Mazursky (remember Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice...

...Its observations and its sympathies are so right that even those who don't think they would be interested are guaranteed to be enthralled...

...Tightly and professionally made, stylish and occasionally witty, it is a Saturday afternoon movie par excellence, not to be pondered upon or dissected, but simply enjoyed...

...With Gian Maria Volonte absolutely riveting in the title role, Mattei adeptly poses gnawing questions about the oil megalopoly at an unfortunately appropriate time...

...Criticized themselves all year round as tendentious curmudgeons who wouldn't like their own mother if she appeared on the screen, reviewers take this opportunity to show they are just plain fans after all...

...with his customary shrewdness about Southern California marriage, divorce, and all the states in between, Blume is blessed with superbly trenchant dialogue and expert performances by George Segal, Susan Anspach, and especially Kris Kristofferson...

...Green Door is weak on plot but strong on fantasy...

...It is graphic without being overwhelmingly clinical, erotic without being sleazy, and features one slow-motion solarized color sequence that has to be the best hard-core footage ever shot...

...Walking Tall—the last on my list, and in many ways the most striking...

...The Mattei of the title was one Enrico, once known as "the most powerful Italian since Julius Caesar," who ramrodded Italy's postwar economic recovery by siding with the Middle Eastern Arabs against the major American-owned oil monopolies only to die in a suspicious plane crash...

...The film is so true it sometimes hurts...

...Yet all are quite fine films, and each will surprise and reward the gritty viewer who guts it out and goes to see for himself...

...Blume in Love—what is rarer than an intelligent movie, one that deals accurately with the way people really live, a film that manages to be humorous, touching, and sensitive without a touch of the maudlin...

...Well, Blume in Love is it...

...The Mattei Affair—apparently only one political film can be popular in any given year, and by some perverse Gresham's Law of Cinema, a bad film, State of Siege, drove out this much more incisive and dramatic Italian film, directed by Francesco Rosi, best known for the fine bullfighting elegy, Moment of Truth...

...A film that pulls out every conceivable emotional stop and deftly gets away with it all, this is the most effective potboiler in my memory, a movie that is guaranteed to be unforgettable...

...Mattei was apparently a contradictory man who greatly relished personal power while plumping stoutly for that of The People, and the film, while not always as clear as it might be, at least doesn't attempt to whitewash his character...

...The New Land—the successor and equal to last year's The Emigrants...

...Yet most lists have a flaw: excessive obviousness...

...The Harder They Come—there are enough plot contrivances and corny situations here to fuel a half-dozen bad movies, but somehow this Jamaican-made feature ends up vital, invigorating, and full of life...

...Anyone faintly interested in film does not need a critic to tell him that Bergman's Cries and Whispers was a wrenching experience or that Truffaut's Day for Night Kenneth Turan is a staff writer for Potomac, The Washington Post magazine, as well as a film critic...

...Directed by Hollywood veteran Phil Karlson, it is based on the true story of one Buford Pusser, who as sheriff almost singlehandedly cleaned up organized vice in McNairy County, Tennessee...

...A step, even if a rather small one, in the right direction...

...he already knows this, or if he doesn't, he probably doesn't care...

...And since the truest pleasure of film criticism is a process of sharing and spreading the joy, of convincing people that films they would tend to neglect are more than worthy of their time, my ten-best list, besides consisting of eleven films, will be determinedly offbeat...

...Unlike such other "nostalgia" films as Let the Good Times Roll, Graffiti's characters are startlingly real, humanized instead of patronized...

...from James Caan, Peter Boyle, and Sally Kellerman...

...And since the public seems to relish the chance to compare its taste with that of its arbitrary arbiters, the lists go on and on and on, receding into the sunset like John Wayne on a good day...

...He is coauthor, with Stephen F. Zito, of a forthcoming book, "Rated X: American Pornographic Films and the People Who Make Them," to be published later this year by Praeger...

...Taken together, they qualify as an instant classic, as fine a pair of films as can be imagined...

...Dealing with one man's righteous anger, this is a movie of frightening, gut-wrenching power, seductively based on the unattractive proto-fascist idea that one semi-superman taking the law into his own hands can fix everything up fine...

...Live and Let Die—everyone knows that the James Bond movies, now into their second half-dozen, are supposed to be washed out and no fun at all, but this one confounds the stereotype...