Movies: Celebration

...In any event, it is outrageous that bankers would fight auditing—not only fight it themselves but get their borrowers to fight it, and even mobilize the hack professors to whom they throw consultant fees to fight it also...

...With Warren Beatty as George, Shampoo is droll and nicely observed without pushing things too hard, showing sympathy for its characters without sacrificing just the right amount of bite...

...a solid, best-seller type of film which becomes more and more believable as you are caught up in the high quality performances...

...The Fed must have something to hide...

...Sisters—made a few years back but massively re-released in 1975, this is a little nightmare of a film, rough around the edges but awfully frightening nonetheless...

...Though poles apart in theme, technique, and even boxoffice, —Jaws has become the biggest and fastest grossing film in the history of the business, taking in $124 million in just seventy-eight days, while Nashville hasn't done nearly so well—both share the quality of making an audience feel they have never seen anything quite like this before...

...Inevitably, their August holdup attempt in Brooklyn gets totally out of hand...

...The appearance of both these films in the same year is reason enough to call it exceptional...

...A pastiche homage to Alfred Hitchcock, complete down to the unnerving score by Bernard Herrmann, and dealing with the strangest kind of split personality, Sisters redeems its weak spots with a handful of absolutely terrifying moments...

...A pithy, perceptive little film, sharper than it looks at first, and one that could be made only in America...

...If the president of my bank said anything like that I'd get my money out of it, but perhaps Stults is merely unlucky in facility of expression and he really meant something less alarming...

...It is the Fed which prints up the money that the bankers lend to prop up such dubious enterprises as the Chrysler Corporation, TWA, and Penn Central, or so we surmise...

...Smile—director Michael Ritchie, whose Downhill Racer was the most observant of sports films, here looks at a teenage beauty pageant and comes up with the most consistently funny, infectious movie of the year...

...Even more heartening, most of the best films had a fair shot at boxoffice success, and if many did better than anyone expected, why shouldn't we celebrate...

...Endearing and full of winsome good humor, it easily fulfills the promise of director Howard Zieff, who did the equally delightful and low-key Slither two years back...

...fuller, more devious plot, Four proves, as did last year's Juggernaut, that if director Richard Lester's humor is to succeed, it must have a hard edge to work against...

...Wonderful, simple-minded fun, plus a bouncy John Philip Sousa score...

...The Fed has never been given an outside audit...

...Buddy, can you spare a dime...

...A touch corny, but genuinely affecting and sincere...

...In Celebration—made for the American Film Theater, this is doubtless the least seen item on the list, and more's the pity...

...In Distant Thunder, a rare color film, he deals with the Bengali famine of 1943, letting the effects of war and starvation slowly seep into both the local countryside and the viewer's consciousness...

...Over the last several years a number of CIA people have defected over to the side of elemental human decency...

...Stults wrote, "I would be deeply concerned with the possibility of public confidence in our central bank and perhaps in our entire financial system being undermined as a result of more public information being made available than at present...

...Mention also ought to be made of a trio of films which, while not destined for greatness, were unexpectedly effective and enjoyable in a variety of ways: Doc Savage—an extremely hokey, easy-going Saturday afternoon entertainment that knows it is silly and doesn't mind a bit...

...On the negative side, it should be noted that Peter Bogdanovich, who had one of the worst films of 1974 in Daisy Miller, was back in 1975 with perhaps the ultimate turkey, At Long Last Love...

...Expertly acted by Bruce Dern and Barbara Feldon, Smile pokes amiable, unmalicious fun at beauty pageants in particular and small-town life in general...

...Deeply moving, and reminiscent of nothing so much as Ingmar Bergman's classic, Shame...

...But, boiled down to the essentials, the Fed is controlled by bankers and many of their principal borrowers...

...With Oliver Reed and Faye Dunaway fairly crackling with spite, this turns out to be the type of workable modernization of a genre film that The Three Musketeers and The Long Goodbye attempted, but couldn't pull off...

...Dog Day Afternoon—an absolute tour de force for actor Al Pacino as a comic/manic bank robber with a partner who doesn't know where Wyoming is...

...Actually, the line goes, 1975 was too good a year: Individual items earned so much that studios cut down the number of films they were making, not wanting to compete with their own successes...

...Such wailing notwithstanding, 1975 seemed definitely a year to take heart, and the process of finding eleven ten-best films was more one of discarding challengers that weren't quite good enough than trying to pump up tired old trial balloons...

...Hester Street—against an enormous set of odds, this Yiddish-language first feature by a woman director about the agonies, traumas, and embarrassments of becoming an American turns out to be an entrancing experience...

...NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN (Nicholas von Hoffman is a regular commentator on the CBS Radio "Spectrum" series...

...You'll laugh, you'll cry, you won't believe they're still making them like this...

...Grotesque, not quite believable, but believable enough...

...Not a fun movie, but marvelously photographed and faultlessly acted, especially by Genevieve Bujold...

...Jaws and Nashville—paired not because each can't stand alone, but because I've written about them at length...

...Nobody knows for sure except the Fed...

...Kamouraska—a harsh and cold-blooded tale of romance and crime, set in a splendidly recreated rural Canada of the last century, Kamouraska is a kind of benighted Love Story, showing how the thwarted Grand Passion can turn lovers into coarse, manipulative schemers who end up hating and destroying each other...

...Representative Wright Patman of Texas has told the House that officers from such corporations as Boeing, Crown Zellerbach, and Dresser Industries are embarked on a furious letter-writing effort to stop the audit...

...Next year may not be so good...

...Never mind, say the skeptics, that 1975 was the best boxoffice year ever recorded, that films, good films, made spectacular amounts of money...

...With the usual apologies for end-of-the-year films I did not get to see in time, here, in alphabetical order, are my choices for 1975: Distant Thunder—There is no more deft, more sympathetic observer of human nature and human foibles than the Indian director Satyajit Ray...

...The Other Side of the Mountain—an honestly sentimental and sensitive film based on a real-life happening, about a girl skier crippled for life...

...Even more interesting is the letter opposing the audit that Patman got from Allen P. Stults, former head of the American Bankers Association and now president of the American National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago...

...Based on the play by David Storey and starring the marvelous Alan Bates, In Celebration deals in a blessedly low-key way with the quiet tyrannies of family life...

...The next time you see his name on a marquee, duck...

...Secrets at the Fed The Federal Reserve Board is more powerful than the CIA and less well known...

...Hearts of the West—A Western spoof that plays on our wistful love of the genre while allowing us to be charmed by Jeff Bridges as a young innocent who wants to be a pulp writer and almost ends up as a Hollywood Western star, circa 1933...

...No one has ever defected from the Federal Reserve System over to the side of the people...

...Diana Ross stars as an up-from-the-ghetto fashion success who gives it all up for her power-to-the-people politician beau...

...Shampoo—a kind of Prisoner of Sex Hollywodd-style, a frantic game of musical beds, where everyone, especially George, a priapic hairdresser who fears "I'm cutting too much hair, I'm losing all my concepts," juggles sexual partners with an awful yet comic frequency...

...Another film in which New York pats itself on the back for being such a yeasty, abrasive place, but gripping and involving for all that...

...Mahogany—many of the great cliches of the 1930s transposed with almost total seriousness to a black milieu...

...Unfortunately hard to summarize in a way that will do justice to its subtle qualities, graced by fine acting and better writing, it is affecting in an old-style way that film seems to have quite forgotten about...

...That also is unique among Government agencies...

...The Fed is a uniquely scandalous institution of such unnecessary but successfully devious complexity that it takes days even to understand its table of organization...

...A bill to require outside auditing is running into heavy lobbying resistance...

...The Four Musketeers—droller, more mischievous, and delightfully nastier than its predecessor, with a Kenneth Turan of The Washington Post reviews movies regularly for The Progressive...

...Although the Fed is a Government agency, created by act of Congress, it escapes ever having to go to Congress to ask for an annual appropriation...

...Set in the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side and concerned with a husband who has assimilated much more quickly than his wife, Hester Street is characterized by honesty of feeling rather than high polish...