ELEVEN TEN-BEST FILMS

...Ket Out Your Handkerchiefs—No director working today has as quirky and audacious a point of view on the relationship between men and women as France's Bertrand Blier...

...Soldier of Orange—A sturdy, old-fashioned, nearly three-hour epic about the World War II Dutch underground, Soldier of Orange is much more effective than similar American-made extravaganzas because the characters are more realistic than the usual gun-toting stick figures, and because the loose ends in the plot resist being unnaturally tied up...

...Bonuses include a lush George Gershwin score, dazzling black-and-white photography, and a fine performance from Mariel Hemingway as Allen's seventeen-year-old heartthrob...

...The Innocent—A stately film filled with smoldering passions...

...There was an awful lot of heavy breathing about basically peripheral issues—did gang films like The Warriors breed violence, would hyperexpensive films like Apocalypse Now ever earn their money back—all but obscuring the works that were the supposed focus of all the tumult...

...A totally satisfying, totally romantic film...

...Thurman Arnold, November 1942...

...The Warriors—Now that the trumped-up fuss surrounding its supposedly lethal qualities has dissipated, this film's unique strengths can be appreciated...

...Yet the record shows that the traditional eleven ten-best films of 1979 were the most substantial and diverse lot in some time, offering a variety of sensations sturdy enough to entice even the most tired viewer...

...It is silent, unseen, omnipresent...

...Military power is of value when it enables you to do something to somebody else that he cannot do to you at about the same time to about the same extent...

...They have been edited only to achieve brevity...

...Though a bit overly melodramatic in plot, this is a fitting close to the career of Luchino Visconti, one of the great theatrical geniuses of film...

...Robert M. LaFollette Sr., March 1913 A quicker way Tolerance goes against the grain...

...Privilege prevails Privilege controls everywhere...

...In alphabetical order, then, the eleven ten-best are: Wreaking Away—If one film had to be chosen the best of the year, this tale of boys, bicycles, and Bloomington, Indiana, would have to be it...

...Ralph Barton Perry, July 1954 When in Rome Mussolini ordered Italian officials to ride motorcycles and cheap cars and not to wear silk hats that there might be a better understanding between the government and the people...

...The Tree of the Wooden Clogs— Yet another three-hour film, and not really the transcendent masterpiece that some critics have claimed it to be...

...Persuasion is a patient and difficult method of control...

...Done with charm, grace, an offbeat sense of humor, and the right kind of sensitivity, it manages to take on as potentially ponderous and shopworn a subject as the pain of growing up and make it seem fresh and moving...

...The finale here is, almost by definition, bound to be unsatisfactory, but Australian director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock) has such a gift for creating and sustaining a haunting, eerie mood that the film remains totally absorbing if taken on its own, non-literal terms...

...Those who are greedy for power know a quicker and easier way...

...A very personal project from director John Schlesinger, who put some of his own memories into the film's interlocking stories of World War II liaisons between American GIs and English women...

...The acting is superb across the board, not a gesture or nuance is out of place, and Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Gere are especially affecting...

...Mohandas Gandhi, June 1942 The importance of lawyers Law schools are institutions designed to make simple things look complicated, thus increasing the importance of lawyers, while keeping their potential rivals out of circulation for three years...

...The Shout—This film by Polish expatriate Jerzy Skolimowski doesn't make much sense, but it does create an exceptionally bizarre, totally believable atmosphere of menace and doom...

...If this is progress, please count me out...

...Made completely with nonprofessionals, it presents the life of peasants in turn-of-the-century Tuscany with such feeling that it tears at the heart, touching us as films rarely do...

...While director Walter Hill obviously couldn't care less about dialogue and character motivation, he is a master of screen movement, creating a kinetic excitement with his scenes of romanticized gang battles that no American director can match...

...known primarily for such action epics as Bullitt and The Deep...

...And at $3.50, $4, and even $5 a ticket, more and more moviegoers were getting tired quickly...

...Unless an author's name is appended, the material was editorial comment...

...Morris H. Rubin, July 1944 Into the cauldron I do not know all the facts which determined the U.S...

...Manhattan—Not much remains to be said about this tale of neurotics in love except to emphasize once again that it is easily Woody Allen's most successful film, a witty and sophisticated romance that is both sharper and more true to life than the director, known to hide behind knee-jerk jokes, has dared to be before...

...Aside from the director's mordant point of view, the key to success here is the strength of Alan Bates's starring performance as a mysterious stranger who believes he has the power to kill with a shout...

...Wead Over Heels—Like anything real, Joan Micklin Silver's films start slowly and grow...

...It is tempting to destroy the errant, and often obnoxious, dissenter, egged on by other assenters...

...The scene in which he demonstrates his ability is chillingly effective...

...The Last Wave—Richard Chamberlain plays an Australian corporate lawyer who discovers to his increasing horror that he has a psychic gift which enables him to foretell a world-ending tidal wave predicted by aborigine legend...

...Robert Hutchins, October 1952 By the back door Every one of the steps we took on the road to war was described to us as a "step short of war" or as a device for "keeping neutral...

...Yet this latest effort by Ermanno Olmi, an Italian writer/director (// Posto, The Fiances) whose work has been insufficiently seen in this country, is enormously moving, a kind of 1900 without Bertolucci's stridency and naivete...

...Joseph Baldus, February 1926 The military balance The whole conception of military power exploded with the first Russian atomic bomb...

...Even now she can do so if she divests herself of the intoxication her immense wealth has produced...

...So far as film was concerned, the final year of the 1970s often seemed muddled and contradictory...

...Taken from Ann Berttie's Chilly Scenes of Winter, this funny, bittersweet story of obsessive love, acted with wonderful authority by John Heard and Mary Beth Hurt, has so much real feeling and character fidelity in it that it makes an allegedly sophisticated number like Starting Over look like pablum...

...to throw herself into the cauldron . . . America could have remained out...

...Despite all the recent talk about meatier, more meaningful parts for women, it is my sad duty to report that three of the worst films of the year— Old Boyfriends, The Bell Jar, and Bertolucci's unbelievably misguided Luna—all featured terribly unsympathetic portrayals of hysterical harpies...

...Without question the most unusual film of the year...

...If you have a feeling for what film can do, you will not want to miss this one...

...Wanks—A love story in the classic mold, an old-school film for those who are continually asking, "Why don't they make them like that anymore...

...Its power is centralized...

...THE WAY WE SAW IT The following are excerpts from articles and editorials published by The Progressive since its founding on January 9, 1909...

...His third film (Going Places and the even more outrageous Femmes Fatales preceded it) is so insolent in conception—a woman leaves two virile lovers (Gerard Depar-dieu and Patrick Deware in exceptional performances) to run off with a twelve-year- old boy—that the fact that it doesn't work all the way through is 'If this is progress, please count me out' easily forgiven...

...An unexpected treat for audiences and critics alike and, most surprising of all, produced and directed by Peter Yates, Kenneth Turan reviews films regularly for The Progressive...

...Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli play a husband and wife who burn with alternating hatred and lust in a sumptuous re-creation of turn-of-the-century Europe...

...One word of warning: Some torture scenes are as realistic as everything else in this film...