Of course, in 1977, Star Wars, a consciously child-like film, surpassed them all and established the paradigm for Hollywood filmmaking going forward.
1-a PG-rated film to which grade-schoolers, along with everyone else, flocked. Three years after The Godfather, Jaws ramrodded itself to No. Previously, the record-holding moneymaker was The Sound of Music (1965), an unalloyed family film before that, it was Gone With the Wind (1939), back when all films were intended for general audiences-which is why Rhett Butler’s “I don’t give a damn” stirred such outrage. Its significance as a pop culture hinge is suggested by the simple fact of The Godfather’s overwhelming box office dominance. In fact, 1972 can feel like both last week and a century ago. In the rapidly mutative modern era, 50 years is a substantial bite no matter what aspect of culture you’re looking at, but cinema (if you peg it to the Lumière brothers projecting moving pictures to a paying Paris audience in 1895) is only eight years older than the oldest living person today, so dialing back the time machine a half-century-39% of movies’ entire life-span-seems salient, a solid Goldilocks marker between long ago and not so long ago at all. It’s also not hard to see the relevance and perspective that such an epic chunk of history offers, particularly for film. But because the ’70s were the ’70s, we’re now in an age in which almost every year’s New Wavey half-century-earlier precedent could be said to be some kind of world-beater. You could also make the perfectly reasonable case that searching for cultural significance in round-number calendar benchmarks is arbitrary and meaningless. You could muster a similar pile of evidence for other years, of course (most of those years were in the ’60s, not many came later). Do we count the films already a year or two old that we saw here in the states in 1972, thanks to hardy niche distributors? The Emigrants, Two English Girls, The Sorrow and the Pity, Trafic, Murmur of the Heart, Uncle Vanya…. Not to mention the censored collective-made anti-war doc Winter Soldier, and Robert Frank’s always unseeable but always magnificent wallow in decadence Cocksucker Blues. Not to mention Michael Ritchie’s acidic double-header Prime Cut and The Candidate (released a day apart that June), and Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid, and Marcel Ophuls’s A Sense of Loss, and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come. Not to mention Hitchcock’s penultimate film, and best in almost a decade, Frenzy.
Not to mention Godard and Gorin’s double-bladed show of Tout va Bien and Letter to Jane.
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Indeed, 1972 makes a rousing bid for being the greatest single movie year there ever was, just beginning with The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret, Last Tango in Paris, The King of Marvin Gardens, and Fat City, but particularly when you look globally, at Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege, Jancso’s Red Psalm, Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon, Loach’s Family Life, Wenders’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together, and so on. Movies were still our primary art form, and moviegoing an athletically active engagement with the world, but in 1972 the medium, and the culture that surrounded it, seemed to be cresting. Something pivoted, or peaked, or reached a heated pubertal fever in ’72, that year of Tricky Dick’s landslide re-election, American war machine apocalypses, and terrorist mayhem at the Olympics and around the world-in what for movies looked like a public aggregation of post-’60s New Wave freedom, booming box-office clout, tense political urgency, and social experimentation. The Don’s conscientious catastrophes the patriarchy turned upside-down in 'The Poseidon Adventure' occupying the fringes in 'Cabaret' stranded urbanites in 'Deliverance.' Arlen Schumerĭid movies change in 1972? Of course they did, because movies change all the time, every year, every decade, every half-century-in fact, lately you might find more solid footing asking instead, do they change enough?īut did they, 50 years ago, change enough to rationalize a retrospective half-century-anniversary glance backward? Or, if it wasn’t change, what was it?īecause, clearly, something was going on.
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