CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

Boy Howdy!’s Top Ten Movies Of ’78

by

Georgia Christgau

Three downer flicks in my top ten—Straight Time, Blue Collar, and Who’ll Stop The Rain, and two documentaries; you might say I've avoided the obvious this year. But if you'll recall, two bona fide ’78 hits — Saturday Night Fever and The Turning Point—qualified for 1977, no good for now. Actually, the highlight of my movie viewing this year was discovering that Woody Allen stole the sentence, "This is the most fun Tve had without laughing, ’’for his post-coital one-liner with Diane Keaton, from Raoul Walsh s 1940flick They Drive By Night {the setting then, of course, was the dance floor). Who needs top tens anyway? When Boy Howdy!started thisone in 1975, itoffered lOfave raves based on entertainment value, and then specified: 1) Could you stay awake through this movie? and 2) Would you tell your friends to go and see it? Trouble is, I know that’s too simple; our friends are different and so maybe are our sleeping habits. Still as long as we’re being told that an $80 million lead balloon like Superman is entertainment value, people oughta . write ten best lists. In ’79, maybe you’ll do it.

ANIMAL HOUSE (John Landis):: Someone who should know said this was Jerry Lewis for people who thought Jerry Lewis beneath them. But parts of this were blacker, calmer, and brighter: two college guys reading an obituary and picking up the fiancee of the deceased, for example. Now, John Belushi personifying a pimple, that’s Jerry Lewis for snobs. But funny, too.

COMES A HORSEMAN (Alan Pakula):: Westerns used to romanticize, among other things, traditional relationships; they’re hard to pull off these days, people being as cynical about marriage as they’ve a right to. Jane Fonda’s first night with James Caan might have been a big deal in another movie. Here it means something, but not that much. Richard Farnsworth, the old cow hand, adds plenty to Fonda’s characterization, too, or at least as much as you’d expect from a friend of 20 years. All in all, a realistic western in ’78 and a find.

WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN? (Karel Reisz):: This adaptation of Robert Stone’s The Dog Soldiers about a ■ reporter who bumbles his way into a kilo’s worth of Viet Nam heroin dealing isn’t faithful to the book in the way I’d like it to be—instead of red herrings \ from a yellow journalist whose Stateside beat is the National Enquirer, we get meaningful cliches from a macho man who wasn’t even a major character in the book. But the supporting cast—Michael Moriarty as the reporter, Tuesday Weld as his wife (an intelligent misfit and an intelligent all-American cupcake) —well, they’re two of my favorites. So what if the film turned out to be a vehicle for Nick Nolte? Better this than The Deep.

WORD IS OUT (The Maraposa Film Group):: Thinking that documentaries are more realistic than fictional movies is like thinking that books of non-fiction are more truthful than novels. Andrew Sarris said that. But what acetate ever said anything “real” about gays? This talking heads set of 20 odd interviews is not much on laughs, but not humorless either. If Burt Reynolds’ faggot jokes are funny to you (or Woody Allen’s, to me), try and sit through Word Is Out (now aired on public TV) and remember why you laughed at them.

AMERICAN HOT WAX (Floyd Mutrux):: The Buddy Holly Story, The Last Waltz, Saturday Night Fever, FM, Sgt. Pepper and a re-issue of American Grafitti all in the same year; it’s enough to make you want rock ’n’ roll to just go away. This one was too religious; when Laraine Newman told Tim Mclntire (who played Alan Freed) that she wanted rock ’n’ roll to be her life , I shuddered. But Mclntire never went that far, and that’s why I liked him, even though he did encourage Newman in her folly . (Nah, rock ’n’ roll wasn’t his life. Never.) Actually the best rock ’n’ roll movie I saw this year was either Rock and Roll at the Apollo or Harlem Rhythm and Blues, two 1955 releases with Honi Coles, and the Delta Rhythm Boys, Marta Davis and her spouse, and Joe Turner. But you’d have to move to New York to catch them. Ugh!

MAGIC (Richard Attenborough):: Anthony Hopkins played Equus, too high-brow for most of us here, but in . Magic he plays a stuttering ventriloquist I about to sign a contract for his own comedy series. Johnny Carson meets The Twilight Zone and the fun begins; Hopkins seeks respite by going home for a few days of mental telepathy, a rendezvous with the girl, Ann-Margret, he left behind, and a spin or two around the lake—where he’s just buried her husband and his manager. Best scary flick since Play Misty For Me, and a love story, too.

BLUE COLLAR (Paul Schrader):: Captain Beefheart’s soundtrack, a hammer-and-nail remake of Muddy Water’s “I’m a Man, ” was worth the price of admission, and the moving pictures of Detroit factory life rang true, too (even though I never lived through one, only some weeks in Queens, New York). Of the three principals—Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, and Richard Pryor—it was Pryor who came up short; self-conscious, arid not very funny. But that’s ’cause he knew what he was about: the toughest movie role he’s had since he played himself in Wattstax. Ever see a guy painted to death? Wouldn’t want to, I bet, but that’s here too. This is Schrader’s debut as a director (he wrote The Yakuza), full of blood and guts, painfully spent.

STRAIGHT TIME (Ulu Grossbard):: Its best moment may have been when Harry Dean Stanton played guitar by the side of his newly-purchased suburban pool before confiding to Dustin Hoffman, his,friend and fellow thief, “I gotta get outta here.” Or the split second you knew Gary Busey knew fathers shouldn’t hit their kids like that. Or all the times Hoffman’s loneliness spoke for everyone’s. This was too grim for most; it disappeared here in a week.

ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE (Les Blank):: A day in the life of the Mardi Gras, this documentary knocked me out. Interviews with families of black Indians making their annual feather headdresses and capes, tones of petty rivalry and big pride, this movie is about another world. Though there’s lots of eavesdropping going on, it’s just like the title says—always for pleasure, the motto of one New Orleans social club. Hint: use half a gallon of cayenne pepper, and all the Professor Longhair and Wild Tchoupitoulas you can own up to.

DAYS OF HEAVEN (Terence Malick):: The setting is a 1910 Texas wheat farm, the characters are its owner and three migrant workers, one a little girl, the narrator, who murmurs with her ear to the soft spring earth, “When I grow up, I want to be a mud doctor.” What kind of best movie epiphany is this? Some kinda love I guess. The beautiful photography and the romance are enough to sell Kodak cameras, but the ending, about neither love nor beauty, is the tearjerker. From the director of Badlands, who brought you Sissy Spacek.