1970s – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – The French Connection

The French Connection (1971)
Written by Ernest Tidyman
Directed by William Friedkin

It’s not the story that compels you to keep watching. It’s the lead performance by Gene Hackman. It’s the bleak atmosphere of a decaying New York City. It’s the sense that no matter how this turns out, no one really wins. The rot will just keep spreading. Reactionary cinema had its Golden Age in the 1970s. Most of those depicted the rogue cop or the street vigilante as a bastion of “real justice,” pushing aside those pesky civil rights laws to “get the job done.” You might lump The French Connection in with something like Dirty Harry, but that would be a mistake. Dirty Harry revels in Callahan’s sadism and hatred of pretty much all humanity. Popeye Doyle is not someone we’re meant to admire. He’s an animal we’re observing who stalks and hunts vulnerable prey, invoking the Law as his justification. He doesn’t care about the Law, though. This is about ego.

Movie Review – The Conformist

The Conformist (1970)
Written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Time and again, people in the States seem to conflate fascism with iconography. Yes, that is undoubtedly a piece of the ideology, but its believers are clever enough to know that continuing to wear swastikas and black leather while goosestepping isn’t going to sow seeds anymore. The danger of fascism is how much like the mundane & ordinary it can appear. This is where “I was just following orders” emerges from. You can be a mild-mannered civil servant, just signing the papers across your desk and filing them correctly. Nothing wrong with that, right? If those papers are in connection to greenlighting death camps or murdering political dissidents, then it doesn’t seem like you are “just doing your job.” You are carrying water for a type of thought that seeks to annihilate every last atom of humanity in us.

Movie Review – Xala

Xala (1975)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

In the mid-15th century, the Portuguese landed on the shores of Senegal and began a centuries-long occupation that included the British, the Dutch, and the French. It would not be until 1958 that Senegal declared its independence and merged with French Sudan to form the Mali Federation. That would not last long, and by 1960, they went back to their individual states. The process of decolonization is not quick & easy. When the colonizers withdraw, there is still tremendous work to do, a lot of which centers around removing the ideologies & ways of doing imposed on the colonized people by their occupiers. Ousmane Sembène is keenly aware of this, and in his film Xala, he produces an angry screed at how Western capitalism is allowed to fester in the systems of the post-colonial African people.

Movie Review – Emitaï

Emitaï (1971)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

To combat the Nazi occupation back home, the Vichy government (the official French State government during WWII) would conscript men from the lands they occupied in West Africa. These men would be shipped into Europe, where they were made to fight in that war. Ousmane Sembène devoted several of his films to this practice. This one focuses on the way the French government would slowly exploit & drain people already living in abject poverty for the sake of the empire. It’s probably Sembène’s most straightforward film, which shows he wanted to be very precise & clear in what he shows us.

Movie Review – Welfare

Welfare (1975)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman has made his career focusing on institutions, and while he has branched off in later years ever so slightly, the most significant change in his method of filmmaking is going from tight 90-minute movies to large sprawling epics. It makes sense; the topics of his work are vast & challenging to grasp. You need time to let them breathe and for narratives to emerge. Welfare clocks in at nearly three hours long. I argue passionately that not only is this Wiseman’s masterpiece, but it is also one of the greatest documentary films ever made. Within this relatively short time, the audience will experience every stage of life and almost every element that brings drama into our lives.

Movie Review – Juvenile Court

Juvenile Court (1973)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman’s seventh film, Juvenile Court, came after producing at least one documentary a year from 1968. High School & Law and Order each contemplated how American institutions subjected people to forms of control. The former sees how we teach children as wrapped up in authoritarian ends, while the latter is about how authoritarianism is exercised in the community. It makes sense that Wiseman would make Juvenile Court as it is where these two paths converge, the place where young people are brutally institutionalized to “get them in line.” In a film that foresees Wiseman’s magnum opus, Welfare, he constructs tighter narratives, following a small number of young people and families through the court process.

Movie Review – A Decade Under the Influence

A Decade Under the Influence (2003)
Directed by Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese

Across the globe, there have been numerous cinematic movements. Two of the most influential were the French & Italian New Waves. Through revolutionary experimentation with style & content, the artists behind these movements were able to show how film could tell stories far beyond what people had once imagined. These films often touched on political topics, particularly social injustice and hypocrisy among the ruling classes. The United States saw a similar but much smaller film movement in the 1960s, but something different from the upheaval brought about by their European counterparts. John Cassavettes helped birth American independent cinema, but it was not widely recognized at the time. It would be the 1970s when the States would see their own transformation of movies.

Movie Review – Day For Night

Day For Night (1973)
Written by François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, and Suzanne Schiffman
Directed by François Truffaut

Like Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt), Francois Truffaut seemed like someone born in a movie theater. One of the French New Wave movement’s founders, Truffaut, felt cinema in a way few people do. They were certainly not the same and had a very contentious relationship as colleagues. Godard’s approach was to tear down norms, push back against expectations, and embrace a sometimes mechanistic view of the form. Truffaut was far more into the pathos of his work, wanting it to be relatable, often adopting a very sensual approach to his films. Day For Night was Truffaut’s self-reflexive movie, something for his longtime fans but also an exploration of why people make these pictures in the first place.

PopCult Podcast – All That Jazz/Mikey and Nicky

The new movies we want to see just aren’t available to us yet. So we dipped into the ol’ Letterboxd watchlist and pulled out two classics from the 1970s we’ve needed to watch.

Comic Book Review – The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume One

The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume One (2020)
Reprints Giant-Size X-Men #1, X-Men #94-131, and X-Men Annual #3
Written by Chris Claremont and John Byrne (w/Len Wein & Bill Mantlo)
Art by Dave Cockrum & John Byrne

Last year, I read through the initial X-Men run featuring the original five. Stan Lee & Jack Kirby started out as the creative team, quickly stepped aside, and the title just never found its footing. There was a great stint when Roy Thomas wrote with Neal Adams on pencils; that was a standout, but overall, it was a forgettable comic book. For five years, the X-Men book reprinted its sixty-six issues, and as Marvel got closer to running out of stories to reprint, they decided to do something new with the concept. Len Wein was doing double duty as writer & editor at Marvel in the mid-1970s and worked with artist Dave Cockrum to create some new mutants to shake up the X-Men dynamic. He also pulled in a character he’d introduced around the same time in the pages of Incredible Hulk. It was a short, clawed Canadian superhero named Wolverine.