1973

A thing I’m noticing about the ’70s as we work through them is the Academy is trying very hard to be a “cool uncle” to the film industry. They aren’t leaning hard into high-art, they’re going for crowd-pleasers. Okay, Patton is what we might call a typical Oscar movie, being a big historical biopic and all, but The French Connection? Cops and criminals and chase scenes. Yes The Godfather is rightly hailed as a masterpiece, but it was also a smash hit.

Which brings us to…

And The Oscar Goes To…

See what I’m saying? It’s a heist flick! An excellently made heist flick that has been called one of the best movies ever made, but clearly more interested in thrilling the crowds than saying “This classic novel shows how power corrupts, only it doesn’t quite,” like All The King’s Men, or “Alcoholism is bad, actually” like The Lost Weekend.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford reunite for 2 Butch 2 Sundance The Sting, in which two charming con men… gather a team of grifters… to steal money from a corrupt businessman holy crap it’s my Kryptonite, this movie is my exact Kryptonite, I mean I don’t talk about Ocean’s 11 and Leverage all the time just for the orchestral scores. (I also love the orchestral scores.)

Johnny Hooker (Redford, and oof, bad name) is a small-time grifter who accidentally steals the bankroll from a book-maker reporting to Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw, who I’m seeing often). After one night of attempting to live large but losing his cut at a crooked back-alley roulette wheel, he finds himself needing to duck corrupt fraud cop Snyder and hitmen reporting to Lonnegan… but what he’s angriest about is that the hitmen got to his partner and mentor. And so Johnny seeks out experienced grifter Henry Gondorff (Newman) to pull a big job on Lonnegan as payback.

While Gondorff, Johnny, and their crew get things in place (spelled out for us in title cards labelled things like “The Set-up,” “The Story,” and of course “The Sting”), Johnny also needs to duck killers and Snyder, while staying a step ahead of Lonnegan. And it appears that Gondorff might have a tail of his own. It all builds to a suspenseful climax, where it’s hard to be sure who might betray who and whether the con will succeed. After all, there have been complications a-plenty, and the last time these two actors got together there was that unpleasantness with the Bolivian army, so who knows?

What I noted is that while they did reunite Butch and Sundance, the characters and dynamic here are decidedly different. And you can say “Well of course, this isn’t actually Butch and Sundance: Secret of the Ooze, of course they’re different characters,” to which I’d just remind you of Welcome Stranger, which reunited the stars of Going My Way and put them in the exact same set-up, only with new professions. But The Sting doesn’t box Newman and Redford into types, and lets them play new angles off each other. And they both do quite well with it, as do their associates (including Ray Walston again, less horny than The Apartment).

Definitely a solid flick, but shows that in the 70s, the Academy still hadn’t picked a type of movie that was artistic enough to be nominated for prizes, you could just be a really well done heist movie and they’d say “Sure, good job, here’s ten Oscar nominations.” Makes me think that in the 70s, Best Picture nominee Hell or High Water could have taken the prize instead of Moonlight. Actually if it did racism would have been a big part of that you know what let’s move on.

And Rotten Tomatoes Says: It falls at #50, right under West Side Story and My Fair Lady. I will admit those two had better songs.

What’s New, Hollywood? This one didn’t feel too new. Being set in the 30s made it seem on the old fashioned side.

The Sting was a huge hit with a lifetime gross creeping past The Godfather, and adjusted for inflation is still has the 21st highest domestic gross of all time. It just wasn’t the highest domestic gross of the year, because it was against something so big I could leave the title off the poster and you’d probably still know what it was.

The Box Office Champ

If this were a deep dive into Golden Globes history we wouldn’t be doing two movies this year, because the Globes were all about The Exorcist. The Oscars gave it a Best Picture nomination, but even in this, their decade of trying to be hip, this was a little out there for them.

It’s been called “the scariest movie ever made,” but if I’m honest that’s probably based on how much it scared audiences at the time. Sure it’s still creepy as hell and has many deeply unsettling visuals, practical effects that are downright haunting to see, I just wouldn’t say it’s overly scary, compared to what horror has done since. Compared to what horror had done that far, sure, I buy it. It was an incredibly controversial production and release. Some theatres didn’t want to run it, but it still made a pile of money so the protests didn’t slow it down.

Director William Friedkin turned down a lot of big name stars for the leads, including Aubrey Hepburn (who would only do it if they filmed in Rome where she lived), Anne Bancroft (who wanted them to wait until she was done being pregnant), Shirley MacLaine, and Marlon Brando (who late in life almost played a parody of the priest character in Scary Movie 2 but had to withdraw for health reasons). A playwright who’d never done a movie beat out Jack Nicholson and Paul Newman for the younger priest. But as frustrating as the studio found his casting approach, it has some amazing work from Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, and Max von Sydow (who must have been wearing old age makeup, he looked older here than in Force Awakens). It’s well staged, the practical effects are great, and there’s some good elements in the slow build-up to young Reagan’s possession.

Although… okay, maybe this is 2020 talking, where we expect the Scary Part to be happening by the end of the first act. Maybe we’re a little too used to movies in general, horror movies in specific, getting to the firework factory with a lot more efficiency. Not unlike Love Story, which said “The title promised a love story, let’s not waste time, boom they like each other.” In contrast, The Exorcist acknowledges that “my daughter needs an exorcism” is not an easy decision to come to, and thus decides to walk us through every step of letting medicine and psychiatry take a shot at helping her. In that order. Weird that “invasive spinal tap” came before “therapy,” we really were terrible at mental health treatment for so long. Also the doctors are way too blasé about furniture moving by itself, saying it was just psychosis-strength. To which I have to ask, has a mother ever actually lifted a car to save her child? Because skeptics have been playing that card for decades and I’m not convinced it’s ever happened.

So the pacing could be better. The first half is a lot of long walks to a thematic plot point or sudden shock than boom, jump cut to something else. Also there’s a cold open about von Sydow’s Father Merrin on a dig for creepy statues in Iraq that I’m not convinced adds anything. I could not tell you exactly how that was supposed to add to the story.

Still… overall well made and quite unsettling.

And Rotten Tomatoes Says: It pulls a respectable 83%, as reviews were very controversial when this was released. Not everyone was ready for this much shock value and demon content.

What’s New, Hollywood? The Exorcist made horror films bigger and bolder than just schlock flicks from Hammer. The financial and awards success of the movie meant that supernatural horror films like The Omen or The Amityville Horror could get proper budgets and bigger stars.

Other Events in Film

• This Year in Bond: Roger Moore takes over as Bond in Live and Let Die, which has perhaps the most black actors of any Bond film, but only two black characters who don’t work for the villain, so in my mind it competes with You Only Live Twice for “most racist.” I mean an entire New Orleans parade and all of Harlem worked for Mr. Big, come on.
• The kung fu craze in the US starts with Five Fingers of Death, but it happens without Bruce Lee, who tragically passed away right before audiences got to see him smack down Chuck Norris in Enter the Dragon. Audiences would have to make do with knockoffs such as Bruce Le, Bruce Li, or archival footage stitched together into franken-flicks.
• George Lucas breaks out with the hit American Graffiti. This kid might have big things coming.
• After years of shorts, B-movies, and a couple of indie films, Martin Scorsese has his breakout feature, Mean Streets, which also started his string of collaborations with Robert De Niro.
• Dirty Harry uttered one of his most famous quotes, “Go ahead, make my day,” in Magnum Force. And then Clint Eastwood slipped back into western mode for High Plains Drifter.
• Streisand sang about misty water coloured memories of The Way We Were.
• A theme park turns murderous in Westworld. Solid premise, bet you could make a whole series about that, and it wouldn’t get really weird in the second season at all.
• Battle for the Planet of the Apes brings that franchise to end for… thirtyish years.
• Disney accidentally creates the furry subculture with Robin Hood.
• Al Pacino continues to win accolades for Serpico.
• Another iconic twist that has been ruined for everyone for decades happened in Soylent Green.
• One of the better Three Musketeers movies came out this year, and serves as an interesting legal precedent, as the studio split the footage into two movies, at which point the cast that had been paid for one movie said “Hey wait a minute.”
• My Name Is Nobody is a western about a nameless stranger trying to talk a legendary gunfighter into taking on 150 outlaws, and you’ve probably never heard of it but you’d like it if you watched it.
• Marlon Brando does The Last Tango in Paris, which committed a sex crime and the director should have been jailed.
• Stan Lee makes his screen debut in The Year 01, based on a comic strip. He’s gonna be pulling this sort of thing a lot down the road.

Next Page: The Best Sequel?