The seeds of the legendary 70s are being planted in 1969, including a great boomer road trip movie, cowboys in dark, dark, cities, and the movie the Marvel Cinematic Universe clearly used as a template for their banter. Also, this is a last gasp of a great foreign filmmaking year before we get to the American filmmaking boom the next decade.
Ingmar Bergman, Max von Sydow, and Liv Ullman are a potent trio of movie talents. This one sees Bergman in color, but also playing with storytelling, as the movie becomes a meta commentary on the three’s films together. Also, Terrence Malick clearly must have been taking cinematography notes from the great Swedish director, cause this film looks gorgeous.
John Wayne finally got his Oscar playing Rooster Cogburn, drunk marshall of the West. The story is standard frontier fare: young girl (Kim Darby) wants Cogburn to help her track down her family’s killer. It’s not Wayne’s best performance, but he is fun enough, and the movie is a picturesque reminder of why people love wandering out in the American wilderness.
Gene Kelly’s last musical is just joyful fun, with beautifully choreographed, iconic musical numbers. It helps a lot when the vocally intimidating Barbara Streisand is your Dolly, lavish and dressed to the nines. Walter Matthau also helps bring levity and a dry sense of wit to the proceedings.
Boasting a killer soundtrack, Dennis Hopper’s movie about road tripping bikers across the USA defined the free/love hippie era. But if you look deeper, at its core is that age old generational divide between youth and adulthood.
I’m certain a young Richard Linklater watched this film, the best of Eric Rohmer’s 6 moral tales, and got inspired to make the Before films. Jean Louis Trintignant (also the star of Z!), thinks he’s in love with one woman he knows in his town, but after a riveting night of dialogue/connection with Maud (Francoise Fabian), he learns that real connection goes beyond the physical.
Intentionally gory (for it’s time), Sam Peckinpah’s Western basically thinks about what’s really going on inside a Western. We see lots of violence, and more infighting and changing of the times, which elevates Peckinpah’s story to one of those genre movies that plays with genre conventions while still being a great genre movie.
An early iteration of the sex comedy. Paul Mazursky’s film looks at partner-swapping in the 60s with 4 friends, who go to a sex workshop and try their hands at a foursome. The comedic elements cover also a story about younger couples trying to figure out adulthood but haven’t quite left their youth.
Costa Gavras’s Best Foreign Language Winner sets the template for where films in the 70s would go in the US. Equal part action thriller and look at a powerful conspiracy, the movie follows a detective investigating the murder of a political activist, capturing how a fascist militaristic body like the police can get drunk on its own power and belief systems, and how even courageous crusaders may not even be enough to stop them.
Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman excel in the mismatched buddy comedy formula: Voight a male escort from Texas, Hoffman a New York low level con man. The two poor men try to make their way in the big city, which heartbreakingly might be too big for them.
The MCU. Buddy cop movies. All of them got their tone and style from William Goldman’s gem of a screenplay. Paul Newman and Robert Redford are the titular characters. Both love to do what they do (rob trains and banks), and quip each other to death while doing it, like when Redford decides to courageously help Newman win a fight against a big opponent, and Newman courageously lets him. All action tension builds usually to a joke or a punch line, making the movie a delight beginning to end.
