1. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971): Directed By Monte Hellman
2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): Directed By Steven Spielberg
3. Days of Heaven (1978) Directed By Terrence Malick
4. Manhattan (1979): Directed By Woody Allen
5. Taxi Driver (1976): Directed By Martin Scorsese
6. (tie) The Godfather (1972): Directed By Francis Ford Coppola
6. (Tie) The Godfather Part 2 (1974): Directed By Francis Ford Coppola
7. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971): Directed By Robert Altman
8. Dog Day Afternoon (1975): Directed By Sydney Lumet
9. Chinatown (1974): Directed By Roman Polanski
10. Day for Night (1973): Directed By Francois Truffaut
Blogger's note: You may notice I cheated with the rules a bit with this particular list. I mentioned at the beginning I would only choose one film per director, however when it came to my number 6 choice in this list, I decided to combine both "The Godfather" and its sequal since to me they both feel like one whole film. This was my reason to choose two films by Coppola.
4 comments:
This by far, as one would expect, would be the most polarizing of the 10 bests.
Films like Cabaret, which revolutionized the way a musical was made, or The Exorcist which defined a new kind of horror, The French Connection, which said that action can have a story, A Clockwork Orange which is arguably the most inventive film ever made...the list goes on and on.
The 70's and lists of the best films are based solely on taste, and there were so many to choose from.
The only real exception I take to the list is the exclusion of Network, which I consider to be brilliantly (and frighteningly) prophetic and a movie that really defined the 70's as a decade both literally and in a film making sense.
Anonymous I sort of figured the 70s list might cause a bit of a stir since it is probably the first modern decade that people still really remember. It can be polarizing since there are so many films you can say are great, however I sort of disagree with A Clockwork Orange, if I were to pick a Kubrick film of the 70s it would probably be "Barry Lyndon". I already got a comment from a friend of mine who read the list and didn't even hear of "Two-Lane Blacktop". My reasons for having it there had a lot to do with the fact that it is fairly unknown to mainstream film buffs, so I guess I wanted to show there were great movies of the 70s that still need to be discovered.
Hi Jeremy: Here's my top ten '70s, and (yet again) we have four in common. I could go on forever with regrets on what I left out: Dog Day Afternoon, The Front, Network... and I bet if I had seen Cries and Whispers more recently I might have found room for it, but here goes. BTW, seen all the films on your list except (surprise) Two-Lane Blacktop.
Top Ten 1970s:
1. The Godfather
2. Annie Hall
3. Star Wars
4. Close Encounters
5. American Graffiti
6. Chinatown
7. Young Frankenstein
8. The Exorcist
9. Manhattan
10. Apocalypse Now
If I must delete the repeat directors, and eliminate Graffiti, Manhattan, and Apocalypse Now, I'd add The Last Picture Show, The Front, and Cries and Whispers.
Thanks for your list oneliner. I agree with all those films on your list, they should be on someone's top ten. I also agree with "Cries and Whispers" which if I had a number 11, that probably would be it. It's probably the most effective Bergman film I've seen. Like I said before I hope "Two-Lane Blacktop" becomes more well known in the coming years, like Richard Linklater said about it, it's like a drive-in movie directed by the french new wave.
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