My Top Ten Films of 1977

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.  

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Wonder is the quality that I most closely associate with Steven Spielberg films, and "Close Encounters" has some of the most spellbinding examples ever put on celluloid.  For years, every time I came across a broadcast, I had to watch it through to the end so I could see the mothership arrive at Devil's Tower and witness the amazing first contact scenario play out. No other film has ever done UFOs quite like this, and no other film has used music quite like this, or offered such a vision of the best impulses of humanity - one that feels almost alien today.

3 Women - Robert Altman's riff on "Persona" puts Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek together in an unsettling desert town, where they form a strange bond that changes them both drastically.  Full of dreamlike imagery and symbols of the subconscious, this is among the most un-Altman-like of Robert Altman's films. However, it reflects his cinematic versatility and his love of actors.  Duvall and Spacek deliver some of their best performances here, creating a fascinating mystery out of their characters' relationship. Answers are few, but the mysteries remain haunting and unforgettable.  

Star Wars - It's easy to forget that the original "Star Wars" was just a fun space adventure romp for kids, one that happened to feature cooler special effects than most.  Everything looks terribly dated now, but the hijinks during the prison break, and the bickering heroes, and the silly sidekicks are still terribly charming and watchable. There's a twinkle in Alec Guinness's eye and smirk on Harrison Ford's face to remind us to not take all this babble about space wizards too seriously.  And yet, between the John Williams score and the glittering lightsaber sparks, how could you not get carried away?

Annie Hall - The greatness of "Annie Hall" doesn't come from the fourth wall breaking, the psychoanalytical self-awareness, the wonderful wordplay, or even the performance of Diane Keaton as the magnetic Annie.  What sets the film apart is that the relationship feels so true to life. Even if the particulars of the events are clearly made up, and there's all kinds of cinematic trickery in the portrayal of them, the film has an emotional realism that few other cinema romances have ever captured.  Annie and Alvy fall in love and then fall out of love, simply because that's what people do.

Eraserhead - To try and describe David Lynch's "Eraserhead" is an exercise in folly.  To try and interpret it may be even moreso. However, it remains an unusually effective art film that is never trying to be anything but an art film, and is one of the key early works of David Lynch.  His first feature film, made when he was still a student at AFI, is characterized by an absorbing strangeness and sense of overwhelming alienation. Its horrors are both immediate and existential, familiar and yet difficult to parse.  And as with all of Lynch's work, it really is the sound design that ties the whole thing together.

Stroszek - An immigrant comes to America to make a new life for himself.  However, as this is a story told by Werner Herzog, the immigrant is an awkward simpleton played by Bruno S., and America is not a land of opportunity, but rather a path to the hero's eventual spiritual and financial ruin.  There's no malice or judgment to the depiction, however, but rather a dispassionate, occasionally absurdist view of the unfolding tragedy. In other words, Herzog's usual modus operandi. It's fascinating to see such a familiar narrative turned on its head, and presented through a New German Cinema lens.     

House - Somehow "Eraserhead" wasn't the  strangest movie made in 1977. No, that title belongs to the Japanese horror movie "House," about a group of schoolgirls who embark on one of the weirdest, wildest journeys in all of Japanese cinema.  The girls have to contend with an evil house that wants to eat them, full of possessed furniture and fixtures. Outside of a few experimental short films, I can't think of any film that goes to the stylistic extremes that "House" does, with its mixed media monsters and parade of gruesome deaths.  It's part cartoon, part slasher, and all kinds of delightful nonsense.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar - This is a film and novel that has fallen out of fashion over the years because there's a degree of fearmongering and victim-blaming in its depiction of a single woman living independently.   However, Diane Keaton is such an engaging figure, putting the complicated heroine's self-destructive behaviors in a sympathetic light. Screen heroines were rarely allowed to be so openly sexual, so forward, and so interesting - and in many ways they still aren't.  This depiction may be innately problematic, but it still has value and the movie still has the power to devastate.

Providence - One of Alain Resnais' rare English language films puts a bevy of British and American acting luminaries into a metaphysical melodrama about a family of terrible people who loathe each other.  It's never clear which of the film's different versions of the main characters are the real ones, if any of them are real at all. It's the performances that ground all of this existential uncertainty, full of macabre humor, rage and despair.  John Gielgud, playing the puppetmaster and the ultimate source of all this emotional turmoil, surely never had a screen role as suited to his talents as this.

Pumping Iron - They will never be able to make a biopic of Arnold Schwarzenegger that can match up to "Pumping Iron," which focuses on his efforts to train for a bodybuilding contest in the 1970s.  It captures not only the fascinating world of male bodybuilders, but the cutthroat culture that it fosters. Schwarzenegger is the undisputed star of the picture, not only for his swagger and ambition, but for his keen sense of strategy and ultra-competitive, take-no-prisoners nature.  And knowing what we know now about Schwarzenegger makes his early behavior all the more meaningful and sinister.

Honorable Mention

Sorcerer

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