1975: A Year in Cinema

Sporting a froofed-up mop for the ages, Warren Betty plays George Roundy, a Beverly hills hairdresser whose career ambition competes with his sex drive. George grooms his millionaire clients in the salon and musses them in the bedroom, but he wants more out of life. George longs to open his own salon, and he asks his current mistress Felicia Karpf (Lee Grant) for a loan. However, Felicia’s husband (Jack Warden) is having an affair with George’s best friend, Jackie (Julie Christie). When all four attend a soiree on the eve of Nixon’s 1968 presidential victory, drawing-room drama ignites, and George must confront the disjunction of his priorities and predilections as the consequences of entangling business and pleasure come to a head.

Based on William Thackaray’s 1844 picaresque novel, Barry Lyndon charts the change in fortune of Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), a penniless Irish soldier in the British army who deserts his regiment during the Seven Years War. Barry roams across Europe, lying and cheating. Eventually he seduces a wealthy English widow (Marisa Berenson) and marries her, thereby installing himself as a member of the British nobility. However, Barry cannot shed his base nature and falls prey to his own greed, alcoholism, and violent anger. Bearing Kubrick’s characteristically detached narrative style and obsessively precise mise-en-sc`ène, Barry Lyndon creates an exquisite depiction of 18th century Europe, full of the dreamy elegance of a rococo painting.

An evil from the deep encroaches on the peaceful seaside town of Amity, Massachusetts when literally out of the blue, a great white shark begins preying on beachgoers. Finding their community assailed by a wave of terror, police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and hardened shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) set off in a leaky boat to send this agent of elemental evil to the abyss from whence it came. Steven Spielberg’s thriller made a splash in 1975 as the highest-grossing film of all time, and while this number has subsequently been surpassed, the film’s importance to the history of cinema has rippled. Jaws introduced the world to the summer blockbuster genre: the action-packed adventure movie as a cultural event.

Relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, mother and daughter “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier-Beale were once glamorous socialites, but now they live in gothic seclusion on a dilapidated East Hampton estate with no running water. Surrounded by raccoons, cats, fleas, and distant memories, the mother-daughter pair bicker, reminisce, and dream of returning to their lives of luxury and privilege. Both grotesque and poignant, Grey Gardens presents an intimate portrait of survival, style, and the performance of self. 

In this sequel to Uptown Saturday Night, Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby reprise their respective roles as milkman, Clyde Williams and factory worker, Billy Foster. Financial trouble threatens strikes their fraternal order, the Brothers and Sisters of Shaka, and the two friends hatch a scheme to save their organization’s headquarters.  Scheduling a double wedding anniversary trip as a ploy, Clyde and Billy travel to New Orleans with their wives, but their big idea is to rig a middleweight title fight. Clyde convinces scrawny contender, Bootney Farnsworth (Jimmie Walker) that he can beat the champ (Rudolphus Lee Hayden). However, gangsters have other plans in mind. Kansas City Mack (John Amos) and Biggie Smalls (Calvin Lockhart—and yes, the name that inspired the Notorious B.I.G.) start placing high bets, and Clyde and Billy find their caper quickly going south. Taking stylistic notes from the waning “blaxploitation” genre and featuring a gloriously grooving soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield performed by the Staples Singers, Let’s Do It Again is both a warmhearted buddy comedy and a milestone of Black cinema.

Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile documents the period of sociopolitical tumult leading up to the military coup that overthrew the Salvador Allende’s socialist government. Part 1 focuses on widespread discontent surrounding Allende’s 1973 reelection. Through street interviews, factory protests, and union hall meetings, Guzman assembles a panorama of unrest, culminating in a scene of violence not only witnessed but experienced first-hand when photographer, Leonardo Henrichsen, was shot by while filming. Completed in exile and long-banned in Chile, The Battle of Chile: Part 1 remains a wrenching work of living history.

In a dystopian future, America has succumbed to a totalitarian military regime that pacifies the population by sponsoring a deadly transcontinental car race. Racers compete in ridiculously tricked-out buggies and score points by killing pedestrians. In the 20th anniversary race, five racers hit the road, including leather bondage suit-clad, Frankenstein (David Carradine) and tommygun-toting Chicago gangster, Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone). While engines rev and blood spatters on the asphalt, Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin), the matronly leader of a resistance movement plots to sabotage the race. A sort of cross between Wacky Races and The Hunger Games, Death Race 2000 infuses spectacular brutality with an irresistible spirit of campy pizazz.

To raise money for his partner’s gender reassignment surgery, Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) plans to rob a bank—and that’s about the extent of the plan. On one sweltering August day, Sonny and his friend Sal (John Cazale) barge into the First Brooklyn Savings Bank with guns blazing only to find out that the daily cash pickup truck has left for the day, so there is only $1,100 on site. And this is where the trouble begins. The wannabe robbers take the bank employees hostage, and a standoff with the police ensues, which sparks a media circus. A TV crew alights on the scene and broadcasts live, attracting throngs of cheering spectators. With 60% of the film’s dialogue improvised, suspense tightens in the grip of raw realism.

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 thriller, Blow Up, David Hemmings played an effete fashion photographer who accidentally captures a murder on film. Nearly a decade later, Hemmings plays another unwitting witness for another Italian director-- but in an altogether different kind of film. Dario Argento’s absurdist giallo horror film, Deep Red dispenses with psychological realism, indulging in extravagant style. Hemmings stars as Marcus Daly, an English pianist in Rome who happens to glimpse the murder of a Swiss psychic. He teams up with plucky reporter, Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), and they investigate the mystery, which becomes increasingly incoherent. A disjointed trail of clues serves to curate a series of spectacular set-pieces including self-impaling birds, a giggling mechanical dummy, and a life-size recreation of Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting, Nighthawks. Propelled by a whimsical prog-rock soundtrack by Goblin, Deep Red is a masterpiece that defies interpretation.

Arthur Penn’s offbeat neo-noir stars Gene Hackman as Harry Moseby, once an NFL player and now a Los Angeles private investigator, wrestling with his personal failures and disappointments. When he discovers his wife cheating on him, Harry throws himself into his work: A faded Hollywood star has hired him to find her runaway teenage daughter (Melanie Griffith), and the search leads him to the murky waters of the Florida Keys. There he finds the girl staying with her stepfather, but nothing is as it seems. Beneath the surface of this fractured domestic scene lies a conspiracy that Harry will seek to unravel.

In Ousmane Sembène’s vision of recently independent Senegal, corrupt Black businessmen have taken the economic reins from corrupt white businessmen to perpetuate the same oppressive system. Among them is El Hadj Beye, an ambitious merchant who demonstrates his success by taking on a third wife much to the chagrin of his other two. However, on the wedding night, El Hadj discovers that he has been struck with “xala”—the curse of impotence. While El Hadj frantically searches for a cure from modern doctors as well as traditional Islamic healers, his business starts to fail, and his corruption comes to light. A bitter satire set during a pivotal period in Senegalese history, Ousmane Sembène’s Xala skewers the new francophone ruling class.

To escape prison labor, charismatic drifter Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) successfully fakes insanity in court, landing him a spot at Oregon State Hospital in a ward ruled by the tyrannical Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). McMurphy has no intention of submitting to her authority: He sneaks women and booze into the hospital and even organizes a fishing trip with the other patients, including meek Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif), childlike Martini (Danny DeVito) and truculent Max Taber (Christopher Lloyd). While McMurphy forges camaraderie with the other patients, he attracts the ire of Nurse Ratched, and the two face off in an escalating battle of wills. Filmed in a real mental hospital, Miloš Forman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel offers a resonant commentary on the abuse of institutional power and the price of freedom.