Amarcord
And Now My Love
Dog Day Afternoon (winner)
Lies My Father Told Me
Shampoo
What’s Missing
This is a better year than it looks on paper based on the nominations. Truthfully, I like only two of the nominations as movies, and since the screenplay is in many cases the heart of the movie, I think there’s a lot to be improved upon here. Two foreign-language movies in this category is pretty rare, but I know of two others that I like about as well as one and better than another: The Man in the Glass Booth and Cousin, Cousine. To be fair, the second of those movies got its nominations the following year. I like Rollerball far more than everyone else seems to, and I would have loved to have seen it here. Sure, it’s an old story, but it’s a damn good version of it. Nashville seems like a really serious miss here, particularly since it was nominated for both Best Picture and Best Director. Personally, I’d have loved to have seen a nomination for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Weeding through the Nominees
5. The greatest sin a movie can commit is not being too long or too offensive; it’s being boring. Lies My Father Told Me commits that sin in spades. I lost interest in this film not long after it started and had to gut my way through it. Nothing that happened ever reversed that initial impression of it being dull and plain and without much merit. I can deal with offensive, grotesque, and even stupid, but boring is so hard to handle in a film. If you really need a film from this era that explores Jewish culture, Fiddler on the Roof is a better choice, and Hester Street from this same year is far more interesting.
4. Much of the same thing could be said about And Now My Love, a film for which I wrote a substantially shorter than normal review because, ultimately, I couldn’t really be bothered to care about anything that was happening. The ending also feels like the dirtiest of dirty tricks, something that is a bigger extended middle finger than having a character wake up and realize that it was all only a dream. I cannot fathom how a movie that offers that terrible of a kick in the crotch to the audience wound up here.
3. I said when I reviewed Shampoo that this is a movie that is far less than the sum of its parts, and I stand by that. I like that it moves inexorably from overt comedy to overt drama through its running time without really revealing when or how that happens. That’s actually quite masterful, and it’s a feature that moved this into third. But it also often feels like there’s not a great deal at stake, even if there is. Our main character seems to have always gotten whatever he wants. If he still does, we’re not surprised. If he doesn’t it’s just desserts. In either case, it’s kind of hard to care.
2. Amarcord is notable for being a Fellini film that I don’t hate. In facdt, I think it’s a pretty good movie and one that has a great deal to recommend it. Like a lot of Fellini, though, it’s a bit overblown and flowery; that’s just Fellini. For me, it’s probably a part of what keeps it out of a chance of winning despite being a very good screenplay. It’s more or less a memoir, though, and while it’s well-made and interesting, it’s also spending an awful lot of time in the mind of Fellini, which isn’t a place I honestly feel comfortable .
My Choice
1. There’s a lot I would like to change from this particular set of nominations, but I wouldn’t change the winner. Dog Day Afternoon has everything I want in a screenplay, adapted or original. It’s gutsy, entertaining, and it takes a lot of risks and sticks the landing. It doesn’t cheat the audience or treat us like we’re stupid, and from the opening moments to the very end, there is always a great deal at stake, and it keeps ramping up. This was absolutely the right choice from the five nominations, and in an expanded field, we’d have a closer race, but with the same result.
Final Analysis