Top 10 (and a bit) films of … 1976

1976 was the year of the big summer heatwave in the UK, which I have a vague memory of as “that one time we actually got summer”. I expect I spent a lot of time in my paddling pool. It was also the year that Apple Computer Company formed and released its first computer (handy, given their name) and a space shuttle called Enterprise was unveiled. Like the real Enterprise it couldn’t actually go into space, but it was a cool bit of publicity all the same. Meanwhile, the UK and Iceland ended that third cod war, much to the relief of political superpowers across the globe.

For a while there I thought 1976 might be the year I finally saw some of these movies in the cinema: I distinctly remember watching King Kong and The Pink Panther Strikes Again on the big screen. However, given both of these movies were released on Boxing Day 1976 in the UK I very much expect I wouldn’t have seen them until the subsequent year (remember, movies hung around a lot longer back in those days!)

While neither of those movies are particularly memorable, it was otherwise an exceptionally solid year for cinema—just look at that IMDB top 5! And plenty of quality picks lower down in the list too. Let’s get into it. 

Carrie

The first time I watched Carrie the most striking thing about the movie was that it opened with a bunch of naked girls (or, let’s be honest, women playing girls) in a shower. Luckily I eventually grew up and now I love the film for the precision crafting that Brian de Palma brings to it all. For example, the sequence building up to the ‘bucket of blood’–gorgeously choreographed, ramping up tension, while displaying a love of all the tricks that film-making could offer. The perfect casting of Sissy Spacek. The delicious viciousness of Nancy Allen’s performance, and the terrifying Billie Whitelaw. And let’s not forget what might be the original jump-scare shock ending (certainly the one that inspired Friday The 13th and all that followed).

I went through a huge Stephen King phase in my mid-teens, but honestly can’t remember if I read the book first or saw the film (I did read the book again a few years back and you can read my thoughts about it here). It doesn’t matter: this is one of those rare cases where the book and film own their own space in cultural history and neither has eclipsed the other. The book treads a slightly different path but the impact is the same. Amid the birth of the slasher genre, de Palma managed to show us that there were plenty of other horrors available to explore.

The Omen

In a similar vein, The Omen aimed to give us something new to fear (and as I write this, the US election is looming and I can’t help but think that the eventual outcome of The Omen wouldn’t have looked too different from a second Trump presidency). Richard Donner is a remarkably solid and versatile director (just look at his filmography) and I wonder now how influential this movie was in the further development of the modern horror genre: specifically the idea of a horror ‘set piece’ at regular intervals throughout the story. When you think of The Omen, which scenes do you really remember? The photographer being beheaded? Patrick Troughton getting impaled? “It’s all for you, Damien!” [swoosh!].

The Omen sits on a sizable list of movies that I watched on TV for the first time, enjoyed for the thrills (and perhaps because it was a grown-up horror movie), and then rediscovered in later years and learned to love and enjoy for other reasons. Richard Donner was well-known for bringing ‘verisimilitude’ to Superman a few years later, but I’d argue that he does the same here. Alongside the committed performance of Gregory Peck, Donner never fails to take the story anything less than seriously, while simultaneously never forgetting that his movie has one purpose and one alone: to entertain. Later films in the series (excepting the recent prequel) perhaps didn’t fare so well.

Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver was one of my teen movies, meaning it’s one of the movies I watched constantly during my teen years (we will eventually get to some of my other ‘teen movies’). It was the same friend who introduced me to The Godfather that got me into this one and, while I’ve never been a huge lover of Martin Scorsese’s output, this one had me hooked right away. 

In retrospect I wonder if the story of a Vietnam vet struggling to find his place in a world that’s largely indifferent is something that resonated with me as a teenager. Travis Bickle wants to be special—he wants to be the vengeful hero—but he’s just a damaged man who can’t relate to the people around me. That’s not at all representative of my teen years, incidentally, but if there’s one thing we were all especially good at as teenagers, it was adding dramatic weight to our struggles.

This has been on my rewatch list for some time now, mainly to introduce my own teenage son to it. It’ll be very interesting to see how it lands with a few extra decades of perspective behind me.

King Kong

We’ve just reached the first film in this blog series that I remember seeing during its first release in cinemas (although, as mentioned above, I almost certainly saw it in 1977). As a child I enjoyed the scenes of Kong rampaging through New York, but didn’t take a whole lot else away from it. 

My main fascination with this version of King Kong has been with the poster, which depicts Kong straddling the World Trade Centre, one foot on each building, and clutching what appeared to be a crushed Apollo rocket ship in his fist. Honestly, this was the era of NASA and it seemed perfectly cool and reasonable (and awesome!!) that Kong would have somehow plucked a spaceship out of the sky, and that this was how they’d show the power of Kong in the [then] modern era. This image has remained so strongly etched in my memory that I did some proper research last year and not only discovered that I’m far from the only person on the internet who was wondering what the hell Kong is holding in his hand, but finally determined that … actually no one else really knows, except that it’s almost certainly some sort of plane. Click on the poster and see what you think …

Logan’s Run

I love this movie. I watched it while I was at high school and the big joke the day after was that Playtex had gone out of business in the future (we were teen boys, what can I say). At the time I loved the epic scope of the movie, the quest that Logan is forced to go on that eventually becomes personal. The effects might be goofy, but it’s a compelling story. Years after first watching this I eventually turned thirty myself and remember reflecting that I was now older than all of the characters in Logan’s Run and would have been ‘renewed’. If you don’t know what I mean by that, why not check out the movie?

Silver Streak

I haven’t seen Silver Streak for many years and possibly hadn’t seen it at all since watching it on TV with my Dad back in my childhood days. Despite this I have fond memories of the film while, at the same time, being able to remember almost nothing about it bar the closing shot.

While writing this blog post I decided to give it a fresh viewing. One of the things I remembered quite early on is that the reason it had grabbed my attention (back whenever that was) was because it had Jaws from the James Bond movies in it! Yes, I know I should be referring to him as Richard Kiel, but it’s Richard Kiel with metal teeth and I would have first seen Silver Streak at a time when Jaws was one of the most recognisable villains in the Bond franchise. The idea that this character could cross over into entirely different movies was fascinating to me at the time (even if it was clearly not intended to be the same character).

Watching the movie some fifty years after it first landed is a very different experience. It’s quite dated in many, many ways, although the script is just about sharp enough to carry most of those moments off. It also features a blackface sequence which is, arguably, only made bearable by the knowledge that Richard Pryor insisted he be involved in rewrites for it. This also marked the first on-screen pairing of Pryor with Gene Wilder (which almost happened with Blazing Saddles, and is definitely something that will come up in later posts).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Silver Streak (and something I would never have known had I not revisited it) is that it’s a very deliberate homage to another much-loved movie: North By Northwest, this time with Gene Wilder playing the ‘ordinary man’ caught up in a murderous conspiracy.

All The President’s Men

Given my love of seventies conspiracy movies it’s strange to think that I’ve only seen this once or twice. In a strange way it’s almost too obvious—it’s the ultimate conspiracy of the decade and, as such, seems oddly less interesting when you know it actually happened.

Appropriately my favourite part of this is probably the wonderful Hal Holbrook going largely unseen as the legendary Deep Throat. I’ve just read that he initially turned it down precisely because he realised no one would see him but Robert Redford persuaded him to take the role which, of course, ended up being one of his best-remembered roles.

The Enforcer

I watched all of the Dirty Harry films a few years ago. This is the last one I remember watching as a kid and is, by a very comfortable margin, the last mostly decent entry in the series. Sudden Impact gets a lot of credit for its iconic line but doesn’t have much to offer otherwise. The Enforcer at least gives us a character who still feels a bit like Harry Callaghan and has a suitably nihilistic ending. Still … not essential viewing, in my book.

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The Unseen

The big gap here is Rocky—that’s right: I’ve never seen Rocky. I actually came very close to watching it a few weeks back. What happened instead was that I listened to a podcast about the music to get me in the mood (the very excellent The Soundtrack Show) and then felt that I didn’t really need to watch the movie anymore. I’ll get around to it eventually but I expect I’ve probably missed the boat on this one and it’ll lose the impact it had when it first came out.

I remember my mother telling me Murder By Death was a hugely funny movie and the concept sounds great yet, somehow, I’ve not found the time to watch this one. It will be going on the watch list. I can’t claim to have ever had any interest in watching A Star Is Born, Midway or The Bad News Bears, so they won’t be going on the list.

Update: I attempted to watch Murder By Death the other day. I got as far as Peter Sellers’ first appearance in yellowface doing a Charlie Chan parody and decided I just couldn’t. Off the list, I’m afraid.

The Unheard Of

There’s one film in the North American top ten up there that I had honestly never heard of: To Fly! It turns out this one was an IMAX movie—the first IMAX blockbuster, in fact (read the wiki page)—which proved popular enough to squeeze its way into the box office top ten. It played a major role in popularising the large screen format and was still playing in the 1990s (having originally been scheduled for a one-year run). It’s highly possible I’ve seen this, given my Dad used to often take me for holidays in the USA during the early eighties, but I honestly can’t recall so down here it goes.

The others

My pet theory about cinematic decades (which is likely very easy to disprove) is that it takes the film business a few years following the start of the decade to work out what it’s doing. The archetypal eighties movie didn’t really get going until 1983-1984. Similarly, the start of the 1970s saw a mishmash of genres and movie styles before finally settling down into some recognisable tropes (disaster movies, conspiracy thrillers, new Hollywood, etc).

Perhaps it’s because of this that we have an embarrassment of riches at this point in the decade. While not quite a blockbuster year, we already see filmmakers playing around with a variety of genres and seeing how far they can be pushed. Some of my other favourite movies from include The Outlaw Josey Wales (originally helmed by Philip Kaufman before Clint Eastwood shunted him aside) and Assault on Precinct 13—two very different plays on the western genre; a genre which should have been dead and buried by now, but still has life in the right hands. The war movie, another popular genre from a decade or two previous, gets a fun outing in The Eagle Has Landed (a movie that I remembered visually from my younger days, and which took some minor detective work for me to identify again in later years) which borrows a little from the conspiracy thriller.

Nicolas Roeg takes the sci-fi movie into some fascinating new places with The Man Who Fell To Earth. I remember my school friends talking about this one due to its more salacious content, but even the first time I watched it I was drawn in more by its otherworldliness. It helped no end that I was a big David Bowie fan at the time as well as a sci-fi movie enthusiast.

Finally the horror movie gets a very different outing in The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane, a lesser known but unforgettable (once seen) movie starring a very young Jodie Foster tackling a very creepy Martin Sheen. I haven’t seen this one for many years and I’m now thinking it definitely warrants a rewatch.

UK Top 10

1. Jaws
2. The Return of The Pink Panther
3. All The President’s Men
4. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
5. Logan’s Run
6. The Man Who Would Be King
7. Bugsy Malone
8. The Bad News Bears
9. Marathon Man
10. At The Earth’s Core

An interesting mix of titles in the UK top ten for this year. A few of last year’s major hits finally make their way across the Atlantic alongside a few current releases too. It’s interesting to see a couple of other noteworthy releases of the year proving more popular than they did in North America.

Firstly, Marathon Man, a superlative thriller that still feels slightly odd with Dustin Hoffman in the lead, however good he is. I watched this again not too long ago and it feels a bit too self-conscious to be among my favourite movies from the decade but it’s still a dark and excellent ride.Perhaps not too surprising that The Man Who Would Be King gets a high showing given it stars two of the UK’s crown jewels: Sean Connery and Michael Caine (a fine pairing indeed). Similarly, At The Earth’s Core is (I think) a largely British production, hence its popularity here. Oh yeah, and Bugsy Malone—which I remember being huge, and which I’ve still never seen!

Join me next time for 1977 in which there were absolutely no big movies released. Not a one.

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