I’m taking a personal look back at the top ten films in every year since the one I was born in. We’re up to 1979. I was cannonballing towards 8 years of age. Margaret Thatcher took power in the UK, setting the political tone for the next few decades. The Ayotollah Khomenei was restored to power in Iran. Sony released the first Walkman, and Philips demonstrated the compact disc for the first time. Usenet was created by a couple of college students who were either very bored or very smart. Perhaps both. I might remember 1979 as a particularly drab year, but change was clearly afoot. And how was that reflected at the cinema, you ask? Let’s find out.
- Alien
- Nosferatu the Vampyre
- Apocalypse Now
- The Warriors
- Mad Max
- Stalker
- Escape from Alcatraz
- Moonraker
- Life of Brian
- Kramer vs Kramer
- Kramer vs. Kramer
- The Amityville Horror
- Rocky II
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture
- Apocalypse Now
- Alien
- 10
- The Jerk
- Moonraker
- The Muppet Movie
Only four movies appear in both lists this year, which again demonstrates how our tastes change in retrospect and when marketing hype is removed from the equation. To be honest the biggest surprise to me is seeing Moonraker in the IMDB top ten as I didn’t think anyone remembered that entry with great fondness. That said, the suspiciously high showing for Nosferatu does have me continuing to question the IMDB algorithm, Otherwise I think we have a pretty good spread of movies here, showing which titles had people queuing up at the box office in 1979, and which of those have stood the test of time.