A year ago, Sight & Sound magazine came out with its once-a-decade list of the greatest movies ever made, passing over the likes of Dr. Strangelove, Double Indemnity and Pulp Fiction, which didn't make the top 100, and skipping over past winners Citizen Kane and Vertigo as well, before settling on Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a French art film about a woman silently peeling potatoes for three and a half hours.
I've seen Jeanne Dielman and I've gotta tell you, its appeal mystifies me. But if by some miracle it really is the best movie ever made, then Delphine Seyrig definitely deserves the Oscar for best actress because she's on screen every single minute — the movie lives or dies on her performance.
Me, I'm going with Ann-Margret in Tommy. I can't say with 100% confidence that it's the best performance of 1975 but she had a great career, was a wonderful singer-dancer and deserves some kind of award for letting that lunatic of a director, Ken Russell, hose her down with a swimming pool's worth of Heinz baked beans.
As always, though, the choice is yours.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Sight & Sound came out this past week with its once-a-decade list of the greatest movies ever made.
As usual, it treats the ticket-buying public with ridicule rather than respect. Screw Star Wars and Marvel. And there's not much love for classical Hollywood filmmaking either — no Spielberg, no Hawks, no Capra, no Lubitsch.
Dr. Strangelove? Double Indemnity? The Marx Brothers? Not on the list.
The Adventures of Robin Hood? Pulp Fiction? The Grapes of Wrath? Nope.
A Hard Day's Night? Unforgiven? Uh-uh.
Not even Weekend at Bernie's 2!
Make of it what you will.
As for their choice of the best of all time, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — a dull movie about a dull woman living on the raggedy edge of Dullsville — well, other than to note that it's 200 minutes of Delphine Seyrig peeling potatoes, I don't have much of anything to say about it.
But I do want to mention how much film fandom has changed in my lifetime. Back in the day, everything was word of mouth — no VHS, no DVDs, no streaming. No IMDB. Hell, no cable television! There were only two ways to see a movie: in the theater or on broadcast television. Sometimes you'd have to wait five years to see a movie and if for some reason you missed it, you waited five more.
And if some boozed-up jackanapes laid claim to a watching-paint-dry-snoozefest as the best movie of all-time, you had to take his word for it.
Now pretty much everybody in the industrialized world can dial up a movie like Jeanne Dielman (on the Criterion channel) and watch it at their convenience.
The old film canon is dead because you don't need one — watch everything yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Anyway, is Jeanne Dielman the greatest movie ever made? Let me put it this way — I'd rather spend three hours on line at the DMV. But if you want to vote it the best movie of 1975, here's your chance.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
The first time around, Erik Beck and Mister Muleboy — who I like to think of as the loyal opposition — took me to task over my selections for 1975's best supporting actor. Muleboy plumped for Robert Shaw's turn in Jaws and the math supports him; but Erik's argument for Jack Warden in Shampoo fell, by my count, on twenty-eight deaf ears, including two of my own.
The rest of the year stands as is. Jaws took the top prize with less than twenty percent of the vote. Other top contenders were Nashville, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, all of which finished within five votes of the winner. If ever a situation called for ranked choice voting, this would be it (that is, as long as the New York City Board of Elections doesn't do the actual counting).
By a slightly more comfortable margin, Steven Spielberg (Jaws) claimed the award for directing.
Top honors for acting went to Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Isabelle Adjani (The Story of Adele H.). Lily Tomlin (Nashville) romped to the award for best supporting actress.
Okay, let's get best supporting actor squared away.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ.
Sorry I'm running late today. It was a busy week on the cancer front. I'll try to blog ahead a couple of months so there'll be no future disruptions of service ...
This final collection spans two years simply because Lennon put out a studio album of original material in 1974, McCartney in 1975, but not vice versa.
The Beatles Solo: 1974-1975
SIDE ONE
● Venus and Mars/Rockshow – Paul (3:46) (A favorite pastime of the press is to build someone up to ridiculous heights, tear him down because he gets a nose bleed way up there on that pedestal, then write a lovely redemption story after he bounces off the bottom — or a "whatever happened to" story if he doesn't. It's a lazy narrative arc and we could surely do with something better, but in the mid-1970s, McCartney was riding his redemption story to the toppermost of the poppermost, with five straight number one albums. Critics eventually went back to ripping him with the release of Back to the Egg in 1979, but he wrote hit singles into the 1980s, hit albums to the present day, and has won every award known to mankind. This is the single edit, which made it to #12 in the U.S. charts.)
● Whatever Gets You Thru the Night – John (3:28) (Lennon's only solo #1 hit during his lifetime, part of me thinks even that was only because Elton John sang vocals with him. The song came to him one night when he stumbled across a sermon by Reverend Ike while channel surfing. Elton predicted this track would hit the top of the charts and got the skeptical Lennon to agree that if it did, they would play live together during Elton's upcoming concert at Madison Square Garden. The rest is rock n roll history.)
● Stand By Me – John (3:28) (From John's oldies album, Rock 'n' Roll, this cover of the Ben E. King classic was a top twenty hit. For such a simple recording, there's a long, tortuous history behind it, including accusations of plagiarism, lawsuits and countersuits, stolen tapes and gunfire in the studio. You can read about it here. All you really need to know is that this was the last record Lennon released before his five-year self-exile from the music scene.)
● Magneto and Titanium Man – Paul (3:16) (Actually, even though Venus and Mars hit number one on the charts, it did so for only a week, and compared to the success of Band on the Run, was considered something of a disappointment. This song, based on the Marvel comic book characters, was the flip side of "Venus and Mars/Rockshow," the third single from the album.)
● (It's All Down To) Goodnight Vienna – Ringo (3:01) (The title tune to Ringo's fourth album, Lennon wrote it — that's him on the count-in. Appearing twice on the album, this version combines elements of both and was released as a single in the U.S. It only reached #31 in the charts. Apparently nobody was in the mood to buy this paean to the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)
SIDE TWO
● #9 Dream – John (4:47) (Appropriately enough, the lyrics came from a dream. Lennon later dismissed this as a "throwaway," but it's the best thing on Walls and Bridges and it cracked the top ten as a follow-up to "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.")
● Dark Horse – George (3:55) (The title tune from George's worst solo album. He was suffering from laryngitis but recorded a record anyway, an effort the critics dubbed "Dark Hoarse." A failed marriage, a return to drugs and alcohol, and the pressure of having to fulfill a recording contract were all getting to him. Still, I love the single, which hit #15 in the U.S. If you like anything else from the album, I'm happy for you.)
● Listen to What the Man Said – Paul (3:57) (A #1 hit in the U.S. Recorded in New Orleans with what I think was the fifth iteration of the Wings lineup, with Joe English joining the group on drums and Tom Scott sitting in on saxophone. Looking back at the contemporaneous reviews, the critics wanted to hate this but grudgingly conceded it was really good pop music — damn those catchy melodies! This is the version from Wingspan without the unintelligible muttering between tracks.)
● Bless You – John (4:38) (A love letter to Yoko during their long separation. Lennon also offers words of encouragement here to David Spinozza, a session musician from the Mind Games era who may or may not have been sleeping with Yoko in his absence. Certainly John was sleeping with May Pang with Yoko's encouragement. John and Yoko had a very strange relationship, but then they were very strange people.)
● Scared – John (4:37) (This is also about Lennon's separation from Yoko, but the other side of the coin. "Hatred and jealousy, gonna be the death of me / I guess I knew it right from the start / Sing out about love and peace / Don't want to see the red raw meat / The green eyed goddamn straight from your heart.")
SIDE THREE
● Junior's Farm – Paul (4:24) (Written at songwriter Curly Putman, Jr's farm, recorded in Nashville. Released as a standalone single in 1974, it hit #3 on the U.S. charts, just #16 in the U.K.)
● Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox) – John (2:55) (A love song for May Pang, that's Elton John on backing vocals. According to the Beatles Bible, it took three hours of takes for Elton to match Lennon's phrasing. "People were leaving the room," Elton said later. "Razor blades were being passed out!")
● No No Song – Ringo (2:34) (Ringo's last unalloyed commercial success, a #3 hit in the U.S. He never cracked the top twenty again. Not being a songwriter himself, Ringo had to rely on the kindness of strangers for his material, and unfortunately, with each passing year strangers and friends alike grew more and more careless, palming off indifferently-written dreck that left Ringo's limited vocal talents very much exposed. I suspect it didn't help that he started chasing musical trends — Ringo does disco! — or, if you'll pardon me for saying so, that he was drinking like a fish. His next album, Rotogravure, limped in at #28 in the charts, the three after at #162, #129 and #98, respectively. In the 1980s, he was the narrator of the Thomas the Tank Engine series.)
● Old Dirt Road – John (4:12) (Co-written with Harry Nilsson. Along with the Who's Keith Moon and ex-Beatle Ringo, Nilsson was one of John's drinking mates during the Lost Weekend. Compared to those legendary boozers, Lennon was a relative lightweight. And yet he could fall down with the best of them.)
● Letting Go – Paul (4:32) (This is the album version of a song that was later remixed and edited for release as a single. It hit only #39 in the charts, McCartney's first single to miss the top twenty in the U.S. since "Mary Had a Little Lamb," which hardly counts. He wouldn't suffer another flop until "Mull of Kintyre," the biggest selling single in U.K. history at that time but which failed to chart altogether in the U.S.)
SIDE FOUR
● You – George (3:43) (George followed up 1974's critically-panned Dark Horse with Extra Texture, the second worst album of his career. Released as a single, "You" made it to #20 in the U.S. The follow-up single, "This Guitar (Can't Keep From Crying)" — no, really, that's what it was called — failed to chart at all. Harrison would eventually regain his form, if not all of his commercial appeal, and would make some great records as part of the Traveling Wilburys.)
● Sally G – Paul (3:41) (The flip side of "Junior's Farm," this was in itself a top twenty hit. A country-and-western love letter to Nashville where McCartney recorded the single, this got a lot of radio play in my hometown back in the day. That's Johnny Gimble on the fiddle, Lloyd Green on the pedal steel guitar.)
● Steel and Glass – John (4:38) (Most people assume this is about Allen Klein, John's choice to manage the Beatles after the death of Brian Epstein, and whom Lennon would later sue, but John said it wasn't that simple. "[L]ike a novel writer, if I'm writing about something other than myself, I use other people I know or have known as examples. If I want to write a 'down' song, I would have to remember being down, and when I wrote Steel And Glass I used various people and objects. If I had listed who they were, it would be a few people, and you would be surprised. But it really isn't about anybody ... For sure, it isn't about Paul and it isn't about Eartha Kitt.")
● Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out) – John (5:10) (Lennon wrote this one with Frank Sinatra in mind who, unfortunately, never recorded it. Would have made a great companion piece to "One For My Baby.")
● Call Me Back Again – Paul (4:59) (McCartney doing a soul number in New Orleans with Jimmy McCulloch on guitar. A live version appeared on Wings Over America.)
Total Running Time: 79:42.
What have we got here — 9 Lennon's, 7 McCartney's, 2 Harrison's, 2 Starr's. The final totals: John 37, Paul 37, George 20, Ringo 9. 103 total.
That's it. As usual for the Monkey, this has been an exhausting exercise in overkill. I hope the nineteen people who read it get a small modicum of pleasure from the effort.
I wonder in retrospect why Robert Altman chose to plant so many of his movies in settings he didn't understand or particularly care for—Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Garrison Keillor, high fashion, country music, English society, Popeye cartoons, Korea. Was it sloppiness, arrogance, boredom, or was it a necessary artistic conceit, like Nuke LaLoosh wearing garters on the pitching mound, to keep his focus slightly off-center which is the proper mindset for both an artisan pitcher and a great director? I don't know.
Whatever the case, though, I've got to tell you, Altman knew exactly nothing about Nashville-based country music. (He later admitted as much.) I grew up two doors down from George Jones and Tammy Wynette, three doors down from Bobby Bare (Sr. and Jr.), went to church with Johnny Cash, knew Roy Orbison, and was close friends with William Lee Golden's sons. My brother is a drummer and his friends are some of the best sessions players in Nashville. And as I mentioned to Erik Beck (of the Boston Becks) on his blog recently, with the exception of "I'm Easy," not one of the songs in Nashville would get a second hearing during open mic night at the Blue Bird Cafe.
Now normally I'd say this is only a minor quibble, like complaining that the Casablanca of the movie looks nothing like the Casablanca I once visited. But since the movie is essentially a country & western musical, with an hour's worth of musical performances, Altman's contempt for the form is something of a major flaw.
Not to say Nashville isn't a great movie. I think it has real insight into our national obsession with celebrity, and how we confuse being a fan with being a friend. Perhaps if he had called the movie Las Vegas or Hollywood or Broadway or something else I know but don't know well, I might have chosen it as the best picture of the year. As it is, I'd call it a flawed masterpiece, well worth your time but not as good as it could have been had he taken a minimal amount of care.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:Jaws (prod. David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:Monty Python and the Holy Grail (prod. Mark Forstater and Michael White)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) (prod. Werner Herzog)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Isabelle Adjani (L'histoire d'Adèle H. a.k.a The Story Of Adele H.)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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