Summer 2012 is overripe with superhero fantasies, pumped-up fairy tales, video game and board game adaptations, cartoon movies umpteenth entries in brain-dead series and franchises. 'Tis the season of tentpoles, every one of them hankering to be this summer's "Jaws." Really, is this all there is?
"But," some fan boy protests, "isn't that what summer at the movies is supposed to be?" Yes, according to the marketing mavens and dealmakers and packagers, that's the plan. But it wasn't ever thus. Leaving Spielberg's big fish out of it, what was the summer slate of '75 like? How was it different from the kind of present-day cinematic fare we credit "Jaws" for spawning?
But first, how did the revolution begin? In 1975, against considerable odds and with myriad technical difficulties, the Zanuck-Brown unit of Universal Pictures and young hotshot director Steven Spielberg brought novelist Peter Benchley's summer 1974 page-turner "Jaws" to the screen. Universal opted for an unprecedented 450-theater release supported by a marketing blitzkrieg, and the great white shark movie rose swiftly to become Hollywood's new box-office champion. Summer tentpole madness was born.
It's important to note a difference between "Jaws" and the vast majority of "high-concept" tentpole offerings that followed: "Jaws" was a really good movie. Spielberg and company didn't just deliver the requisite suspense and scares. They crafted a film rich in atmosphere, sense of place and situation, and above all, character -- the sort of engagingly quirky humanity that has remained a hallmark of the director's best movies.
And yet already something was going amiss. During its opening week, audiences for "Jaws" sat riveted throughout the film, but by Week 2 a new pattern had set in. Younger viewers, especially, spent a lot of time chatting, even getting up from their seats to move around the auditorium and visit with friends. Whenever the time drew nigh for the shark's next nosh, they'd pause, watch the screen, and whoop with satisfaction. Then the shark took a deepwater break and socializing resumed.
The movie, with its stellar performances and shrewd rhythms, had essentially ceased to matter -- had been deconstructed into designated high points and dispensable filler. And a new style of film-watching had been culturally sanctioned.
"Jaws" looms as the most evolutionarily consequential event of that movie season, but if we set aside its spectacular box office and impact on the film industry, it was, for the consumers of the day, just one attraction among many in a diverse field.And instead of Aryan superheroes, comic-strip fantasy and the endless irreality of CGI, the bill of fare at the multiplexes was largely movies with true movie stars, real-life plotlines, adult genres and visions attentive to whole actions in the real world.
Let's start at the summit. The week before "Jaws" went into release, a cornucopia of a film opened on somewhat fewer than 450 screens across the land. Robert Altman's "Nashville" came on as a vibrant mashup of everything cockeyed, corrupt and glorious about modern American life, media, politics, show business, aspiration and desperation. Twenty-four"stars" careened through nearly as many converging or ricocheting story vectors during several days in the country-music capital. A viewer rarely had the luxury of feeling sure about which sector of the wide, wide screen to be watching most closely. No one had ever seen anything quite like it, even in the already notable, and notably iconoclastic, career of its director. "Nashville" and "Jaws" would end up as rivals for the Academy Award.
Social comment was more conventionally front and center in "Smile," Michael Ritchie's take on American competitiveness, as refracted most memorably through the gamesmanship of a smalltown beauty pageant. The movie's drugstore-Fotomat look was a brave choice for stellar cinematographer Conrad Hall, who heated up an entirely different color palette to catch the rotten-sunlight atmosphere of "The Day of the Locust." Director John Schlesinger's ambitious attempt to adapt Nathanael West's classic novel of '30s Los Angeles mostly misfired ("an embarrassingly constipated apocalypse," one critic observed), but at least a major Hollywood studio was willing to let him try it.
Comedy, too, was ambitious in '75. With his fourth directorial effort, "Love and Death," Woody Allen made merry with the classic Russian novelists, the ghost of Eisenstein, the music of Prokofiev -- and yeah, a smidge or two of Ingmar Bergman. "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" told the terrible truth about the killer Rabbit of Caerbannog and the Knights who say Ni, but to this very day the world remains unready for such revelations. With "The Return of the Pink Panther," director Blake Edwards and star Peter Sellers picked up the Inspector Clouseau thread abandoned after "A Shot in the Dark" more than a decade earlier; it was a return more fond than inspired, but a pleasant enough way to pass a summer evening.
In 1975 they still had movie stars worth the candle, even if it was an off year for some of them. Paul Newman reprised his private eye Lew Harper in "The Drowning Pool," but the already-dubious sassiness of 1966's "Harper" had turned sour and glum. Robert Mitchum, premier icon of RKO film noir, was summoned to play Philip Marlowe in a new version of Raymond Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely" (RKO had done two in the 1940s, sans Mitchum). It looked -- and played -- more like a nostalgic magazine spread than a movie, but that wasn't Bob's fault. John Wayne had two late-career showcases: "Brannigan," featuring him as a fish-out-of-water Chicago cop cracking a case in London, and "Rooster Cogburn," for which he re-donned his "True Grit" eyepatch. The Western's ad campaign unofficially changed the title to "Rooster Cogburn ... and the Lady," stressing that Katharine Hepburn, no less, was the Duke's co-star in a movie willing to be mistaken for a distant cousin of "The African Queen."
The Western genre was more nobly served by writer-director Richard Brooks, whose "Bite the Bullet" bypassed cliché at every turn to recount a days-long, overland horse race. (Incidentally, the film made its Blu-ray bow last month.) "Bite the Bullet" was also one of three summer '75 titles boasting Gene Hackman in the lead. This superb actor become unlikely movie star also returned, like John Wayne, to the role that had brought him an Oscar: maverick cop Popeye Doyle of "The French Connection." Although it didn't repeat the 1971 film's success with the public or the motion picture Academy, "French Connection II," a sequel deeper and more powerful than its predecessor, benefited from director John Frankenheimer's gift for portraying troubled men on the edge of obliteration.
"Night Moves," Hackman's third movie of the season, won little attention, mixed reviews, and the bum's rush from the few screens showing it, yet this haunting Arthur Penn picture is the quintessential '70s film. Spiritual kin to the previous year's "Chinatown," the movie adopts the framework of a private-eye picture even as the mystery at its core keeps slipping away -- as if "Night Moves" were a Michelangelo Antonioni film in disguise, and there were enigmas of character, motivation and human nature no design could encompass. Hackman's performance as the P.I., a former football player with a marriage on the rocks and a sense of decency he'd be more comfortable without, may be his finest. (And Melanie Griffith, a very ripe 16, gives off whiffs of sad corruption.)
There's one more film to single out from summer '75, and although it comes nowhere near the brilliance or zeitgeist aptness of a "Night Moves" or a "Nashville," it was a moment to cherish then and now. "The Wind and the Lion" was a large-spirited adventure movie from an eternally adolescent writer-director, John Milius (a contemporary and colleague of Steven Spielberg, in fact) who clearly yearned to revive the grand scale of golden-age Hollywood epics. Telling a rousing period story loosely inspired by an actual 1904 incident, he undertook an amazing balancing act that entailed being mindful of the self-congratulatory hipness of the contemporary audience while also keeping faith with the red-blooded, unashamedly heroic tenets and passions of old-school, often jingoistic movie adventurism. And Milius pretty much pulled it off, surprising the viewer each time the viewer thought he had everything figured. The director succeeded in telling an adult version of a child's adventure story, but not adult enough to spoil it.
Key to the film's triumph was Sean Connery, savoring the juiciest star part in recent memory and making the most of it. His character (the Lion? The Wind?) is the Berber chieftain El Raisuli, prepared to match wits and wills against a distant enemy he will never meet (Brian Keith as U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt -- the Wind? The Lion?). Part of the beauty of the film and the performance is that we never for a moment forget Sean Connery; even his inconcealable Scots burr is flaunted as though it odd to be perfectly acceptable as an aural replica of what a cultured Berber chieftain talked like. Almost certainly no one was planning it, but the actor's performance in "The Wind and the Lion" marked the first installment in an unofficial trilogy completed by John Huston's "The Man Who Would Be King" (released Christmastime 1975) and Richard Lester's "Robin and Marian" (summer 1976): rich portraits of aging heroes confronting defeat and death with dignity and grace. It's the sort of cinematic genealogy that enables audiences, sharing the (never-CGI'd) spiritual and emotional journey through the films, to grow.
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