Reeling: Grand Follies from the ‘70s American Canon

I’ve long been fascinated by the way that virtually every big-name American director of the ‘70s released at least one film that was a) a box-office disaster, and b) was vilified by most critics at the time. Hubris, megalomania, coke—they almost all seemed to go off the deep end at some point, and some of them never made it back.

I picked 12 films that I think fit. The three that will probably raise the most objections are Pat Garrett, New York, New York, and Interiors; someone else might say that Star 80 was too inconsequential to include.

I’m going mostly by memory, but I’m pretty sure none of these was well received at the time, and, based on the ones I’ve seen, and what I know of the ones I haven’t, they were all wildly ambitious. I limited myself to one film per director. I went with One from the Heart rather than Apocalypse Now, because whatever kind of troubled history the latter had, it was (and remains) a major critical success. With Altman, I listed Quintet rather than Popeye, because…Quintet’s more interesting to me. There’s subjectivity at work here, of course. I couldn’t think of an obvious candidate from among Ashby, Mazursky, Rafelson, Pakula, or De Palma (speaking personally, Scarface belongs, but I know I’m way in the minority there; also, it made a lot of money, and there were at least two big-name critics—Ebert and Canby—who liked it).

So vote for the one you’d be most inclined to passionately defend. These films are polarizing by nature, and they’ll almost always have people who love them for one reason or another.

I haven't seen a lot of these but often wonder if some of them are as terrible/interminable as their reputations. I've never enjoyed the Deerhunter, so not really curious at all about Heaven's Gate but New York New York sounds like a delightful disaster, for ex.

I lol'd at the anecdote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls about Jodorowsky telling Hopper he had "failed" with the "Last Movie" and had just made a conventional American western.

of the ones I've seen:

Pat Garrett is tops, easily of a piece with Peckinpah's best (that reminds me, for some reason this and Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia have been on On Demand recently)
Quintet is stupid.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the best of the bunch, and it's just very good (I watched it again last month).

Star 80 is terrible in a masochistic way.

very curious about that one, didn't know the story behind it until recently and in general I LOVE Fosse. but it seems pretty icky.

I'm still celebrating getting through such a long post without messing up the italics.

I watched Pat Garrett for the first time a few months ago; I definitely loved all the footage with "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" playing. One thing I meant to mention: many people would put Cruising on the list rather than Sorcerer.

You must endure Mariel Hemingway's drippy performance.

xpost

Eric Roberts is creepily effective, though. And there's a great roller-disco scene set to Benny Goodman. (Also the only film that crosses over here, with Roger Rees essentially playing Bogdanovich.)

I watched Pat Garrett for the first time a few months ago; I definitely loved all the footage with "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" playing. One thing I meant to mention: many people would put Cruising on the list rather than Sorcerer.

― clemenza, Wednesday, December 8, 2010 6:58 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

Cruising was more controversial, but Sorcerer was an unmitigated disaster (which I voted for)... Cruising was actually kind of a hit, wasn't it?

You're right. Wikipedia calls it a "modest financial success," and lists the box-office as just shy of $20 million, which was probably still pretty decent in 1979. So I guess that doesn't fit. I do remember how bad the reviews were.

Cruising features the Germs ergo it cannot suck

pat garrett probably is the best but the missouri breaks is my fave up there. ny, ny is very watchable, it doesn't quite come together though, he's made worse movies. is interiors the allen disaster? it got a lot of oscar nominations and i can't imagine there were many box office hopes riding on it. always thought stardust memories was supposed to be allen's disaster. has anyone here actually seen at long last love?

Star 80 is incredible.

Damn--you're absolutely right about Stardust Memories, which completely slipped my mind. Interiors was quickly forgotten in the wake of Manhattan--as Stanley Kauffmann pointed out, there were after-the-fact rationalizations for it as having cleared the way for Manhattan--but I'm pretty sure Stardust Memories was lambasted. That's the one that should be listed.

From where else: "Stardust Memories opened in North America on September 26, 1980 to an onslaught of bad reviews. At 29 theatres, it grossed $326,779 ($11,268 per screen) in its opening weekend. The film failed to attract more than Allen's loyal fanbase in the long run, and it grossed a modest $10,389,003 by the end of its run. The film's budget was $10 million, so it likely made a profit after foreign revenue was taken into account."

I remember it came out at almost the same time as Raging Bull (same studio, too), and was dwarfed by the Scorsese film.

interiors cost/grossed about the same.

Working from memory, but I think a lot of reviewers, though puzzled by Interiors, gave it the benefit of the doubt because it was so off-the-chart different from everything Allen had done to that point (and there was undoubtedly residual goodwill still around from Annie Hall). With Stardust Memories, I remember actual hostility from reviewers, as in "Who does this guy think he is?"

i think stardust has the better rep now tho

Probably. A lot of these are viewed much more favorably today than they were then; in drawing up the list, I was trying to remember which of these directors' films were most vilified at the time. I wouldn't be surprised if Heaven's Gate draws three or four votes in the next Sight & Sound poll (even though it lost one with Robin Woods's death).

"Wood's..."

w/ the exception of at long last love and quintet (weirdly - cuz i know a lot of altman fan so i've heard defenses of dr. t and the women, that neve campbell ballet movie, oc and stiggs, you name it) i've heard ppl rep for each of these movies (well w/ 1941 it's more they'll defend parts of it)(which to be honest i'll defend parts of it). i've definitely heard ppl rep for heaven's gate but i've seen enough cimino for this lifetime.

Both Interiors and Stardust Memories are awful in boring ways. The former is stilted and badly written in every way.

The humdrum title Interiors gives a good clue to the faux-literary pretensions it carried.

I bought Quintet online and gave it a try a couple of years ago. Got about 20 minutes into it; just deadly slow and ponderous. Altman's got a number of follies on his resume, most of them located between Nashville and his mid-'80s comeback.

It's been years since I've seen either Interiors or Stardust Memories. I remember the latter's "we liked your earlier, funnier movies better" schtick; I remember nothing about Interiors other than that it was, indeed, boring.

Yes, I've seen At Long Last Love, also long ago. (The entire film is currently watchable in segments on youtube.) I love a lot of B-grade musicals, and actually have a fondness for Cybill Shepherd's debut LP, "Cybill Does It... To Cole Porter," which features many of the same songs from the film, so my tolerance for this film might be higher than most. The choreography is understandably clunky, and the vocals by non-singers idea presaged Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You. Parts of this work *okay* for me as an interesting but failed experiment, but I can see where most people would hate it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2deTJpNOuo&feature=related

I think Stardust Memories is great if just for the opening and closing scenes but it is VERY "bite the hand that feeds me" material and it's no wonder critics hated it.

there are Quintet defenders on this very board (Milton Parker iirc?)

"I’ve long been fascinated by the way that virtually every big-name American director of the ‘70s released at least one film that was a) a box-office disaster, and b) was vilified by most critics at the time."

I'm curious, does Star 80 actually meet any of these criteria?

well, Kael didn't like it

One from the Heart is up there with Apocalypse Now and Tetro imo. My easy vote.

I'm pretty sure the reviews for Star 80 were mostly brutal--I believe Kael called it pornography, but I know she wasn't alone. Wikipedia says it made just over $6 million. I guess that's not a disaster, but you wouldn't call it good. I threw that on the list at the last minute--it's one of about three that I know are on the fence.

I'd be most inclined to passionately defend three of these. But I doubt I'd have many opportunities to do so with The Last Movie (just too avant for most but if you dug it, then definitely check out American Dreamer which is to The Last Movie as Hearts of Darkness is to Apocalypse Now). And folly or no, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid doesn't require many defenders today (although I'm apparently in the minority in preferring Slim Pickens' death scene [aka the greatest scene in American cinema history] without "Knockin on Heaven's Door" on the soundtrack, fantastic though it is in other contexts). So 1941 it is and I'ma defend ALL of it, esp. the director's cut. Still Spielberg's best film if you don't count his Kubrick collaboration A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

Worst film on this list: very easily At Long Last Love. The New Hollywood waves its dick in your face. But it's a pathetic, small one which demands your attention but offers so precious little in return. Even though it's slightly more tolerable than Song of Norway, it makes me angrier. As Kael said of the latter, “You can’t get angry at something this bad; it seems to have been made by trolls.” But boy can I get angry at a self-satisfied "correction" of the classical Hollywood musical. Hate hate HATE it!

Side note: it's important to remember that, though not a folly, Raging Bull didn't exactly burn up the box office. In fact, iirc (from that Easy Riders book perhaps?), its disappointing performance forced Scorsese to put The Last Temptation of Christ, which he was prepared to film next, on hold. But that's when his great period began.

It's been so long since I saw 1941, I don't have any sense of it anymore. I know that Kael thought it had passages that were some of the greatest ever.

As you can see from the thread title, I tend to see these films (and so many films from the '70s) through the filter of Kael. I wouldn't doubt that the vitriol that was heaped on some of those listed above was tied in with how polarizing Kael was herself (not all of them, as some were made by directors she didn't care for). But I get the feeling that because Spielberg and Altman and Scorsese were such favorites of hers, when the time came where they failed--where they got their comeuppance, in a sense--critics who didn't like Kael pounced that much harder.

1941 it is and I'ma defend ALL of it, esp. the director's cut. Still Spielberg's best film if you don't count his Kubrick collaboration A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

Challops of the best kind!

Curious how you see At Long Last Love as "correction" of the Hollywood musical, rather than just hamfisted tribute.

Can't divulge too much there because I'm writing on it. If you have the soundtrack, though, most of Bog's redonkulous reasoning is in the liner notes.

really hopin that "the Bog" is real-life nickname for ol' Peter

One way to avoid having a major folly on your record is to go the George Lucas route: after he made the space movie, he essentially stopped directing.

There were a couple of foreign films I considered for the list. Zabriskie Point fits in a lot of ways, but it's much earlier, and obviously Antonioni comes from a totally different world. Also thought about 1900, which I've never seen. I know it was mammoth, and I don't think it was either a commercial or (generally speaking) a critical success. And De Niro sort of brings it into the sphere of the rest. But there are far more ways that they're different than ways they're similar.

um Lucas has some major follies on his record FYI

some people around here would even call them CRIMES

Zabriskie Point fits in a lot of ways, but it's much earlier

Much earlier for what, though, exactly? I'm confused on how you're periodizing this.

I don't follow Lucas much, but I guess he did eventually go back to directing all the SW films...Do you also maybe count him as de facto director of the ones he just produced?

I guess it's only a year earlier than the Hopper; originally I was going to stick to a '75-80 window, Bogdanovich to Cimino, then I widened it. I'm just kind of winging it here...

nah Lucas hated directing and while his taste as a producer was predictably execrable for the most part I wouldn't blame him for the crappy direction of Willow or Howard the Duck or whatever.

but those prequel films. oy

The Missouri Breaks isn't bad; it's "weird" in that picaresque sort of way a lot of these seventies Westerns were.

Always wanted to see it, just never have for some reason. The folly/vanity-project element there seems more tied in with the two leads than the director, like Ishtar.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I never even voted...I have no strong feelings about any of these films. Who started this idiotic poll?

Would Barry Lyndon count?

Maybe. But it didn't perform hideously at the box office, its production was no loonier than any other of his projects, and finding passionate defenders of a Kubrick film is about as difficult as finding a penis on a man/Kubrick defender.

You should poll The 50 Worst Films of All Time next, clemenza.

Would Barry Lyndon count?

Maybe a tiny bit--it's big, and it's obsessive--but it's just too good a film by most any measure (critical acclaim, awards, etc.), and was greeted as such right from the start. Except for Interiors to a degree, that's not true of any of the above.

I'm off to study up on the intricacies of Terror of Tiny Town.

star 80 is the film that seems the most odd & out on this list, not because it's great (i like it, but that's just me), but because it wasn't a giant ambitious faceplant relative to fosse's other work. if anything, it's a modest, character-driven picture: hardly some ego- & coke-bloated folly. at least that's how i remember it. all that jazz is fosse's narcissistic swan dive over the precipice, redeemed by the fact that it somehow worked and managed to turn a nice profit.

^^^ agree also Barry Lyndon sucks.

I agree that All That Jazz is a better choice in a lot of ways. I deferred to the fact that it got some acclaim and won some awards; as a 19-year-old Scorsese fan, I squirmed through it at the time and have never gone back for a second look.

This poll would be a lot more coherent if I'd stuck with the four or five films that obviously fit: At Long Last Love, Sorcerer, New York, New York, 1941, Heaven's Gate, and One from the Heart. Whatever their reputations now, they were all colossal belly-flops at the time. By trying to add a few more films, I really confused the issue.

^This thread was your grand folly. Hey that's OK, I enjoyed it.

All That Jazz is awesome. dunno if I can take the morbidity of Star 80 but I do love Fosse.

Was really surprised by how good Roy Scheider was.

This thread was your grand folly

Love it! It started with me suggesting additions to Eric H's folly thread, then setting up this. I now see why he had a very narrow, specific focus.

By the way, this poll was originally budgeted at 75 cents, but I ended up spending well over $100 million on focus groups. The whole thing was a vanity project right from the start. It may single-handedly bring to close my career here at ILX.

xoxo

But you're nice so Menahen Golan will reach deep and give you $100 million to direct the much-needed sequel to The Apple (1980) tentatively titled The Apple II: What Would Adorno Do - Electric Boogaloo?

Other poll ideas:

Best Rebound From A Folly
Most Obnoxious Art Film/Would-Be Folly

Best Rebound From A Folly

this would be good except lol a lot of these guys (Hopper, Bogdanovich, Copolla) didn't rebound

I think you're basically right--they never again reached the stature they once held (hard to imagine now, but I think there were critics who considered Bogdanovich more or less major after The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon)--but each of those guys did come back with some modest critical successes. Bogdanovich had They All Laughed and Mask, Coppola had the S.E. Hinton movies and (the one I like) Dracula, and Hopper had his big comeback as an actor, plus a couple of fairly successful films that he directed.

hard to imagine now, but I think there were critics who considered Bogdanovich more or less major after The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon

yeah this really surprised me when I was reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. He seems like such a minor figure in retrospect.

His career was derailed by Orson Welles, who instructed him to clean up after Kael.

Which is not to say that I don't like The Last Picture Show a lot--it's excellent. But I think Kael and Kauffmann and Simon saw very clearly what a lot of critics didn't, that its excellence was very imitative and rather limited.

I mentioned this on the Bogdanovich thread: when he spoke in Toronto a month ago, I was genuinely surprised at how much bitterness he retains for Kael, ostensibly because of "Raising Kane" but surely more to do with how negatively she reviewed his films. No exaggeration: He stops just short of calling her a lying, no-talent b_____. (There was some commotion on another thread over whether that word's permissible or not...)

Kael's comments – "an honest soap opera" a movie "even Nixon could love" – are right-on. And, according to Boggy, Nixon did love it. He's got an anecdote about an unexpectedly garrulous Nixon praising TLPS in a White House receiving line.

i'll take barry lyndon over any of these that i've seen (though i haven't gotten around to the peckinpah yet).

bogdanovich (and welles) were mostly right about "raising kane," even tho it is a very entertaining, brilliantly written article.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.