Last Tango in Paris / **** (1972)

No other high-profile actor from the Hollywood golden age was more earnest in personifying the agony of character than the great Marlon Brando. Across four decades of challenging performances that involved smooth-talking creeps (“A Streetcar Named Desire”), crime world kingpins (“The Godfather”), exiled military generals (“Apocalypse Now”) and a mournful dock worker (“On the Waterfront”), it was his harrowing turn as a pseudo-predatory widow in “Last Tango in Paris” that ricocheted with the most realism. Something within what was otherwise accepted as perfunctory dialogue and staple behaviors slipped past the notion of simple observation and echoed deeply and sincerely, particular in a cluster of scenes where the camera observes his mourning process. “I’ll never understand the truth about you,” he tells the figure of his deceased wife before collapsing in a heap of raw emotion over her corpse. There is the moment where the entirety of his career can be absorbed in miniature, in a scene where all the conviction of his method is unleashed in a heartbreaking explosion of grief and confusion. How did he find the ability, or the strength, to transcend the notion of embodiment and become the very source of torment he was portraying? Where most actors simply repeat the words and actions to the service of a story, Brando became one with an identity.

Images / ***1/2 (1972)

While the seed of Robert Altman’s “3 Women” is said to be contained in “Persona,” the key bridge between them may be “Images,” a daring film he made in 1972 during the pinnacle of his first (and some say greatest) commercial peak. Like those films, it was an experiment that embodied the bold risk of an emerging method of cinema, where a garden of new filmmakers was being driven by themes more than characters or story – and though Altman was still refining his own voice, it presented the sort of audacious challenges that horrified those resting comfortably in convention. Yet today it rarely comes up in a discussion about his most prominent work, other than a vague reference to the confusion it first caused in the film festival circuit; initially, no one could decipher the intricate meanings between the overlapping narrative arcs, and many gave up in frustration too early to realize their concealed resonance. Was it simply ahead of its time? Or did “3 Women” cast a shadow impossible to move out of? Some, fortunately, have kept the material active in discussion despite a trend to elevate the more populist achievements of his early days, and thanks to internet theories and a new digital restoration it can finally be seen with the tool of modern hindsight, where its power becomes obvious.

"Last House on the Left" Revisited

In some underhanded way a horror film has the capacity to contemplate one’s destructive tendencies just as it does to abuse and torment the souls of the innocent. More perceptive directors discover those possibilities not by holding out optimism in bleak scenarios, but usually by looking through the cracked mirror of passive acceptance. That is the sort of wisdom that informs many of the early Wes Craven pictures, several of which were made with a distinction that raises them above the more sensationalized Hollywood gorefests of later times (even his own). To most they possess the foresight to see a purpose beyond the astonishing violence, and to regard them is to understand that there are some terrible side-roads one must walk before the fates can restore light to an obscured path. But what is one to make of “Last House on the Left,” his nihilistic debut, which by all indications ought to have been one of those endeavors forever lost in the wastes of oblivion? Like a painful secret it persists achingly through the minds of those who discover it, often to a point of mystification; decidedly outside of conventional standards and made quickly and cheaply in a span of weeks, little was there to announce it as anything other than just another trenchant exercise in the murderous tendencies of the disturbed. And somehow that was far more than enough.

Deliverance / **** (1972)

“Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you find anything.”

Hindsight is an attribute that can diminish the value of films that once walked the fine line of visceral envelope-pushing, but to possess it also allows for deeper observations. Consider John Boorman’s “Deliverance” as a noteworthy example; released in 1972 well before the full disclosure mentality of filmmakers drove the underlying current of popular cinema, it was once considered the most explicit mainstream drama of its kind. Just as audiences were taken aback by the implication of simple characters stumbling into frightening realities, a good portion of viewers were greatly unnerved by another key suggestion: that the back corners of the American south could also be hotbeds for cruel and disturbing behaviors. These ideas informed an entire way of thinking that would become the running joke of southerners throughout popular culture, ultimately inspiring the likes of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” – that is, movies where the underbelly of horror was often localized in wooded areas populated by inbred villains. Four decades have passed since that approach left an imprint, and nowadays the ideas are commonplace and tired, and often without artistic foundation. To see them at the source, in a movie far removed from the desensitized nature of modern violence, is like staring back at a relic. And yet despite such facts Boorman’s film still speaks to us in profound ways, as if to indicate hidden wisdom has long rested in frames glossed up by a once-shocking philosophy.

Frenzy / ***1/2 (1972)

Some movies depend, in a way, on the right man standing behind the camera. Alfred Hitchcock’s calculated demeanor often meant he was the only director skilled enough to undertake some of the endeavors he did, and that notion is never more obvious than in the two hours that “Frenzy” occupies our attention. The core values of a film like this are often written in an intricate language that requires a precise marriage of mood and style, and in the wrong hands any director could sabotage the momentum by simply striking the wrong chord. By the time the material arrived in the hands of the master of suspense, however, his knack for evoking wit and irony in the shadows of intensely bleak premises had already been long perfected. Most filmmakers would have succumbed to the challenge of balancing the right notes for this story, but for him, we get the sense that the result was essentially a mere reflex for his sharpened artistic sensibilities.

Aguirre, The Wrath of God - **** (1972)

Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” begins and ends with like-minded shots – the first being that of a troupe of explorers scaling down a soaring cliff side in the Andes Mountains, and the last being that of a raft tugging steadily down a river as its inhabitants are picked off one by one from sailing arrows in the distance. Both moments are a symbol of a greater puzzle destined to unfold in brooding and hypnotic passages, yet isolated they underline a greater implication, an idea that allows viewers to observe and react on the basis of behavior and subtlety above any semblance of movie structure. This is the kind of endeavor that persists in the mind not because it implores the idea of effective payoff, but rather with the thought that payoffs are irrelevant. It seeks something deeper, something more haunting and more thought-provoking than just basic core values; it knows far more about what gets under our skin than it should.