When a Stranger Calls / *** (1979)

“When a Stranger Calls” endures primarily for two sequences that bookend a fairly routine middle act. The first, in which a young high school babysitter (Carol Kane) is left alone in a neighbor’s house while a menacing voice hurls ominous warnings over a phone (“I want to feel your blood on me”), is the total summation of a director evoking all the qualities of a thrilling short subject, while the latter manages to play into the same tension as her long ordeal – and the trajectory of the villain – come full circle. But compelled by the success of “Halloween” and the urgings of studio heads who wanted their own slice of the new bloody pie that was teenage slashers, Fred Walton’s material became a full-length feature marred by conflicting values: meandering pacing, unconvincing heroes, implausible setups and a plethora of fairly uninteresting extra characters randomly stuffed in an underwritten screenplay. Yet to watch the film in its entirety is to find an intriguing case study in the differing values of the long and short forms of this medium. Was Walton just too exhausted by wallop of the first and last sequences to really commit himself to something great for a full-length endeavor? The movie is hardly worthless or even insulting – there are, in fact, some passable stuff among all the middle muck – but so brilliant are the opening and closing passages that they deserved more than just an average link in the chain.

Mad Max / *** (1979)

In awe of George Miller’s  recent “Mad Max: Fury Road” – and the precision of craftsmanship that went into its ambitious chase sequences – I found it essential to return to the first source of that inspiration, a small and inexpensive movie that began life as a shell for one director to pour his distinct vision into. The first endeavor about the wandering avenger Max – then an agent of justice who had yet to endure his inevitable personal tragedies – was a broad and coarse character study without the refined world that we recognize as post-apocalyptic (though it did, in fact, open after the end of a devastating war). What separated it from a host of other law-enforcer-turned-punisher vehicles of that time, however, came down to a principal of technical values; it was not one of those pictures that blurred the coherence of a story in the jumbled images of nonsensical action, but one that celebrated the danger of the open road in photography with impeccable clarity. The majority of the picture seems to exist as an open protest of the time’s shoddy trend, and there is not a moment where we suspect the man handling the cameras isn’t willing to be right there in the middle of the chaos along with his subjects, potentially in the hands of incredible danger. In those first images are the seeds that would go on to become the elaborate shows of the later films of this series, arguably brought to a furor of artistic perfection in the most recent.

Alien / **** (1979)

The ill-fated journey of the Nostromo in Ridley Scott's "Alien" is the kind of epic space excursion that avid 1970s science fiction pioneers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas would probably discard in early script stages. On a written page, described in broad strokes, the concept lacks the potential visual dynamics of a "Star Wars" and the innovative scope of a "2001: A Space Odyssey." As a finished screenplay, it would be hard to assume the result being anything other than a carbon copy of those low-budget 1950s space exploitation sci-fi horror films that only film-crazed teens would have paid money to see. The revolution of visual effects in the late 60s and early 70s, furthermore, meant that the concept of silly B-movie space travel was no longer something that audiences would fall for. Just as Stanley Kubrick hotwired a new reality for filmmakers with "2001," the genre dominated by fearsome aliens picking off Earth's inhabitants had lost its footing.