Your Favourite Performances from 1929 to present are...

[Bogie56]

The Golden Globe Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor in a Drama

John Voight, Coming Home*

Gregory Peck, The Boys From Brazil

Robert De Niro, The Deer Hunter

Anthony Hopkins, Magic

Brad Davis, Midnight Express

 

Best Actress in a Drama

Jane Fonda, Coming Home* 

Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata

Geraldine Page, Interiors

Glenda Jackson, Stevie

Jill Clayburgh, An Unmarried Woman

 

Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical

Warren Beatty, Heaven Can Wait*

Gary Busey, The Buddy Holly Story

Chevy Chase, Foul Play

John Travolta, Grease

George C. Scott, Movie Movie

Alan Alda, Same Time, Next Year

 

Best Actresses in a Comedy or Musical

Maggie Smith, California Suite*

Ellen Burstyn, Same Time, Next Year*

Goldie Hawn, Foul Play

Olivia Newton-John, Grease

Jacqueline Bisset, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

 

Best Supporting Actor

John Hurt, Midnight Express*

Bruce Dern, Coming Home

Christopher Walken, The Deer Hunter

Dudley Moore, Foul Play

Robert Morley, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

 

Best Supporting Actress

Dyan Cannon, Heaven Can Wait*

Meryl Streep, The Deer Hunter

Maureen Stapleton, Interiors

Mona Washbourne, Stevie

Carol Burnett, A Wedding

[Bogie56]

The 1978 Berlin International Film Festival winners were…

 

Best Actor

Craig Russell, Outrageous! (77)

 

Best Actress

Gena Rowlands, Opening Night (77)

 

——————————————————————————————

 

The 1978 Cannes Film Festival winners were…

 

Best Actor

John Voight, Coming Home

 

Best Actresses

Jill Clayburgh, An Unmarried Woman*

Isabelle Huppert, Violette Noziere*

 

[Bogie56]

1978

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Meryl Streep  The Deer Hunter****

 

 

Well, okay Meryl Streep was great in The Deer Hunter but can she sustain a career?

It is said that her scripted part in The Deer Hunter was so negligible that director Michael Cimino let her write her own dialogue.

I've taken the following from someone's blogspot who has put it better than I ever could ...

Linda's an archetype, a symbol, a stock character drawn in bold, unoriginal strokes. That is, until an emerging actress named Meryl Streep took the role.

Meryl Streep does more than spin gold from straw in her performance; Streep retrieves a fully-inhabited characterization from a role that's not so much a character as a pathetically underconceptualized plot device. Through the forceful clarity of her performance and the (mostly wordless) chemistry she establishes with DeNiro's Michael and even a little bit of goofiness, Streep's Linda becomes one of the most vivid presences in Cimino's film.

Truly, Streep acts her butt off in this thankless prop of a part. Her Linda is beautiful, gentle, a little bit dangerous and absolutely riveting. What's more, even though I'm left with no idea “who” Linda is, Streep’s emotional intricacies make me care about Linda anyway. I may not understand "who" Linda is, but I have no doubt "that" she is a living, breathing, complicated woman. Hers is a curious accomplishment. She's in the film, but somehow not of the film.

[Swithin]

Well, okay Meryl Streep was great in The Deer Hunter but can she sustain a career?

She had already begun to impress theater audiences, in the mid 1970s. I saw her in Happy End in 1977. She has a great voice -- sang "Surabaya Johnny" so beautifully. Around that time, she appeared in leading roles in a few of Joe Papp's Shakespeare performances, including Taming of the Shrew, opposite Raul Julia; and Measure for Measure, which also featured Sam Waterston, Howard Rollins, Jr., Judith Light, Frances Conroy, Lenny Baker, John Cazale, and Jeffrey Tambor (at the Delacorte in Central Park, for free!).

 

[Bogie56]

The Venice Film Festival was not held in 1978

 

—————————————————————————————————

 

The 1978 San Sebastian Film Festival winners were…

 

Best Actor

Joe Sacristan, A Man Called Autumn Flower*

 

Best Actress

Carol Burnett, A Wedding*

[LawrenceA]

I wanted to talk a bit about a few of my more obscure or offbeat choices.

 

Gaylen Ross had never acted in films before starring in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. She, along with co-stars Ken Foree, David Emge and Scott Reiniger, were cast partially due to their unknown status, a practice Romero preferred as he felt that known stars often distracted from the characters. Ross has most of the heavy acting lifting, and does a very good job projecting the conflicted nature of Francine, caught between the competing egos of the three male survivors she's shacked up with in a shopping mall, and with a growing sense of the ultimately empty lives they are leading. She only appeared in a couple of small roles after this, instead opting to become a successful regional documentary filmmaker in Pennsylvania. 

 

 

Stacy Keach was best known for intense, brooding, often violent or troubled roles on film and TV when he played the obsessed narcotics officer Sgt. Stedanko in Cheech & Chong's inaugural film outing Up In Smoke. A pastiche of all of the over-the-top anti-drug cops in pop culture (and in real life), he wasn't subtle, but he was hilarious. I recently read Keach's autogiography, wherein he states that other than his TV turn as Mike Hammer, the role that he gets asked about the most is Sgt. Stedanko.

 

 

 

Paul L. Smith was an American by birth, despite the fact that he most often appeared in foreign films and played foreign characters. In fact, he was a graduate of Florida State University, where he played football and got a degree in philosophy. He had small roles in films going back to 1960's Exodus, and he got several small roles in Italy due to his resemblance to Bud Spencer. Smith wouldn't really stand out, though, until his iconic turn as the brutal Turkish prison guard Hamidou in Midnight Express. He became a figure of nightmares for world travelers, embodying all of the horrible traits they feared they'd experience if they were unlucky enough to get tossed into jail outside of their home countries. Smith's performance is mainly one of expression, as his dialogue is minimal, but he does the most with the smallest gestures, and his 6' 4'' frame helps considerably. Smith went on to greater fame among younger crowds with his role as Bluto in Robert Altman's Popeye in 1980, and Smith also appeared in David Lynch's Dune and the cult comedy Crimewave, among others. He eventually settled in Israel, where he died in 2012, age 75.

 

[Bogie56]

Here are some performances from 1978 that will be recognized in subsequent years …

 

Glenda Jackson will win the NY Film Critics Best Actress Award and the National Board of Review Best Actress Award in 1981 for Stevie (1978).

 

Mona Washbourne will win the NY Film Critics, the National Board of Review and the Boston Society of Film Critics Best Supporting Actress Awards in 1981 for Stevie (1978).  She will also be nominated by the National Society of Film Critics in 1981.

 

Robert De Niro will be nominated for the BAFTA Best Actor Award in 1979 for The Deer Hunter (1978).

 

Maggie Smith will be nominated for the BAFTA Best Actress Award in 1979 for California Suite (1978).

 

Meryl Streep will be nominated for the BAFTA Best Actress Award in 1979 for The Deer Hunter (1978).

 

Christopher Walken will be nominated for the BAFTA Best Supporting Actor Award in 1979 for The Deer Hunter (1978).

 

Ulrich Thein will win the Moscow International Film Festival Best Actor Award in 1979 for Anton the Magician (1978).

 

Velimir Bata Zivojinovic will win the Moscow International Film Festival Best Actor Award in 1979 for Moment (1978).

 

Anders Lonnbro won Sweden’s Guldbagge Best Actor Award in 1977 for The Score (1978).

 

Flavio Bucci will win Italy’s Nastro d’Argento Film Journalists Best Actor Award in 1979 for Ligabue (1978 theatrical version).

[skimpole]

I want to talk about my choice for the movie that won best Actress Autumn Sonata, where Liv Ullmann became the first actress to win three lead oscars in my alternate oscars, and Ingrid Bergman won the last of her nominations.  But rather than have me talk about, here's Farran Smith Nehme's essay for the Criterion collection:

 

 

Autumn Sonata (1978) cuts deep into a woman, even if she recoils from it. We are all some mother’s daughter, whether we were cherished or abandoned, spoiled or abused. Both of the film’s stars, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman, had daughters as well as celebrated careers. But when Bergman left her husband for Roberto Rossellini, she went years without seeing her daughter from her first marriage. As for Ullmann, just the year before she had written, “Success in one’s profession and trying to write a book do not compensate for domestic shortcomings as obvious as mine.” She was referring to her relationship with her daughter, Linn, whose father was Ingmar Bergman. The director later said that when he conceived Autumn Sonata, he considered no other actresses for the two main roles. He didn’t say why, nor did he need to.

 

Filmed by Sven Nykvist in the haunting palette sug­gested by its title, Autumn Sonata uses Bergman’s signature technique of tightly focused close-ups in an almost claus­trophobically small setting to tell the story of a daughter, Eva (Ullmann), who invites her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), for a visit. Charlotte is a famed pianist whose glamorous life hasn’t included a visit to her daughter in seven years. In that time, Eva has married a minister, Viktor (Halvar Björk); has had a son, Erik, who drowned before his fourth birthday; and has been caring for her sister, Helena (Lena Nyman), who is dying, slowly and horribly, from a degenerative disease. Charlotte arrives, vivacious as ever, and seems to think that her debts have already been paid. That isn’t the case.

 

Bergman’s closely observed account of how one daughter’s disabling rage builds to a devastating all-night confron­tation with her mother was created during his self-imposed exile from his native Sweden. In 1976, that country’s most famous filmmaker had been picked up by the police for tax evasion. He was released after five hours, and the courts eventually dismissed the case, but the lèse-majesté had been more than he could bear. From his exile, he had already made The Serpent’s Egg (1977), which didn’t find much success. And after Autumn Sonata—filmed in Norway, Ullmann’s home country, in about fifteen days—he would also make From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) outside Sweden. In retrospect, this part of his career seems as much like a long, slow transition from screen to stage as an exile. Autumn Sonata’s close quarters and big confron­tations seem to anticipate the director’s later focus on the theater. And it was also his last work made expressly for the cinema; From the Life of the Marionettes, Fanny and Alexander (1982), and Saraband (2003) were made for television.

 

But Autumn Sonata also connects back to Bergman’s earlier seventies films. Up until the tax contretemps, he had been spending the decade making some of the best films of his career. And Autumn Sonata represents another variation on the intimate family miseries of his other pinnacles from that period—preoccupied with physical and moral frailty, like Cries and Whispers (1972), full of recriminations for crimes the other person doesn’t recollect committing, like Scenes from a Marriage (1973).

 

For Autumn Sonata, Bergman built his screenplay around exposition. Each revelation about Charlotte comes like another page of the indictment. She wasn’t just absent on tour for much of Eva’s childhood, leaving the girl to keep vigil with her father (Erland Josephson); Charlotte had an affair that resulted in her leaving both husband and children for eight months (the child Eva, shown in flashback, is played by Linn Bergman). She didn’t just leave Eva and her son-in-law alone; Charlotte didn’t show up for Eva’s pregnancy or her one grandchild’s birth (“I was recording all the Mozart sonatas. I hadn’t one day free,” she reminds Viktor). Evidently, Charlotte never came even after Erik died, although no one bothers to throw that at her. There’s so much else to choose from, like putting Helena in a home and never visiting.

 

The amount of harm that Charlotte has inflicted over one not-terribly-long lifetime could fill a miniseries. Indeed, this sort of story line recurs in classic Hollywood melodrama, where a selfish mother is the worst kind of villainess, like the parasitic Gladys Cooper in Now, Voyager, nagging Bette Davis into a wreck who winds up physically resembling Ullmann in Autumn Sonata, right down to the wire-rim glasses. Watch Autumn Sonata and other movie mothers may start to drift through your mind: Mary Astor, the pianist in The Great Lie, leaving her baby behind with Davis, then embarking on a world tour because (no other reason is plausibly suggested) she’s a heartless ****; Davis—now the bad mom—in Mr. Skeffington, abandoning her lovelorn husband and daughter so she can pursue flirtations, lunches, and shopping; Lana Turner lighting up more for her show business pals than she does for her daughter in Imitation of Life (which Charlotte’s phone call to her agent echoes).

 

It may seem quixotic to bring up these films when discussing the resolutely un-Hollywood Ingmar Bergman. But these old studio tropes reflected attitudes, they did not produce them, and those attitudes cross borders more readily than even cinema itself. In Autumn Sonata, there’s the essence of many a maternal melodrama, concentrated by telescoping events into a couple of days, and deepened by Bergman’s ability to find reasons within reasons for what people do.

 

Surely, too, the director knew what he was getting when he insisted on Ingrid Bergman for his Charlotte. Cast a Hollywood star and she brings to a role memories of her past films, as well as her public image. The actress didn’t play mothers during her peak years in Hollywood—scandal cut short her career before she got old enough to do so. But she understood that playing Charlotte meant tapping into her own choices and the reams of newsprint from the 1950s accusing her of being unfit for motherhood. And there’s another tidy irony here, one that would scarcely have escaped her director’s notice. Ingrid Bergman’s American stardom began with Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939), a remake of her Swedish hit. She plays a pianist who falls deeply in love with a married violinist played by Leslie Howard . . . and gives him up for the sake of his child.

 

She’d made splendid movies with her husband Roberto Rossellini (they appear to be the roles that impressed Ingmar Bergman the most) and had had a triumphant return to Hollywood with her Oscar for Anastasia (1956). But from the 1960s on, despite another Oscar (for 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express, a diverting movie but a role she could have nailed from inside a steamer trunk), Bergman focused on stage work because the movie roles were mostly fluff. Perhaps that’s why, in 1973, when she was presiding over the jury at Cannes, she found time to slip a note into Ingmar Bergman’s pocket, reminding him that when they’d last met, he’d said he would give her a part.

 

In Images: My Life in Film, Ingmar Bergman wrote that he’d come up with a near-complete outline for Autumn Sonata in one day, after a period in which his accumulating woes had left him temporarily bereft of ideas. The primary difference between it and the finished film is that after the fight, in his original conception, “the daughter gives birth to the mother.” How this might have looked on-screen is an intriguing mystery, but it’s one Bergman himself couldn’t solve, and he abandoned the idea.

 

Autumn Sonata contains no such mystic scenes, but it’s not without its odd touches. Bergman opens by breaking the fourth wall, to have Eva’s husband, Viktor, tell the audience about his wife, whom we see serenely writing at her desk. Eva is mousy and plain, Ullmann’s considerable beauty hidden by the clothes and hair of a woman twice her age. She seems gentle, but there is calculation beneath the facade. Eva knows that Charlotte will be confronted with precisely what she prefers to avoid: the past. If the film is a chamber piece, as is often said, it’s one played against the sound of a buzz saw coming from far offstage, the thrum of years of pent-up agony.

 

When Charlotte arrives, she sweeps in with matched luggage, wearing a chic pantsuit and letting her daughter carry her bags into the house. Much has happened to Eva in the seven years since she last saw her mother, but it’s Charlotte who can’t go for more than a few sentences of conversation without turning matters to herself. Eva tells of holding musical evenings for her parishioners, and Charlotte rushes to mention that she has given five school concerts and they were wildly successful.

 

Charlotte is a performer, but she’s on her best behavior until Eva reveals that Helena is there. Then Charlotte is openly aggrieved; she has just escaped the presence of death, when her lover, Leonardo, passed away after a long illness. In Autumn Sonata, like in Cries and Whispers, death is constantly in the house—in the photographs of little Erik, in Helena’s ravaged body. It’s no wonder a person as self-absorbed as Charlotte backs away; a child’s mor­tal­ity is the ultimate reminder of your own. Still, Charlotte is not a performer for nothing. She steels herself to see Helena, and when she does, her charm is once more in place.

 

Lena Nyman’s presence as Helena is interesting. She made her name starring in I Am Curious—Yellow, the late-sixties film that enshrined Sweden as a world capital of self-indulgence; as Helena, she is there to remind Charlotte of the cost of self-indulgence. Her expression on seeing her mother—pure joy so intense it seems to cause her physical pain—is the most heartbreaking moment in the movie.

 

And Ingmar Bergman is too great an artist to go the route of utter villainy with his character by suggesting that Charlotte is unaffected. Next she’s shown alone and pacing around her room, full of emotions she doesn’t want to have, planning an early end to her visit so she can avoid them. Neither is the so-far-saintly Eva above signaling some resentment. She sarcastically predicts to Victor that her mother will show up in the appropriate widow’s weeds. Instead, Charlotte sweeps in wearing a flowing red dress.

 

Dinner is dispensed with in one cut, the better to empha­size the aftermath. Eva shyly lets herself be persuaded to play Chopin’s Prelude no. 2 in A Minor. She renders it softly and hesitantly, seemingly with a missed note here and there. Bergman’s camera lingers on Charlotte, her face at first indulgent, then gradually more and more discontented. We expect a mother to be supportive, and Eva’s yearning for approval is so tangible it almost seems to be sitting on the bench between them. But it’s inconceivable to Charlotte that, presented with a medio­cre performance, she should do anything other than try to improve it. Chopin, she tells Eva, is about “feeling,” not “sentimentality.” Unqualified praise for your child’s best efforts falls firmly in the latter category.

 

Painful as this scene at the piano is, it is not entirely about maternal callousness. Ingmar Bergman, wrote journalist Simon Hattenstone, “used to say, almost boast, that he didn’t know the ages of his children, that he measured the years by his movies, not his offspring.” And throughout this film, Charlotte begins reminiscences by citing what she was playing—Mozart, Beethoven’s First, Bartók. It’s hard to say how much Bergman’s own paternal attitudes are being invoked here; a man who puts art above his children is considered normal in a way that a woman is not. Clearly, though, when Bergman shows repeatedly that Charlotte does not know what it is to be a mother, he is also showing that neither does Eva understand what it is to be an artist.

 

That gap becomes a chasm later in the evening, when the fight begins with the simplest of questions from Eva: “Do you like me?” Here Ullmann’s performance gains its fullest force; her face screws up uncannily like a child’s, but she’s so devastated it’s impossible to mock. “I was a doll you played with when you had time,” Eva continues. Charlotte protests; she felt guilty, her work was suffering and it made her life seem meaningless. Here, at last, one may feel some real sympathy with Charlotte’s bitter laugh. Eva’s fury is relentless now, and Charlotte never seems more human than when she confesses, “I’ve always been afraid of you . . . I was afraid of your demands.”

 

Eva answers that she had no demands, but that is clearly not true. She swerves to another time, before Helena’s illness got worse, when Charlotte and Leonardo visited, and Helena fell in love with her mother’s lover. (Imitation of Life, indeed.) Somehow, Eva has worked this out to be her mother’s fault, although how could anyone believe that maternal duty extends to sharing your man with your daughter? “I caused Helena’s illness?” asks Charlotte. “Yes, I think so” is the reply. It’s unfair, childish logic, but then the whole conversation has been a regression.

 

As the scene finally closes, Charlotte is asking Eva to hold her; we don’t know if Eva does, nor do we know if they are capable of reconciling. The movie cycles back around to Eva writing another letter to her mother, convinced she’s driven Charlotte away. Bergman, for his part, wrote that “their hate becomes cemented.”

 

Autumn Sonata was Ingrid Bergman’s swan song in thea­trical movies; when she filmed it, she already had the cancer that would kill her. Her Charlotte ended up as a triumph of emotional rawness, but director and star fought bitterly during rehearsals. He said she’d mapped out every facial expression in the mirror and was stuck “in the 1940s.” It seems clear she was grasping for any­thing that could soften Charlotte. The actress pleaded for a joke or two. No jokes, she was told. (Autumn Sonata, outside of some wan sallies from Charlotte, is indeed a joke-free zone; Scenes from a Marriage, arguably a depiction of even greater emotional damage, is a laugh riot in comparison.) They clashed over whether Charlotte had been absent from her children for seven years, as the director wrote, or five years, as his star insisted, which does sound less biblically harsh. “So to keep me quiet,” wrote the star in her memoirs, “he cut it to five—even though I noticed seven came back in the finished picture.” He won that battle, and by the time cameras rolled, he’d won the war. The finished film exposes not only a mother’s mistakes but also her searing terror of what those mistakes have wrought.

 

Actress told auteur, “Ingmar, the people you know must be monsters.” With Charlotte, Ingmar Bergman got the fully human and ultimately tragic monster that he wanted.

[Bogie56]

France’s Cesar Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor

Michel Serrault, La Cage Aux Folles 

 

Best Actress

Romy Schneider, A Simple Story

 

Best Supporting Actor

Jacques Villeret, Robert et Robert

 

Best Supporting Actress

Stephane Audran, Violette Noziere

 

[Bogie56]

Italy’s 78/79 Nastro d’Argento Film Awards for 1978 included …

 

Best Actor

Flavio Bucci, Ligabue (78 theatrical version) 

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Italy’s 78/79 David di Donatello Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor

Vittorio Gassman, Caro Papa (79)

 

Best Foreign Actors

Michel Serrault, La Cage Aux Folles*

Richard Gere, Days of Heaven*

 

Best Actresses

Monica Vitti, My Loves*

Sophia Loren, A Special Day*

 

Best Foreign Actresses

Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, Autumn Sonata*

[Bogie56]

The 77/78 Sweden’s Guldbagge Awards for 1978 included…

 

Best Actor

Anders Lonnbro, The Score 

 

Sweden’s Guldbagge 78/79 Awards were…

 

Best Actor

Anders Aberg, The Emperor (79)

 

Best Actress

Sif Ruud, A Walk In the Sun

[Bogie56]

Jane Fonda, Liv Ullmann, Ellen Burstyn, Jill Clayburgh and Gena Rowlands all enjoyed very good runs in the 1970's.  Another actress that fits this bill is Diane Keaton with her two Godfather appearances, Looking For. Mr. Goodbar and Woody Allen comedies.

Her character in Interiors is an interesting one.  On the surface, Renata seems to be the strong ice-queen.  She lends support to her self-pitying husband, to her sister and to her divorcing parents.  Despite her best intentions this still doesn't satisfy her needy family who find her too detached. Renata herself has feelings of alienation and worries that she might go as mad as her mother.

 

 

[Bogie56]

The Canadian Etrog Film Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor

Richard Gabourie, Three Card Monte*

 

Best Actress

Helen Shaver, In Praise of Older Women*

 

Best Supporting Actress

Marilyn Lightstone, In Praise of Older Women*

Alberta Watson, In Praise of Older Women

 

——————————————————————————————

 

The Australian Film Institute Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor

Bill Hunter, Newsfront

 

Best Actress

Angela Punch McGregor, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

 

Best Supporting Actor

Ray Barrett, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

 

Best Supporting Actresses

Angela Punch McGregor, Newsfront

[Bogie56]

The Japanese Academy Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor

Ken Ogata, The Demon/Kichiku

 

Best Actress

Shinobu Ohtake, The Incident/Jiken

 

Best Supporting Actor

Tseunehiko Watase, The Incident/Jiken

 

Best Supporting Actress

Kaori Momoi, Seishoku no Ishibumi

 

—————————————————————————————

 

Japan’s Blue Ribbon Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor

Ken Ogata, The Demon/Kichiku

 

Best Actress

Meiko Kaji, Double Suicide of Sonezaki

 

Best Supporting Actor

Tseunehiko Watase, The Incident/Jiken

 

Best Supporting Actress

Junko Miyashita, Dynamite Bang Bang and Bandits vs. Samurai Squad

 

—————————————————————————————

 

Japan’s Mainichi Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor

Ken Ogata, The Demon/Kichiku

 

Best Actress

Meiko Kaji, Double Suicide of Sonezaki

[Bogie56]

**Announcement**

We will conclude 1978 tomorrow but anyone wishing to play catch up please post your choices so that they may be included in the end of the decade tally.  1979 will start on Thursday, Jan. 12 and will run until the following Tuesday/Wednesday.  We will then start the best of the 1970's.

[LawrenceA]

From 1978, I haven't seen:

 

American Hot Wax

Anton the Magician

Bandits vs Samurai Squad

Blue Collar

The Brink's Job

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

The Cheap Detective

Death On the Nile

The Demon/Kichiku

Doomed Love

Double Suicide of Sonezaki

A Dream of Passion

Dynamite Bang Bang

Girlfriends****

The Glass Cell

The Green Room

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

In a Year of 13 Moons

In Praise of Older Women

The Incident/Jiken

Ligabue

A Man Called Autumn Flower

Moment

Movie Movie

My Loves

Newsfront

A Night Full of Rain

Pretty Baby****

Robert et Robert

The Scenic Route

The Score

Seishoku no Ishibumi

The Shout

The Silent Partner

A Simple Story

Stevie

Three Card Monte

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Violette Noziere

A Walk In the Sun

A Wedding

Who Is Killing the Greats Chefs of Europe

[Jlewis]

 

The Australian Film Institute Awards for 1978 were …

 

Best Actor

Bill Hunter, Newsfront

 

Best Actress

Angela Punch McGregor, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

 

Best Supporting Actor

Ray Barrett, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

 

Best Supporting Actresses

Angela Punch McGregor, Newsfront

 

Good year for Australia. Newsfront has been shown on TCM at least twice... I think. Seen it twice, but just once on TCM. It covers the last great years of movie newsreel production of the late forties and fifties just as television was taking over that country mid-decade. This is Bill Hunter.

 

 

Bryan Brown has a supporting role, not big. He became famous a couple years later in The Thorn Birds (1983), marrying star Rachel Ward... and still married happily.

 

 

[skimpole]

There could be more quotes from this year:

 

Come back! Come back and fight! Dogs aren't dangerous!  (Watership Down)

 

I won't give up, even if it is too late.  (Autumn Sonata)

[kingrat]

The Oscars did a better job in 1978 than they sometimes do. Jon Voight and Jane Fonda are certainly acceptable choices, though some would have preferred Jill Clayburgh; Maggie Smith, though not my choice, did her best with inferior material; and Christopher Walken gave the performance of the year.

 

I agree with jlewis that 1978 was a year where the actors stood out in flawed films. This is true not only of The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and An Unmarried Woman, which at least were ambitious, but also of films like Midnight Express and California Suite.

 

Although I'm pretty sure I liked Robert DeNiro in The Deer Hunter, I don't tend to remember his performance well because he's trapped in all the less successful parts of the film, like the hokey symbolic stuff that gives the movie its title. What I like revolves around Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, who would definitely be my choices for best supporting actors, and John Savage, who would be my runner-up for best supporting actor. The scene between Walken and Streep where this undereducated man tries to articulate his poetic intuitions is the heart of the film, well written and beautifully acted by both stars.

 

DeNiro has company this year; Bruce Dern has an even worse written part in Coming Home. It seemed obvious to the filmmakers that if anyone who supported the war in Vietnam ever wised up--and we're never told what the experiences were that led him to change his mind; this is taken for granted--his only course of action would be to turn into James Mason in A Star Is Born. Dern does as much as anyone could with this underdeveloped role.

 

I'm interested in Jane Fonda's performances in Julia and California Suite because she's so miscast in both. Lillian Hellman was an unattractive intellectual, two things Jane Fonda never was and never could be. In California Suite Fonda plays a woman who is obviously a Jewish New Yorker, though I don't believe the J-word is ever spoken. Neil Simon's comedy comes from these roots, and many an actress would flourish as Fonda's character. Fonda does her best with both parts, and it's possible to watch her acting choices more directly than in roles where she is more appropriately cast.

 

Midnight Express makes me think not only of Brad Davis, a good actor whose life was cut short by drug use and AIDS, but of Bo Hopkins, a fine supporting actor who worked regularly but had the talent that would have justified an even bigger career.

[Bogie56]

From 1978, I haven't seen:

 

American Hot Wax

Blue Collar

The Brink's Job

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

The Cheap Detective

Death On the Nile

The Glass Cell

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

In Praise of Older Women

Movie Movie

A Night Full of Rain

Pretty Baby****

The Silent Partner

Stevie

Three Card Monte

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

A Wedding

 

The Silent Partner isn't a bad caper flick.  Elliott Gould plays someone who works at the fictional "Bank of Toronto" in the newly built Eaton Centre who helps himself to the till when it is being robbed by psychopath, Christopher Plummer.  Of course when the reported theft doesn't add up Plummer comes after Gould.  Celine Lomez has a memorable part as a victim.  John Candy has a small part.  Partner was at the forefront of the new 'tax-dodge' investment that kick-started the Canadian film business.  The films that got green-lit were often ones that tried to compete head-on with the American market.

I thought Eddie Deezan was a bit OTT in Spielberg's 1941 (1979) but he somehow made me laugh as the wacko Beatles fan in I Wanna Hold your Hand.  He made my runner up list.

The Glass Cell is a German adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith crime story.  It was nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar.  Brigitte Fossey, the memorable child actress from Forbidden Games (1952) was in my top ten lead actresses for this year.  Apparently it also comes in an inferior dubbed version.  

[Bogie56]

Here are the films from 1978 that were mentioned that I have not seen as yet. 

 

Anton the Magician with Ulrich Thein

Bandits vs. Samurai Squad with Junko Miyashita

The Demon/Kichiku with Ken Ogata

Doomed Love with Antonio Sequeria Lopes and Cristina Hauser

Double Suicide of Sonezaki with Meiko Kaji

A Dream of Passion with Ellen Burstyn

Dynamite Bang Bang with Junko Miyashita

Empire of Passion with Kazuko Yoshiyuki

Fingers with Harvey Keitel

The Fury with Carrie Snodgress and John Cassevetes

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs with Gerard Depardieu

Girlfriends with Melanie Mayhron

The Green Room with Francois Truffaut and Nathalie Baye

I an Year of 13 Moons with Volker Spengler

The Incident/Jiken with Shinobu Ohtake and Tseunehiko Watase

The Legacy with Margaret Tyzack

Ligabue with Flavio Bucci

A Man Called Autumn Flower with Jose Sacristan

Moment with Velimir Bata Zivojinovic

My Loves with Monica Vitti

Newsfront with Bill Hunter, Chirs Haywood and Angela Punch McGregor

Robert et Robert with Jacques Villeret

The Score with Anders Lonnbro

The Shout with Alan Bates, Susannah York, John Hurt and Tim Curry

Seishoku no Ishibumi with Shinobu Ohtake

A Simple Story with Romy Schneider

Violette Noziere with Isabelle Huppert and Stephane Audran

A Walk In the Sun with Sif Ruud

Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? with Robert Morley and Jacqueline Bisset

The Wiz with Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell and Mabel King

 

 

And I would like to see these again …

 

Days of Heaven for Linda Manz

Halloween for Brian Andrews and Ryle Richards

[Bogie56]

Before we hit 1979 I would like to mention that I am going with 1979 for The Great Santini which was released in August in the U.S. that year and was slowly tested in various cities.  It subsequently competed for the 1980 Oscars.

The same goes for Tess which was released in Polanski’s France in October 1979.  It also competed for various awards in 1980.

 

[LawrenceA]

Here are the films from 1978 that were mentioned that I have not seen as yet. 

 

Empire of Passion with Kazuko Yoshiyuki

Fingers with Harvey Keitel

The Fury with Carrie Snodgress and John Cassevetes

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs with Gerard Depardieu

The Legacy with Margaret Tyzack

The Wiz with Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell and Mabel King

 

The Wiz is The Wiz. Love it or hate it. I land closer to the latter, although I applaud the effort, sort of.

 

The Legacy and The Fury are both glossy, higher budget horror offerings. The Legacy actually creeped me out back when I saw it during the initial release. I haven't seen it in a long time, though. The Fury has some decent touches, but it ranks below the earlier Carrie and the subsequent Scanners as far as telepathic/telekinetic movies go.

 

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs won the Oscar for best foreign film that year. It's a romantic comedy/drama about two friends who are having an affair with the same woman to try and cure her of her depression. I found it enjoyable, and it was one of the first subtitled films I ever saw. More recently, I just saw Empire of Passion in the past year. It's a love story, a tale of murder, and an effective ghost story all in one. 

 

Fingers is from director James Toback, and it has his usual drawbacks of weak plot and sloppy filming techniques, but the characters are strong, especially Keitel's. The movie is sort of a mix of a Scorsese street-thug movie and Five Easy Pieces, as Keitel's character could be a concert pianist, but instead he's working as a low-level debt collector for his loan shark father. 

[CoraSmith]

Death on the Nile is a rather faithful adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's best novels. It follows all the principles of a classic whodunit. Because of the subtle plot details and the drawing of the characters I never grow tired of this story, even if I already know who did it. Christie's second marriage was to an archeologist, which explains why several of her stories are set in the Middle East or Egypt. The Nile and the historical sites provide a beautiful setting. The first shot of Poirot's face is followed by a match cut to the face of the sphynx - both are equally impenetrable.

 

Peter Ustinov gives Poirot the necessary sense for details and symmetry, but with enough flair to avoid becoming a stereotype. The ribbon he sleeps with to keep his moustache in shape was a topic in Stephen Fry's QI. The cast is an impressive line-up. Every character has its place in the plot, one for comical relief, another as a red herring. Many actors play a part that might remind you of one of their other roles: David Niven as the British gentleman, Mia Farrow as the neurotic type, Bette Davis as the schemer with piercing eyes, Olivia Hussey as the attractive daughter, Angela Lansbury as the eccentric writer... It's a delightful combination of suspense and humor.

 

 

Pretty Baby is a controversial but interesting film by French director Louis Malle, who made several English-speaking movies. It's about Storyville, the red-light district in New Orleans that was closed down in 1917. Keith Carradine plays photographer E. J. Bellocq. Antonio Fargas' character The Professor is based on pianist Tony Jackson, who wrote the song Pretty Baby. It was the period when jazz was born. Brooke Shields plays the daughter of a prostitute (Susan Sarandon) who grows up in a brothel. It shows a part of American history that isn't taught in schools.

 

The Wiz is a remake of The Wizard of Oz with Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow and Lena Horne as Glinda the Witch. The best part are the songs, especially A Brand New Day and Ease On Down the Road.

[skimpole]

Before we hit 1979 I would like to mention that I am going with 1979 for The Great Santini which was released in August in the U.S. that year and was slowly tested in various cities.  It subsequently competed for the 1980 Oscars.

The same goes for Tess which was released in Polanski’s France in October 1979.  It also competed for various awards in 1980.

 

I would point out that in 1980 two Australians films were nominated for relatively minor awards:  Breaker Morant (adapted screenplay) and My Brilliant Career (costume design).  My Brilliant Career is clearly a 1979 film.  Breaker Morant appears to be a 1980 film:  IMDB says it debuted that year.  It's just that some websites, including TCM, have it as a 1979 film.  If there's any evidence that it actually was a 1979 movie, it would be good to have it before tomorrow.