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It was mid-June 1977 by the time the new sci-fi fantasy movie, "Star Wars" rolled into the small town where I grew up. I'd seen the TV ads (see video at the bottom of this post) and some Ralph McQuarrie pre-production art in Starlog magazine (bunch of stormtroopers standing around in a hallway). A horror and sci-fi fan from an early age, in 1977 what you had was Saturday morning TV, periodic "Planet of the Apes" marathons at the drive-in ...

 

When "Taxi Driver" first came out in theatres in 1976, I remember seeing the ads on TV, and I remember my parents heading off to see it: the most talked-about film of the year. It didn't really interest me at the time, although, for some reason it made me think of "Psycho" and I didn't know why. Since then, I've seen "Taxi Driver" countless times, on home video, on DVD, in rep theatres. It's just one of those films that hits me in the ...

 

Before the age when all movies needed a deafening wall-to-wall music soundtrack, there were movies like "Dog Day Afternoon", which, apart from the opening title track ("Amoreena" by Elton John) which fades into a car radio as the story begins, there isn't a single note of music for the rest of the film. The story is left to the script, and the director and the performers. Based on the real-life story of John Wojtowicz, Al Pacino, who'd become ...

 

By this point, in the 1970's, I was starting to get to the age where I could sneak into PG and R rated movies on my own, so a lot of my favorite films come from the 1974 - 1976 era. I guess, trying to cash in on the lines-around-the-block stir that "The Exorcist" caused only a couple of years before, Universal pulled out all the stops on the hype and tie-ins. I think I had every conceivable piece of shark paraphernalia, including several Doodle Art posters ...

 

If ever there was a movie in the history of movies that didn't need a remake, it's "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three". Despite this, a second remake is already underway. Let me clarify my position, once and for all: I don't get the point of remakes. Sure, I can see how there can be some reward in doing an updated version, like if the original was a silent film, or if the filmmaker is adding something ...

 

When I was growing up in the seventies, everything was "The Godfather", and rightly so, as the film has taken its place as one of the best American films ever made. I recall reading in "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" by Peter Biskind, how William Friedkin rode past Francis Coppola and his friends on the street after winning his Oscar for "The French Connection", waving the statue out the window, shouting. I don't know if this served directly as an impetus to Coppola ...

 

One of my favorite films, and a film that I watch again nearly every year, is the film that elevated director William Friedkin to the level that Warner Brothers would entrust him with another literary treatment, a horror story called "The Exorcist". But that's jumping ahead. In October, 1971, the film version of a best-selling non-fiction book (yes, studios used to go to books for ideas, rather than just remaking old films, imagine that) called ...