My favourite films (text credits below to Far Out magazine), include the following:
All That Jazz (to follow)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
Peter Weir’s second film was the hypnotic Picnic at Hanging Rock, adapted by Cliff Green from the 1967 novel of the same name by Joan Lindsay. The movie, a cornerstone of the Australian New Wave, explores the disappearance of a group of teenage girls and their teacher during a Valentine’s Day picnic at Hanging Rock. Set in 1900, the movie features stunning costume design, which earned designer Judith Dorsman a Bafta nomination. Moreover, Picnic at Hanging Rock boasts dreamy visuals inspired by Impressionist paintings, often draping various veils over the camera to achieve a hazy look. The film’s visual and thematic style has been hugely influential, most notably reflected in the work of contemporary filmmakers like Sofia Coppola.
Picnic at Hanging Rock bubbles with tension and sexual repression, mounting in the heat of the sun-drenched trip. Upon its release, many audiences complained that the film failed to offer a solution to the mystery, but this, of course, entirely misses the point of Weir’s covert horror, which aims to unsettle through exploring the unexplainable.
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
One of the most impressive directorial debuts in the history of American cinema, Badlands introduced the world to the mastery of Terrence Malick. Starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, this remarkable cinematic achievement is a violent odyssey that is fuelled by the stupidity and courage of youth.
Malick, who started working on the screenplay after going on a road trip, was surprised by the funding process. He revealed: “I wrote and, at the same time, developed a kind of sales kit with slides and video tape of actors, all with a view to presenting investors with something that would look ready to shoot. To my surprise, they didn’t pay too much attention to it; they invested on faith”.
Inspired by real criminal events, Badlands reflects on what it means to be young and in love, but it takes it to a gory extreme – examining the psyche of the young lovers who embark on a murder spree. To this day, many fans insist that Badlands is Malick’s greatest work because of its unforgettable exploration of America’s troubling relationship with violence.
The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
American cinema wouldn’t have looked quite the same without the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1972 classic The Godfather, a seminal crime movie that would influence the remainder of cinema in the 20th century. Starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Diane Keaton and John Cazale, the film tells the story of Don Vito Corleone, who is looking to hand over his leadership at the top of the mafia to one of his sons.
Telling a complex tale that spans many years, Coppola creates a film that feels both vast and intimately tight, allowing Brando’s magnificent performance as Vito to dominate the film, with characters slowly orbiting his gravity with varying degrees of efficacy. Despite the personalities that dominate the screen with brutish masculinity, perhaps the movie’s greatest strength lies in its characterisation of Pacino’s Michael and Keaton’s Kay, with the pair’s relationship flowing with a tragic inevitability.
There’s a reason why, even generations after its release, The Godfather remains at the top of many people’s lists of the greatest movies of all time, with Coppola creating the template of modern gangster flicks, reinventing modern cinema at the very same time with a film that questions the problems inherent within the concept of the American dream, asking whether the fantasy is worth pursuing at all.
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
How does one translate the tortuous horrors of the Vietnam War? Oliver Stone’s first-hand account in 1986’s Platoon does a pretty great job, as does Stanley Kubrick’s visceral 1987 movie Full Metal Jacket, but Francis Ford Coppola approached the subject from a new existential point of view. Seeing the event as a catastrophic failure of human dignity and honour, Coppola’s film took audiences into the heart of darkness.
The story follows the journey of Martin Sheen’s Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a soldier tasked with assassinating a rogue Colonel who has fled into the jungle and pronounced himself a God amongst a local tribe. The chaos is captured in the backdrop of America’s wild conflict with the Vietnamese forces, with Coppola putting an unprecedented amount of time, effort and funds into making the setting feel as authentic as possible.
Apocalypse Now succeeds on several fronts, but it is the contrast between the bombastic, even exciting, action scenes where American forces bomb a small village with fire, fury and the sound of Richard Wagner’s ‘Flight of the Valkyries’ and the central theme of internal human despair where the film truly excels. This existential terror that fuels the film is elevated by the marvellous performance of Marlon Brando as the insane Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.
“The horror, the horror,” Kurtz utters upon his final breath, coming to terms with the futility of war and the folly of man, with Brando’s character perfectly embodying the spirit of a film that feels monolithic in its cinematic importance. Much praise is heaped on Brando, but it is Coppola who somehow manages to tie the project together, with his co-written script making for a riveting American masterpiece.