In 1979:
The Dukes of Hazzard debuted on CBS and ESPN launched;
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran;
Michigan State defeated Indiana State in the NCAA Championship game;
The nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island suffered a meltdown;
Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom;
Micronesia and Kiribati became independent nations;
McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal;
The first Sony Walkman was sold;
Michael Jackson released Off the Wall and Pink Floyd released The Wall;
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan;
Drew Brees, Aaliyah, Rosamund Pike, Rutina Wesley, Brandy Norwood, Jesse Spencer, Mena Suvari, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Titus Burgess, Oscar Isaac, Danny Pudi, Chris Klein, Adam Levine, Lee Pace, Norah Jones, Heath Ledger, Claire Danes, Luke Evans, Kourtney Kardashian, Kate Hudson, James McAvoy, Lance Bass, Rosario Dawson, Tracy McGrady, Morena Baccarin, Robyn, Chris Pratt, LaDanian Tomlinson, Mindy Kaling, Busy Phillips, Kevin Hart, Jayma Mays, Rose Byrne, Graeme McDowell, B.J. Novak, Jason Momoa, Evangeline Lily, Carl Edwards, Aaron Paul, Pink, Flo Rida, Chris O’Dowd, Brandon Routh, Stacy Kiebler, Ron Artest, Joel Kinnaman, Diego Klattenhoff, Tiffany Haddish, Trevor Immelman, Chris Daughtry, Carson Palmer, and Andre Holland were born;
While Conrad Hilton, Charlie Mingus, Nelson Rockefeller, Sid Vicious, Jean Renoir, Emmett Kelly, Mary Pickford, Jack Haley, John Wayne, Dave Fleischer, Arthur Fiedler. Minnie Riperton, Carl Laemmle, Jr., Mamie Eisenhower, Al Capp, Dimitri Tiomkin, Merle Oberon, Zeppo Marx, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Joan Blondell died.
The following is my list of the ten best films released in 1979:
10) The Jerk
Adopted by black sharecroppers, Navin Johnson (Steve Martin) is inspired to move away to St. Louis by a song on the radio and embarks on a series of adventures: he adopts a dog he names Shithead, falls in love with Marie (Bernadette Peters), invents a new type of glasses, gets rich, loses everything, evades a crazed gunman, works at a gas station, and has a brief romantic relationship with a daredevil biker.
The loose plot is an excuse for Martin to showcase his considerable talent, easily making the transition from stand up sensation to bona fide movie star. Carl Reiner guided Steve Martin through many of his initial movie offerings, including this, his film debut. Their fruitful relationship lasted five years and spawned four movies, all of them enjoyable, although none as well remembered or as blisteringly funny as this one.
9) Alien
The cast is perfect in this film, one of the first films to straddle the line between science fiction and horror. Veronica Cartwright. Yaphet Kotto. Harry Dean Stanton. Tom Skerritt. Ian Holm. Amongst the stellar work, John Hurt and Sigourney Weaver stand out. Hurt is responsible for one of cinema’s iconic scenes, Kane’s death and the alien exploding from his chest. Weaver became an instant star, one of the earliest female action heroes, and her career is still going strong nearly forty years later.
While most science fiction films make the ship seem infinitely large, this claustrophobic film allows the tight confines of the ship to close in on us.
H.R. Gieger’s work designing the creature is sublime.
The android twist was unexpected and foreshadowed the now omnipresent fear of human look alike robots in science fiction.
8) Real Life
Albert Brooks first feature length film is a hilarious send up of the PBS series and television phenomenon, An American Family. It seems quaint, but reality television was once controversial; as it’s become a staple, this film seems prescient and amazingly perceptive.
Brooks plays a fictionalized version of himself, a documentary filmmaker who enlists a normal family (the Yeagers) for an experiment: he’s going to capture their every moment on film.
Charles Grodin is his usually understated, irascible self as the family patriarch.
There are complications and the crew documenting their lives soon worries they are ironically dictating the circumstances of their subject’s life; the project falters and Brooks desperately concocts a big finish.
It’s a hilarious and relevant look at the effects of television and the never ending quest for fame on our societal structures.
7) Meatballs
Tripper Harrison (Bill Murray), a camp counselor with a heart of gold at plucky Camp North Star, takes a young awkward camper under his wing in exchange for help in his relationship with Roxanne.
There’s plenty of pranks (usually played on camp director Morty) and a spirited rivalry with the snooty camp across the lake, Camp Mohawk.
This family friendly version of Animal House boasts a similar pedigree, but wouldn’t be more than a mildly inoffensive diversion if not for the ascendant luminescence of Bill Murray.
Monty Python’s masterpiece highlights the dangers of religious zealotry, of believing in a dogma to the point of blindness to all other concerns.
It gently satirizes religious institutions as self-serving, straying from the ideas and ideals of their founders taking on a life and plan for themselves independent of the reasons behind their creation.
Rules and regulations consume and obscure the reason behind them. New religious ideas meant to be reactions against the old religious order become the thing they were rebelling against.
Despite its serious subject, this film features the Pythons at their comedic peak and is frequently cited as one of the funniest movies of all time. The closing musical number, with a befuddled and innocent Brian breaking into the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” during his crucifixion remains one of the most daring scenes in twentieth century comedy.
I favor comedic films which take risks; it’s why I love The Great Dictator, and To Be or Not to Be; it’s why I love this movie.
The movie is, in essence, the origin story of The Muppet Show. Kermit is determined to get to Hollywood and encounters many other muppets who join him on his journey.
Charles Durning is wonderful as an evil businessman obsessed with turning Kermit into frog legs, while Austin Pendleton is well cast as his goofy henchman.
The cameos are feature a who’s who of legendary performers: Carol Kane, Dom DeLuise, James Coburn, Madeline Kahn, Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, Chloris Leachman.
A movie which features the combined talents of Orson Welles, Richard Pryor and Bob Hope is a glorious thing.
Its enduring appeal is in its unabashed simplicity. It’s a celebration of dreams, friendship, and the idea we can accomplish more together than apart.
4) Hair
Five years after winning an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Czech filmmaker Milos Forman directed this film adaptation of one of the biggest American musicals of the 1960s.
New army recruit Claude meets a tribe of hippies in New York. After experiencing their Bohemian lifestyle, he must choose between his heart or his army commitment.
When Claude goes to basic training in Nevada, his adopted tribe follows him to say goodbye, but the tribe’s leader Berger is mistaken for Claude and sent to Vietnam where he dies.
Beverly D’Angelo is electric as Sheila, the hippie who catches Claude’s eye while Nell Carter, Charlotte Rae, and Nicholas Ray are delightful in small roles.
In the musical, Claude goes to Vietnam and dies, but the chaotic way Berger meets his demise and the ensuing heartbreak is a nice approximation of the random destruction of war.
This bold movie takes on feminism, classism, racism, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War and holds no prisoners.
Obsessed with bicycle riding, particularly Italian racers, working-class kid Dave Stoller convinces his friends to enter Indiana’s famed bike race the Little 500. Overcoming an injury and the cheating Italians, Dave’s team is somehow victorious.
The supporting cast is a dream: Daniel Stern, Dennis Quaid, Jackie Earle Haley, Amy Wright, and Paul Dooley.
In the 1970s, movies showed their seams, the characters were weird and occasionally assholes. They liked bizarre things for no discernible reason. They were awkward and relatable.
This wonderful, funny film captures peak 1970s quirk before it slid into 80s overindulgence and camp.
2) Being There
Sheltered his entire life, Chance (Peter Sellers), the gardener for a wealthy, powerful man, is ignorant of everything except gardening and television. When his benefactor dies, Chance inadvertently enters public life through a random encounter with businessman Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) and his much younger wife Eve (Shirley Maclaine). Eventually, the seemingly wise Chance is giving advice to the President of the United States and groomed as a potential successor.
The film is a sort of a spiritual precursor to Forrest Gump and implies the platitudes of television are all that’s necessary for a successful life. It wisely never explains how Chance came to live with a rich old man or why he had been confined to his estate for years, and even adds another layer of mystery at the end as Chance reveals a Christ-like ability to walk across water.
His transcendent performance here cemented Peter Seller’s legacy. MacLaine is delightful, and Melvyn Douglas rightfully won an Oscar. The always welcome Jack Warden makes a too brief appearance as the President and veteran character actor Richard Dysart is very good as a physician who doubts Chance is what he seems.
This is a wonderful, complex film about how much television has come to dominate our culture and politics (a claim made even more pertinent by the rise of Donald Trump as a major political figure).
1) The Tin Drum
Just before World War II, three-year old Oscar Matzerath decided to stop growing.
Despite his increase in age, he remained, by all outward appearances, a child. This is how he experienced Nazism, concentration camps, the Soviets, and the American liberators.
This movie is about children forced to make adult decisions because of circumstances beyond their control. Because the main character doesn’t age, we’re forced to filter the film through the eyes of a child, and see how absurd many of the most pressing twentieth century calamities actually were.
An anti-war film is one thing, but an anti-war comedy is more effective.
Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel is an audacious, surrealist film, like Salvador Dali directing MASH.