1970s

  • Bo Widerberg – Joe Hill (1971)

    1971-1980ArthouseBo WiderbergDramaSweden

    I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night. Alive as you or me. Says I, but Joe you’re ten years dead. I never died says he.

    In the early 1900’s, the legendary Joe Hill emigrates with his brother to the United States. But after a short time, he loses touch with his brother. Joe gets a few jobs but is struck by all the injustice and tragedy going on. He becomes active in the forbidden union IWW, a union for workers without trades. It is forbidden to demonstrate and to speak in public but Joe gets around that by singing his manifests with the Salvation Army. He manages to get more and more people to get on strike with him but he also makes powerful enemies doing that. Finally he gets connected with a murder and during the trial he fires his lawyer and takes upon himself to become his own defender.Read More »

  • Robert Clouse & Bruce Lee – Game of Death (1978)

    1971-1980ActionBruce LeeHong KongMartial ArtsRobert Clouse

    In this movie, Bruce Lee is a very famous martial-arts master who stars in many films. After an unsuccessful murder attempt against him, everyone thinks his is dead, but he’s just hiding, preparing his revenge…Read More »

  • Sergio Martino – Lo Strano vizio della Signora Wardh aka The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971) (HD)

    1971-1980GialloItalySergio MartinoThriller

    Newly married to an older man, Julie returns to Vienna, where a razor wielding slasher is killing women. Jean, her cruel and sadistic former lover, immediately contacts her, certain that only he can satisfy her strange vice. But she rejects him. She also meets George, the handsome cousin of her friend Carol; both are newly rich, thanks to an uncle’s death. Julie’s husband Neil is away frequently, so George pours on the charm. Meanwhile, it seems that the slasher is now focused on Julie. Bodies pile up, other murders are barely avoided, and George invites her to go away with him. Can it end happily?Read More »

  • José Giovanni – Les Égouts du paradis aka The Sewers of Paradise (1979)

    1971-1980ActionCrimeFranceJosé Giovanni

    Quote:
    Albert Spaggiari (Francis Huster), a legendary bank robber, assembles a team of assorted experts, all with great gangster names such as 68, Mike La Baraka, The Egyptian. Together they plan to tunnel up through the sewers and break into the vault of the bank in Nice. Director José Giovanni, himself an ex-convict and a successful crime writer, steps up to helm this film about a super-robbery. Will it work? Will they crack? Will Albert and Charlotte (Lila Kedrova), resolve their differences, or will the police catch them all? Albert Spaggiari was one of the most notorious and successful bank robbers in history, this film tells the tale of just one job!Read More »

  • Alan Ormsby – The Great Masquerade AKA Murder on the Emerald Seas (1974)

    USA1971-1980Alan OrmsbyCampExploitationQueer Cinema(s)

    Quote:
    After a series of mysterious murders, a Miami detective goes undercover to try and solve the crimes, but there’s one small catch: in order to find the killer the detective must infiltrate a drag ball on a cruise ship dressed in full female garb.Read More »

  • Zdravko Velimirovic – Vrhovi Zelengore AKA The Peaks of Zelengore (1976)

    1971-1980WarYugoslaviaYugoslavian Cinema under TitoZdravko Velimirovic

    Quote:
    During the Battle of Sutjeska, partisan troops must endure 24 hours of big and heavy attacks on German units Ljubino grave, to the main Partisan units, with the wounded and the Supreme Headquarters, pulled out the ring that is tightened around them.Read More »

  • Kinji Fukasaku – Bakuto gaijin butai AKA Sympathy for the Underdog [+extra] (1971)

    1971-1980ActionCrimeJapanKinji Fukasaku

    Synopsis:
    From Kinji Fukasaku (Battles Without Honor & Humanity) comes this pivotal early crime drama in the celebrated career of the director who changed the face of Japanese action cinema. Stylish and hard-boiled, Sympathy for the Underdog stars Koji Tsuruta, one of Japan’s seminal figures in the Yakuza genre, as Gunji, an aging Yakuza who is released from prison after ten years. Gunji lives by a code of honor that has no place among Tokyo’s modern corporate gangs. He gets a new lease on life by reforming his former gang and taking over the whiskey trade on the island of Okinawa. But he is forced to make a final, fateful, bloody stand against the mainland gang that sent him to prison.Read More »

  • Martin Ritt – Norma Rae (1979)

    1971-1980ArthouseDramaMartin RittUSA

    The story is based on Crystal Lee Sutton’s life as a textile worker in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, where the battle for the workers union took place against a J.P Stevens Textiles mill. Her actual protest, in the mill, is the scene in the film where she writes the sign “UNION” and stands on her worktable until all machines are silent. Although Sutton was fired from her job, the mill became unionized, and she later went to work as an organizer for the textile unionRead More »

  • Melvin Van Peebles – Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song (1971)

    1971-1980BlaxploitationDramaExploitationMelvin Van PeeblesUSA

    After saving a Black Panther from some racist cops, a black prostitute goes on the run from “the man” with the help of the ghetto community and some disillusioned Hells Angels.

    “Run, motherfucker.”

    Quote:
    “Sweetback was politically unacceptable on the one hand, but it made a lot of money on the other. And I thought it was a stroke of genius to suppress the political aspects and highlight the cartoonish aspects, and there you’ve got your blaxploitation. In essence, blaxploitation ushered in a bunch of counterrevolutionary films….The upside was that because the films were so markedly “urban”–and I’m using the code word–they had to use minorities in central roles. So a lot of people got to learn a craft that had always been denied them.”Read More »

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