Seven to Place, Four to Show

1972 was as good a year for film as any other. There was no heightened seriousness, no now charm to make very many new films worth seeing I did enjoy myself more often than the year before and on occasion even learned a bit. But you can't generalize solely on this year's output. All that really can interest us in our annual found ups--until there are major changes to our attitudes towards culture, and our cultural industries-- are the individual achievements of the world's best filmmakers.

Were it not for studio cuts, The Emigrants might have been a perfect film. In tracing a journey of Swedish farmers to Minnesota in the 1840's writer-director photographer Jan Troell has not only dramatized what the idea of American meant for those who dared test their limits a against it but the social and economic processes by which an ethnic group of disparate individuals slowly became a community. And with his camera alone, Troell can express usually well the joy his characters found in nature and the hardships they suffered when their native land wouldn't work for them: the deprivations of the emigrants' ship, and the bounty of their new country. Of course, Troell placed two fine actors in his lead roles--May son Sydow and Liv Ullman.

Acting also figures significantly in the success of The Godfather--by far the year's most interesting and accomplished American film. You might wish that the filmmakers had taken a more objective viewpoint than Mario Puzo, and shown what really happens to the middlemen and junked-up patrons of the Mob's cathouses and clipjoints. But the detailing of inner Mafla workings is vivid and accurate, as is--more importantly-- the Corleone family chronicle. This comes less from plot incident than from the perfect characterizations of Brando's Godfather, and At Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall as his natural and adopted sons. Francis Ford Coppola has directed with a line enough eye to make all the connections between them apparent: Gordon Willis's septa-tinged photography and Nino Rota's robust music help sustain the varying moods of his emotional Italians.

Cries and Whispers, Ingmar Bergman's latest, is a howl of desperation, at times unberably intense, each brutal. Although the dramatic, tension are unremittingly psychological, the film is also in effect a stab at the heart of bourgeons society through dissection of its women. The entire Bergman crew is in fine form Ellman, Thulin, photographer Sven Nykvist, most of all Harriett Anderson as the dying sister at the center of the film's family.

Sounder is not the quintessential black film (Super Fly has more contemporary truth to it), but it does have the sense of history all other black films lack. As a young boy matures and gains adult responsibility before his time, we witness the struggles of any individual in a racial minority to acquire a vigorous identity without getting thrown into a prison or insane asylum. This story about a black Louisiana depression family isn't overly sentimental--in fact, critics of the film have claimed the environment it etches is harsher than what they personally experienced in similar times and places and table-turning social truths more it powerfully effective. Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield stand out as Kevin Hooks' parents: Martin (Hud) Ritt directs with surprising force and tact.

Deliverance, John Boorman's best film yet doesn't have anything new to say (thank God) about the lack of morality in brute nature. Still, its pro-civilization sentiments are refreshing, its recreation of a moral vacuum in Georgia backlands terrifying, and its pure adventure sequences on the Cahulawassee. River among the best action filmed. John Voight turns in a fine star performance as a symp turned strongman.

The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' documentary cross-section of Clermont Ferrand residents who lived through Occupied France, is, in the final analysis, a noble failure. It brings us up close to varying degrees of complicity and guilt and some causes for it, but the sheer bulk of its interviews and newsreel clips not only occasionally deadens, but gives the audience a misconceived faith in the completeness of Ophuls' very selective vision. Documentary talents like Ophuls' are hard to find, however, and they're needed desperately to slake a thirst for social commentary rarely touched by fiction filmmakers.

Henry Kaiser and his Mather House Films cronies gave Harvard audiences a treat very low outside New York or Los Angeles have enjoyed--Wojciech Haas's The Saragossa Manuscript. In his witty, complex fantasy of a chaotic, magical late-medieval society, Haas urges spiritualism as an alternative for social conventions when real social choice is blocked. Beautifully photographed and edited, and acted by Poland's best.

The Year's Best:

1. The Emigrants

(Troell - Sweden)

2. The Godfather

(Coppola - U.S.A.)

3. Cries and Whispers

(Bergman - Sweden)

4. Sounder

(Ritt - U.S.A.)

5. Deliverance

(Boorman - U.S.A.)

6. The Sorrow and the Pity

(Ophuls - France)

7. The Saragossa Manuscript

(Haas - Poland)

There are two films which might have made this list if I have seen them Tokyo Story and The Rulong Class. And a couple of others should be cited as intelligent entertainment--Sam Peckinpah's Bonner, hampered slightly by unbelievable dialogue but far superior in his latest piece of backwork (The Getaway) and Slaughterhouse-Five George Roy Hill's skilled adaptation of Vonnegut's novel.