THE greatest year for movies? It has to be 1975.
Half a century ago, cinema was changed for ever by the release of five films so important that no one would dare remake them.
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It is impossible to improve on Steven Spielberg’s nerve-shredding Jaws, the first summer blockbuster.
Who would have imagined that a film about a killer shark, one you don’t see for most of the two hours, could smash box office records.
In the same year, people queued to see arguably the best film ever — One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
The darkly comic drama starring Jack Nicholson as a criminal who feigns mental illness for what he thinks will be an easier time on a psychiatric ward won five Oscars.
Nicholson, the man Leo DiCaprio wants to be, has never been better.
And while I’m no fan of the sequel plague, something director Francis Ford Coppola recently apologised for, that trend was begun by his brilliant The Godfather Part II.
Never has a follow-up come so close to matching the original as the Al Pacino gangster epic, which arrived here in 1975.
If that is not enough to sway your opinion, surreal comedy went global when the Monty Python team released their first movie together, Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
Sure, Life Of Brian later topped it, but there is no doubt that knights saying “ni” and fighting a giant killer rabbit set future script writers on a more unpredictable path.
And then there is the campest, most unlikely cult hit British cinema has produced — The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Still touring as a stage show around the world, Richard O’Brien’s sci-fi horror musical blended genres and genders in a way no one else could have imagined.
Other movies enjoying their 50th anniversaries this year include The Who’s rock opera Tommy, Goldie Hawn’s Shampoo and bank robbery classic Dog Day Afternoon.
Now, I can already hear millennials and Gen Z’ers bleating that their eras were far better.
The last decade?
Barbenheimer was a fantastic marketing ploy, but Oppenheimer isn’t even director Christopher Nolan’s best creation and the Barbie film will age even less well than the doll.
Millennials have a decent claim with 1994, which brought us Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Four Weddings And A Funeral, The Lion King and Forrest Gump.
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My generation, Gen X, will rightly have fond memories of 1984, when we were treated to Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Footloose, The Terminator, Gremlins, A Nightmare On Elm Street and The Karate Kid.
I could watch all of them again and again.
None, though, are as daring as those who went before them in 1975.
A then relatively unknown director, Spielberg was given the budget to stick an animatronic great white shark into the sea, something that had never been tried before.
It promptly sank due to the salt water.
The film includes a long monologue from Robert Shaw’s drunk sea dog Quint recounting being surrounded by the “lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes” of the sharks that circled him after his ship was torpedoed in the Second World War.
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With the planned 55-day shoot stretching to 159 days, and the budget more than doubling, Spielberg thought his career was sunk.
But the risk-taking more than paid off, because Jaws beat all previous movies financially by earning £355million.
In today’s money, that’s more than £3billion.
It’s also hard to imagine a movie such as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, with a psycho nurse tormenting mental patients, finishing second at today’s box office.
No, what we get is a churn of remakes, prequels and sequels.
If cinema is ever going to surpass 1975, Hollywood is going to need bigger balls.
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HOLD ON A SEC…WHAT ABOUT 1999?
By Dulcie Pearce
OH to be back in the Nineties.
The decade when the music was superb, the fashion so cool that teens are wearing it again now and just before the internet fried all our brains.
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But, most importantly, it held the year that saw the best films ever released: 1999.
The variety of box office beauties from that year reads like the results of Googling “best films of all time”.
The incredible movie list includes Fight Club, Notting Hill, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, Toy Story 2, The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix and Being John Malkovich.
I see your One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and raise you The Talented Mr Ripley.
This is a film so breathtakingly dark and alluring that it legally must be watched when regularly repeated on ITV2.
How I wish that cinema could party like it’s 1999 again.
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