With only nine films in his filmography, Quentin Tarantino has built his own very relatable style that has captivated millions of viewers and the most demanding critics. Winner of two Oscars and a Palme d’Or, among other recognitions, he himself writes the scripts for the stories that he later transfers to the big screen, where action and generous doses of violence abound, the result of a devotion to the seventh art that was born being a kid in Tennessee theaters and that made him a voracious viewer.
From his fast-paced feature film debut with Reservoir Dogs, through Pulp Fiction, the Kill Bill saga or Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, which he novelized in his first foray into literature, writing has become another of his passions. . Now he publishes Cinema Meditations (Reservoir Books / Column), his most personal book, where he analyzes his favorite movies, those that marked his childhood in the 1970s and that shaped modern Hollywood.
Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968)
Frank Bullitt is a Lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department. An ambitious politician tasks him with protecting a protected witness who is being hunted by the Chicago Crime Syndicate. Despite Bullitt taking every possible precaution, he is unable to prevent him from being killed. From that moment on, he will endeavor to thoroughly investigate the case, which is much more complex than it seemed at first glance.
“Steve McQueen had a reputation for taking his time committing to a project, but his concerns about this crime movie were its embrace of the hippy counterculture.”
“I saw it when I was six. I don’t remember the movie. I remember the chase. And that’s what almost everyone remembers about Bullitt. But they also remember how cool McQueen was as Frank Bullitt, how cool everything was. in it: the clothes, the haircut and the Ford Mustang”.
“It’s the first urban action movie that, instead of wasting time trying to explain a mystery, moves from one well-executed scene to the next.”
Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971)
Harry Callahan is a tough cop who grew up on the streets of San Francisco. His classmates call him Dirty Harry because of his particular methods of fighting crime and because he always takes on the nastiest jobs. When a sniper calling himself ‘Scorpio’ murders a woman from a rooftop and promises to kill more people if the city doesn’t pay him $100,000, Inspector Callahan is tasked with trying to crack the case.
“Most genre directors were shooting fistfights and shootings, but when they did, it was action. When Siegel was shooting those same conventions, it was violence.”
“Dirty Harry was the fourth collaboration between Siegel and Clint Eastwood and the film for which both would become best known. It was in Dirty Harry that Eastwood carved out a space for himself outside of cowboy movies and dethroned John Wayne as the lead American action movie star.
“The film would lead to the transition from westerns to crime movies that took place in that decade both on the big screen and on television. And it would become the most imitated action film in the following two decades, as well as being the first official example of the popular subgenre of serial killer movies.
Defense (John Boorman, 1972)
Four friends who live in the city decide to spend a weekend in the Appalachian Mountains, away from their families and office problems. They want to canoe down a river that runs through a forest that will soon be flooded for the construction of a dam. Everything seems to be going well but, after a pleasant day, the meeting with the locals turns the excursion into a harrowing nightmare
“In the same way that people, after Tiburón, were afraid of going into the sea, to me, after Defense, the idea of ??going camping in the forest scared me.”
“Defense men are faced with a social taboo – the rape of a male member of the group – which, to a greater or lesser extent, will hang over them for the rest of their lives. Similar to how Boorman’s film shows the same social taboo on viewers and it hangs over all of our heads throughout the film.”
The Escape (Sam Peckinpah, 1972)
Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery. Thanks to his wife Carol (Ali MacGraw), an influential figure gets him parole; but, in exchange, the couple will have to rob a bank. During the assault, one of his two accomplices and the guard are killed. The survivor chases them to finish them off and seize the loot
“I first saw The Getaway, rated 10+, when it came out along with The Hanging Judge. I liked both films enough to see them again the following weekend (…) but, although I’ve always loved it, and like it better than some of Peckinpah’s more lauded films, I’ve also always had some doubts.”
“My main doubt was that it was not the book. Peckinpah’s film is harsh; but Thompson’s novel is much, much, much crueler. The characters, the events it describes and the final outcome. And, on top of that cruelty, a thick layer of pessimism and cynicism is spread over it, and on top of that is a light coating of surrealism.
The Criminal Organization (John Flynn, 1973)
An ex-convict finds himself having to confront the Mafia to avenge the death of his brother, with whom he robbed a bank, oblivious to the fact that the entity was under the control of a sinister society.
“I first saw the film when it was shown in Tennessee in March 1974, under the title The Good Guys Always Win. Because of John Don Baker’s extraordinary popularity in this state for Stomping Up, Baker was given particular prominence. and its connection to the character Buford Pusser.And eight months later, when the film finally opened in Los Angeles under its original title, The Criminal Organization, I saw it again at the United Artists Cinema in Marina del Rey in a double session together with the escape
Actually, I thought I was buying a ticket to the sequel to The Good Guys Always Win. I didn’t care. the second time is always better. And the hearty male audience scattered around the small room added to the fun. They laughed at everything John Don Baker said. Including his extraordinary final sentence, which elicited cheers from the sparse audience.”
Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973)
Two twin sisters, Danielle and Dominique, have very opposite characters: one is normal, but the other is so disturbed that it is highly dangerous. The chance of nature wanted these two conjoined twin sisters to live with their bodies joined for several years, specifically until adolescence. Science, thanks to a complicated surgical intervention, will separate them. While one is a kind and sweet person, the other is the opposite: lunatic and insane.
“Sisters” was De Palma’s first foray into both Hitchcock homage and meta-Psycho reworking. Critically elicited promotional lines on the poster and in press announcements strategically evoked Psycho. Everything else, however, was meant to capture the attention of the same audience that had been drawn to The Glass Feathered Bird, and Sisters ended up doing exactly what it was designed to do, giving De Palma access to commercial film directing. of Hollywood and had results good enough to justify the author’s future films”.
A rebellious young lady (Peter Bogdanovich, 1974)
Daisy Miller (Cybill Shepherd) is a pretty American girl, who meets her mother and her young brother at the Les Trois Couronnes hotel in Vevey, Switzerland, on the traditional trip that “well-off” families usually make to Europe to educate themselves. There she will meet Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown) with whom, on a new trip to Rome, she will have a curious relationship, while she will be able to learn about the rigors and intolerance of that Victorian society, whose morals are quite narrow and their languages quite long
“The film builds strength as it progresses, ending with a punch-in-the-stomach ending. Bogdanovich’s film is great fun, yet leaves viewers with an aftertaste of profound sadness as they watch the titles disappear. final credit”.
“It seems that Bogdanovich also sought a duality between character and actress. In the same way that the brash and innocent Daisy is swamped by the high-society expats in Rome, Cybill is swamped by that exuberant period production.”
Taxi driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
To cope with the chronic insomnia he has suffered since his return from Vietnam, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works as a night taxi driver in New York. He is an unsociable man who barely has contact with others, he spends his days at the movies and lives in love with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), an attractive blonde who works as a volunteer in a political campaign. But what really obsesses Travis is seeing how violence, sleaze and desolation dominate the city. And one day he decides to take action
“At the beginning of the film, Travis could almost be called an indifferent naïve. But part of the interest of the film is watching him gradually lose his innocence. And what is scary and exciting is watching what he gives way to that lost innocence.”
“One of the reasons why Taxi Driver is so disturbing is that it’s filmed from the perspective of Travis Bickle. And this is from a racist perspective.”
“Nobody ever reflected the chaos of urban street life in New York in the 1970s like Scorsese in Taxi Driver, and the audience laughed as they recognized the situations. Violence, despair, the grotesque and absurd comedy had never been represented before with such vigor and precision in a Hollywood film. The film generated a sense of realism that we entered into because we recognized its authenticity.”
The ex-prisoner of Korea (John Flynn, 1977)
At the end of the Vietnam War, an American fighter returns home to find that his family has been murdered by a group of Mexican criminals.
“The first time I saw the film with my mother and her boyfriend Marco in 1977, opening night in a double session with Operación dragón, I was blown away! What was it about the film that made me so cool? Well, to that age, the ‘revenge’ genre movies, with powerful climaxes of bloody walls, coincided with my idea of ??having a good time in the cinema”.
“After watching it a few times, I began to have a deeper understanding of it. In fact, deeper than I had from any film up to then (…) The Korean Ex-Prisoner was the film that empowered me to be critical. It was the first time I reviewed a film.”
“What I used to say about the movie was that it was the best combination of a character study and an action movie ever made. And it still is.”
Hell’s Kitchen (Sylvester Stallone, 1978)
Story of three Italian-American brothers, the Carbonis, who live in a New York slum in 1946. Their only dream is to leave this troubled place forever. Cosmo (Sylvester Stallone) is a small-time street hustler, but full of wacky get-rich-quick ideas. His plan is to turn his rough but good-natured brother Victor, an ice-block deliverer, into a professional wrestler. Lenny, the third brother, is a cynical war veteran, wounded in combat, who works in a funeral home.
“If you were a fan of Hell’s Kitchen, the most important thing was not that you liked it, but to defend it before the first one that arrived (…) My most forceful phrase was: “Hell’s Kitchen was the best debut of a film director in the seventies! And the best directorial debut of an actor of all time! Okay, but what do I think now? Well, maybe not one of the best directorial debuts of all time! But it is an excellent debut from a filmmaker with obvious talent and vision (I would say Stallone is the best director Stallone has ever worked with).”
“This film is Stallone’s vision and aesthetic, unfiltered, undiluted, thrown squarely in the viewer’s face. His collection of Damon Runyon-esque cartoonish characters, his boozy Irish sentimentality, the mean-street vibe of the film and its stylized poetic flourishes… it all points to the passionate vision of an artist who, if he really has nothing to say, certainly has something to express.”
Escape from Alcatraz (Don Siegel, 1979)
San Francisco, January 1960. Frank Lee Morris (Eastwood), a highly intelligent inmate who has escaped from several prisons, is transferred to Alcatraz, a maximum security prison located on a rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Despite the fact that no one has ever managed to escape from there, Frank and other inmates begin to carefully prepare an escape plan.
“Escape from Alcatraz, a film that I didn’t like when it was released – it was surely too dry for the 17-year-old boy I was then – was a revelation when I reviewed it a few years ago. From a cinematographic point of view it is the most expressive film of Siegel”.
“It represents the last time it was possible to tell a compelling prison story that didn’t focus on the male rape aspect.”
Hardcore: A Hidden World (Paul Schrader, 1979)
The daughter of a man who lives in a Midwest town goes missing while on a high school trip to California. A detective finds a clue that leads him to the world of porn movies. Next, the father will travel to the place to recover the young woman.
“Hardcore is a compelling studio-produced drama that promises, for the price of one ticket, to take the viewer on a sightseeing tour of the porn world of late-’70s Los Angeles (…) For the first hour , Schrader creates a gripping film of unquestionable strength.
“When I saw Hardcore opening night at the United Artists venue in the Del Amo mall, the entire audience (with a packed theater) rejected the daughter’s final decision as an unconvincing and forced conclusion to the story ( there was a boo in a literal sense)”.
The House of Horrors (Tobe Hooper, 1981)
Some young people in search of strong emotions go to a sinister traveling fair, despite the opposition of one of the girls, who has heard certain rumors about the disappearance of some young people in the place.
“Went to see House of Horrors at United Artists Theaters at Del Amo Mall, My verdict? I liked it, quite a bit, but it seemed mediocre. Then sometime in 2011 I got a fever of slasher cinema. And when I saw House of Horrors again, I was a bit surprised. I found that I was much more impressed by Hooper’s direction, the work of cinematographer Andrew László, but most of all, the production design Morton Rabinowitz’s spooky traveling carnival and haunted house set, extraordinarily effectively.”
“By far the best scene in the film is when the pathetic, naive and confused young man, hidden behind the Frankenstein mask, tries to buy sex from the fake gypsy fortune teller from the traveling fair (Sylvia Miles).”
