Fridays at 8pm in July
The days of youth are marked by growing pains and life lessons, inevitable parts of the human experience. As a stage of life, childhood is made all the more special by the movies we watched growing up. For comedian, actor, writer and TCM friend Mario Cantone, a select, core group of films defined his adolescence. Every Friday at 8pm ET, Cantone sits with Ben Mankiewicz for a special series, Child of the ‘70s. Together, both hosts will take a weekly trip down memory lane to reminisce on the films from the 1970s that played an integral, personal role in their development as movie lovers and adults.
July 5: Our Child of the ‘70s retrospective kicks off with the Martin Scorsese musical New York, New York, starring Liza Minnelli and Robert Di Niro. Set in New York City in the final days of WWII, a saxophonist and a singer embark on a turbulent relationship that affects their rise in the 1940s music and film scene. Scorsese intended to make a “valentine to Hollywood,” and he took inspiration from films such as My Dream is Yours (1949) and The Man I Love (1946) along with the big band music of his youth. Minnelli brought Golden Age star power with her naturally gifted singing voice reminiscent of her mother, Judy Garland. De Niro committed himself to learning to play tenor saxophone in only a few months, though his teacher, saxophonist Georgie Auld, dubbed much of the notes.
Diane Keaton became an audience and critic’s favorite in the 1970s when she starred in a series of monumental pictures that encapsulated the changing style of Old Hollywood into New American cinema. The same year she starred in her breakthrough role as the titular character in Annie Hall (1977), she also starred in the gritty drama Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). Keaton plays Theresa Dunn, a repressed and insecure schoolteacher living in the shadow of her older sister (Tuesday Weld). She finds excitement in causal yet dangerous sexual encounters with men that threaten her safety and eventually her life. The film’s dark subject matter is based on the true story of New York schoolteacher Roseann Quinn. Keaton’s performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama. She instead won an Oscar and a Golden Globe in Comedy for her performance in Annie Hall.
That same year, Lily Tomlin starred in the neo-noir The Late Show (1977) as the client of a murdered detective whose former partner (Art Carney) comes out of retirement to solve his murder. In The Out of the Towners (1970), written by Neil Simon and directed by Arthur Hiller, Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis portray a married suburban couple whose trip to The Big Apple for a job interview is marred by complications and bad luck. Across the country in San Francisco, Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal play two strangers who become entangled in each other’s lives when two pairs of overnight bags are swapped in What’s Up, Doc? (1972), Peter Bogdanovich’s ode to screwball comedy.
July 12: Gay representation hit an unprecedented cinematic height with the release of the groundbreaking film The Boys in the Band (1970). Harold (Leonard Frey) is an aging gay man celebrating his birthday in the Manhattan apartment of his friend Michael (Kenneth Nelson), a recovering alcoholic. As the night continues and more friends arrive, so does Michael’s straight, homophobic friend Alan (Peter White), who brings chaos with him causing bad habits to return and repressed resentments among the group of friends to rise to the surface. Written by playwright Mart Crowley originally as an off-Broadway play in 1968, the film adaption stars an ensemble cast who all reprised their stage roles, as many actors at the time resisted playing gay characters out of fear for their careers. William Friedkin directed and later said in 2008 that it was one of the few films of his that he could still watch. The picture’s legacy remains in its bold, open story, its status as a cult favorite and its historical place as a bookend to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York. Another cult classic is the George Roy Hill comedy Slap Shot (1977) starring Paul Newman as Reggie Dunlop, the coach and player of a losing minor league hockey team whose careers are further jeopardized by the closing of the town’s steel mill. Dunlop concocts several schemes, particularly encouraging on-ice brawls, to entice audiences and energize his apathetic team. During its 40th anniversary, Rolling Stone praised the film’s authentic 1970s grit, and Newman fondly referred to Dunlop as one of his favorite career roles.
Other beloved ‘70s picks include Robert Redford as a CIA agent struggling to trust those around him in the Sydney Pollack political thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975), also starring Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max Von Sydow; Bud Cort as an isolated youth attempting to build a pair of wings with the help of a mysterious woman in Brewster McCloud (1970); and Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as star-crossed lovers on a killing spree in Terrence Malick’s directorial debut, Badlands (1973).
July 19: In Paper Moon (1973), Tatum O’Neal became the youngest Oscar winner at the time for her role as an orphaned child who finds herself on a road trip with a con man suspected of being her father in Depression-era Kansas. O’Neal starred alongside her real-life father Ryan in Peter Bogdanovich’s black-and-white drama also starring Madeline Kahn. A few years prior, Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort’s age difference played central parts in the 1971 black comedy Harold and Maude. As the titular characters, Harold is a death-obsessed young man who learns to embrace life and live it to the fullest when he meets the carefree, 79-year-old Maude. In another black comedy, The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), Anne Bancroft and Jack Lemmon play a middle-aged married couple struggling with layoffs during a recession, a garbage strike and inner-city woes of crime and disorderly neighbors.
Inner-city struggles are the focus of the 1971 trailblazing crime drama Shaft. Richard Roundtree stars as private detective John Shaft, whose case to find the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem crime boss puts him in the middle of a dangerous Mafia conspiracy that threatens to start a city-wide race war. Shaft was a box-office hit that became one of three profitable films for MGM in 1971, virtually saving the studio from bankruptcy. Also set in 1970s New York is the British farce, The Ritz (1976). Jack Weston stars as a strait-laced businessman who seeks refuge in a gay bathhouse after his mobster brother-in-law (Jerry Stiller) puts out a hit on him. Rita Moreno and F. Murray Abraham are among the colorful cast of oddballs at the bathhouse. Adapted by Terrence McNally from his original Broadway production, in which Moreno won a Best Actress Tony for her performance, The Ritz is one of the first films to highlight the setting of a gay bathhouse.
July 26: The youth of yesteryear by way of the 1970s makes up the first half of the final night of our special theme. Johnny Whitaker and Jeff East star as Mark Twain’s famed adventure-prone children Tom Swayer and Huckleberry Finn in the 1973 adaption Tom Sawyer, directed by Don Taylor. Celeste Holm also stars as Aunt Polly alongside Jodie Foster as Becky Thatcher, Tom’s love interest who serves as a moment of respite in Tom and Huck’s dangerous travels and brush with murder. Ode to Billy Joe (1976), based on the song “Ode to Billie Joe” by Bobbie Gentry, centers on the ill-fated budding romance between two Mississippi teens in 1953, Billy Joe and Bobbie Lee. The serious themes exploring homosexuality, abortion and suicide from a youth’s perspective give the film its distinctive 1970s spirit. In Martin Ritt’s Sounder (1972), Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield star as Rebecca and Nathan Lee, sharecroppers in 1930s Louisiana struggling to survive and make ends meet for their two children. When an act of desperation results in Nathan Lee getting arrested and the family dog Sounder is shot, their son David (Kevin Hooks) learns hard lessons about the racially suppressed and economically destitute world he lives in but is given hope in the possibility of education being a way out.
Closing out the month’s theme is the ripped-from-the-headlines drama Over the Edge (1979), in which a group of teens in a Colorado subdivision violently revolt against local police after a friend of theirs is killed. The film marked the cinematic debut of Matt Dillion. Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is another story based on a real-life crime that captured the public’s attention in 1972. Al Pacino portrays Sonny Wortzik, a man who robs a bank to get money for his lover’s gender-affirming surgery. Though the robbery goes wrong from the start, resulting in a 14-hour hostage standoff with authorities, both the real-life and fictional version of Sonny become a cultural icon emblematic of the anti-authority, disillusioned American sentiment of the 1970s.
