my favorite movies of 1973:

(1) American Graffiti

(2) Sleeper

favorite of 1973:

American Graffiti

(Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Harrison Ford. Directed by George Lucas.)

George Lucas, the director/writer, has said he knew that each plotline in this movie about adolescents in 1962 was a thin “thread,” but they came together to make a “rope.” More memorable than any one of the stories is the bittersweet atmosphere evoked by the ’50s and early ’60s music which suffuses the whole movie.

In this scene, Richard Dreyfuss is riding with his friends when he becomes entranced by a fleeting encounter with a young woman in another car (Suzanne Somers):

Quick … cut over to G Street! I just saw a vision … a goddess! Come on, you’ve got to catch up to her! … This was the most perfect, dazzling creature I’ve ever seen! … She spoke to me right through the window! I think she said, “I love you.” That means nothing to you people? You have no romance, no soul? … Someone roaming the streets wants me! Will you turn the corner?

Ebert saw the “elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird” as a symbol of “innocence in the process of being lost.” Ebert concluded:

“American Graffiti” is not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant.

Stream American Graffiti on these sites.

2nd favorite of 1973:

Sleeper

(Woody Allen, Diane Keaton. Directed by Allen.)

In this sci-fi comedy, Woody Allen continues his absurdist approach to political satire that he started in Bananas (one of my favorite movies of 1971), but now with a more compelling leading woman in Diane Keaton.

Woody Allen plays a health-food store owner in New York City in 1973 who’s frozen after a routine medical procedure goes wrong, until he wakes up 200 years later in a dystopian society where America has turned into a police state, and rebels are trying to use him to infiltrate the government. He tries one weird idea after another to get by in the soullessly automated future, from impersonating an android butler (see the video below), to stealing engineered food that’s bigger than himself, to kidnapping Diane Keaton.

She plays a bad poet with a comfortable lifestyle that’s typical for the year 2173, when people expect to get all their pleasure from technology such as an “orgasmatron,” a machine they step into for instant sex with none of the complications. (When we and Woody Allen first meet Diane Keaton, she’s having some friends over and casually remarks to one of them as they’re leaving: “We should’ve had sex, but there weren’t enough people.”)

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen’s constant squabbling is the heart of Sleeper and points the way to how they’d be paired up again, more seriously and enjoyably, in Annie Hall (my favorite movie of 1977) and Manhattan (my favorite of 1979).

(How to stream Sleeper.)

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.