The Top 10 Movies of 1979
It was the end of a decade that many were happy to put behind them. The 70s had seen the resignation of a president, the painful last years of the Vietnam War, gasoline shortages, the Iran hostage crisis, and disco. On the other hand, they were also great years for Hollywood. The death of the old studio era in the 1960s had paved the way for more highbrow auteurs to invent a style known as “New Hollywood.” When that ran its course, it was replaced by something even newer, if sometimes less highbrow: the blockbuster era and the dawn of the “popcorn movie” in the second half of the decade. Products of both of these movements are included in Flickchart’s top 10 for 1979, as well as a British comedy and a Russian… whatever Stalker is.
Read on!
10. Breaking Away
On the surface it is a fun sports movie about cycling, but Breaking Away also tells a classic story about camaraderie between four working-class, aimless teens who band together to show the upper-class elites that they can compete better than them. While this is going on they are wondering what comes next in life, since next year they will no longer be teens. It’s a story anyone can relate to even if they’ve never gotten on a bike. – Ryan Hope
- Global rank: 686
- Wins 52% of matchups
- 2 users have it at #1
- 32 have it in their top 20
9. All That Jazz
All That Jazz is the yin to A Chorus Line‘s yang. Both stories attempt to plumb the emotional reaches of the life in musical theatre. A Chorus Line (global rank: #5649) winds up with the more cohesive and digestible philosophical narrative, that the power of musical theatre is to allow us to transform our darkest, most desperate moments into a flavor of sublime that is nowhere else available. All That Jazz covers the entirety of A Chorus Line‘s narrative journey in its first five minutes. Its view of the theatre is a charnel house, a hungry god that needs to eat our best and brightest artistic impulses in order to make a world that sings and dances. For all of musical theatre’s apparent whimsy, All That Jazz asks us to remember that that whimsy is built on a foundation of artistic pain and hardship. The magic of the medium occurs when the darkness that underlies it is transformed into light. This is an incredibly subtle and abstract statement to make on the nature of art, but this film dares to make it. – Doug Van Hollen
- Global rank: 526
- Wins 51% of matchups
- 7 users have it at #1
- 58 have it in their top 20
8. The Jerk
The Jerk is the ultimate evolution of the Jerry Lewis-style, clown-centered picaresque comedy. It’s a tragedy is that the wide gap of time since that subgenre’s heyday in the ’60s makes this film seem like more of an outlier than it is. But The Jerk is by no means derivative, and the sharp, unexpected turns of its comedy are what gives it staying power even as our collective sense of humor continue to change. Steve Martin‘s clown is incredibly verbal, and it is through Navin Johnson’s non-regional Caucasian twang that we get a picture of him as essentially an innocent, a soul so smitten with naive American ambition that he is cinematically “coded” as a moron. But he is not a moron; he is merely devoid of artifice, putting him in similar territory as Chance the gardener (see the entry for Being There below) and Forrest Gump, but in much more shady and improbable contexts. The film calls him a “jerk,” a word which no longer means what it seems to have meant in 1979, but he is really a fool, a clown custom-made for Carter-era malaise and post-satire silliness. And it is the familiarity of that archetype that gives the comedy such deep teeth. – Doug
- Global rank: 503
- Wins 52% of matchups
- 12 users have it at #1
- 273 have it in their top 20
7. The Warriors
This film wins on almost every axis of movie success, but its main triumphs are atmospheric. It captures all of the subtlest features, good and bad, of living inside such a unique civic organism as New York City: the secret codes and signs among hidden subcultures; the intense effort required for even modest transit from place to place; the insane and improbable serendipities that bring joy and terror into your life on an hourly basis; the feeling of the city as a thing that watches you, sometimes grinning, sometimes leering, but always with more surprises than you want; and, most of all, the heat. The city heat that bakes off the screen in The Warriors is pitch perfect, a combination of temperature, stagnant air, the stench of humanity and civilization’s byproducts, the braking-force of city life until the leaves change. That the movie manages to capture such subtle and timeless nuances of the city is a textural triumph, and it’s why I fall in love with it every time I see it. Take that “city feel” and wrap it around a mythic tale of noble antiheroes under siege in a world where crime flourishes like an algal bloom and the sun rises only with reluctance, and you have the definition of cult movie: specific and universal, weird and recognizable, sad and glorious. – Doug
- Global rank: 472
- Wins 50% of matchups
- 25 users have it at #1
- 176 have it in their top 20
6. Being There
Being There has the same premise as Forrest Gump: a simpleminded man (here played by Peter Sellers) becomes involved in national affairs, and the people he meets interpret his comically-plain observations as sage philosophy. Of the two movies, Being There is more aware of the absurdity and sometimes troubling implications of the concept. In one scene, when Sellers’ character goes on a national talk show whose host thinks his commentary on gardening are an elaborate metaphor for the economy, a black housekeeper who formerly worked with Sellers says “It’s for sure a white man’s world in America… Dumb as a jackass, look at him now! Yes, sir, all you’ve gotta be is white in America.” It’s a funny line and truthful satire, and it helps keep Being There from becoming too insipid. Filmmaker Hal Ashby was a keen observer of the American experience in the 1970s, recording stories about Vietnam (Coming Home), alienated youth (Harold and Maude), and sexual politics (Shampoo) that captured the moment but largely avoided soapbox moralizing. Similarly, Being There‘s take on concepts of privilege and power manages to feel truthful without claiming to transmit any “grand truth,” and with Sellers in command of the screen it seldom fails to put comedy first. – David Conrad
- Global rank: 299
- Wins 50% of matchups
- 6 users have it at #1
- 132 have it in their top 20
5. Life of Brian
Life of Brian was, of course, quite controversial, as any movie based on the Gospels is doomed to be, particularly a comedy movie. But the Pythons always insisted that their movie was not sacrilegious, and they have a good case. Brian (Graham Chapman) is quite clearly not Jesus. As his mother (Terry Jones) famously points out when three Magi bearing gifts for the Christ-child enter her hovel by mistake, “He is not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.” More than naughty, though, Brian is just misunderstood. In a land under Roman occupation when foreign names and obscure language and shifting alliances cause consternation (Naughtius Maximus, the People’s Front of Judea versus the Judean People’s Front, “blessed are the cheesemakers”), it’s no wonder that Brian becomes a victim of mistaken identity. Chapman’s flummoxed, put-upon persona serves him as well here as it did when he played King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (global rank: #24), and if this movie is not quite as well-paced as that one, it does have nearly as many quotable lines, a feat which should have been impossible. And even though Holy Grail is the one that got turned into a hit stage musical, it’s Brian that still has the best musical number. “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” indeed. – David
- Global rank: 198
- Wins 54% of matchups
- 292 users have it at #1
- 6107 have it in their top 20
4. Manhattan
The unenviable task of writing about Manhattan falls to me, so I am the one who has to say this, because there’s no ethical way to avoid it: in Manhattan, Woody Allen‘s character has a relationship with a 17-year-old girl, making it one of the chief reasons why the longstanding allegations against him are so easy to believe. The fact that Allen is, usually, a very good filmmaker has motivated a lot of people to overlook the allegations (which are, unfortunately, impossible to prove or disprove), but in the #MeToo era we’re finally past the point of ignoring them, and Manhattan is a movie that doesn’t let you forget them for a second. In 1979 the writer/director was still shifting gears from the straight comedies of his early period to the dramedies and dramas of his later period, and Manhattan nails the tonal mixture with its famous opening monologue, an amusingly neurotic but heartfelt ode to New York City set to a montage of Gordon Willis black-and-white photography. It’s tempting to say that the strong visual style elevates the aforementioned narrative, but it’s more accurate to say that Manhattan is a pretty movie with an ugly story. – David
- Global rank: 182
- Wins 54% of matchups
- 40 users have it at #1
- 539 have it in their top 20
3. Stalker
Stalker is not a movie, but an experience. And not an experience in the “thrill ride” sense — it’s more like the experience of watching grass grow, or more aptly watching it die. Even Stalker‘s biggest fans admit to falling asleep during it. Yet Andrei Tarkovsky‘s nearly three-hour experiment in post-apocalyptic imagery is one of only a few cinematic efforts that can claim to have entire books written about them: Goeff Dyer’s 2012 book on Stalker is subtitled “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” To say that Stalker is “about” anything, though, is to sell it short. It’s “about” everything. Three men (“Writer,” “Professor,” and “Stalker,” which in this context means something like “guide”) travel through a wasteland of crumbling buildings to get to a room where they will find… well, what they’ll find there depends entirely on what they want to find. “The room” at the heart of “the zone” is the ultimate MacGuffin, a genie in a lamp, the One Ring, and he who enters it will receive what his heart most desires even if he himself does not know exactly what that is. Movie viewers who embark on this journey expecting a clear moral or closure or even coherency, though, are likely to be as disappointed as the three protagonists. With Stalker it’s not the destination that matters, nor even the journey, which unfolds through a sequence of very still vignettes. Rather, it’s what and who you are that shapes your experience of Stalker, just as it shapes your experience of life. – David
- Global rank: 119
- Wins 62% of matchups
- 31 users have it at #1
- 214 have it in their top 20
2. Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now proved a hard project to walk away from. Not content with the initial release, director Francis Ford Coppola later oversaw an extended cut (Apocalypse Now: Redux) and is currently working on yet another edit of his famous Vietnam War movie. What was so important that it needed 40 years of on-and-off tinkering? Clearly it’s not that Coppola feels the need to be faithful to the film’s initial moment, the long post-Vietnam hangover of the late 1970s and 80s that produced guilt-ridden movies like The Deer Hunter and resentful ones like First Blood Part II. What keeps Coppola coming back to his Vietnam movie even after the war itself became, by American standards, ancient history is his belief that it was never really a Vietnam movie in the first place. Rather, the movie is an attempt to explore themes that transcend particular historical events and that remain true across chasms of space and time. “You have to realize, when I was making this I didn’t carry a script around… I carried a green Penguin paperback copy of Heart of Darkness with all my underlining in it,” Coppola says. Heart of Darkness was then around 80 years old, and it wasn’t even about a war, but rather a journey into a part of the world that Europeans had not fully mapped and did not understand. What Joseph Conrad’s novel had to do with the American experience in Vietnam was the fact that the key players in both were men who were far, far out of place. Coppola’s movie, as he has repeatedly said, is not anti-war, and Conrad’s book is not anti-travel, but both of them are concerned about what happens psychologically to people who go abroad to play god. It’s not always a pretty picture, as other films on this theme like Aguirre: Wrath of God and The Man Who Would Be King also assert. These are all period stories, but of course people still attempt such things in the 21st century, so Apocalypse Now remains as relevant as ever — in all its variations. – David
- Global rank: 54
- Wins 62% of matchups
- 776 users have it at #1
- 9792 have it in their top 20
1. Alien
Ridley Scott’s reputation as a director is mixed. Some would say he’s a mediocre director who happened to catch lightning in a bottle with two of his early films, Alien and Blade Runner. Others would insist that even his lesser works have a special quality to them. Regardless of which way you lean, Alien proves that Scott was a masterclass director for at least one shining moment. Alien is the #1 horror film of all time on Flickchart, topping even The Shining (global ranking: 20) and Jaws (global ranking: 63). Ultimately it’s a very simple film: a slasher set in space. But it has one of the most potent “last girls” of all time in the form of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. Her gritty determination to stay alive as she outlasts the Xenomorph and other enemies make her a worthy protagonist, and she’s contemplated by a fantastic cast including Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, and Harry Dean Stanton, easily the strongest cast of characters in any horror film. They may play off broad stereotypes, but the actors all bring something unique to the characters to make them feel fleshed out and real.
From the opening shots of the interior of the Nostromo, Scott sets a feeling of unease and tension. The labyrinth hallways give way to an otherworldly vision of the crew awakening from their artificial slumber. Alien is full of notable sequences that, even when parodied, retain staying power. The “chestburster” scene is wonderfully underplayed for how grisly it is. No dramatic music or frantic cutting, just a cold, clinical birth. The film’s subtle commentary on the nature of man, corporate capitalism, and underlying sexual themes all elevate Alien to something more than a genre movie, and we would be remiss not to mention the fantastic creature design by H.R. Giger who crafted one of the most iconic monsters in cinema. It achieves the task of looking truly alien, which is the coup de grace that shows why Alien is king of 1979 and king of horror on Flickchart. – Connor Adamson
- Global rank: 16
- Wins 64% of matchups
- 983 users have it at #1
- 15,251 have it in their top 20
Kramer vs. Kramer and 10 are two of mine.