The Day Of The Jackal (1973)

There is so much detail in Fred Zinnemann's riveting adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal - European filming locations; real people on the street unaware they are being filmed, an audacious plot that sweeps through multiple countries yet also manages to detail the minutiae of the characters' day-to-day - that at times the political thriller starts to feel like a documentary, lending real-time urgency as we follow Edward Fox's Jackal, an assassin for hire meticulously plotting the assassination of Charles de Gaulle while the Parisian police struggle to track him, a faceless, nameless master of disguise.

★★★★★

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Serpico (1973)

Sidney Lumet's biographical film, based on the book by Peter Maas, is the always interesting story of Frank Serpico and eleven years of his career as an undercover policeman, a period in which he took a stand against police corruption - against both the grass eaters and the meat eaters -  and he is an impressive man, thanks to Pacino's great performance, but the film never manages to convey the sense of danger he no doubt faced.

★★★★☆

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Night Watch (1973)

Like the best parlour-game play-adapted mysteries of the 70s and 80s, like Ira Levin's Deathtrap or Simon's Murder By Death,, this atmospheric mystery-thriller features a jangly 70s organ that accompanies the shadowy thrills and lightning-flash-reveals of its creepy old-house murder mystery, with its cast of five players, including Elizabeth Taylor's lead, a hysterical witness to murder, running around in a thriller that reworks and melds together plot elements of other classic thrillers, like Suspicion, Rear Window, Deathtrap, Sleuth, Murder By Death, Shock - like these classics, this is a well-acted, effectively staged jangly good murder mystery time.

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★★★★☆

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The Last of Sheila (1973)

This is one of those parlour game thrillers in which the characters run around playing macabre games involving murder, but it isn't one of the greats like Sleuth or Deathtrap, but rather more on the level of the very entertaining but imperfect Knives Out and reminscient of April Fool's Day with its dated look and not entirely satisfactory mystery involving, similar to April Fool's Day, a gathering on a yacht of a group of film industry associates whose host has organised an itinerary of games and puzzles designed to flush out a killer.

★★★☆☆

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Westworld (1973)

In this 1973 Michael Crichton written and directed scifi thriller, the author's first directorial effort, Isla Nubla is an immersive theme park and the dinosaurs are robots built to interact with and accommodate the high-paying tourists' every holiday whim, and while especially shallow (the plot is three-quarters peculiar robot glitches that perturb the theme park scientists but not enough to progress the plot, and one quarter sudden showdown (in which mildly perturbed scientists flip their lids and turn suddenly into shrieking there's-no-stopping-them, robots-will-kill-us-all nihilists) it is a ripping sci-fi tale full of Planet Of The Apes/Soylent Green era kitsch and quite prescient future-imagining, with amusing performances from Richard "The 70s? I'm in everything" Benjamin, Josh "Am I twenty or seventy?" Brolin, and a 1973 version of the T-800, a sinister, sparkly-eyed Yul Brynner.

★★★★☆

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The Wicker Man (1973)

A policeman heads to a Scottish island to investigate a young girl's disappearance and discovers a veritable Pitcairn of pagan craziness, but the most troubling thing by far is the sight of Christopher Lee in a series of mustard-coloured skivvies.

★★★★☆

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F For Fake (1973)

If you can get past its chaotic first half and look past the movie's and a slouch-hatted and caped Orson Welles' own self-indulgent style, there are fascinating issues to ponder here about fakery and fraud in art - the careers of art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, for example, and Orson Welles' own forays into fakery - but the "essay film" rockets through its ideas, presupposes much knowledge, and opts for a wordy, poetic free artistic form over coherence and consequence.

★★★★☆

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