All The President's Men (1975)

Two Washington Post journalists (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, showing everyone how it is done) are assigned to investigate a burglary, but little do they realise the story they are about to uncover will go right to the very top and result in the first resignation of a President of the United States - a riveting account of the Watergate scandal from start to...well, resignation, but not finish.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Look at online photos from the real incident at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972, and photos of the real robber John Wojtowicz - in the movie, Sonny Wortzik, played by Al Pacino - and you'll be impressed by the likenesses, but exactly why these events led to such a painstakingly recreated film treatment by Sidney Lumet is lost in time: hailed for its portrayal of desperate 1970s New York, the film in fact revels in two other things - the comic chaos of the bungled robbery turned fourteen-hour hostage situation, and the fact Wojtowicz apparently wanted the stolen money to fund a lover's gender-affirming surgery - and, though well acted, is ultimately as chaotic and unrewarding as the robbery - a dull little mess - itself.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Death At An Old Mansion (本陣殺人事件) (1975)

It seems strange to stay completely faithful to the plot of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel The Honjin Murders yet change the title so no one who has read the book can easily find this adaptation, but I suppose Death At An Old Mansion dispenses with the archaic and unhelpful concept of a honjin and provides a more atmospheric English title better suited to this 1975 adaptation's giallo stylings - in good part a horror movie, chilling at times, but also an effective telling of Yokomizo's classic Japanese locked room murder mystery inspired by Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Spiral Staircase (1975)

The 1946 movie made a few changes to the Ethel Lina White book (the heroine, Helen, was rendered mute from trauma, the lunatic's motivations were simplified and so made easier to deal with in a quick 83 minutes, and the truly diabolical characters of Nurse Barker and Lady Warren were sanitised) and this 1975 made-for-tv remake of that movie further distances itself from the book by making even more changes, and dopey ones like heavy-handed signposting of the killer's identity and motives, an unnecessary extrapolation of Helen's trauma by way of repetitive flashbacks, and several more murders, at least one of which doesn't even fit the story.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Count of Monte Cristo (1975)

Probably all film adaptations of Alexandre Dumas' classic revenge story, the roughly 1000-page brick The Count of Monte Cristo, need to abridge characters and subplots in order to fit something sensible into a movie runtime, so this entertaining 1975 made-for-tv adaptation needs to be excused for dispensing of one of my favourite of Dumas' eighteen chapter releases, the episode introducing the electrifying Luigi Vampa, leader of a band of Italian smugglers, and probably noone can blame the movie for letting the intensity of Edmond Dantés' love for Mercedes extinguish long before their very late reunion - there is just too much other stuff to cover - but can anyone forgive the movie Richard Chamberlain's Count's whitened and slicked back 'do or the poster's redundant hyphen?

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

The incompatiability of the English sensibilities of early white Australians with the hot, dry Australian landscape and the wariness and suspicions harboured by Western invaders towards the bush are themes beautifully realised in Peter Weir's enigmatic film of the Joan Lindsay book which has a teacher and a group of schoolgirls like Botticellian angels quietly vanish without trace up Hanging Rock while on a school picnic.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece based on a William Makepeace Thackerey novel tells of an Irish man's efforts to promote himself in English society and about the only detail slightly out of place in over three hours of tightly-controlled, painstakingly and sumptuously staged painterly period drama is Ryan O'Neal as Redmond Barry Lyndon - it is just a fraction hard to believe such a gormless, self-interested meathead is able to command any attention at all let alone the sympathy, ire, or outrage he arouses in the women and society figures around him.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS