What’s it about?
A couple of robots escape from a space battle with sensitive data that could help a scrappy band of rebels destroy a giant weapon called the Death Star. The robots crash land on a desert planet, where they hook up with a young moisture farmer (who dreams of space heroics) and a grizzled old hermit played by Alec Guinness (who hopes to teach the youngster an old martial arts philosophy called “the Force”).
A young Harrison Ford and an alien who looks like Bigfoot agree to transport the fugitives and the secret plans to the rebel base. But first they must rescue one of the rebellion’s leaders (a feisty princess) from deep inside the Death Star (a moon-sized space station that destroys entire planets) and have a quick electric sword fight with top bad guy Darth Vader (a black-helmeted mystic voiced by James Earl Jones). After all that’s done, the rebellion uses the captured plans to launch a last-ditch attack against the Death Star before their secret headquarters is blasted into oblivion.
Is it any good?
I said at the very beginning of this project that I was going to focus on less well-known movies instead of the ones that everybody knows about. That’s still true -- I’m still watching at least one movie that I haven’t seen yet for each year and still doing my best to dig a little deeper to find them. But I have known for a long time now that I was going to write something about STAR WARS. Even if I had nothing to say myself, it would at least give other people a chance to say whatever they wanted. Because, as you all know, everybody has an opinion on STAR WARS.
The version that I just finished watching is the DVD of the original theatrical version (as opposed to the special edition with additional footage that came out in 1997). I picked this version on purpose -- not because I think it’s “better”, but because it’s practically impossible for me to watch the special edition without playing a (very distracting) game of “spot the new footage”.
Like most folks my age, I watched STAR WARS a lot as a kid. It was on television every few months, and at some point my folks taped one of those broadcasts so that we could watch it whenever we wanted on long summer days. (We had no Nintendo in my house, incidentally.) I was in high school when the special edition version was released to theaters, and my friends and I naturally all went, since none of us had ever had the chance to see it on the big screen. And then, after that -- nothing. Except for a snippet here and there on television, I didn’t watch STAR WARS again for ten years. I did see a couple of the prequel movies (one in a second-run theater and one on DVD), but after 1997 I left the original trilogy alone for a decade.
The ten-year gap was at least partly on purpose. After watching something so many times during such formative years, I felt like STAR WARS was no longer just a movie to me. It’s a rare experience that I can remember having at many different points in my life. Watching STAR WARS had become like an archaeological expedition -- I could use the movie as a prism to look back into my past and remember how I felt at different stages of growing up. And for some reason, I wanted to put a rest to that. Without being too melodramatic about it, I suppose I packed up STAR WARS with the rest of my childhood and started looking for new experiences instead.
Until, that is, one fateful night in a hotel room in Ventura, California. Flipping around the cable stations, I came across the very beginning of STAR WARS on HBO. It was totally unplanned, but it had been ten years since I had last seen it and I decided right then that enough time had passed. I could watch it again with an uncritical eye and judge its merits as a mere movie. The result? I didn’t much like it.
I liked parts of it, of course. I couldn’t deny that the assault on the Death Star was an amazing fifteen minutes of cinema, and some of the screwball chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher was fun. But by and large, I was not impressed by the simple plot, flat characters, and borderline nonsensical events. I could see why Alec Guinness had asked George Lucas to kill him off. Yet, watching it again now, I can’t help but think I completely missed the point in that hotel room.
Of course, things are different now. For the past nine months, I have almost literally watched nothing else besides science fiction movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A couple entries ago, I said that I had this secret hypothesis that science fiction could be divided into pre-STAR WARS and post-STAR WARS. I don’t really think that’s true anymore, but it is certainly true that there is nothing else prior to 1977 that looks or even feels even remotely like STAR WARS. George Lucas didn’t invent the space opera, but he made it look absolutely incredible.
One of the most interesting things about STAR WARS (in the context of the popular sci-fi flicks that came before it) is that it isn’t designed to make you think. It has no specific message or cautionary tale to deliver. George Lucas famously cribbed from Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth when he was working on the movie, but any “meaning” in the movie is vague and mushy. This is a big departure from movies like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) or even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), where all the spectacle and circumstance seem crafted specifically to make you ponder the nature of humanity (or something equally heavy).
STAR WARS is entirely an adventure -- and it’s an adventure in a startling universe. The Mos Eisley cantina scene alone contains more surprising aliens than the rest of sci-fi cinema had managed to conjure up in the previous eighty years. The same holds true for the other details of the sci-fi world -- the giant skeleton of some extinct creature in the Tatooine desert, the glimpses of banthas being ridden by sand people, the brief allusions to the Galactic Senate by the Imperial brass, the battered and dirty ships of the rebellion, and so on.
STAR WARS is a movie that is just full of stuff -- much of it half-realized or barely mentioned. Even the concepts of Jedi knights and the Force itself are undeveloped here. I don’t think this is a bad thing though. Much of what I loved about STAR WARS as a kid were these tantalizing glimpses at a world beyond. It was a few years before I saw any of the sequels, and I know that I wanted to know more about everything in the world. (Most of all, I wanted to see more banthas.) In some ways, the sequels and the special editions ruin some of this feeling of wonder and excitement.
On the other hand, as I was watching this time, I was surprised how much my knowledge of the rest of the series gave more meaning to certain events. I found it very hard to identify anything redeeming about THE PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES when I saw them (never saw REVENGE OF THE SITH), but I was aware this time that knowing what Obi Wan Kenobi was like back in his prime made his appearance here as an old man all that more meaningful. And his acquiescence to death at the hands of Darth Vader was something that never ever made any sense to me as a kid or teenager. It’s only in knowing what Obi Wan knows about the relationship between himself and Darth Vader, and between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, that it actually makes sense.
So STAR WARS is pretty well ruined for me as a movie, from a combination of individual factors, cultural factors, and George Lucas specific factors. From my point of view, we’ve all collaborated to turn a perfectly decent movie into... what exactly? Something more than a movie, I suppose, and something seemingly completely unique. Maybe generations from now or in countries somehow untouched by American culture, folks will think of STAR WARS as just another movie. But for me at least, I don’t think that kind of assessment is possible at all.
What else happened this year?
More entries to come! Stick around and find out!
Showing posts with label George Lucas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Lucas. Show all posts
Monday, October 19, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
1971: THX 1138
What’s it about?
Robert Duvall plays THX 1138, a citizen of a sterile indoor city of the future. He has a dangerous job in the factory that produces the robotic policemen who patrol the city, a “mate” whom he is forbidden from having sex with, a holographic television, and a cocktail of drugs to keep him sedated and contented. But he has recently found himself losing his focus and experiencing strange emotions -- and ultimately it’s revealed that his mate has been making substitutions in his drug regimen to flush the sedatives from his system.
The un-sedated Duvall wastes no time in discovering sex, but he is observed by the all-seeing authorities who begin to monitor him closely. Meanwhile, a twitchy surveillance technician (played by Donald Pleasance) starts illegally modifying system software to get himself assigned as Duvall's roommate. The robotic police soon arrest them both and take them to a featureless white prison with no walls. Duvall and Pleasance soon escape with the help of a holographic television star. Once back in the city, more chases ensue until Duvall manages to make it to the world outside.
Is it any good?
THX 1138 is famously George Lucas’s first feature, adapted from a short student film he produced in 1967. The version I watched is a re-edited one with some new scenes and special effects that Lucas added for the DVD release in 2004. (As far as I know, no other version is available on DVD.) Besides being Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138 is also one of only six that he has directed -- the others being AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), STAR WARS (1977), and the three recent STAR WARS prequels. That being the case, it’s surprising to me how little attention this movie seems to get -- there are millions of fans of STAR WARS who apparently have no interest at all in THX 1138.
I can’t say that I had a whole lot of interest myself until I started watching it. Despite knowing that it existed for many years, I never bothered to seek it out. That’s partly because (like most people) I have mixed feelings about STAR WARS and its sequels. But it’s more likely because I had just never heard very much about THX 1138 before -- nobody seemed to be talking about it, so I didn’t feel any urgency to go out and see it.
I’m not even going to try and compare THX 1138 to any of George Lucas’s other movies. I’ve never seen AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and STAR WARS and its sequels have such cultural ubiquity that it’s almost absurd to even think of them simply as movies. I will say that it was kind of amazing to see a George Lucas movie for which I had absolutely no expectations. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know who Darth Vader was or what storm troopers looked like, but I knew practically nothing about THX 1138 before I sat down to watch it.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The story and setting are pretty familiar, after all. The oppressive society in THX 1138 is a variation on the one found in George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD. It’s not exactly the same as either, but there are dystopian elements that are very familiar -- the constant surveillance, the compulsory consumerism, the faceless enforcement figures, the manipulation of sexuality, the elimination of emotion and love, the state-mandated pharmaceuticals, and so on. Some of these elements crop up in earlier movies as well. Besides the 1956 version of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, similar extreme visions of oppressive societies show up in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966). And the paranoid obsession with constant surveillance and control is a big part of movies like THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE (1960), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1961), SECONDS (1966), and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970).
This is not to say that THX 1138 is derivative or unoriginal. I think it’s more a case of the movie being “of its time”. Orwell and Huxley wrote their novels in response to the totalitarian surveillance societies that coalesced during the rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe. But those regimes hunted down dissidents the old-fashioned way -- by accusations gathered through infiltration, entrapment, coercion, or fabrication. These kinds of things show up in the dystopian sci-fi flicks of the 1960s as well -- for instance, Robert Duvall informs on Donald Pleasance’s deviancy in THX 1138, which leads directly to his arrest. But these movies also resonate differently since ubiquitous video cameras and tape recorders were (and are) no longer the science-fiction trappings that they were for Orwell and Huxley. These themes became even more urgent after the abuses of the Nixon administration were exposed in the Watergate scandal, and they’ve never really gone away since then.
As far as the story goes, it’s a variation on the standard dystopian theme. There are a few neat twists though -- I really liked how Duvall’s mate needed to alter his drug mix before she could turn him into a co-conspirator. And since the story is told entirely from Duvall’s point of view, he starts to feel disoriented and confused long before he (or the audience) knows what’s happening to him or why. Another nice bit is that Duvall actually needs his drugs to safely do his job -- without the sedatives, he runs the risk of dropping radioactive and explosive materials during some delicate assembly operations. It’s not clear whether his need is physical or psychological, but either way it adds a much more serious element of danger to his decision to stay off the pills.
Donald Pleasance’s character is also a bit of an enigma. Like Duvall’s mate, his job is to watch a bank of monitors and coordinate security responses to deviant behavior. Apparently he takes a shine to Duvall while observing him during his hours on the job, but it’s not exactly clear what form his interest takes. The “mate” relationship in the world of THX 1138 is completely asexual, so it could simply be that the fussy Pleasance wants a roommate who will annoy him less than his current one. But watching the monitors means that Pleasance isn’t ignorant of sex -- and probably isn’t even ignorant of Duvall’s own sexual activity. So it seems at least reasonable that there might be some element of desire to his motives. Pleasance also seems more in touch with his emotions, though it’s not clear whether he’s off his drugs or not.
The futuristic world is very white, very sterile, and very inhuman. The vision of the future has a lot in common with the one in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) -- but with one important exception. I said that I got the feeling from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the movie took place the night before opening day in space -- that is, that the pristine spaceships and whatnot were being prepared for an onslaught of people who hadn’t arrived yet. In THX 1138, everything is still clean and pristine, but there’s also a sense that a lot of things are broken just below the surface. There are a lot of little throwaway scenes that show various bits of technology failing -- an elevator refusing to work, a robotic policeman running into a shut door over and over, and so on. The future isn’t dirty yet in this movie (we have to wait for STAR WARS for that), but it certainly has a lot of bugs. This isn’t the night before opening day -- it’s just another day in the peak season where the Hall of Presidents is closed for repairs.
The world is very minimalist as well. The starkest example of this is the prison where Duvall and Pleasance are incarcerated in the middle of the movie. It’s literally nothing more than a white space with a couple of couches. There are no walls -- instead, the whiteness stretches infinitely in all directions, making it impossible to see the way out and very easy to get lost. But Duvall’s apartment and the shows on the holographic television are minimalist as well. For a society that supposedly values mindless consumerism, there are really very few things to buy or desire. Instead, people simply take home useless geometric shapes (“dendrites”, according to the film commentary) which they then destroy and buy again the next day. But the consumerist angle is the least convincing and least interesting part of the movie -- whatever point they were trying to make gets wiped out by the production design and the lack of real attention to it in the script.
The robotic policemen, however, are one of the coolest and most interesting parts of the movie. The combination of police uniforms with expressionless silver faces is very creepy and compelling. There are some other scattered images here and there that are not so well integrated into the story -- a lot of the beginning of the movie is devoted to very brief unconnected vignettes (some involving the main characters, others not) of life in the city. They each last maybe five seconds or so, but they give a real sense of what the world is like. It also gives the movie a higher density of information so that it’s not always obvious exactly what’s happening or if it relates to the story. After skimming through the movie a second time to get some screenshots, I’m pretty confident that it all makes sense and that there is a clear story to it. But the little bits of unconnected business make it more interesting to rewatch since there’s a good chance that some little bit slipped by unnoticed the first time.
I do think the movie starts to go downhill a bit after Duvall and Pleasance are sent to prison. It becomes a much more self-consciously artsy movie in the middle section, before abruptly switching to a long (but pretty ho-hum) chase sequence at the end by foot and car. But the movie is always interesting to look at, and small parts of the future world are pretty thoroughly realized. (Vast sections remain unexplored, obviously.) The plot and characters are extremely simple, and nobody does very much acting in the movie, but most of that fits pretty well with the dystopian, emotionless setting. As I said before, I am not even going to attempt to compare this to STAR WARS, but I can say that right now I would far rather watch THX 1138 again than any of the six movies that George Lucas is most famous for.
What else happened this year?
-- Peter Watkins delivers yet another sci-fi documentary with PUNISHMENT PARK, this one about a government detention center where political dissidents (i.e., hippies and draft dodgers) are hunted down in a law enforcement training program.
-- Michael Crichton's break-out novel THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN was adapted into a very effective "how done it" about a lethal alien disease.
-- Take Roddy MacDowell and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira from THE PLANET OF THE APES; add in Ricardo Montalban, Sal Mineo, Eric Braeden, a funky score, and a time travel plot that brings talking chimps back in time to the 1970s; mix well and serve as ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES.
-- Charlton Heston, meanwhile, imports his cynical, world-weary persona practically wholesale into THE OMEGA MAN -- the second adaptation of Richard Matheson's novella I AM LEGEND.
-- Stanley Kubrick directed A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, about which I assume everybody has already formed their own opinion. (I don't like it much.)
If you only watch one movie from 1971...
THX 1138 is the one that I would recommend, but PUNISHMENT PARK is pretty interesting and unusual as well. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and THE OMEGA MAN are both more typical (but still solid) choices too.
Robert Duvall plays THX 1138, a citizen of a sterile indoor city of the future. He has a dangerous job in the factory that produces the robotic policemen who patrol the city, a “mate” whom he is forbidden from having sex with, a holographic television, and a cocktail of drugs to keep him sedated and contented. But he has recently found himself losing his focus and experiencing strange emotions -- and ultimately it’s revealed that his mate has been making substitutions in his drug regimen to flush the sedatives from his system.
The un-sedated Duvall wastes no time in discovering sex, but he is observed by the all-seeing authorities who begin to monitor him closely. Meanwhile, a twitchy surveillance technician (played by Donald Pleasance) starts illegally modifying system software to get himself assigned as Duvall's roommate. The robotic police soon arrest them both and take them to a featureless white prison with no walls. Duvall and Pleasance soon escape with the help of a holographic television star. Once back in the city, more chases ensue until Duvall manages to make it to the world outside.
Is it any good?
THX 1138 is famously George Lucas’s first feature, adapted from a short student film he produced in 1967. The version I watched is a re-edited one with some new scenes and special effects that Lucas added for the DVD release in 2004. (As far as I know, no other version is available on DVD.) Besides being Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138 is also one of only six that he has directed -- the others being AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), STAR WARS (1977), and the three recent STAR WARS prequels. That being the case, it’s surprising to me how little attention this movie seems to get -- there are millions of fans of STAR WARS who apparently have no interest at all in THX 1138.
I can’t say that I had a whole lot of interest myself until I started watching it. Despite knowing that it existed for many years, I never bothered to seek it out. That’s partly because (like most people) I have mixed feelings about STAR WARS and its sequels. But it’s more likely because I had just never heard very much about THX 1138 before -- nobody seemed to be talking about it, so I didn’t feel any urgency to go out and see it.
I’m not even going to try and compare THX 1138 to any of George Lucas’s other movies. I’ve never seen AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and STAR WARS and its sequels have such cultural ubiquity that it’s almost absurd to even think of them simply as movies. I will say that it was kind of amazing to see a George Lucas movie for which I had absolutely no expectations. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know who Darth Vader was or what storm troopers looked like, but I knew practically nothing about THX 1138 before I sat down to watch it.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The story and setting are pretty familiar, after all. The oppressive society in THX 1138 is a variation on the one found in George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD. It’s not exactly the same as either, but there are dystopian elements that are very familiar -- the constant surveillance, the compulsory consumerism, the faceless enforcement figures, the manipulation of sexuality, the elimination of emotion and love, the state-mandated pharmaceuticals, and so on. Some of these elements crop up in earlier movies as well. Besides the 1956 version of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, similar extreme visions of oppressive societies show up in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966). And the paranoid obsession with constant surveillance and control is a big part of movies like THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE (1960), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1961), SECONDS (1966), and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970).
This is not to say that THX 1138 is derivative or unoriginal. I think it’s more a case of the movie being “of its time”. Orwell and Huxley wrote their novels in response to the totalitarian surveillance societies that coalesced during the rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe. But those regimes hunted down dissidents the old-fashioned way -- by accusations gathered through infiltration, entrapment, coercion, or fabrication. These kinds of things show up in the dystopian sci-fi flicks of the 1960s as well -- for instance, Robert Duvall informs on Donald Pleasance’s deviancy in THX 1138, which leads directly to his arrest. But these movies also resonate differently since ubiquitous video cameras and tape recorders were (and are) no longer the science-fiction trappings that they were for Orwell and Huxley. These themes became even more urgent after the abuses of the Nixon administration were exposed in the Watergate scandal, and they’ve never really gone away since then.
As far as the story goes, it’s a variation on the standard dystopian theme. There are a few neat twists though -- I really liked how Duvall’s mate needed to alter his drug mix before she could turn him into a co-conspirator. And since the story is told entirely from Duvall’s point of view, he starts to feel disoriented and confused long before he (or the audience) knows what’s happening to him or why. Another nice bit is that Duvall actually needs his drugs to safely do his job -- without the sedatives, he runs the risk of dropping radioactive and explosive materials during some delicate assembly operations. It’s not clear whether his need is physical or psychological, but either way it adds a much more serious element of danger to his decision to stay off the pills.
Donald Pleasance’s character is also a bit of an enigma. Like Duvall’s mate, his job is to watch a bank of monitors and coordinate security responses to deviant behavior. Apparently he takes a shine to Duvall while observing him during his hours on the job, but it’s not exactly clear what form his interest takes. The “mate” relationship in the world of THX 1138 is completely asexual, so it could simply be that the fussy Pleasance wants a roommate who will annoy him less than his current one. But watching the monitors means that Pleasance isn’t ignorant of sex -- and probably isn’t even ignorant of Duvall’s own sexual activity. So it seems at least reasonable that there might be some element of desire to his motives. Pleasance also seems more in touch with his emotions, though it’s not clear whether he’s off his drugs or not.
The futuristic world is very white, very sterile, and very inhuman. The vision of the future has a lot in common with the one in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) -- but with one important exception. I said that I got the feeling from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the movie took place the night before opening day in space -- that is, that the pristine spaceships and whatnot were being prepared for an onslaught of people who hadn’t arrived yet. In THX 1138, everything is still clean and pristine, but there’s also a sense that a lot of things are broken just below the surface. There are a lot of little throwaway scenes that show various bits of technology failing -- an elevator refusing to work, a robotic policeman running into a shut door over and over, and so on. The future isn’t dirty yet in this movie (we have to wait for STAR WARS for that), but it certainly has a lot of bugs. This isn’t the night before opening day -- it’s just another day in the peak season where the Hall of Presidents is closed for repairs.
The world is very minimalist as well. The starkest example of this is the prison where Duvall and Pleasance are incarcerated in the middle of the movie. It’s literally nothing more than a white space with a couple of couches. There are no walls -- instead, the whiteness stretches infinitely in all directions, making it impossible to see the way out and very easy to get lost. But Duvall’s apartment and the shows on the holographic television are minimalist as well. For a society that supposedly values mindless consumerism, there are really very few things to buy or desire. Instead, people simply take home useless geometric shapes (“dendrites”, according to the film commentary) which they then destroy and buy again the next day. But the consumerist angle is the least convincing and least interesting part of the movie -- whatever point they were trying to make gets wiped out by the production design and the lack of real attention to it in the script.
The robotic policemen, however, are one of the coolest and most interesting parts of the movie. The combination of police uniforms with expressionless silver faces is very creepy and compelling. There are some other scattered images here and there that are not so well integrated into the story -- a lot of the beginning of the movie is devoted to very brief unconnected vignettes (some involving the main characters, others not) of life in the city. They each last maybe five seconds or so, but they give a real sense of what the world is like. It also gives the movie a higher density of information so that it’s not always obvious exactly what’s happening or if it relates to the story. After skimming through the movie a second time to get some screenshots, I’m pretty confident that it all makes sense and that there is a clear story to it. But the little bits of unconnected business make it more interesting to rewatch since there’s a good chance that some little bit slipped by unnoticed the first time.
I do think the movie starts to go downhill a bit after Duvall and Pleasance are sent to prison. It becomes a much more self-consciously artsy movie in the middle section, before abruptly switching to a long (but pretty ho-hum) chase sequence at the end by foot and car. But the movie is always interesting to look at, and small parts of the future world are pretty thoroughly realized. (Vast sections remain unexplored, obviously.) The plot and characters are extremely simple, and nobody does very much acting in the movie, but most of that fits pretty well with the dystopian, emotionless setting. As I said before, I am not even going to attempt to compare this to STAR WARS, but I can say that right now I would far rather watch THX 1138 again than any of the six movies that George Lucas is most famous for.
What else happened this year?
-- Peter Watkins delivers yet another sci-fi documentary with PUNISHMENT PARK, this one about a government detention center where political dissidents (i.e., hippies and draft dodgers) are hunted down in a law enforcement training program.
-- Michael Crichton's break-out novel THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN was adapted into a very effective "how done it" about a lethal alien disease.
-- Take Roddy MacDowell and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira from THE PLANET OF THE APES; add in Ricardo Montalban, Sal Mineo, Eric Braeden, a funky score, and a time travel plot that brings talking chimps back in time to the 1970s; mix well and serve as ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES.
-- Charlton Heston, meanwhile, imports his cynical, world-weary persona practically wholesale into THE OMEGA MAN -- the second adaptation of Richard Matheson's novella I AM LEGEND.
-- Stanley Kubrick directed A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, about which I assume everybody has already formed their own opinion. (I don't like it much.)
If you only watch one movie from 1971...
THX 1138 is the one that I would recommend, but PUNISHMENT PARK is pretty interesting and unusual as well. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and THE OMEGA MAN are both more typical (but still solid) choices too.
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