The Miracle of Marcelino opens the way a lot of great fables do, with an ending. A priest is called to the deathbed of a woman he doesn’t know, and to comfort her he tells the story of a boy named Marcelino. From there the film drops back decades, to a war-scarred Spanish monastery where the friars find an abandoned infant on their doorstep. They decide, over the objections of at least one grumbling brother, to raise him themselves.
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Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope opened on May 25, 1977, written and directed by George Lucas, produced by Gary Kurtz, with a score by John Williams that did as much to define the movie’s identity as anything on screen. A desert-planet farmhand named Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, gets pulled into a galactic rebellion after a droid hides a stolen set of plans inside its memory banks. He falls in with an aging hermit named Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness, a smuggler named Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, and a captured rebel leader named Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher.
Standing against them is Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing, and his enforcer, Darth Vader. The plot is simple enough to draw on a napkin. Everything interesting happens in how it’s executed.
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High Noon opens on the happiest morning of Marshal Will Kane’s life. Played by Gary Cooper, Kane has just married Amy Fowler, played by Grace Kelly, and turned in his badge, ready to leave the small New Mexico town of Hadleyville behind for a life running a store. Then word arrives at the train station: Frank Miller, the outlaw Kane sent to prison years earlier, has been pardoned and is arriving on the noon train, with three of his old gang already waiting at the depot to meet him. Kane and Amy start to drive out of town. He stops the wagon himself, turns it around, and goes back to face what’s coming.
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Annie Hall opens with Woody Allen, as neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer, addressing the camera directly, working through a Groucho Marx joke about never wanting to belong to a club that would have him as a member, before announcing flatly that he and Annie have broken up and he’s still trying to figure out why. From there the film abandons any pretense of a straight timeline. It jumps back to Alvy’s childhood in a house literally built under a Coney Island roller coaster, then forward through a first marriage, then to the night he meets Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton, at a Manhattan tennis club.
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Monty Python’s Life of Brian came out in 1979, directed by Terry Jones, written by all six Pythons together, and produced by John Goldstone, with George Harrison quietly saving the whole production by financing it himself after the original studio got cold feet and walked. Graham Chapman plays Brian Cohen, born in the stable next door to a rather more famous baby on the same night, and cursed for the rest of his short life with extraordinarily bad timing. I have loved this film for longer than I can honestly account for, and every time I sit back down with it, I’m struck again by how a movie this silly manages to also be this wise.
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There’s a moment in the King and I when Yul Brynner, playing a king who’s just been told by a schoolteacher that he’s wrong about something, doesn’t yell. He goes still. You watch a man who’s never once been contradicted try to figure out what to do with that feeling. Everyone remembers the big ballroom dance, the hoop skirts, the row of children lined up by height. What you should really watch for is that stillness, because it’s the best thing in the movie, and it’s why this one has held up so much better than most musicals from its era.
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The Philadelphia Story opens with one of the great silent gags in American film. Cary Grant, playing the newly ex-husband of Katharine Hepburn, storms out of their house carrying golf clubs while she trails behind hurling his belongings after him. She snaps one of his clubs over her knee. He responds by putting his open palm flat against her face and shoving her, hard, backward through the front door. Not a word is spoken. The whole marriage, its wreckage, and roughly forty percent of the movie’s argument about who these two people are to each other, plays out in about fifteen seconds before the title card even finishes.
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Nobody has actually reviewed Tony yet. Rotten Tomatoes has a page and no score. There’s no wide critical consensus, no embargo lift, nothing but a trailer, a featurette, and one room full of chefs who got to see it early. So take this for what it is: a bet, not a verdict. But it’s an informed bet, and after two decades writing about the people this movie is trying to honor, I’ve got opinions.
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