The 1960s saw the medium of film (particularly in the U.S.) start to become radically different, with more mature, experimental, and risk-taking movies being released and enthusiastically received. 1967 was a particularly significant year for this overall trend, bringing in a brief but important film movement referred to as New Hollywood. By the early 1970s, there’d been at least a few years of fantastic, daring films, with filmmakers young and old making the most of this newfound freedom.
This made 1972 a year ripe with great movies that pushed the boundaries of cinema forward. For as great as New Hollywood was, it should be noted that this year was just as good for various other film industries from around the globe, with that necessitating that a ranking of the year’s best shouldn’t just focus on the American film industry. The following 1972 releases demonstrate the year’s legendary reputation, with the films below ranked from great to greatest.
10 ‘The New Land’
The second and final part of an extremely long movie that began with 1971’s The Emigrants, The New Land follows a Swedish family in the middle of the 19th century as they try to settle and make a living in the United States. The Emigrants showed how harrowing their international journey was, yet reaching their destination is shown to introduce a whole other set of obstacles.
The New Land is a powerful movie that refuses to pull punches, and watching it play out over more than three hours (part 1 is similarly long) proves a daunting and difficult watch. It is exceptionally made and features remarkable performances from its cast, but its often surprising brutality and honesty about how life was back then means it’s likely not for everyone.
9 ‘The Heartbreak Kid’
Not to be mixed up with the inferior 2007 remake of the same name, The Heartbreak Kid is an underrated and very entertaining romantic comedy from an underrated filmmaker: Elaine May. She wrote and directed two other acclaimed films from the 1970s (1971’s A New Leaf and 1976’s Mikey and Nicky), though making 1987’s infamous Ishtar seemed to bring her directing career to a stop.
This film focuses on an indecisive and very unlikeable main character: a newlywed husband who begins to regret his marriage days into the honeymoon because he meets a woman while holidaying who he decides he likes more. It’s frequently funny, though the fact it also serves as something of a character study for the protagonist gives it a darker edge than most traditional romantic comedies, and helps it stand out from the crowd.
8 ‘Deliverance’
Deliverance is an infamously tense and unnerving thriller, and a prime example of a movie that couldn’t have been made in America during the days of the Hays Code. It follows a group of men who go on a river-rafting trip through a very remote area, and after clashing with some locals, find their lives suddenly in immense danger.
It starts out feeling like an adventure movie, but soon reveals itself to be a far more unnerving take on the genre than what most might be used to. By the halfway point and onwards, it feels like a survival movie, with the main characters fighting for their lives, and to make it home in one piece. It still holds up as a piece of uneasy and traumatic filmmaking, with age doing little to dull its shock value.
7 ‘Frenzy’
Alfred Hitchcock certainly made some dark movies in his time, but none can claim to be as graphic or disturbing as Frenzy. The great director likely saw how audiences were growing more accustomed to stronger content in movies, and so he went all-out with this story about one man who’s falsely identified as a serial killer who’s been targeting women in London and strangling them with neckties.
The film has a very dark sense of humor, and mixes it with some unsettling sequences that still disturb to this day. While it wasn’t Hitchcock’s very last movie, it’s often considered his last classic, and is well worth watching for fans of the director (as long as they know ahead of time that it really doesn’t hold back).
6 ‘What’s Up, Doc?’
The screwball comedy genre was particularly popular in the 1930s, went out of style for a few decades, and then in 1972, Peter Bogdanovich aimed to bring it back with What’s Up, Doc? The attempt was largely successful, because it endures as a great 1930s throwback while nowadays also feeling charmingly like a product of the 1970s.
The plot involves a series of bags that all get mixed up, leading to various people crossing paths and causing ridiculous amounts of chaos from what would otherwise be a fairly mundane and minor problem. Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal are both excellent in the lead roles, and with the movie’s fast pace and brief 94-minute runtime, it’s a ton of fun to watch.
5 ‘Sleuth’
Sleuth is a wonderfully twisty and comedic mystery movie that’s hard to summarize without giving too much of the plot away. It begins with two men trying to devise a plan to illegally earn money through an insurance scam, but given that neither is ever fully trusting of the other, things soon unravel in inevitable yet surprising ways.
Maybe some viewers might see where certain things are going before they’re supposed to. After all, plenty of comedic mystery films have come out in the years since 1972, and it might not be quite as surprising as it once was. Yet even putting the plot aside, it’s a delight to watch two actors as great as Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine bounce off each other. And though actors Alec Cawthorne and John Matthews (as Inspector Doppler and Detective Sergeant Tarrant respectively) never appeared in any other films besides this one, their work here should also be commended.
4 ‘Solaris’
One of the greatest films directed by the legendary Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris is a slow, long, yet deeply impactful science-fiction film. It follows a psychologist who travels to a space station, intending to treat the people who live there, as they’ve all been affected by some sort of mysterious condition or sickness.
It takes a while for him to get to the bottom of anything, making it an undeniable slow-burn of a film. Yet it sticks with you long after watching, and though sci-fi is often concerned with exploring the darker or more mysterious sides of human nature, few do it as effectively as Solaris.
3 ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’
Werner Herzog has made great documentaries and great feature films. He’s just a great director in general, though when it comes to his feature film output, nothing else in his filmography has quite the same impact as his 1972 movie Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
It follows a group of explorers who venture deep into the Amazon jungle in search of El Dorado, believing the legendary golden city to be something that genuinely exists. It’s comparable to Heart of Darkness and the loose Francis Ford Coppola adaptation, Apocalypse Now, depicting a visceral and life-changing (not in a good way) descent into unfamiliar territory both physical and psychological. It’s heavy, ugly, beautiful, and gripping all at once, and stands as one of Herzog’s greatest achievements.
2 ‘Cabaret’
Cabaret is undoubtedly one of the greatest musicals of all time, and though it didn’t win Best Picture at the 1972 Oscars (look below for that winner) it did win the most Oscars for that year, with eight in total. It’s about a group of people who work in and around a Berlin nightclub in the 1930s, unaware (or ignorant) of the rise of Nazism happening around them.
It feels like a tragedy centering on a way of life, or a tragedy for an entire nation, rather than being a tragic film about one specific person’s downfall. It’s ambitious, bleak, and yet also very entertaining and visually spectacular, with great performances and phenomenal style courtesy of Bob Fosse and his directorial trademarks.
1 ‘The Godfather’
The Godfather only won three Oscars compared to Cabaret’s eight, yet one of those was for Best Picture. It kicked off one of the most famous movie trilogies of all time, introducing viewers to the Corleone crime family, here led by aging patriarch, Vito (played by Marlon Brando in a legendary performance).
It’s a film that changed the crime genre forever and also pushed cinema as a whole forward. It established Francis Ford Coppola as one of the all-time great directors, and also served to make stars out of up-and-coming actors at the time like Al Pacino, James Caan, and Diane Keaton. It’s a legendary movie for many reasons, and deserves to be crowned 1972’s best.