Movies of 1972 Bracket Game

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2022/01/03/__trashed/

It’s the first Monday of a brand new year… I think. It’s been a blur since 2020. Did 2021 actually happen? Yeah. Somehow it’s 2022 and we’re starting another round of bracket games here at Le Blog.

The tradition has been to start each new year off with five bracket games representing the movies released decades ago. That starts us off in 1972 when the old Hollywood system was crumbling. Blaxploitation was peaking. Movies like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were entering the mainstream (although they won’t be making appearances here). Eventually corporations would pick up where studio heads left. But fifty years ago, movies were gritty and unsanitized.

The eventual outcome of this game is as certain as we’ve ever had. But you know, let’s vote anyway.

Our first bracket game of the year goes back half a century. A lot of my readers probably weren’t alive much less going to the movies in 1972. I was a toddler. But I do remember how different the moviegoing experience was in the days before cable, home video and recording devices much less streaming. In 1972 the old studio system had more or less collapsed. Young directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were taking the reigns and reinventing American cinema (Scorsese directed the Roger Corman-produced Boxcar Bertha which won’t make the brackets whereas Coppola’s movie of 1972 is probably going to win).

This is a crop of movies that feels like it came from a different planet. And that’s without including oddballs like Fritz the Cat. Honestly, there aren’t a lot of movies from 1972 that I think most of our readers are likely to be familiar with or invested in. So once again, our look at the decade of the seventies will be abbreviated with only 16 entries instead of a full roster of 32. That means making some tough cuts. You may have a movie from 1972 that you remember fondly that I just couldn’t squeeze into the condensed brackets.

I came up with a draft of a full sized set of brackets. It included a Woody Allen match pitting Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex vs. Play It Again Sam. But I just watched Farrow Vs. Allen, so that was a pretty easy cut. The Getaway was the only other top ten grossing movie I ended up cutting. Most of the major Oscar nominees are represented, but I couldn’t find room for Sleuth, Fat City or Pete ‘n’ Tillie. I would have liked to have included some family films, but Snoopy, Come Home was among the most memorable of the new releases.

The elephant in the room is that 1972 saw the release of The Godfather. By any metric, it was the movie of the year and time has been kinder to Coppola’s crime drama than anything else. While there are some good movies in this game (and some good movies that didn’t make it), I have a hard time imagining anything upsetting The Godfather. But the winner is often besides the point. What are your favorite movies from 1972?

Voting ends at noon on Friday EST. You can come back any time after that to vote in the second round.

[Dude111]

I picked The Poseidon Adventure..

[AMackII]

There were so many good 1972 films but I’m going with Super Fly as my vote