10 popular films from 1977 that weren’t directed by George Lucas

Film notebook

By G. Arnold

Thirty years ago, Star Wars premiered in American movie theaters. Before its release, the film didn’t elicit much enthusiasm, even from its own studio. But soon after opening, the George Lucas fable became a sensation. Audiences in 1977 waited in long lines, and many came back for second, third, and even more viewings.

But what about other popular films released that year? Was 1977 a good vintage for directors? You be the judge. Here, in no particular order, is a sampling of some other movies from 1977. Not necessarily a run-down of the highest grossing films, this eclectic list shows the wide range of movies that attracted audiences of the day.

Airport 1977—This much can be said: Without the Airport movies, later movie spoofs such as Airplane! (1980) would have had less material to satirize. Veteran actor Jack Lemmon plays the captain of a private 747 jetliner that’s filled with art treasures. The plane spends much of the film underwater. Here’s the praise that the industry paper Variety could muster: “The story’s formula banality is credible most of the time.”
Annie Hall – Director-comedian Woody Allen was hugely popular with movie critics and with his target audiences, which tended to be composed of educated (some might say snobby), East Coast (okay, more like New York-oriented) cultural liberals. This semi-autobiographical tale contains Allen’s famous encounter with an escaped lobster.
Saturday Night Fever – This disco-flavored look at urban nightlife features music by the Bee Gees and other disco acts of the day. It also revealed, somewhat surprisingly to some, that lead actor John Travolta could make a successful transition from television (he was Vinnie Barbarino in the situation comedy Welcome Back, Kotter) to the big screen.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind – His friend George Lucas made huge waves with Star Wars in the spring of 1977, and later that year Steven Spielberg introduced his own entry into the sci-fi genre. The BBC’s review observes that the movie “is saturated with imagery that fascinates, terrifies, and utterly consumes the viewer with the desire to discover the secret that’s eating away at the on-screen characters.” It’s a vintage Spielberg movie, pure Hollywood in many ways, but also quite entertaining.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar – This somber movie intends to show audiences a picture of hidden life in the 1970s. The all-star cast features Richard Gere, Diane Keaton, Tom Berenger, Tuesday Weld, Levar Burton, and Brian Dennehy. In the story, Diane Keaton’s straight-laced character, a teacher of deaf students, decides to use her free evenings for cruising bars in search of sex and drugs. It all seemed quite serious and edgy when it premiered, but today the ending rings more of Hollywood’s earlier days than the liberated 70s.
High Anxiety – Comic Mel Brooks rode to box office glory with his classic Western send-up, Blazing Saddles (1974). In High Anxiety, he aimed his sights at the movies of director Alfred Hitchcock, known as the “master of suspense.” Brooks plays the new director of Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. And yes, this is the movie that introduces audiences to the forbidding Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman).
Oh, God! – This vehicle for the aged George Burns paired the popular comedian with singer John Denver, who had entertained (some folks used a less kind word) radio audiences with such hits as “Rocky Mountain High,” now the second official state song of Colorado. (The first is “Where the Columbines Grow.”) In the story, the Almighty (Burns) chooses a grocery clerk (Denver) to be his modern messenger to humanity. Who are we to argue with the Almighty?
Smokey and the Bandit — Burt Reynolds, the 1970s icon, stars as a bootlegger, but the real story here, as wisely noted by Variety, involves “many different ways to crash cars.”
The Deep – Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bissett star as a couple vacationing in Bermuda when they cross paths with treasure hunters of the kind who do not make television specials for National Geographic. Novelist and screenwriter Peter Benchley had already hit pay-dirt with Jaws a few years earlier, and here he tries to keep his menace-and-water theme going, with rather uneven results.
The Spy Who Loved Me – The James Bond franchise kept chugging along in the 1970s, though by then Bond movies didn’t so much simply contain spoof elements as have them as their central feature. Many people’s least favorite Bond, British actor Roger Moore, stars in the title role. Barbara Bach, wife of Beatle Ringo Starr, appears as his opposite number, a Soviet agent with whom Bond has to “cooperate.” The title song, “Nobody Does It Better,” and musical score were nominated for an Academy Award, as was the art direction. The rest of the movie? Well…not so much.

So, these are the sort of movies that were popular with the stalwart audiences of the Carter years. Like most movies, maybe, these tell us more about the life and times of their era than may have been apparent at the time. Are they still entertaining? Some are worth a look. Others, however, make us ask, “What were they thinking?”

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G. Arnold is an editor of Bread and Circus. He is author of the books Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics ( Praeger 2008 ) and The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam ( McFarland 2006 ). Contact him here.