The Motion Picture Academy Awards will be presented this coming weekend. This is a topic that I usually write about in great length, but I have not done so at all his year due to the fact that I have seen only one nominated performance for 2025, Best Actress Nominee Kate Hudson for Song Sung Blue, although Linda and I do plan on watching Sinners before Sunday's awards ceremony.
So, I am going to take a look at the movies today in a different light, and talk about some of the movies that will be turning fifty years old in 2026. In a world where Google exists, it is easy enough to find such films by Googling, say, "best movies of 1976". In fact, you can find all kinds of such lists, and it is hard to say that any one of them is definitive. However, all of them include these movies:
All the President's Men
Alan Pakula directed this story of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as they dug in and reported on the Watergate break in that eventually led to the resignation of the President of the United States.
Taxi Driver
Network
Rocky
This story of an underdog tomato-can of a boxer who gets a chance to fight for the heavyweight championship is considered by many to be the greatest sports movie ever made. It won the Best Picture Oscar that year, and it launched the career of Sylvester Stallone. As one write up I saw today said, the many, many sequels to this may have dulled the luster of the original, which is a shame, because it really is a terrific movie. (Purely Personal Opinion: In retrospect, the Oscar should have gone to All The President's Men.)
The Shootist
The story of a legendary Old West gunfighter who has been stricken with cancer and now seeks to see how to end his days with a "minimum of pain and maximum of dignity". The movie stars John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, and James Stewart. It is remembered today because it was Wayne's last movie. The fact that Wayne himself was battling the cancer to which he was eventually succumb, adds to overall tone of the movie, making it almost autobiographical.
In no particular order, here are some other notable movies that are also turning 50 this year, all of them worth watching:
- Murder by Death - Screenplay by Neil Simon makes this one worth watching
- Marathon Man - Great thriller starring Dustin Hoffman and Lauren Olivier
- Silver Streak - Great comedy starring Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, and Jill Clayburgh. Some comedies don't hold up after fifty years; this one does.
- The Bad News Bears - Walter Matthau coaches a team of misfit Little Leaguers whose best player is a girl played by Tatum O'Neal, who won and Oscar for her performance.
- Family Plot - Should be watched if for no other reason than it was Alfred Hitchcock's last movie.
- The Front - Woody Allen stars in this movie drama (he neither wrote not directed it) about the Hollywood Blacklist Era.
- A Star Is Born - The one with Barbra and Kris Kristofferson.
These are all movies that I have seen, and I think that I will make a point of watching all of them at some point during this fiftieth anniversary year of their release. I can highly recommend all of them to you. In researching material for this post I saw two movies on every list that I had not seen, and I am going to make it a point to see them too.
- The Outlaw Josey Wales - A western directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
- Assault on Precinct 13 - A thriller set in contemporary Los Angeles directed by John Carpenter
And just to show that not everything was groovy back then, 1976 also saw the first remake of the 1933 classic King Kong. This movie was universally panned by critics. The miracle of this one was that the careers of Charles Grodin, Jeff Bridges, and Jessica Lange (in her very first movie role) did not go down the drain along with it.
