WORLD-CLASS FEAST AMID A FAMINE YEAR

If critics were groundhogs, one look at the shadow cast by the films of 1985 would be enough to turn them around for a decade or two. This has been, unequivocally, the year of the great famine, in American films in particular.

One after another fad was rushed to the fore, then discarded: teen comedies, teen sex comedies, voyeuristic teen sex comedies, and seriocomedies of teens awakening to sex in clumps and/or in shopping malls. The pumped-up, muscle-bound movie lumbered into view and is with us yet; other factions are still concerned with taunting us into World War III.

It seemed that almost every time you looked to a serious American film to save the day, it was a hope aborted. With few exceptions, they felt hollow, manufactured, not made from an overwhelming desire to tell a certain story in a certain way.

I suspect this is going to result in more foreign films crowding 10-best lists of the nation’s critics than we’ve ever had before. Quite rightly, too. This year the majestic ballast of thought, integrity, seriousness of purpose and execution has come from Japan, West Germany, France and England.

It was also a year in which the elder statesman set the pace for the striplings: 71-year-old Kon Ichikawa, 79-year-old John Huston, 75-year-old Akira Kurosawa. As subject matter, age, for once, had an honored place: in the central couples of “Cocoon”; in “The Shooting Party,” whose indelible exchange took place between James Mason and John Gielgud; in “Emerald Forest,” where the father/shaman certainly knew best; with the wily, croaking Don in “Prizzi’s Honor”; in the wonderful emeritus professors of “Creator,” and in “A Sunday in the Country” as an elderly, honored painter took up his brushes with an air that said challenges still lay ahead of him.

Critics may feel infinitely more geriatric this December than any of us did last January--please do not forget that 1985 was the year of “Perfect,” “Stick,” “Red Sonja,” “Spies Like Us,” “National Lampoon’s European Vacation,” a fourth Rocky, another Rambo and a Swedish ninja.

But for the good news, from a very personal viewpoint these motion pictures seemed the finest of the year, with enough substantial candidates left over to make a serious runners-up list:

1--Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters is the year’s indispensable movie: the complex, interdependent lives of four aristocratic sisters just before World War II, adapted from the novel of Junichiro Tanazaki and consummately well acted. Like Japanese Chekhov, unhurried and subtle, it is also slyly funny and sensuous. Tanazaki regarded women with adulation and the director’s use of color, design and costuming gives that fervor an almost palpable presence. The result is almost swooningly beautiful, but beauty with a rigorous purpose.

2--Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is a universal, elemental study of war, love and death that sums up the director’s lifelong concerns. As writer-director, Kurosawa has taken the Lear story from Shakespeare and gone with it to the edge of the abyss; “Ran’s” epic violence has a purging effect. As the Lear-like Hidetora, Tatsuya Nakadai is poignant and terrifying, never less than noble, and Kurosawa’s addition of a new character, the dangerously vindictive Lady Kaede, gives the story fullness and balance. Both sumptuous and austere, “Ran” is Kurosawa in complete control of his creative powers and even, seemingly, the elements themselves.

3--Bertrand Tavernier’s A Sunday in the Country takes place in one afternoon at the comfortable country house of the painter, M. Ladmiral, an honored and passed-over contemporary of Renoir and Monet. Beneath its tranquil surface--a predictable visit of a dutiful son and his family and the unpredictable visit of a sunnily outrageous daughter--this is a film about love and risk, about age and compromise. It is a cry for bravery at any age, for striking out into the terrifying unknown. In its every detail, it is masterly and deeply, deeply moving.

4--John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor is part Italian opera, part love story with sobering underpinnings. It centers around a reigning Brooklyn Mafia family who go at life, and each other, at the top of their lungs. In the Prizzis’ world, every emotion is larger than life, but death is simply business. The fun is the rough Jack Nicholson and the smooth Kathleen Turner as a matched pair of hit persons , while Anjelica Huston is left to carry a torch in a manner that may just ignite Brooklyn. Like Kurosawa today, Huston is a master doing what he does best: sly, witty, immaculate, seditious movies that rattle our notion of what’s “nice.” 5--Edgar Reitz’s Heimat was the triumphantly juicy moviegoing experience of the year, 15 hours and 32 minutes long without a banal moment. It traced the unfolding lives of a peasant family in a small, fictitious German village in the Rhineland, not unlike a little remote town in Wisconsin or Maine or Oregon, between the crucial years of 1919 and 1982. One of the ways Reitz captured and held his audience (completely--there was the feeling of being an accomplice to this tale) was by his selective, intuitive use of color--which picked out one detail (like a glowing orange-red stove warming lovers in an otherwise black-and-white bedroom) or seeped into an entire scene and heightened its emotional content. In much the same way, politics entered these characters’ lives, leaving some untouched, staining others forever. A mesmerizing film, there is some talk that it will be back early this year.

6--Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo was a light, inventive homage to what movies mean, or meant, to their audiences. You have the feeling that Allen hopes they still do in this Depression-time fable set when movie theaters were Mecca and 15 cents bought you some pretty fabulous daydreams. Allen begins with a page from Buster Keaton, an actor walking straight off the screen; then doubles it when both the actor and his character pop off and into the audience to swoop up a wispy, moviestruck dishwasher. Bracingly bittersweet and lovely, this.

7--Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind may be his “Casablanca,” a romantic triangle (quadrangle, sextet, full house) set in dangerous, enigmatic RainCity. Or it may not be. In any case, it’s the only movie we’ve had this year where you cared desperately that its two lovers got together, then shed a tear for the odd man/woman out. Rudolph is getting better and better at creating complete worlds--like this one, getting ready to explode--then setting them to music, the very best music. Marianne Faithfull does the music; Kris Kristofferson and Lori Singer the loving; Keith Carradine and Genevieve Bujold the losing. Super.

8--George Stevens Jr.’s George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey should be required viewing for anyone with a love of film. These intimate memories of Stevens at work, stories of stubbornness and faith, meticulous planning and spur-of-the-moment invention--told by Joel McCrea, Katharine Hepburn, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, John Huston, Fred Zinnemann and others--are the pungent back side of movie-making. Interspersed with liberal clips from Stevens’ work, they become articles of inspiration. You leave this film buoyed up, feeling you’ve had a glimpse at the heart of the film-making passion.

9--John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest, which combined intelligence with surpassing beauty, was one of the very few films this year (“Ladyhawke” was another) to infuse the screen with magic. Against a true story of a little boy abducted by Amazonian natives--to be found by his father 10 years later as a young chieftain of “the Invisible People”--Boorman created a highly detailed tribal civilization of power, dignity, innocence and mystery. Like many of his films (“Deliverance,” “Excalibur”), this one fretted about blundering outsiders who affront a delicately balanced civilization. It also considered the universal, inevitable sorrow of parting from one’s family.

10--Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Occasionally, language seems truly finite--as though there were only so many words that precisely capture a film, and Stanley Kauffmann used the best ones when he said “ ‘Shoah’ belongs in every civilized human being’s experience.” It does. If you, as I did, feel you have absorbed everything you could on the Holocaust, do not shut out “Shoah.” This is not an archival footage film, with corpses like cordwood. In a way, that’s too easy. Lanzmann’s bulldog-like interviews with this precious handful of eyewitnesses from both sides of the barbed wire puts the experience where it must go--into our minds. In this extraordinary and beautiful 9 1/2-hour epic investigation, Lanzmann achieves his aims: to chart the geography of what was done, and how it was done, with infinite precision and finality. He stands as a giant among documentarians and film makers.

That still leaves a rich pool of runners-up. In order of preference they are: Year of the Dragon (United States, Michael Cimino), After Hours (United States, Martin Scorsese), The Official Story (Argentina, Luis Puenzo), Kiss of the Spider Woman (Brazil, Hector Babenco), Fool for Love (United States, Robert Altman), Dance With a Stranger (Great Britain, Mike Newell), Brazil (United States-Great Britain, Terry Gilliam), The Shooting Party (Great Britain, Alan Bridges), 28-Up (Great Britain, Michael Apted), Ladyhawke (United States, Richard Donner), Runaway Train (United States, Andrei Konchalovsky).

KEVIN THOMAS’ LIST:

1--Ran.

2--Shoah.

3--The Holy Innocents (Spain, Mario Camus).

4--Himatsuri (“Fire Festival”) (Japan, Mitsuo Yanagimachi).

5--The Horse (Turkey, Ali Ozgenturk).

6--When Father Was Away on Business (Yugoslavia, Emir Kusturica).

7--A Sunday in the Country.

8--The Death of Mario Ricci (Switzerland, Claude Goretta).

9--Prizzi’s Honor.

10--Desperately Seeking Susan (United States, Susan Seidelman).

Honorable mention: Diary for My Children (Hungary, Marta Meszaros), Sheer Madness (West Germany, Margarethe von Trotta), Dim Sum (United States, Wayne Wang), Americana (United States, David Carradine), Re-Animator (United States, Stuart Gordon), Onimasa (Japan, Hideo Gosha).

MICHAEL WILMINGTON:

1--Ran.

2--Heimat.

3--The Home and the World (India, Satyajit Ray).

4--Brazil.

5--The Purple Rose of Cairo.

6--The Devil, Probably (France, Robert Bresson).

7--A Sunday in the Country.

8--Shoah.

9--Himatsuri.

10--(tie) Prizzi’s Honor,

Fool for Love, After Hours.

Honorable mention: The Makioka Sisters, When Father Was Away on Business and Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Yugoslavia, Emir Kusturica), The Holy Innocents, Lost in America (United States, Albert Brooks), Streetwise (United States, Martin Bell), The Company of Wolves (Great Britain, Neil Jordan), Mask (United States, Peter Bogdanovich).

GOODBY ‘85And good riddance. It was a very lean year for U.S. films.