Paul Mazursky is almost always given short shrift when critics and historians write about the movies of the 1970s.
The actor-turned-writer-turned-director never made a landmark film on the order of “The Godfather” (1972) or “Taxi Driver” (1976) — and he didn’t get embroiled in the juicy sex/drug chaos that added to the legends of Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola — but Mazursky did make a series of highly personal and highly entertaining pictures that are now a valuable time capsule of the era.
After “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” put him on the map in 1969, Mazursky suffered a major misstep with with the expensive flop “Alex in Wonderland” (1970).
“Blume in Love” (1973) turned things around for Mazursky, however, with its dead-on portrait of marriage and feminism at the start of the “Me Decade.”
The writer-director went on to make a critical and audience hit, “Harry & Tonto” (1974), that also demonstrated Mazursky’s skill with actors by netting Art Carney a best actor Oscar for his against-type casting as an aged Upper West Side intellectual who is kicked out of his apartment and then goes on a cross-country road trip.
The success of “Harry & Tonto” launched a very good period for Mazursky because he gained control of his work thanks to the support of 20th Century Fox production chief Alan Ladd Jr. (Ladd gave Mazursky the same sort of artistic freedom that Woody Allen found at United Artists during the 1970s).
The Fox partnership would result in the zeitgeist-defining 1978 hit, “An Unmarried Woman,” but my favorite film from this period is the autobiographical comedy, “Next Stop, Greenwich Village,” which opened to wildly mixed reviews and poor box-office in 1976, but has gone on to become a minor coming-of-age classic.
Mazursky looked back to his own halcyon days as a struggling actor living in the Greenwich Village of 1953. A wonderful 30-year-old stage actor named Lenny Baker (who would become an early casualty of AIDS in 1982) plays the Mazursky stand-in Larry Lapinski. Cabaret singer and actress Ellen Greene (who would go on to star in “Little Shop of Horrors” on stage and on screen) was cast as Larry’s first big love, Sarah, whose conflicted views of sex and romance reflect the 1970s as well as the 1950s.
To play Larry’s lively and funny and desperate circle of friends, the filmmaker gathered together an amazing ensemble that includes Christopher Walken, Lois Smith and Jeff Goldblum. Mazursky also managed to elicit an incredibly poignant (and hilarious) performance from Shelley Winters as Larry’s super-possessive Brooklyn mother during a period when the actress was resorting to self-parody in most of her movie and TV roles.
Like that other funny-but-unsentimental memoir film — Barry Levinson’s “Diner” (1982) — “Next Stop, Greenwich Village” hasn’t “dated” because it was already a period piece when it came out.
Join me Tuesday night at 7 for a free screening of the movie at the Fairfield Theatre Company as part of its “Martini and a Movie” series.
