'Little Murders' may be the best little-seen masterpiece of the '70s

Sometimes you see a movie from several years ago and think not only - how did this get made - but -how did they make something this ahead of its time? That's the feeling I had while watching satirist Jules Feiffer's 1971 masterpiece Little Murders.

The movie, which leveraged the goodwill and stardom engendered by Elliott Gould's breakout hit M*A*S*H from the year before to make something deeply subversive and, also just deep. There are traces of Wes Anderson and the Coens here, maybe even a little David Lynch. I can't imagine a time when Hollywood studios would wholeheartedly embrace a movie like this, but I am so glad they did.

Gould, who is normally cute and funny deliberately dials down the charisma. He’s hangdog and beaten down -- is bruised and bleeding throughout. He plays an emotionally stunted photographer who is targeted for a romance by a spirited woman (played beautifully by Marcia Rodd) who comically insists on 'moulding' him into the kind of man she wants him to be.

This includes forced visits with her eccentric family, which includes a creepy brother who may or may not be attracted to her, a homophobic father and a blithe mother who has lines like: “You’re a photographer so I thought you’d appreciate looking at these photos of Patsy’s dead brother Steven.”

People don’t talk like this anymore in movies. It's remarkably funny dialogue this is heightened to be sure, but never not interesting. Naturalism can be boring. In fact, when was the last time you actually remembered a line of dialogue from a movie you've seen? "Wakanda forever," is one of the only things that comes to mind for me.

One of the strengths of the new Star Is Born is that the script is memorable even if it is flawed.

From this movie--  ‘What I really want to do is direct films’ - is one of my favorite non sequitur punch lines ever. There's another line I love: “I hate families.” And it's not just the witty, surreal dialogue that makes this movie special, its the willingness to celebrate iconoclasts, which was something of a trademark for 1971 films -- with films like A Clockwork Orange, Harold & Maude and even The French Connection -- putting unorthodox, even crazy characters, front and center.

And while this movie, on it's surface appears to be a light, quirky romantic comedy -- there is a shocking, sudden, not fully explained burst of violence in the denouement that delivers a punch to the gut and changes the entire feeling of the film for the rest of its running time.

There are, of course, elements that date the film. The F gay slur thrown is thrown around casually with contempt, but it does feels authentic to the time. There are moments, some of them, where its evident that the film's origins were on the stage and not the screen.

But these are minor quibbles. This is a brilliant, hilarious movie that deserves to be rediscovered. It's hard to describe, and even harder to find (it's not on Netflix, Amazon or any of the other obvious platforms).

The '70s are full of hidden gems like this that are sadly buried from potential audiences -- movies like The Big Fix with Richard Dreyfuss, and Darker Than Amber, with another cool, unconventional leading man in Rod Taylor, that you have to really hunt for and can't get access to a quality version of them.

These movies must be resurrected -- nudge, nudge Criterion -- they speak to the paranoia, the existential crisis of the 1970s, a decade touched by economic uncertainty, political corruption and senseless violence. Sound familiar?