In 1978, we should have had American movies, art works or not, that were powerful and ambitious and intelligent, not un-chaste and often unconvincing thrillers like Magic. Even a failure such as ’78’s The Deer Hunter is a limited example of what I’m venerating. Magic is the one about a mentally unbalanced ventriloquist (Anthony Hopkins) whom we do not quite believe in, and his vulgar dummy. It’s a rather adolescent nonentity, put together by some talented technicians but much, much weaker than Hitchcock’s Psycho. By ’78, movies were pathetically weak.