Like before any game, ground rules ought to be laid out, plainly, fastidiously, before ticking off the selection of the year past's stand-out movies, The only real requirement is to clarify the criterion for eligibility - what movies are ripe for picking as the year's best. For this particular playing of the game the rule is that the movies must have begun their first run in San Diego during the 1972 calendar year. Now this rule possibly sounds like it goes without saying. But certain problems come up merely from being confined to the San Diego vicinity. This area suffers most of the customary problems of living anywhere in the provinces of the USA, though somewhat intensified. As is immediately recognized by anyone who now and then leafs through the entertainment pages of an out-of-town newspaper — any town at all, particularly — San Diego on some counts is destitute, despite whatever full-breasted feelings you experience as you roll along the new Interstate 805, or cast your gaze along the skyline of ships' masts in back of Anthony's Fish Grotto, or smilingly admire the sky koalas in Balboa Park.

It is simply out of deference to those who are anchored inmates of San Diego that this rule is laid down. Because it would be very easy to pull in movies, from Los Angeles for example, that never arrived in theaters here but that would make much more solid, guiltless picks than the best of the movies which were available locally. In short, there is a significant lack of synchronization between what goes on here and what goes on in New York. Bluntly, if the entire body of movies produced last year were thought of as the total area of Nebraska, then San Diego would have access to only the narrow strip of land that's Highway 80 - the main line. (About the only theaters in town that appeal to hopes for unusual. wayward movies. movies that emerge from sources outside the main Hollywood - studio distributors, are the Unicorn and the Academy, when they occasionally play a first run film, and formerly the Academy's brother theater, the Fine Arts, until brother took an exclusive interest in skin.) Of course. even in New York exists the helpless, impatient wait for movies that can only be read about in film magazines covering the film festival in Trieste or San Sebastian or someplace. But New York receives a relative windfall of odd items which are. in large part, buried on the spot. In addition to the drop-outs into oblivion from the available movies, there is the aggravating slowness of films crossing the country, passing first through areas of proven high-interest in movies, making way pokily toward notorious end-of-the-line stops like San Diego. Which means that August's movie in New York might be February's movie in San Diego. And consequently, some of the titles mentioned subsequently are officially known as 1971's property, and some of the late released of 1972, which fed the Best Ten lists in national magazines. will not be arriving here for some time yet. But without further sulking, follows the selection of prefered 1972 movies, in alphabetical order.

Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime. Alain Resnais's most recent film, finished in 1968, was incredibly delayed. in its arrival in this country, and was shrouded during the wait in black-cloudy advance reports that it was in any case only a minor work of the director's. But Resnais's fixation on time and memory, put into a science fiction format, is a deeply fascinating, complex movie. Entering a pumpkinlike time machine, depicted with an inscrutable deadpan tone, the guinea-pig hero nips backward and forward through stiff, fizz-less moments, equally weighted, from a long and dismal love affair. The stubborn misery of the lovers ("I used to wake up at nigh!...1 hated it. .. 1 stayed awake so as not to wake up") becomes incurable, u nreachable, under the cool, random impartiality of the selection and structure of past events, the obfuscations which the time traveller's uncooperative mind adds to the reliving of the past, and the apathy in Claude Rich's fine performance.

Walkabout, by Nicholas Roeg, maroons a couple of British school kids in the Australian Outback. The unsteady relationship of civilization and nature probably presents a more complex theme than it appears to, but the situation never lures much belief, consideration, or even tolerance. The fascination is in the clear, bright, simple images and the switching between supernatural magnifications (a close-up lizard, bird, rock, or wallaby) and telescopic distances (tiny figures in enormous landscapes). The mixing of civilization's peculiar practices and products with nature's curiosities produces a heady hallucination-effect.

Hickey and Boggs. Filed in the "Sleeper" folder. Robert Culp's first feature film directing try turned out to be a remarkably intelligent, unpretentious genre film (lonely private eyes in the bullying city), which kept its undertones and implications, about city life and self-respect, where they belong — out of the characters' mouths, out of the line of action, out of sight, hidden beneath the characters' appearances, variously spiffy and tatty, hidden beneath the L.A. smog and cityscapes, hidden beneath the furious, multiplied pursuits to turn an elusive suitcase of stolen money into personal profit.

The Culpepper Callie Co. A broad yarn about how an adolescent tries to keep up with the men on his first cattle drive, and how the character of the drive changes when four of the cowboys are killed and are replaced by a quartet of toughs who consider themselves to be cowboys only after they are carousers and gunslingers. Dick Richard's directing style has tendencies toward the prettily picturesque, but otherwise the details of cowboy physique, equipment} and routine seem quite authentic, and unbiased by the limitations of a contemporary imagination.

Jacques Demy's The Pied Piper slipped through town with no prior announcement whatsoever, and was not helped by being treated as a kids' show, which it definitely is not, co-billed with a nature movie starring a brown bear. This is a gloomy fairy tale of Dark Age oppression, black death, and disillusioned farewell to the hopeless world. The careful production values — somber-colored costumed and cluttered sets — drift unpointedly, unobtrusively, minus all of the vanity and price tags that are so visible in the average period piece. Donovan's meek acting debut is unremarkable, fairly bland and fairly likable, while the remainder of the cast is composed of people who can generally smother the spectator single-handedly (Michael Hordern, Donald Pleasance, Jack Wild, Diana Dors). These overemphatic actors appear to have been chosen, out of perversity, as a trial for Demy's stylistic exercise. in which the cameras follow the actors at a wary distance and each individual scene runs on uninterrupted by conventional editing punctuation, Watching even these hammy players weave across the screen is stately choreography, shadowed by Demy's graceful, stealthy cameras is a placid, lulling experience.

Ulzana's Raid, by Robert Aldrich (director) and Alan Sharp (screenwriter), injects a stereotypical Western form with a horror story's frenzied emotional content: dislocated, dread feelings are dredged up by deceptively familiar sights of mounted troopers and Indians peering over rock rims, The apparent topicality of a white-vs.-Indian cultural clash is continually turned back from disgestible moralistic cliches, as the speciator, like the characters, is kept floundering in mixed feelings and inadequate understandings,

If running off at the mouth was permitted, the next movies to be mentioned, as a second string, would be Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Pete and Tillie, Deliverance, Andrade's Macunaima, Skolimowsky's Deep End, Pasolini's The Decameron, Chabrol's The Butcher and Ten Days' Wonder, and Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place.