America in the 70s
As in our own time, the America of the 1970s faced financial insecurity, rising fuel prices, and struggles to end an unpopular war overseas. This led to a sense of instability and a feeling that the old familiar landmarks and trusted standards were being swept away. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the movies of the period. The 70s were a time of unprecedented upheaval for American film. Daring young directors experimented with new visual techniques and narrative styles. Controversial subject matter and unconventional characters found their way into mainstream movie houses. Familiar genres like the musical, the war pic, or the gangster movie were reinterpreted and blockbusters changed the way movies were marketed and sold.
| Jack Nicholson | ||
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Chinatown
Jack Nicholson was a new kind of leading man;
sarcastic, conflicted, and more than a little
unstable. In Roman Polanski's Chinatown he plays a
private eye caught up in a web of corruption and
deceit surrounding booming post war Los Angeles.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest
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Five Easy
Pieces
Character study of a talented pianist who has given
up a promising career and now works on oil rigs.
Nicholson's brief battle of wits with an obstinate
waitress foreshadows the epic conflict with Nurse
Rachet at the center of One Flew Over the Cuckoos
Nest.
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| Martin Scorcese | ||
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Mean Streets
Martin Scorcese based his film about small time hoods in little Italy on people he really knew, rather than Hollywood gangster stereotypes. In 1973 Scorcese's hyperkinetic editing and clever use of pop music were highly unconventional. |
Taxi Driver
A twisted loner slowly implodes in a hellish vision of 1970s New York. This violence of this movie shocked audiences of the time as did child star Jodie Foster's portrayal of a twelve year old prostitute. Disturbing and prophetic.
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Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore Scorcese leaves the gangsters and psychopaths back in the city as he directs this story of a recently windowed woman's journey of self discovery through the Southwest. The inspiration for the hit 70s TV show, Alice, and source of that lovely 70s catch phrase "kiss my grits". |
| Tough Guys | ||
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Dirty Harry
The Dirty Harry series quickly descended into camp,
but the first movie is a gripping battle of wits
between Clint Eastwood's brutal cop and a psychotic
murderer loosely based on San Francisco's "Zodiac"
killer. Director Don Siegel successfully transplants
the amoral drifter Eastwood played in Sergio Leone's
spaghetti westerns into a corrupt 1970s urban
landscape. Unfortunately the movie's refusal to offer
a serious critique of Harry's behavior could be seen
as a justification of torture and police brutality.
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Enter the Dragon
The movie that made Bruce Lee a household name, and
introduced American audiences to the "kung fu movie".
An secretive international organization recruits a
martial arts master to penetrate the island
stronghold of an evil warlord. Lee died shortly after
filming the movie, apparently due to a fatal drug
interaction. Lee's son Brandon also died at a young
age after filming his breakthrough movie,
The Crow. Enter the Dragon was spoofed without
mercy in
Kentucky Fried Movie.
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Patton
George C. Scott won an Oscar for his portrayal of the
controversial four star general. Although Patton was
a hero to the older generation that fought in WW2,
the Francis Ford Coppola screenplay emphasizes his
rebelliousness, and his counterculture tendencies.
Patton is depicted as a man struggling to maintain
honor in a corrupt war machine that devalues heroism
in the service of politics and profits.
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| Francis Ford Coppola | ||
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The Conversation
A provoking mystery-suspense drama explores the
morality of privacy in the story of Harry Caul, a
surveillance expert, who conducts a routine
surveillance job only to later find himself
suspicious that he has become an unwitting player in
murder scheme.
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The Godfather I and II
The gangster movie as an operatic epic about the
immigrant experience. Marlon Brando created a film
icon in the role of Vito Corleone (Coppola wanted
Laurence Olivier for the part, but the distinguished
British actor was in poor health at the time). The
Godfather Part II simultaneously details a young
Vito's rise to power (Robert DeNiro) and his son
Michael's attempts to hold the Corleone crime family
together after Vito's death.
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Apocalypse Now Redux
A United States Army officer/trained assassin is sent
into the depths of a southeast Asian jungle to seek
out a renegade colonel and terminate his command
during the Vietnam War. Filmed amid hurricanes,
threatened shutdowns and star Martin Sheen's heart
attack, Coppola's surrealistic war story was as much
an epic in its creation as in its presentation.
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| Blockbusters | ||
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The Exorcist
People lined up around the block, local news shows ran stories on demonic possession, and the whole nation became fascinated by the occult in response to this story about a young girl who becomes possessed by a devil. |
Jaws
Steven Spielberg and his mechanical shark scared people out of the water and launched an avalanche of spoofs, imitations, and commercial tie ins from toys to novelty records. |
Star Wars
Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away George Lucas
updated the campy serials of his youth and changed
the movie industry forever.
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| War and Madness | ||
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Coming Home
A sad, poignant love story set against the social
upheaval of the Vietnam war. Set in 1968, the story
concerns a woman who, while her husband is serving in
Vietnam, falls in love with a paraplegic while
performing volunteer work at a San Diego veterans
hospital.
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The Deer Hunter
Tracks a group of steelworker pals from a
Pennsylvania blast furnace to the cool hunting
grounds of the Alleghenies to the lethal cauldron of
Vietnam. Shows what happens to friendship and courage
under stress.
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Catch-22
Mike Nichols directed this adaptation of Joseph
Heller's story of a group of fliers in the
Mediterranean during World War II.
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| Controversial | ||
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Last Tango in Paris
An American widower in Paris, desolate at the unexplained suicide of his wife, plunges into a torrid sexual relationship with a stranger, a young French girl half his age. Rated X at the time of its release for its uncompromising sexual content
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Straw Dogs
A young mathematician, David Summer, and his English wife, Amy, move to a Cornish village, seeking the quiet life. But beneath the seemingly peaceful isolation of the village lies a savagery and violence that could destroy the couple. A graphic rape scene and thematic elements that could be interpreted as a glorification of violence made this one of the most controversial movies of the 70s. |
Midnight Cowboy
A Texas "cowboy" takes a bus to New York in search of lonely, rich women who will pay for his sexual services, but spends a hard winter helping a con man. Rated 'X' on its initial release and went on to become the first such movie to win a best picture Oscar in 1970. |
| Post Watergate Disillusionment | ||
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Being There
Circumstances propel a feeble-minded man, whose
entire knowledge of life comes from watching
television, into becoming the most powerful figure in
America. Couldn't happen, could it?
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The Parallax View
Warren Beatty is a news reporter who, along with seven others, witnesses the assassination of a political candidate. When the other seven die in "accidents", the newsman begins to doubt the official position: that a lone madman was responsible for the crime. |
Capricorn One
Astronauts are forced to take part in a faked flight to Mars, and their lives are threatened when they attempt to expose the truth. |
| Character Studies | ||
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Harry & Tonto
Comedy about a man evicted from his apartment who decides to take his cat, Tonto, and head cross country to live with one of his children. He has many 'encounters' with an assortment of people he meets on the way. |
John Cassavetes. Five Films
John Cassavetes was one of the original "independent filmmakers",. Operating outside the studio system, he made a number of small movies that were more interested in people and their behavior than in constructing plot mechanisms. "A woman under the influence" originally released as a motion picture in 1974; "The killing of a Chinese bookie" originally released as a motion picture in 1976 and again in 1978; "Opening night" originally released as a motion picture in 1977. |
Harold and Maude
A black comedy about a rich, disturbed, young man, fascinated with death and funerals, who has an affair and a series of adventures with an eccentric and independent 80-year-old woman. |
| Nostalgia | ||
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National Lampoon's Animal
House
The monster hit of 1978. In the early 60s, with Vietnam a distant rumble and the counterculture just beginning to arise, loud, crude, and offensive members of the Delta house wage war on the respectable fraternities and on their corrupt college president. |
The Last Picture Show
A bittersweet drama of the social and sexual mores in small-town 1950s Texas. Larry McMurtry's adaptation of his own novel mourns the passing of a lost way of life, recognizing the nobility but also the prejudice and meanness that lay at its heart. |
American Graffiti
George Lucas' second film. Four teenagers come of age in 1962 on the last summer night before they go off to college, jobs, or the army. |
| Sci Fi Dystopias | ||
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The Omega Man
The second adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel I
am Legend, first made as The Last Man on Earth and
recently remade under its original title. Charlton
Heston, who had established himself as a post
apocalyptic sci fi hero in Planet of the Apes and
Solyent Green, battles a cult of disfigured mutants
in an abandoned Los Angeles.
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THX-1138
George Lucas' student film at UCLA. a dystopian tale of an oppressive future society, where love is outlawed and an individual's emotions are claimed by the state. |
Silent Running
Bruce Dern in an ecological nightmare that looks forward to recent films like WALL-e and Sunshine. In the far off year of 2008, earth's last remaining forest occupies a space platform and is scheduled for destruction. |
| Happy Feet | ||
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That's Entertainment
One of the biggest hits if the 70s was this look back
at the 40s. MGM celebrates its 50th anniversary with
this musical collection of dazzling show-stoppers.
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Saturday Night Fever
John Travolta made the jump from television to the
big screen in this hit that spawned the disco fad of
the 70s. Soon everyone was wearing gold chains and
platform shoes, and the BeeGees were at the top of
the charts. Despite all this, Saturday Night Fever
remains a credible account of the struggles of the
working class to find beauty and release in the
Brooklyn of the 70s.
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All That Jazz
The story of an obsessed, pill-popping, chain-smoking choreographer/ director dancing simultaneously with love and death. Based on the life of director Bob Fosse, who died of a fatal heart attack in 1987 not unlike the one depicted in the film.
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| TV | ||
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MASH
Series portrays both the horror and hilarity of the
daily lives of MASH unit 4077 in Korea in 1950. Less
graphic and cutting than
the 1969 Robert Altman film on which it was
based.
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The Bob Newhart Show
Before his 80s era stint as an innkeeper in Vermont, Bob Newhart had a successful run as a psychiatrist in Chicago. Along with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, this was one of the definitive examples of the 70s sitcom. |
Saturday Night Live
The first season of the groundbreaking series that
brought the world Land Sharks, Samurai Tailors, and
the Bass-O-Matic 76, as well as introducing people
like John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Albert Brooks, Andy
Kaufman, Jane Curtain, and Chevy Chase.
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This page is maintained by Matt Benzing.
