The Decade When Movies Mattered

Chinatown was written by Robert Towne, an important figure for the '70s, if most often in the background. Towne did a lot of rewriting on Bonnie and Clyde; he wrote the final scene between Brando and Pacino in The Godfather--the most touching moment in the history of the Corleones; and he wrote The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo. His script for the story of water in L.A. grew out of a lifetime in the city and a deep regret at how much it had changed for the worse as it spread. But the script had had a hopeful ending: Gittes was to have been reunited with Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and her daughter; Noah Cross was killed.

Then the director of Chinatown, Roman Polanski, began to argue, and the battle is characteristic of the '70s. Towne wanted to be optimistic: he wanted to believe in humanity, and he had been raised in the culture of happy endings. Polanski is Polish. Some of his relatives had died in concentration camps. He came from an Eastern Europe of repression, hardship and bureaucratic brutality. He allowed himself few illusions. His wife, Sharon Tate, had been one of those slaughtered by the Manson gang at the house on Cielo Drive. Some instinct told Polanski that Towne's ending was too "soft," too benign.

Look at the real Los Angeles! Feel how power really worked! So Polanski went for unmitigated tragedy: Evelyn is killed, shot through the eye; Cross has sinister care of his daughter/granddaughter; and Gittes is shattered, led away by his partner who can only tell him: "Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown." In Chinatown, the law was different: the cops made deals, they did as they liked. It was the metaphor of the age-- '30s?'70s? '90s?

Chinatown was maybe as somber a picture as has ever been a great hit. Its closing fatalism seemed to capture a public mood as well as Norman Mailer's warning from the late '60s--"The shits are killing us." Only now we had to appreciate that we might be the shits ourselves.

I have looked at a dozen or so films which end in degrees of bleakness (and don't forget the abyss of ambiguity in the two Godfather films, where personal evil helps consolidate family power and a sense of civic purpose!). You may be sufficiently of another generation to be depressed by so many "downers." Weren't there optimistic pictures in the '70s? Of course-- Star Wars (1977); Rocky (1976); even Coming Home (1978), in which a decent woman and a paraplegic seem likely to make a good marriage; Norma Rae (1979), where Sally Field unionizes the plant and slaps a smile on her face; Jaws (1975), in which the shark is defeated (so long as you've never heard of sequels); and don't forget the smirking camaraderie of The Sting (so rigged a film that it now looks like a closet gay story).

I don't want to depress you. I'm only trying to illuminate a passage in our history. So it's right and proper, in passing, to mention some other defeats for positive thinking: Apocalypse Now (1979), in which the military code doesn't match up to unusual conditions in the field; A Clockwork Orange (1971), where everything is unspeakable in the future; The Conversation (1974), in which being a solitary bugger is removed from the list of suitable careers for a boy; Dirty Harry (1971), in which a freelance and laconic Clint Eastwood throws away his cop badge in disgust; Don't Look Now (1973), in which losing a child is foreplay for having your husband murdered near the canals of Venice; Save the Tiger (1973), in which we see so breathtaking a survey of Middle-American disenchantment that Jack Lemmon actually works as a heel; Straw Dogs (1971), in which Dustin Hoffman may have his slut wife all to himself so long as he kills every other man around; Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), in which the pursuit of the orgasm goes a few screams too far; and Night Moves (1975), another Arthur Penn movie, where the private eye (Gene Hackman) brings about the death and disaster he hoped to avoid.

It's always dangerous to say that films like that would not be made now--so many films are made for reasons that defy sense. But times have changed. Where in Taxi Driver we had to argue with ourselves whether Travis was a killer or a hero, and in any case whether he should go free, in The Silence of the Lambs Lecter becomes just a sick joke. And if you want a demonstration of how a mood was lost over the course of 16 years, look at that travesty The Two Jakes (1990), the belated sequel to Chinatown.

There was commercial daring in the '70s. It came from instability and the smell of success; the structure of the business was coming undone, but American domestic rentals tripled. The code of censorship that had lasted over 30 years broke down in the mid-'60s. In 1963, The Servant only suggested sexual depravity; in 1966, there was a clear glimpse of pubic hair in Blowup; by the time of Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Easy Rider (1969), there was wholescale nudity, unmistakable evidence of fucking, orgies, drugs--and language.

In The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah made violence and bloodletting things of dreamy, lyrical beauty. Within the space of a few years, a whole range of recently forbidden behaviors could be seen and enjoyed. Such liberty might earn an X rating-- Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris had that alleged mark of shame--but audiences were not daunted. A whole generation found instruction in how to make love by going to the movies--which is not the healthiest way perhaps, but that's another story. Naked women doing it was as great a boost to the medium as sound had been in the late '20s.

A chasm opened up between movies and TV in terms of what the two media would allow. In the time it took Jane Fonda to turn a trick in Klute, TV was established as the soporific entertainment of the tired, the cautious, the prudish--the enemy. Movies were for young bold people--all of which was rather flattering if you were young, as well as subtle encouragement not to listen to parents. (By now, of course, it is clear that we are as afraid of sex as ever our parents may have been.)

This young audience went into frenzy with Easy Rider. There is no need now to make any pretense about the film being better than rubbish, but in 1969 it was a sensational unbuttoning and turning on--and it ensured that movie contracts were thrown at newcomers. Fortunately, many of these new people would prove more talented than Peter Fonda or Dennis Hopper.

Easy Rider relied on a production company, Raybert, made up of Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson. With Steve Blauner, they formed BBS Productions, and on the cash flow of Easy Rider they did a deal with Columbia for a series of low-budget features that would draw on new talent. BBS made Five Easy Pieces (1970), directed by Rafelson, and starring Jack Nicholson as a refined pianist who has dropped out and become a wanderer; The Last Picture Show (1971), the third movie by Peter Bogdanovich; Drive, He Said (1972), Nicholson's directorial debut, an anarchic study of college and basketball; A Safe Place (1971), the debut of Henry Jaglom, starring Orson Welles, Nicholson and that moody goddess of the '70s, Tuesday Weld (in the same decade she gave wonderful performances in I Walk the Line, Play It As It Lays and Who'II Stop the Rain); and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), directed by Rafelson again, with Nicholson and Bruce Dern as brothers, the depressive and the manic halves of the American soul.

At least two of the BBS films were hits-- Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. Nicholson was set on course as one of our great actors (and a case can be made that he has not surpassed the two '70s films with Rafelson). Bogdanovich showed his versatility with What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973). And, everywhere, "kids" were in demand. Francis Ford Coppola was trusted with The Godfather --not without misgivings at Paramount--and his triumph made him a don to his generation.

Martin Scorsese got his chance with Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Mean Streets (1973). William Friedkin made a huge splash with The French Connection (1971), which let us know that modern cops might be as devious and as violent as those they hunted, and The Exorcist (1973). Aged 27, Steven Spielberg made a clever road film--half-comic, half-desperate--out of Sugarland Express (1974). A year later, he delivered the summer wallop, the beach-clearing Jaws (1975). George Lucas introduced a team of fine young actors in American Graffiti (1973) and then did all he could in his modest way to persuade dull heads at Fox that Star Wars might do well.

There was exuberance as these young men--many of them friends, JL. some since film school--got their break, scored hits, had actresses on their arms, and saw the world opening up. Strangely enough, the happier they felt, the freer they were to be gloomy in their work. These guys had come of age in the era of Kennedy and Nixon, civil rights, Vietnam, campus riots and drug experimentation. They witnessed an America with more self-inflicted wounds than Hollywood had ever cared to admit. They proposed tough new material--it was a new age of film noir, albeit in color.

They had their own actors and actresses--Nicholson, Beatty, De Niro, Pacino, Duvall, Hackman, Harrison Ford, Donald Sutherland; Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep. And studio money competed for their dark visions.

Robert Altman was 15 years older than these directors, yet he was doing his best work, too. In The Long Goodbye, he took Philip Marlowe--once Bogart's role--and turned the sardonic private eye into an amiable stooge who is used and deceived by a more ruthless world. At the end, beyond the law, he can only walk away to the mocking sounds of "Hooray for Hollywood!" Then in Nashville (1975), on the eve of the bicentennial, Altman made a gentle satire not just of country music, but of all American hopes and dreams. Here was a film that took in the whole untidy crowd, hinted at the profusion of stories going on all together, heard the protestations of honor and sincerity, and recorded the endless lies. It had an assassination and a political candidate (eerily like Ross Perot). It saw the chaos and loved the stupid energy that kept everything in motion.

Altman is from Kansas City, but Nashville had some traces of European sensibility. It had no heroes or villains; it seemed to drift and circle; it was so alert to life that it neglected story. There were intriguing influences from Europe in the '70s. Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1972. Its surreal, absurdist view of wealthy people denied a meal was debated at dinner parties in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. No foreign film was more emulated than Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1971), a story about betrayal--that favorite topic--so richly realized that some Americans copied its look and ended up hiring its crew--photographer Vittorio Storaro (who would film Apocalypse Now and Reds); designer Fernando Scarfiotti (who was a visual consultant on American Gigolo) and composer Georges Delerue (The Day of the Dolphin and Julia).

Brando would accept Bertolucci's offer to make Last Tango, and by the end of the decade Jill Clayburgh had followed for Luna (1979). Michelangelo Antonioni had nearly ruined MGM with Zabriskie Point (1970), but there were filmmakers in America who knew he was a genius. Later on, Nicholson went to Africa to star in Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), an inspired alliance of film noir with the tone of Albert Camus, Jorge-Luis Borges and Paul Bowles. Louis Malle came to America to do Pretty Baby (1978) and Atlantic City (1980). A refugee from Czechoslovakia, Milos Forman, added an Iron Curtain edge to the institution in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)--when I saw that film in New York, there were people on their feet, roaring in anger and loathing at Nurse Ratched.

By now, this is a long article, somewhere between a list and a generalization. Yet there is so much I have left out-- The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976), two scathing films written by Paddy Chayefsky, full of gallows humor about American institutions. John Cassavetes was the leading figure in American independent pictures; A Woman Under the Influence (1974) was one of the first movies to treat the virtual imprisonment of ordinary wives. The Andy Warhol factory broke onto the art-house circuit with Trash (1970) and Heat (1972). Who had ever before seen the representation of ingrained poverty as it appeared in John Huston's Fat City (1972) and who has seen it since?

The Western came alive again, only now the events of the late 19th century were seen as precursors of modern American materialism-- Little Big Man (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). (So many of these films are from '71, '72 or '73. Did Nixon watch a lot of movies? Is that why he was jittery?)

In the '70s, for a few years at least, our movies spoke to us with unaccustomed candor. For that moment, not just the audience, but the business responded. There was so much noticing going on, with coffee-shop talk about numbered frames in the Zapruder film or delicacies of evasion in John Dean's testimony. So many kids wanted to put everything on film; so many people reckoned anything could work there. For a few years it was all one could do to wait for the next startling picture. In colleges, people studied film history and foreign films. In book stores, film was a new section. Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris were at their best. Repertory theaters were thriving--this was, let it be noted, the last time audiences had no choice but to sit in the dark and be overwhelmed by the image on the big screen. Video was in by the end of the decade, and pictures got smaller--just as Norma Desmond had lamented in Sunset Blvd.

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David Thomson is the author of Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick.

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