In the '70s, when the going got tough, the tough made movies, and those movies remain a last testament to a tough-mindedness that is no longer the province of the big screen.
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I had a dream about '70s movies. There was that image from the end of Deliverance (1972), of the hand coming up out of the water--the corpse that refuses to go away. One hand. Where's the other hand? I wondered. Zinger! It erupted from beneath the cinders on the grave of Carrie (1976), a hand to drag us down into the darkness.
But perhaps you were only in elementary school in the '70s, and thus, in a country with contradictory impulses about sheltering its young, you did not attend to what was going on then. After all, it's a fundamental right in the saga of psychic shelter that no one really has to notice things. The most up-to-date new frontier is knowing how to look the other way.
Who the hell is talking to you like this? How old is he? The author is 52, and he loved the decade of the '70s and its movies. It was a time of travail and upheaval when the world took it for granted that grownups were born to take notice. We had movies then that you had to watch. The age gave us plots as intricate and unrelenting as The Sting (1973) and Chinatown (1974). Sitting in the dark watching the show kept you as wired as an air-traffic controller. If you weren't awake you would miss some sudden glimpse or murmur:
- In Taxi Driver (1976),Travis Bickle is guiding his yellow steel church through the scum when, just like a scrap of paper, a pale face scutters across his view--it's a kid, a girl, Iris, Jodie Foster. Bickle is riveted by the second or so of that face and the scent of need. He's seen a soul to rescue, and so the dementia of the plot begins.
- In The Long Goodbye (1973), whenever anything remotely musical plays--not just the movie's theme, but a piano idling in a bar, a funeral procession in a small Mexican town, a doorbell in Malibu--it's always a variant of the song "The Long Goodbye," by Johnny Mercer and John Williams. The melodic phrase hangs in the air, like haze or the trade of lies in L.A.--it's the sound of a game, and the click of fate closing. It tells you that so much in L.A. is set up, scripted, produced. There's so little "there" left--just lines, shots and locations.
- In Shampoo (1975), an unruly symphony of unease comes out of George Roundy (Warren Beatty), sounds that are not words, but which say so much about the despair of ever making sense. There are groans, grunts, moans and sighs, as if to say, what the hell? You could close your eyes in Shampoo and just absorb the wealth of indecisiveness that Beatty brings to George's hesitation.
The '70s were full of such things: the way Al Pacino, in The Godfather (1972), notices that he is not shaking when he holds a cigarette lighter outside the hospital--it is the moment he recognizes his authority; Sissy Spacek's narration in Badlands (1973), so affectless the whole story seems overheard on a night bus going from Amarillo to Memphis; that aimless first hour of The Deer Hunter (1978), filled with the day of the wedding so we grow more and more uneasy--where is this film going, and why are we going with it?; and the end of Fingers (1978), with Harvey Keitel crouched naked in the corner and we're saying, that's how a movie ends?
It was not just in moments that we had to pay attention to these movies. Many of them had unfamiliar shapes, new narrative structures or strategies. They began late. They switched course. They didn't say this guy is reliably good and that one write-off bad. They didn't stick to the rules. And they did not end well, or happily, or comfortably. Sometimes they broke off in your hands or your mind. People you had come to like took it in the head, or turned traitor. The world of the films was as complex and as frightening as anything you'd come into the theater to escape from. And you were left there when the lights came up, having to work it all out.
In this preemptive culture of ours, decades get an early start, or perhaps a pregame show. It seemed to me at the time that something new and dangerous touched the movies in ... well, I'd say 1966, with Blowup and with a movie called The Chase, which I'd nominate as the first American film of the '70s. (In the same spirit, I'd call Blue Velvet the last film of the decade.) Directed by Arthur Penn, The Chase was one of the most disturbing views of America I'd ever seen on a screen. It's set in Texas, in a town dominated by a business tycoon (E.G. Marshall) but under the legal authority of a sheriff (Marlon Brando). A prisoner escapes from the penitentiary, Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), and everyone guesses he's coming home to see his wife (Jane Fonda). Bubber doesn't know she's having an affair with the tycoon's son (James Fox).
In cast and credits, The Chase was a prestige venture. Yet its self-appointed task was to uncover an America racked by greed, lust, paranoia, mob recklessness and a passion for violence. At the film's climax, the sheriff has rescued Bubber from the mob, but someone manages to leap up and shoot him at point-blank range. As the movie ends, the sheriff and his wife abandon the town to its dark frenzy.
There was no consolation in The Chase, and no escaping Penn's direction of the final murder. You felt for sure when you saw the film that this was Lee Harvey Oswald getting killed by Jack Ruby in the garage of the Dallas police station. Had real life ever been "quoted" like that in a Hollywood picture? The implication of what that moment in Dallas really meant was naked on the screen. You see, Ruby killing Oswald was a worse nightmare than the assassination that preceded it. The death of JFK had been so unexpected that it seemed like a spasm, an aberration. But when Ruby fired the bullets into Oswald, the possibility that JFK's murder had been just an irrational act was gone.
Ruby made it clear there was a pattern, either of conspiracy or--as seemed more persuasive in November 1963--of an infectious disease in America, not just violence, but willful melodrama, an uncontrollable urge to act things out. An age had dawned in which so much "happened" on TV. The movies were crosscut with the footage of war in Vietnam, of the Ervin Committee, of planes exploding in the desert as terrorists kept their promise, of Neil Armstrong stepping onto a wedding cake called the Moon. The real images fed into the movies, and America seemed to burn most brightly "on camera."
Arthur Penn's next film, Bonnie and Clyde, overcame mixed reviews to be a box-office sensation. Nothing matched its influence or its perilous balance of comedy and slaughter. The Barrow gang ran wild in the early '30s, but that past drained down into 1967. Those lovely kids were robbing banks, searching for sex and living on a fatal spree because their society was depressed, dishonest and boring. A lethal young energy was being courted, and provoked. Of course, the outlaws were shot to fragments, but that slow-motion orgasm was an insolent way of honoring the humbug that miscreants must not escape.
The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde were just two of a number of late '60s films-- Point Blank and The Graduate are two others--that assumed the moral bankruptcy of established order. All of a sudden, thank God, Hollywood had found a taste for un-American pictures. In films of the '70s, the curtain called "happy ending" was ripped away by the life force of the people, and by the actual conditions of America. So many kinds of dismay and disenchantment made for the short-lived but still beguiling honesty of the '70s. There was a recognition of what violence meant in the age of assassinations. No matter the enactment of so much civil rights legislation, and the determination to enforce it, we began to see how much harder it would be to dislodge racism from our imaginations. Vietnam exposed the limits of American power, the brittleness of its morale, and the helplessness of its leadership.
The disasters of war were a focus for inter-generational antagonisms that flared out in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention, at Kent State, and in so many other smaller communities. Americans were beginning to see how thoroughly and intelligently they were despised in other parts of the world.
Not that every blow fell on conservative attitudes. Many naive liberal and revolutionary notions were confounded by actual experiences in the late '60s and early '70s--the idea that love could be "free," that drugs were good, that education could be carried out according to curricula designed by students, that what any kid wanted to say was worth listening to, that the world of rock music was a paradise, that "all you need is love." Commune philosophy led so easily to the Manson gang.
Then came Watergate. We do not have to regard that commonplace fuck-up as monumental. It is just as dispiriting to accept the glum complaints of those indicted that such dirty tricks had long been the currency of American government. Richard Nixon elected to handle his own corruption the way Joan Crawford responded to age lines. His denial was vital to what became a national melodrama, a prolonged TV watch-in, and absolute confirmation for every conspiracy theory. The state was a wretched, crooked mess; there really was a "them" planning ways to get "us" and do dirt on the ideal of the Republic. Nixon was our real-life Michael Corleone--withdrawn, chilly, paranoid, an actor desperate for power and control.
The playing out of Watergate inspired, justified and deepened movies in which beleaguered men and women feared the worst about authority and slowly came to appreciate the steady, lapping ocean of intrigue all around them. Alan Pakula--a key director of the '70s, and never as good since--would do a very adroit job in handling the labyrinthine plot of All the President's Men (1976). Who can forget that moment when, alone in the underground parking garage, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) feels an infinite, pervasive threat to himself, to truth and to democracy. Pakula had already made two films that predicted the unease of Watergate: Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974). Hardly a person in Klute is quite whole or wholesome-- everyone walks in some kind of anxiety.
The Parallax View ends with the best people gone--disappeared, killed, frightened back into the shadows of anonymity.
All the President's Men did offer comfort: two young reporters could uncover the scheme of evil. That gives the picture an old-fashioned exhilaration (especially since the reporters are impersonated by stars), the cleansing of having a mystery solved. It's also why All the President's Men did better than Klute or The Parallax View --and it's the white lie of Bernstein and Woodward.
Twenty years later, government has learned to obscure its tracks better, while too many journalists have been tamed by the prospect of becoming celebrities like "Woodstein." The greater achievement of President's Men lay in its supporting roles, a gallery of uneasy consciences and hustling ambitions--the soldiers of Washington. Among the supporting players one saw the compromise and the insecurity that knows how idealism is trapped by muddle, gridlock and the tranquil ambivalence of graft and disorder. It was in the '70s that we recognized how compelling villains could be--Nixon, Dean, Mitchell, Liddy. . . The line could include the Corleones, Martin Sheen's casual killer in Badlands and Travis Bickle. By now, it numbers such "stars" as John Gotti, Claus von Bulow and Ted Bundy--so wicked we can hardly take our eyes off them.
Consider Noah Cross, the character played by John Huston in Chinatown (1974), maybe the best film of this troubled age. Cross possesses great power. He finessed the water deal that made Los Angeles a great city. He raped his daughter and had another daughter by her. He has all the crisp eloquence and brave, Western positivism that Huston could give him. He also has the wisest lines in Chinatown, as when he tells the detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), "You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything." (In The Godfather, Part II, Michael Corleone observes with the innocence of common sense, "If history has taught us anything, it says you can kill anyone.")
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.