The 1970s were a wild decade for American movies, and widely regarded to be the best. As detailed in Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Old Hollywood died in the late ‘60s and studios were going bankrupt. Big-budget musicals were no longer in vogue and executives were forced to take risks with lower-budget projects from visionary filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas, who ushered in the New Hollywood movement.
The Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal had American audiences disillusioned with people in power, and the cinema of the time reflected that. Here are 10 Movies That Defined ‘70s Cinema.
All The President’s Men (1976)
There were a ton of paranoid political thrillers in the wake of the Watergate scandal, as Nixon’s resignation in disgrace had made Americans realize that the government can’t always be trusted. Some great movies came out of this era — The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation etc. — but arguably the finest is All the President’s Men.
It tells the story of the Watergate scandal from the point-of-view of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they uncover the Nixon administration’s secrets. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford are a riveting pairing in the lead roles, while the screenplay by William Goldman is spectacularly written.
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Stanley Kubrick’s harrowing portrait of a carefree sociopathic criminal going through the justice system in a near-future dystopia is one of the most disturbing movies to ever come out of the mainstream Hollywood system. It could only have happened in the ‘70s.
In adapting Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick refused to tone down the violence or make the slang any more comprehensible. At the heart of the movie is Malcolm McDowell’s sinister, captivating performance as Alex DeLarge, a rare example of a despicable protagonist who is genuinely interesting.
Rocky (1976)
Rocky is the ultimate underdog story, which played great with disenchanted ‘70s audiences. Sylvester Stallone was his own kind of underdog behind the scenes of Rocky. As a broke struggling actor who had to sell his dog when he couldn’t afford to feed him anymore, Stallone wrote the script, inspired by a boxing match between Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali.
Stallone turned down huge sums of money because he wanted to star in the movie himself. As the movie became a runaway hit, Stallone joined the ranks of Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin in receiving concurrent Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay.
Chinatown (1974)
With Chinatown, Roman Polanski brought the visual markers and plot conventions of ‘40s film noirs to the ‘70s. He replaced the fears and paranoia of the ‘40s, which were reflected in the original film noirs, with the fears and paranoia of the ‘70s.
Anchored by Jack Nicholson’s compelling portrayal of private eye Jake Gittes, Chinatown is a disturbing, breathtaking odyssey. There are no good guys and bad guys, and there are no happy endings. Robert Towne’s Chinatown screenplay has since become a staple of screenwriting classes, as it’s one of the most perfectly structured scripts ever written.
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Peter Bogdanovich’s black-and-white coming-of-age drama The Last Picture Show has a rare 100% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes. Looking back at the 1950s with a perspective that flits between nostalgic and bleak, The Last Picture Show is filled with well-rounded characters and brilliant performances that bring them to life.
Bogdanovich co-penned the screenplay with the source material’s author, Larry McMurtry, so the novel wasn’t butchered in the adaptation process and the movie maintains its semi-autobiographical tone.
Jaws (1975)
If you’ve ever grown tired of studios cramming blockbusters down your throat during the summer season, then you have Steven Spielberg’s Jaws to blame. Spielberg took a simple high-concept premise — a 25-foot great white shark terrorizes a beach town — and applied Hitchcockian suspense-building techniques to make it a cinematic masterpiece.
There are also anti-government overtones with the mayor choosing tourists’ dollars over their safety. The beauty of Jaws is that it’s not a movie about a shark eating people; it’s a movie about three very different guys who are forced to work together. The film is completely driven by character. Its countless imitators always seem to miss that.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
The ‘70s were a time of rebellion, and Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on the Ken Kesey novel of the same name, answered the demand for rebellion with the story of Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a convict who gets himself transferred to a mental institution, despite having no mental illness, in order to avoid hard work for the rest of his sentence.
There, he butts heads with the nefarious Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who represents every authority figure trying to keep the people down. The movie captured the zeitgeist, and became one of the decade’s biggest hits as a result.
Taxi Driver (1976)
While all of his contemporaries were going into the jungle to make Vietnam War movies, Martin Scorsese stayed in New York and made a movie about the effects of the Vietnam War. Travis Bickle is a veteran with PTSD who becomes a round-the-clock cabbie when he develops insomnia.
Taxi Driver tackles a lot of themes that were common in ‘70s cinema — isolation, violence, fighting back against people in power etc. — and has more to say about them than most of the other movies of that era. Bernard Herrmann’s smooth, jazz-tinged musical score supplies the movie with the feel of a dark fairy tale, and Robert De Niro gives one of his all-time finest performances as Bickle.
Star Wars (1977)
George Lucas changed the way that movies are made when he wrote and directed the original Star Wars movie. 20th Century Fox had so little faith in the picture that they traded some of Lucas’ salary for merchandising rights, which they thought would be worthless, and then tried to bury the movie upon its release.
But when it arrived at theaters, it captured audiences in a big way. Moviegoers were lining up around the block to watch Star Wars for the umpteenth time. It was a cultural phenomenon. Using Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as a template and drawing influences from Kurosawa and Flash Gordon, Lucas revolutionized filmmaking, storytelling, and American culture.
The Godfather (1972)
Arguably the peak of American filmmaking, The Godfather tells the story of the Corleones, a powerful Mafia family, as the Don’s wayward son Michael (Al Pacino) returns from war and gets seduced by the mobster lifestyle. Marlon Brando is fantastic in the role of Vito Corleone, but this is Al Pacino’s movie.
Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s seminal crime novel is a long movie — clocking in at almost three hours — but there’s so much beauty packed into every frame, and so much complex story material, that it couldn’t be made a second shorter.
