Little did I know when I was staying home with two small children in the seventies that Hollywood was making some the best movies in cinematic history. This sort of movie is only made by independent film makers now. Steven Spielberg taught Hollywood at the end of this decade that they should only be concerned with blockbusters and they learned that lesson well.
I spent the last two nights watching two of them: Payday and Electric Glide in Blue. Both recount a few days in the lives of their protagonist and things don't turn out too well in either movie. They're beautifully filmed, scored, edited.
What you notice most is the pace of these dark movies,
Because we all had so much more time in the 70s, the director/and or writer was in no hurry . We got to see the characters develop over 120 minutes. I especially liked Payday-- recommended by my daughter--I'd never heard of it although I like Rip Torn a lot. Robert Blake was also very fine in Electric Glide although I'm not so fond of him nowadays. If you haven't seen these, both made around 1972, give them a try.
What are your favorite 70s films? I may have missed them too.
17 comments:
Robert Blake was excellent in "In Cold Blood" (a great flick overall) - although looking back, maybe he wasn't acting.
"Days of Heaven" and "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" were standouts - although they may have been more early 1980's.
I will check out those two movies you mentioned - thanks for the recommend.
Maybe we shouldn't give Spielberg too much credit, Hollywood was built on blockbusters from DW Griffith on.
Those 70's movies may have been the exceptions, a slight blip and not the end of a trend.
You know I'm going to say "The Return of the Seacacus Seven," which came out in 1980, but I saw at the Montreal Film Festival the year before. If you haven't seen it you might like it. The "real" Big Chill, so to speak.
And, you know, not all of us had so much time in the '70's. I know Americans look at everything from the POV of race, but we're British enough in Canada to still see some things through the eyes of class. The 70's were probably the peak of the middle-class, still upwardly mobile, confident and feeling like it had all the time in the world. Maybe all that's changed is that the middle is starting to see things from a more working-class perspective. Welcome to the club.
Oh, wasn't Goodbar scary? John, you are certainly the ultimate Sayles fan. Although I am one too. I thought "Return" was better than TBC because it was rawer and the people seemed real. I love a movie where the people look real. Maybe he only could afford real people but still...
Before Spielberg and Lucas made near-billions with rancid candy, Irwin Allen and similar schlock peddlers were making multimillions as well...but the loosening of production codes after the 1960s, and the smash success of pseudo-sophisticated films such as MIDNIGHT COWBOY and the more modest success of more genuinely sophisticated films such as THE CANDIDATE, led a relatively desperate Hollywood, shocked by the bankrupting failure of the likes of STAR! and the remarkable success of the likes of EASY RIDER, greenlighting things ranging from TWO-LANE BLACKTOP to THE FRENCH CONNECTION to works of genius such as BADLANDS.
So, if you haven't seen THE CANDIDATE or BADLANDS yet, please do.
I'd known about ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE for years, but just saw it on the Starz/Encore channels for the first time last weekend...it is famously the only Other good film from Blake, unless we choose to count his turn in that Lynch film...
Meanwhile, I'll be happy to blame Spielberg for anything. And not everything on the Starz channels is brilliant...I saw PRIVATE LESSONS for the first time last night, mesmerized by the utter wrongness of this pathetic "romantic comedy" about an adult woman and her eventually tender tryst with a young adolescent boy. John Hughes films aren't improved in retrospect, but one wonders how desperate for money Howard Hesseman, Ed Begley Jr, and particularly Silvia Krystel were at that point.
And, John, 1970s US saw the beginning of the erosion of the gains the middle class had made in the post-war (the poorer folk were still scrambling, albeit with a few more instruments to help them out than they had before the New Deal)...the unions and the endless war-footing economy led to a comparitive economic boom that been pretty consistent, till then, and the confusion as to what had actually helped was part of what kept us electing reactionaries and the most rightwing Democrats we could dig up. Still does.
And, of course, DAYS OF HEAVEN (one of Josephine's recs) and BADLANDS were Terence Malick's two 1970s films. Pity about THE THIN RED LINE.
Oops. Terrence Malick.
Perhaps with Malick (although I didn't hate TTRL) the times changed. You can certainly see that after watching a few of the more character-driven films from that era.
I didn't hate THE THIN RED LINE...I thought it as beautifully-shot as his other films. Just remarkably static and unfulfilled in its intentions. Makes a telling contrast to Spielberg's atypically brutal but typically otherwise cotton-candy videogame SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, inasmuch as both are attempts at relatively adult takes on WW2 and people in and around combat that both fail for nearly opposite reasons. Contrast PATHS OF GLORY, a smashing success by my lights, even if the last scenes are unsubtle. So's war. Or the incomplete artistic success, to say the least, of the film of CATCH-22. Arkin, at least, Not the only good thing in that one!
Best Vietnam war movies: Go Tell the Spartans, Full Metal Jacket and Casualties of War. (IMHO). What about you?
Why I'm not a True Film Buff: I've managed never to see the entirety of any cut of APOCALYPSE NOW, so far. And De Palma annoys me as much as Spielberg, Penn only slightly less, so I've never seen the entirety of CASUALTIES. So, my best VietNam films so far are FULL METAL JACKET, HEARTS AND MINDS (the documentary, I'll accept the notion I'm cheating), and HEAVEN AND EARTH (although Oliver Stone is also on the Annoying list, the fact that the film is from Ms. Hayslip's perspective keeps his machismic chest-beating to its minimum in his films I've seen).
I read the Hayslip book for a class on the war 15 years ago but have never seen the movie.
Rent Go Tell the Spartans sometime. Interesting because it's at the very start of the war. Hearts and Minds is terrific.
Also quite fond of the tv series, CHINA BEACH. I'll give SPARTANS, and maybe even CASUALTIES, a tumble.
Loved China Beach. I only have to hear that Supremes's song to tear up.
The 70s had a lot of great crime films: THE FRENCH CONNECTION, NIGHT MOVES, KLUTE (almost 70s), CHINATOWN...
And I'm sure I could think of some more.
And then you look back at the sixties or ahead to the eighties and there is so much less.
Hmm...the 1980s does seem a bit thinner, in some ways, with the likes of BODY HEAT, BLUE VELVET, BLOOD SIMPLE (killer Bs) coming to mind...Scorcese doing criminous comdedies such as AFTER HOURS and THE KING OF COMEDY (and lots of other black comedies from others)...and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, which is a pretty long stretch to drag into crime drama. The 1960s certainly had PSYCHO (barely), BONNIE & CLYDE, more black comedies (leaving aside the extent to which PSYCHO and B&C were also) such as THE LOVED ONE and LORD LOVE A DUCK and DR. STRANGELOVE...truly the decade of love...
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