This Month

Fridays in July | 14 Movies

Like society, the Hollywood film industry was in turmoil in the 1950s and 1960s. The studios were still hemorrhaging money after being forced to sell off their theater chains when their monopoly over movie production, distribution and exhibition was broken up by the Supreme Court. They continued to struggle to compete against television, which was no longer considered a novelty, but a financial threat, and the growing popularity of foreign and independent art house films that were beginning to make a real dent in the market. Although Hollywood relaxed some censorship restrictions, made more Technicolor and widescreen films and tried gimmicks like 3D, it wasn’t enough. In 1961, after heavy box office losses, 20th Century-Fox was forced to sell off their back lot to real estate developers. By the end of the decade, there was yet another reason for Hollywood’s failure, a refusal by studio chiefs to accept that their audiences’ tastes had changed. Old-fashioned, big-budgeted musicals and bloated historical and biblical epics were no longer relevant in the age of the Counterculture and protests against the Vietnam War. The 1970s began with MGM and 20th Century-Fox’s fortunes diminished to the point that they auctioned off props and costumes to the general public. By then, most of the moguls of the Golden Age of Hollywood were gone and the studios sold off to corporations headed by people who knew nothing about making modern movies but had the good sense to hire young filmmakers who did.

These were the first generation of film school graduates who had grown up with television, like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. Although they had smaller budgets, they were given more control over their content. As a result, the films that captured the public’s imagination in the 1970s were more realistic, more violent and more overtly sexual, with subjects that would have been difficult, if not impossible to make before the replacement of the censorship dictated by the Production Code with the now familiar ratings system in 1968. 

The Studio System was officially dead, which proved to be a double-edged sword for the stars. While they were no longer put under iron-clad, long-term contracts, and had the freedom to work as freelancers, they lost the opportunity to grow into their stardom, and have their image carefully created, controlled and protected, both literally and figuratively. Unlike the stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the stars of the 1970s were not always perfectly coiffed, beautifully dressed and brightly lit, but allowed themselves to appear however the scene required.

Their appearance had changed, and so did their roles. The expansion of women in the workforce and the fight for equal rights were reflected in films with stronger female leads, like Barbra Streisand, who had altered the concept of female beauty in the 1960s. Her star power was so great that from 1969 to 1979, she appeared on the list of Top 10 Box Office Attractions more than any other woman. She would play opposite sex symbols like Ryan O’Neal in What’s Up Doc? (1972) and The Main Event (1979), Robert Redford in the box office hit The Way We Were (1973) and Kris Kristofferson in the second remake of A Star Is Born (1976). Writers John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion gave the film authenticity by touring with bands like Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and Uriah Heep for several weeks to immerse themselves in the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, but Streisand wanted the script altered to be closer to the original 1937 and 1954 films, while exploring the change that gender roles were undergoing in the 70s. Barbra Streisand became the first woman to win an Academy Award for composing music (Best Original Song) with the film’s theme, “Evergreen,” that she wrote with Paul Williams.

Faye Dunaway won a Best Actress Academy Award for portraying obsessed television programming executive Diana Christensen in Network (1976), who described both the mood of the country in the 1970s, and eerily prophesied the change in television. “The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the Depression. They’ve turned off, shot up and they’ve fucked themselves limp and nothing helps. […] The American people want someone to articulate their rage for them.” Robert DeNiro articulated that rage, becoming one of the most respected actors of the decade for his total immersion in roles like the young immigrant gangster Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974) resulting in a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, a psychotic vigilante who wants to get rid of the “scum” on the streets of New York City in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) earning him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and as the deadbeat gambler in debt to the mob in Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973).

It was thanks to the success of Mean Streets that Ellen Burstyn choose Scorsese to direct her as a struggling widowed mother in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), despite his admitted lack of experience in making a film about “women’s issues.” Burstyn’s Hollywood clout gave her director and script approval, and the chance to hire women in key behind-the scenes roles for the film, including producer, art director and editor, because she knew women were badly under-represented in the industry. Scorsese, for his part, took the job because he wanted to “participate in the consciousness of 1975.” Burstyn’s performance in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, which would be accepted on her behalf by Scorsese. The film would later be spun-off into the long-running television series, “Alice,” starring Linda Lavin.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s entered the consciousness of Hollywood, and by the 1970s, Black actors were getting more long-overdue opportunities to play nuanced leading roles, among them Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield, who were nominated for Best Actress and Best Actor Academy Awards, respectively, as Depression-era sharecroppers in the racist South in Sounder (1972). The film was a box office hit, earning $15 million from a budget of only $1 million, and, just as importantly, proved to the studios that not only did Black audiences want more than just action or “blaxploitation” pictures, but that films with Black leads would be embraced by white audiences. One of the biggest hits of 1971 was Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree (in his first major film role) as a Black New York detective searching for the kidnapped daughter of a mobster. Its success spawned several sequels with Roundtree, including John Singleton’s 2000 film, also called Shaft. Controversial standup comedian Richard Pryor was good box office in the 1970s, thanks to his very popular comedy albums and film roles in Silver Streak and Car Wash in 1976. The following year, he starred in Greased Lightning (1977), the biopic of Wendell Scott, the first Black stock car racing champion, alongside his real-life love, actress Pam Grier, who would later star in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown in 1997.

Sex and sexual identity were frankly discussed in the 1970s. Jane Fonda won a Best Actress Academy Award and critical raves for portraying sex worker Bree Daniels, who becomes involved with the investigator (Donald Sutherland) pursuing the disappearance of her client, in Klute (1971). Dog Day Afternoon (1975) starred Al Pacino as a bank robber trying to steal enough money to pay for his lover’s (Chris Sarandon) gender affirming surgery, which was groundbreaking in a time when transgender people were often caricatures. The film earned Academy Award nominations for Pacino for Best Actor and Sarandon for Best Supporting Actor.

One of the biggest stars, and sex symbols, of the decade was Burt Reynolds, who had begun his career in television on “Gunsmoke,” and became a star with the controversial thriller Deliverance (1972). He would spend the 1970s (and 1980s) playing charismatic and hyper-masculine roles like the aging stuntman at the end of his career in Hooper (1978) and the Pontiac Trans Am-driving outlaw smuggler Bo Danville, known as the “Bandit,” who outwits and out drives the eternally irritated Texas sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) in the Smokey and the Bandit films. Reynolds’ status as a sex symbol was cemented by his now-famous nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan. 

Another sex symbol of the decade was Robert Redford, who rose to superstardom alongside Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and rode out the 1970s with his star power undiminished, thanks to roles in films like the mega-hit The Sting (1973), which earned him a Best Actor Academy Award nomination and reunited him with Newman. He would venture into political films, portraying Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, who uncovered the Watergate conspiracy with partner Carl Bernstein, in All the President’s Men (1976), and in 1972, starred in the comedy-drama The Candidate, about a former governor’s son who is asked to run for the Senate against a popular incumbent California Republican, even though he has very little chance of winning…until he does. 

Steve McQueen continued his stardom as the “King of Cool” well into the 1970s, acting in disaster films like The Towering Inferno (1974), playing a rodeo-rider in Junior Bonner (1972) and champion race car driver in Le Mans (1971). In 1972, he costarred with his future wife, Ali MacGraw, with whom he fell in love during production of The Getaway, playing a convict who is paroled so he can rob a bank. McQueen’s career was cut short with his early death from mesothelioma in November 1980 at the age of only 50. 

Although some actors were happy to continue to play to type, Clint Eastwood was not. He had become a star in the 1960s on television, and from appearing in Sergio Leone’s “Dollar Trilogy” of Spaghetti Westerns as The Man with No Name, before transitioning to hard-bitten detective roles like San Francisco’s Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films, but by the latter half of the decade, Eastwood wanted to branch out into more family-friendly fare like Every Which Way But Loose (1978). The film was an action comedy about a trucker-turned-bare knuckle brawler (with a pet orangutan named Clyde), who follows a woman to Denver, but is pursued by the motorcycle gang he’s crossed. Everyone from Eastwood’s business partner to his manager to his attorney thought it was a bad script and a terrible idea, and advised him against the project, but despite the warnings and mediocre critical reception, the film was a surprise box office smash.

The 1970s was also the decade that made Richard Dreyfuss a star. After his first film appearance with a one-line role in The Graduate (1967), his life was changed forever when George Lucas hired him for a part in American Graffiti (1973). When the film was completed, Lucas recommended Dreyfuss to his friend, Steven Spielberg, for the career-making role of biologist Matt Hooper, who hunts a great white shark in Jaws (1975). Dreyfuss followed that up with another Spielberg blockbuster, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and that same year, starred with Marsha Mason in Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl (1977), as a struggling actor who falls in love with a single mother with a bad romantic history. The part made Dreyfuss, at 30, the youngest actor up to that time to win a Best Actor Academy Award.