Published on October 25, 2010
I have always had a weakness for the 1970s – was it because I was born in 1971 or was it because my formative years covered almost the whole of that decade? The 1970s were a hugely eventful time both in the West and in India. The counterculture movements of the 1960s had given way to a different scenario in the US and the UK – governments and ruling authorities were no longer seen as sacrosanct and benevolent. In fact, several governments were now regarded as acting in a suspicious manner in many cases! And, in India, there was the Emergency in the mid-1970s which forever changed the country’s democratic thought process.
The movies made in this decade, not surprisingly, reflected the events that were happening in society. The old generation of film-makers was on the way out while a new young breed was moving in. Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, made his last notable movie, Frenzy, in 1972 but that was already seen as his swansong. It was evident that his glory days were long over.
The new wunderkids – among them such future luminaries as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma and William Friedkin, to mention just the most prominent – were experimenting with works that were far removed from most of the creations that had been seen on screen till then. Hitchcock’s movies, in particular, seemed extremely tame, dated and old-fashioned compared to what these auteurs would come up with the next few years.
Many of the movies that we now consider the greatest ever in the history of movies were released in the 1970s. Take any genre and you arguably have the 1970s to thank for, for providing a template for the future. A sampling of what I mean:
Thinking of drama? Then look no further than The Godfather (1972) which is as close to a complete movie as one can imagine. The 1970s even threw up The Godfather Part II (1974), which many rate as the best sequel ever. Then there is the mini-masterpiece from Scorsese, Mean Streets (1973), which kick-started the director's famed collaboration with Robert De Niro. And a recent Guardian poll of the greatest movies across all categories has just selected Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) as the best movie ever made. These four movies from the first half of the 1970s went on to influence countless future films, both in Hollywood and elsewhere.
Looking for vigilante justice or police procedural? Well, there are Dirty Harry (1971), The French Connection (1971) and Death Wish (1974) to whet your appetite. Amitabh Bachchan’s iconic “angry young man” persona could be directly traced back to Eastwood’s Harry Callahan. Eastwood also directed his first movie in 1971, the creepy stalker thriller Play Misty For Me, which was the forerunner of the more famous Lethal Attraction from the following decade.
Need a text for the classic underdog movie? Then take a look at Rocky (1976).
Or a template for the stereotypical film of the anti-social loner? Taxi Driver (1976), of course.
Escape and heist films? Papillon (1973) and The Getaway (1972) were notable entries in those categories and there were also lesser-known gems like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) – the colour-coded criminals in this thriller found a ready reference in the 1992 Quentin Tarantino offering, Reservoir Dogs.
And, perhaps inevitably, the ultimate action/war movie would turn out to be a typical 1970s product: the ground-breaking Apocalypse Now (1979), which showed the way forward for so many war movies to come.
Would the world of comic heroes have been the same if not for 1978’s seminal Superman: The Movie?
Martial arts? Look no further than Enter the Dragon (1973), which unleashed hundreds of wannabe Bruce Lees into the high-kicking genre.
How about musicals, you ask? The disco-tinged Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978) showed the dance-floor moves for scores of music-and-dance themed films especially in overseas markets like India.
The disaster movie category came of age in the 1970s and gave us plenty of well-known offerings, including The Towering Inferno (1974) and the various Airport films.
Jaws came along in 1975 to inaugurate the “summer blockbuster season” and neither sharks nor beaches were ever seen the same way again. It was a masterclass in suspense in which the real enemy is rarely seen but is only sensed (or heard) throughout the film. The ageing Hitchcock would have surely been proud of such an exercise in fright.
Horror saw a real harvest of seminal fright-fests ranging from The Exorcist (1973) to The Omen (1976) and Carrie (1976), all of which are routinely rated as the most influential in their genre.
The slasher era was also inaugurated with The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and, of course, Halloween (1978) - all of which predated the hugely successful slasher and "torture porn" films of the 1990s and 2000s like the Scream and the Saw series. Blood and gore were no longer taboo on the big screen after these films came along, unlike in the days of Psycho.
Sci-fiction made its first forays into a fictional galaxy with 1977’s pop-culture phenomenon Star Wars, influencing a whole generation of creative artists and laying the base for the CGI-dominated movies that became the norm in the years afterwards. Alien (1979) was another classic sci-fi movie of the period, which was almost as important as Star Wars in its influence on its genre.
A peculiar 1970s phenomenon was the conspiracy movie with such offerings as The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the President’s Men (1976), the last of which was the screen version of the Watergate affair. All were political thrillers which took a long hard look at the (US) government and did not particularly like what they saw. Though the heyday of the political conspiracy thriller is probably over, no recent thriller can deny the influence of the above movies in more ways than one.
Arguably, the most enjoyable movies in Hindi film history were also made in the 1970s, though present-day audiences will have no memories of those! The greatest of the Hindi pot-boilers, Sholay, rode into theatres in 1975 and forever changed the Bollywood landscape. Sholay was the ultimate “curry western” and, like The Godfather, it had everything in it – action, tragedy, drama, comedy, great dialogue, wonderful chase and shoot-out sequences, memorable heroes, a villain for the ages and above-average song-and-dance numbers.
The above movies are some of the obvious choices for the greatest films of the 1970s but surely every movie-buff will have his/her own list, with possibly many other films on them. But, whatever the different selections are, film buffs have much to thank the 1970s for. The most notable movies of that decade, as we have seen, provided the blueprint for much of what was to come in the next 30 years. And, let’s not forget, the best of these films were also hugely exciting. It was, truly, a period to remember for big-screen aficionados.
I have always had a weakness for the 1970s – was it because I was born in 1971 or was it because my formative years covered almost the whole of that decade? The 1970s were a hugely eventful time both in the West and in India. The counterculture movements of the 1960s had given way to a different scenario in the US and the UK – governments and ruling authorities were no longer seen as sacrosanct and benevolent. In fact, several governments were now regarded as acting in a suspicious manner in many cases! And, in India, there was the Emergency in the mid-1970s which forever changed the country’s democratic thought process.
The movies made in this decade, not surprisingly, reflected the events that were happening in society. The old generation of film-makers was on the way out while a new young breed was moving in. Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, made his last notable movie, Frenzy, in 1972 but that was already seen as his swansong. It was evident that his glory days were long over.
The new wunderkids – among them such future luminaries as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma and William Friedkin, to mention just the most prominent – were experimenting with works that were far removed from most of the creations that had been seen on screen till then. Hitchcock’s movies, in particular, seemed extremely tame, dated and old-fashioned compared to what these auteurs would come up with the next few years.
Many of the movies that we now consider the greatest ever in the history of movies were released in the 1970s. Take any genre and you arguably have the 1970s to thank for, for providing a template for the future. A sampling of what I mean:
Thinking of drama? Then look no further than The Godfather (1972) which is as close to a complete movie as one can imagine. The 1970s even threw up The Godfather Part II (1974), which many rate as the best sequel ever. Then there is the mini-masterpiece from Scorsese, Mean Streets (1973), which kick-started the director's famed collaboration with Robert De Niro. And a recent Guardian poll of the greatest movies across all categories has just selected Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) as the best movie ever made. These four movies from the first half of the 1970s went on to influence countless future films, both in Hollywood and elsewhere.
Looking for vigilante justice or police procedural? Well, there are Dirty Harry (1971), The French Connection (1971) and Death Wish (1974) to whet your appetite. Amitabh Bachchan’s iconic “angry young man” persona could be directly traced back to Eastwood’s Harry Callahan. Eastwood also directed his first movie in 1971, the creepy stalker thriller Play Misty For Me, which was the forerunner of the more famous Lethal Attraction from the following decade.
Need a text for the classic underdog movie? Then take a look at Rocky (1976).
Or a template for the stereotypical film of the anti-social loner? Taxi Driver (1976), of course.
Escape and heist films? Papillon (1973) and The Getaway (1972) were notable entries in those categories and there were also lesser-known gems like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) – the colour-coded criminals in this thriller found a ready reference in the 1992 Quentin Tarantino offering, Reservoir Dogs.
And, perhaps inevitably, the ultimate action/war movie would turn out to be a typical 1970s product: the ground-breaking Apocalypse Now (1979), which showed the way forward for so many war movies to come.
Would the world of comic heroes have been the same if not for 1978’s seminal Superman: The Movie?
Martial arts? Look no further than Enter the Dragon (1973), which unleashed hundreds of wannabe Bruce Lees into the high-kicking genre.
How about musicals, you ask? The disco-tinged Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978) showed the dance-floor moves for scores of music-and-dance themed films especially in overseas markets like India.
The disaster movie category came of age in the 1970s and gave us plenty of well-known offerings, including The Towering Inferno (1974) and the various Airport films.
Jaws came along in 1975 to inaugurate the “summer blockbuster season” and neither sharks nor beaches were ever seen the same way again. It was a masterclass in suspense in which the real enemy is rarely seen but is only sensed (or heard) throughout the film. The ageing Hitchcock would have surely been proud of such an exercise in fright.
Horror saw a real harvest of seminal fright-fests ranging from The Exorcist (1973) to The Omen (1976) and Carrie (1976), all of which are routinely rated as the most influential in their genre.
The slasher era was also inaugurated with The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and, of course, Halloween (1978) - all of which predated the hugely successful slasher and "torture porn" films of the 1990s and 2000s like the Scream and the Saw series. Blood and gore were no longer taboo on the big screen after these films came along, unlike in the days of Psycho.
Sci-fiction made its first forays into a fictional galaxy with 1977’s pop-culture phenomenon Star Wars, influencing a whole generation of creative artists and laying the base for the CGI-dominated movies that became the norm in the years afterwards. Alien (1979) was another classic sci-fi movie of the period, which was almost as important as Star Wars in its influence on its genre.
A peculiar 1970s phenomenon was the conspiracy movie with such offerings as The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the President’s Men (1976), the last of which was the screen version of the Watergate affair. All were political thrillers which took a long hard look at the (US) government and did not particularly like what they saw. Though the heyday of the political conspiracy thriller is probably over, no recent thriller can deny the influence of the above movies in more ways than one.
Arguably, the most enjoyable movies in Hindi film history were also made in the 1970s, though present-day audiences will have no memories of those! The greatest of the Hindi pot-boilers, Sholay, rode into theatres in 1975 and forever changed the Bollywood landscape. Sholay was the ultimate “curry western” and, like The Godfather, it had everything in it – action, tragedy, drama, comedy, great dialogue, wonderful chase and shoot-out sequences, memorable heroes, a villain for the ages and above-average song-and-dance numbers.
The above movies are some of the obvious choices for the greatest films of the 1970s but surely every movie-buff will have his/her own list, with possibly many other films on them. But, whatever the different selections are, film buffs have much to thank the 1970s for. The most notable movies of that decade, as we have seen, provided the blueprint for much of what was to come in the next 30 years. And, let’s not forget, the best of these films were also hugely exciting. It was, truly, a period to remember for big-screen aficionados.