God’s Lonely Men: Seventies Hollywood Cinema Reconsidered

eye Weekly magazine
April 9, 1992

Buffalo Bill and the Indians

Hollywood’s last Golden Age? Festival looks at the ’7Os
By Noah Cowan

Can’t Stop the Music. Jesus Christ Superstar. Roller Boogie.
While we giggle about the more excessive moments of the 1970s, we often forget that some of the Hollywood’s finest—and most controversial—films were made in this much-maligned decade. Or have we been made to forget? My theory is that baby boomers—now in control of the levers of power—are embarrassed by their behaviour between 1972 and 1980, and so are seeking nothing less than the full eradication of our recent cultural history. Stop right there, you filthy dope-smoking bankers! Cinematheque Ontario will present an 11-film mini-retro from April 10 to May 22 in celebration of this crucial era of filmmaking. This marks the Cinematheque’s first foray into “time period” vs. “personality” curation, and it’s a welcome change.

Big cars. Stretch pants. Brutal violence. Unsafe sex. America. Some people may be surprised at the list of programmed films—many of them are obscure, lots were box-office bombs, and most of the acknowledged Hollywood “classics” of the ’70s (Taxi Driver, Nashville) are missing. Guest programmer Geoff Pevere admits, in an interview, that “we made a list of the 10 obvious choices, threw away the list, and started again.” This strategy, to obtain a more authentic portrait of the true cinematic trends, has paid off. The films here are not of uniform quality (read: sometimes hard to watch), but each is a fascinating time capsule back to a unique aesthetic and political sensibility. Strongest films include: Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (the follow-up to Easy Rider), Terence Malick’s brilliant Badlands (featuring Martin Sheen as the most charming psychopath brought to the screen), Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians (a fascinating poison pen letter to America from one of its most esteemed directors), and Michael Ritchie’s Smile (an astounding satire of small-town America as it hosts a beauty pageant).

“An educated man’s high-powered masochistic fairy tale”—Pauline Kael in a 1979 New Yorker review of James Toback’s Fingers.

The main event will likely be opening night. James Toback, nominated for his Bugsy script at this year’s Oscars and director of The Big Bang and The Pick-Up Artist, will attend the screening of his first film, Fingers. Toback should be a hoot—his antics after The Big Bang screened at the Festival of Festivals [which became the Toronto International Film Festival] were memorable—and the film should prompt, um, lively conversation.

Deeply indebted to Mean Streets—for its subject as well as its star, Harvey Keitel—this tale of a sex-crazed Mafia bagman/concert pianist (that’s not a typo) is a desperately over-the-top New York story. Toback infuses events with strange pacing—part paranoia, part ennui—that leaves you profoundly unsettled during both Keitel’s melodramatic recitals and the film’s brutally stylized gangland slayings. Unfortunately, a subplot involving Jim Brown goes nowhere, taking the oomph out of an otherwise gritty ending.

“The product of a decade of churning social, political and economic forces, Seventies Hollywood cinema is remarkable not just for its unconscious reflection of such upheavals as Vietnam, Watergate, feminism and gay lib, but also the consistently active and conscious way it took those matters on.”—Geoff Pevere

Controversy will dog this and many other films in the program because of their politics: these stories concern men of action—in Pevere's words, “loose cannons”—paralyzed in the wake of America’s exploded morality, and trying to find some justification for their lives. Society has pushed them, and now they’re pushing back. An entire cinema rewriting James Dean. For the women, it’s more complicated. On one hand, women are objects, manipulated by their aggressive mates. But this is also the era of emergent feminism; these women are fully capable of making their own choices and often do. Eventually, everyone seems to re-insert themselves in their traditional societal roles, but only after showing others what freedom—pure, uncorrupted rebel freedom—might entail. Other films in the program include Daryl Duke’s Payday (1973); Michael Ritchie’s Smile (1975); Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972); Albert Brooks’s Real Life (1979); Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978); John Frankenheimer’s The French Connection I (1975); and Karel Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978). The most amazing part of this cinematic outburst, however, is that Hollywood agreed to finance it. Big. They actually gave unconditional money to counterculture heroes of the late 1960s to make big-budget movies in the 1970s. Movies about an utterly corrupt American society and those repulsed by it; movies about people seeking answers and usually not finding them; movies about uncertainty and alienation. It sure was a change from Mary Poppins 2. It’s no mystery why these films disappeared so quickly at decade’s end. According to Pevere, “the American auteurs, separated from youth culture consumed by disco and punk—and abandoned by their own Reaganite peers—had completely lost their constituency.” It was easy for Hollywood to drop-kick these rebels goodbye. What a shame: with their downfall, audiences bade farewell to Hollywood’s last Golden Age.