The year I enrolled at the University of Minnesota, Francis Ford Coppola released “The Godfather.” I do not think I understood, at eighteen, that I was watching a film that would define a decade of American cinema. I understood that I was watching something American films had not been doing: taking their characters seriously, refusing to simplify a moral world, holding the camera still and letting actors fill the frame without the studio telling them how to feel about it. What I know now that I did not know then is why any of that was possible. The answer is not romantic. It is economic.
The American cinema of the 1970s, what critics call the New Hollywood or the American New Wave, produced the most sustained run of honest American filmmaking since the golden studio era. Roughly eleven years, from “Easy Rider” in 1969 to the collapse of “Heaven’s Gate” in 1980, during which a small group of American directors made films that looked directly at the country and did not look away. The films are still alive fifty years later, which tells you something about what made them.
What made them possible was institutional failure.
By the late 1960s, the major studios had lost their audience to television and spent a decade chasing them back with expensive spectacle. “Cleopatra” in 1963 nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. “Doctor Dolittle” in 1967 and “Hello, Dolly!” in 1969 cost the studio tens of millions more and returned far less. The studios were frightened and without a clear idea of what audiences wanted. Into that vacuum came Dennis Hopper with “Easy Rider” in 1969: a film made for approximately $400,000 that grossed more than $60 million worldwide. The studios looked at those numbers and drew an obvious conclusion. Young directors with young ideas were cheap. The studios wrote the checks.
What they did not anticipate was that those young directors had things to say.
“The Godfather” is the fulcrum of the era. It is also, in its bones, a film about power and corruption that happens to be set in a crime family. The Corleones are America’s founding story told in a minor key: the immigrant who builds something through ruthlessness, the sons who inherit both the enterprise and its costs, the violence that becomes invisible through institutionalization. Coppola was making a critique of American institutional life. The studios were reading it as a hit. Both were right. The highest-grossing film of 1972 told the truth about how power works in America, and nobody at the studio stopped it, because nobody was paying that kind of attention anymore.
Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” in 1974 makes the critique explicit. Robert Towne’s screenplay is one of the two or three best American screenplays ever written, and what it is about, underneath the detective plot and the Bogart allusions, is the impossibility of justice inside a corrupt civic structure. Jake Gittes cannot win because the corruption is not incidental to the system. It is the system. The film ends in a way I will not describe here, but which you will not forget, because Polanski and Towne understood something most American films refused to accept: sometimes the thing that is going to happen happens, and no amount of protagonist effort changes it. The neo-noir tradition this film inhabits runs deep in American cinema, but “Chinatown” is its purest expression, and the thing that makes it so is the refusal of consolation.
Robert Altman’s “Nashville” in 1975 is the film from this period that most rewards a second viewing and most confounds a first one. Twenty-four characters, 160 minutes, an interwoven narrative that moves between country music stardom and political ambition in ways that keep suggesting connections without explaining them. Altman was not interested in plot. He was interested in a country. “Nashville” is about what Americans sound like when they think no one is listening, what the music says that the politics cannot. It is the most formally ambitious American film of the decade and it was made within the studio system because in 1975 the studio system still had not figured out a better option.
Sidney Lumet’s “Network” came out the following year, and it has been mistaken ever since for something it is not. Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay features a television anchorman who goes publicly insane and finds that his breakdown raises his ratings. The film is about how the entertainment industry destroys human beings for content. It won four Academy Awards. The most famous line, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” became a rallying cry for audiences who missed the point entirely: the film is about how even legitimate anger gets turned into product. “Network” was so far ahead of its moment that fifty years later it still has not caught up to the present it described.
Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” that same year is the personal film of the decade. Travis Bickle is not a sympathetic character in any comfortable sense. He is delusional, possibly dangerous, certainly frightening. What Scorsese does, with Paul Schrader’s screenplay and Bernard Herrmann’s final score, is inhabit that interiority completely without endorsing it. The film is about the city as a psychological condition, about alienation that has moved past loneliness into something more active and more frightening. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1976. Scorsese was thirty-three years old. No studio system operating normally would have funded this film. The old system knew what it was making. The studios of 1976 did not.
“Apocalypse Now” in 1979 is where the era collapses into its own ambition, which is the right way to close it. Coppola shot for more than a year in the Philippines, went massively over budget, navigated multiple production crises, and watched his lead actor Martin Sheen survive a heart attack on set mid-production. What he made is a film that uses a journey up a river in Vietnam to argue that American civilization carries its own brutality at its center. It is not a modest film. It is not, in the end, entirely a controlled one. What it is: honest in a way that no studio-comfortable picture could be honest. It costs too much, goes too far, commits to its metaphor past the point of prudence. The excess is the argument.
The window that made all of this possible closed for a specific reason, and the reason carries its own irony.
In 1975, Steven Spielberg released “Jaws.” In 1977, George Lucas released “Star Wars.” Both men had come up through the New Hollywood. Both had absorbed its lessons. Both films also taught the studios something they had been trying to learn for a decade: a single film released wide in the summer, on hundreds of screens simultaneously, could generate returns that dwarfed anything an honest adult drama could produce. The blockbuster model was not invented by studio executives. It was invented by the generation of directors the studios had funded while they were panicking.
Once the studios remembered what they were for, the era ended. Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” in 1980 is the formal conclusion: a film so expensive and so decisively rejected by audiences that it ended United Artists as an independent studio and handed studio executives the cautionary example they had been waiting to use. The young directors could still make personal films. They could not make them on the same terms. The commercial logic that had briefly, accidentally, made the New Hollywood possible had found a better use for its money.
I have seen every film mentioned in this piece multiple times. Not out of professional obligation, though the profession demands its homework, but because they have remained alive in the way that great work does. What they share is a specific honesty: the honesty of a period when the people making American films looked at the country around them and found they could not pretend. That is rarer than it sounds. Most film history is the history of pretending.
The studios lost their nerve and in that decade of lost nerve, some of the most honest films in American history got made. The window lasted eleven years. What came through it is still worth your time.
