The 1970 New York Film Festival – then only in its eighth year – looked to be a very promising affair. As the New York Times reported with enthusiasm on September 4, the event would feature “new films directed by Satyajit Ray, Luis Buñuel . . . Bernardo Bertolucci, Alain Resnais, Kenji Mizoguchi . . . Claude Chabrol, Liliana Cavani, Werner Herzog and Jean-Luc Godard.” (Not too shabby, although, not to get all pedantic, Mizoguchi died in 1956. His film, The Crucified Lovers (1954), was a “retrospective selection” included a slate of eagerly anticipated revivals highlighted by Robert Wiene’s landmark of Weimar Cinema The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Harold Lloyd’s silent classic The Kid Brother.)
The festival would open with Truffaut’s The Wild Child (already sold out, according to the Times), and close with Tristana, which heralded the fifth decade of filmmaking from legendary Spanish-Mexican auteur Luis Buñuel. Tristana would reunite the writer-director with Catherine Deneuve; their previous effort, the then-scandalous Belle du Jour, had won the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice film festival. And of those additional films anticipated by the Times, at least two would be recognized as masterpieces: Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and Chabrol’s Le Boucher. However (and nothing against those great films), in retrospect the most interesting entries at the festival were movies that the paper barely seemed to notice, including two documentaries new to us—and that we are now dying to see: a documentary about Henri Langlois, co-founder and director of the Cinémathèque Française (and Pater Familias of the French New Wave), and a little something called Street Scenes 1970, about “the Wall Street clashes of last spring between the hard hats and youthful anti-war protestors.” As the Times described, “A film crew composed of New York University students and professionals . . . were on the scene that day. They caught the running street battles, then did a series of interviews with participants and bystanders.” Well, that alone sounds like a must-see, for the seventies-inclined. But what if I told you Street Scenes was directed by Martin Scorsese—who has subsequently suppressed the film? The jaw drops, and it looks like we have a new holy grail on our hands!
Finally (and doing violence to the cliché “last but not least”), there was the film not even mentioned by the paper of record in its 1,300 word piece on the upcoming festival: Five Easy Pieces. Directed by Bob Rafelson, written by Carole Eastman, shot by László Kovács, and starring Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, and Susan Anspach, the BBS production announced with undeniable force and clarity that the New Hollywood had emerged as a distinct, major cinematic movement. As we have already written extensively about Five Easy Pieces on this site, in Hollywood’s Last Golden Age, and most recently in our chapter “BBS and the New Hollywood Dream” from When the Movies Mattered, we’ll not repeat ourselves here (except to recount one of our favorite anecdotes: when Karen Black was fighting for the role of Rayette, Rafelson balked at casting her, concerned that she was simply too intelligent to play the part plausibly. “Bob, when you call ‘action,’ I will stop thinking,” she responded.)
Instead we’ll leave the last word to Roger Ebert, who, at age twenty-eight, was at the premiere that night at the Festival, an up-and-coming critic for the Chicago Sun Times. “I remember the explosive laughter, the deep silences, the stunned attention as the final shot seemed to continue forever, and then the ovation,” he would write years later. “We’d had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy.” In other words, into The New Hollywood.
Jack Nicholson and Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces