The sensation that was Taxi Driver settled in as the eleventh screening at our semester of the seventies film. Directed with brilliant, baroque virtuosity by Martin Scorsese (on the heels of his breakthrough Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), Taxi Driver was the result of an extraordinary convergence of the talents of three…
A semester of seventies films offered with its tenth entry a (modest) respite from the usual darkness and despair, with the sex-comedy Shampoo (1975). Of course, everything is relative—it’s still the seventies out there, and we surely don’t get the ending we were rooting for, leaving George (Warren Beatty) as diminished, desolate and despairing as…
Another week, another landmark movie – business as usual for a semester of seventies films. Network (1976), comes in the final year of the New Hollywood (in 1977 the writing was on the wall as Network and Taxi Driver lost best picture to the feel-good entertainment that was Rocky, as the morally unambiguous Star Wars…
A semester of seventies films continues with its eighth entry—perhaps the most under-appreciated of all of the great films of the New Hollywood. Arthur Penn’s astonishingly brilliant Night Moves (1975) was the neo-noir that most successfully carried a nuanced and thoughtful appreciation of the landmark films noir of the 1940s into the revised milieu of…
Even in the glory days of the New Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola’s intensely personal, almost willfully non-commercial masterpiece The Conversation (1974) was not an easy film to get produced. But after scoring a massive hit with The Godfather, Coppola was able to extract studio backing for the picture he cared about in exchange for his…
Klute (1971) is another iconic film of the New Hollywood. Its gritty New York City locations and murky interiors were shot by seventies virtuoso Gordon Willis (“the prince of darkness”—if you can’t make out the screen captures below, take it up with him); Michael Chapman (subsequently the cinematographer on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) operated…
How fresh is Nashville (1975), more than forty years after its release? Tom Wicker, political columnist for the New York Times, described the film as a “cascade of minutely detailed vulgarity, greed, deceit, cruelty, barely contained hysteria, and the frantic lack of root and grace into which American life has been driven.” Robert Altman’s mid-career…
The magnificent Five Easy Pieces (1970) is an exemplar of everything the Seventies Film aspired to be. Directed by Bob Rafelson (who also co-wrote the story), the movie was a product of the legendary six-picture deal that BBS Productions (Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, and Steve Blauner) reached with Columbia Pictures—one that traded small budgets in…
Week Three of the “Politics of the 70s Film” featured Medium Cool (1969), a labor of love from quadruple-threat Haskell Wexler (writer-director-cinematographer-camera operator). I have written at length about this outstanding film previously, and more recently a short piece about Wexler as well, and so I will not repeat those efforts here. But Medium Cool is…
Here at Mid Century Cinema we continue to shadow my “Politics of the 70s Film” class this semester; film number two is Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969). The X-rated film (years later reclassified as an “R”) about the doomed friendship between a dim-witted would-be hustler from Texas and a homeless, tubercular, New York City street-survivor (that…