1970s

"Oh man, those 1970s directors...they got it". The line of dialogue you could expect to hear in any first-year film studies class, but, you know what? There's a lot of truth to the statement. The film output of the 1970s is of such a consistently high quality that it's hard to argue that it wasn't the best decade for the film industry. It certainly was for American film. The inmates were running the asylum after the failure of the studio system and, while they would eventually ruin it for themselves, for a time the director, any artist, was king. The 1970s was a decade of experimentation. People were experimenting with sex and drugs, and they were also experimenting with film. It was a time of social change and the films of the era reflect that change. There is a sense when watching a lot of films from the era that was dubbed 'The New Hollywood' (roughly 1967-1980) that they really thought that anything was possible. Inspired by European art and independent cinema, seventies films had a very different aesthetic that made them different from anything that had come before them. They were gritty, narratively complex, violent and, at times, uncomfortable and uncompromising. When you look at the quality of films, no decade can touch the '70s. The seventies really was the best decade for film. Honorable Mentions: Dog Day Afternoon, Five Easy Pieces, The Sting, Mean Streets, Chinatown. 1. Alien 'In space, no one can, ear you scream' Alien is spectacular a film that is doubly impressive given that it was made in the 1970s. The seventies was a very different decade and science-fiction/horror films were not exactly en-vogue at the time. Although the bar was raised with Star Wars, special effects were constantly evolving and improving and Alien features some truly state-of-the-art effects designed by H. R. Giger. Chestburster, anyone? The story is fairly simple and actually has a lot in common with a little-seen Italian B-movie, Mario Bava's 1965 film Planet Of The Vampires. But it is claustrophobic, tense and genuinely scary in a way that few films are. Plus it has one of the strongest female characters of all time in Sigourney Weaver's Ripley. The sequels received a mixed reception, but the original stands as one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made. 2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Hindustan Times 'Who will survive and what will be left of them?' Tobe Hooper's 1973 horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is exhausting. When you're done watching the film you feel like you've just survived a night running away from Leatherface and family. That's just the way it should be, of course. Chainsaw is 1970s guerrilla filmmaking at its finest: shot on a budget of just $300,000 with a cast of unknowns, the crew was stretched for resources filmed every day of the week for long hours in the Texas heat. The strain of the production really comes through in the finished film: you can sense the actors' anguish. The film received many complaints and was banned for its violence when, in reality, it's not really all that violent. You think you see a lot more than you actually do, and there were other, more mainstream films, doing things just as violent and getting away with it. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has had an incredible impact on the horror genre and has, as is standard with the genre, become a franchise. The returns have diminished with each sequel and remake, but nothing can take away the impact of the original film. 3. Rocky 'His whole life was a million-to-one shot' Rocky Balboa may be an iconic character that made Sylvester Stallone a star, but, for a time, it looked as if the film might not have been made at all. Stallone wrote the script to Rocky after Chuck Wepner went fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali in 1975 with Rocky being an amalgamation of several different fighters including Rocky Marciano and Joe Frazier. Sly would only sell the script to United Artists if he could star in the film, with the studio preferring Robert Redford, Ryan O'Neal, and Burt Reynolds. The studio eventually acquiesced on the condition that the budget was kept low and changes were made to the script and the rest is history. Rocky cost just shy of $2 to make and returned a staggering £225m at the worldwide box-office, winning Best Picture and Best Director for John G. Avildsen at the Academy Awards and spawning a (to date) five sequel franchise. For all of the jingoism, rabble-rousing and iconic scenes in the later films, the original is pretty melancholy at times. Hell, Rocky doesn't even win the fight against Creed. Cinema Retro 4. Halloween Pinterest 'The night he came home' John Carpenter's 1978 film is ten times as scary as most contemporary horror could ever wish to be and it accomplishes this without resorting to ultra-violent nastiness. Carpenter, a director who has claimed he would have loved to direct in the Studio system of the 1930s and '40s, made an incredibly tense film that spawned the slasher genre. The tropes and tricks used in Halloween were cliches by the mid-1980s, but Halloween has stood the test of time. Watching it today, the film still scares. Much of the credit has to go to Carpenter's simple yet very effective score and use of shadows and light. Made for $250,000 the film grossed $70m at the box-office, become one of the most successful independent films of all time. Several sequels, spin-offs, and remakes have followed, but nothing touches the '70s original. 5. The Last Picture Show The Mercury News 'Anarene, Texas, 1951. Nothing much has changed...' Peter Bogdanovich's film is a very 1970s take on the coming-of-age story. It's about kids in a small Texas town who discover sex and other grown-up things and how they react to the pressure of these new experiences. Written down, it sounds like an American Pie film, but The Last Picture Show couldn't be further from it. It's a restrained, intimate look at small-town life and relationships. Performances by Cybil Shepherd and Jeff Bridges are on-point, but Ben Johnson and Ellen Burstyn are even better. Johnson won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, despite his protestations that he would never make the film. Bogdanovich managed to persuade Johnson that he'd win the Oscar if he took the part and, true to his word, he did. The film received a host of other awards and nominations and is generally regarded as one of the best films of the 1970s. It is one of the rare films that have a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 47 reviews). Cloris Leachman won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this film. Her acceptance speech is included below. 6. Nashville Pinterest 'The damnedest thing you ever saw!' When most people hear the word Nashville they probably think of the somewhat cheesy ABC drama series, but, for fans of '70s cinema, there is only one Nashville: Robert Altman's 1975 country music epic. There are a staggering 24 main characters in the film and Altman briskly alternates between their stories, characters dipping in and out of the film as the 'plot' dictates. Altman's loose, improvisational style is on full display here. The actor's wrote and recorded their own songs and everything that is in the film was done 'live'. Nashville was a critical triumph upon release with influential critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert giving it glowing reviews and calling it the best film of the year. The country music community was less enthusiastic, however, claiming that the film made fun of their sincerity and talent. Altman claimed they were bitter because he chose to use actors instead of them. Whatever your opinion on the film, it remains an impressive achievement in the history of American cinema. 7. Annie Hall Pinterest 'A nervous romance' Woody Allen, the man who has been releasing a film every year for the past thirty years, was still an up-and-coming talent in the 1970s. His earlier works (such as Bananas and Sleeper) were farces that received mixed reviews, but 1977s Annie Hall showed Allen's penchant for comedy, drama, and romance. It was a dramatic shift for the director, but one that was very well-received: Roger Ebert once remarked that Annie Hall was 'pretty much everyone's'favorite Woody Allen film. Indeed, Annie Hall stands out as Woody's funniest, sweetest and, well, best film. It even beat Star Wars at the Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress for Diane Keaton's wonderful portrayal of the title character. The film's fingerprints can be seen over a plethora of romantic comedies since. 8. Suspiria avclub.com 'The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92' Dario Argento's technicolor nightmare is as beautiful as it is scary. Argento is perhaps the most famous and respected of the Italian horror directors that came to prominence in the 1970s and '80s and many often cite Suspiria as his masterpiece. You can see why. It is absolutely gorgeous, filled with lush reds, blues and greens. The murder set-pieces are unlike anything seen in horror cinema in the 1970s, owing a great deal to old masters like Orson Welles and Hitchcock, but with a hyper violent twist. The film's typically 1970's score by Italian prog-rockers Goblin adds to the surreal nature of the film. While it didn't make a lot of waves in America or the UK in the 1970s, the film has found an audience on VHS and DVD and has since become a cult classic. A rumoured remake has, thankfully, been cancelled. 9. The French Connection BFI 'Doyle is bad news - but a good cop' The French Connection is one of the best crime thrillers of all time. The film, which is about a pair of New York narcotics cops who uncover a drug smuggling operation, set a new standard for police films and features one of the most intense car chases in cinema history. The film's director William Friedkin decided to shoot the film with a realism hitherto only seen in documentary films and the results are something to behold. The car chase, in particular, makes you feel like you are a witness to something that is really happening. This could be because Friedkin didn't bother to secure permits to shoot the chase and filmed it illegally with the help of off-duty NYPD officers. Many mistakes happened during the frantic chase and a man who was on his way to work had his car smashed into during the mayhem. He had no idea a car chase was being filmed. The material may just be a take on the old cops and robbers formula, but Friedkin's direction and the performances from Gene Hackman and Roy Schneider raise this one above the rest. 10. Network redef.com 'Television will never be the same' Sidney Lumet's satire of network television was eerily close to predicting the future of the medium. While it didn't specifically namedrop Jerry Springer or The Kardashians, it certainly did its best to warn us for the evils to come. The story concerns Howard Beale, a long-serving anchor who is told that he will be fired within a fortnight because of his declining ratings. Beale threatens to kill himself on air on his next broadcast and produces a bunch of long diatribes condemning contemporary society. Eventually, drastic measures are taken to contain Beale, whose popularity is rapidly increasing. The performances in Network, like many '70s films, are absolutely first-class. Peter Finch as Howard Beale is especially good and he was posthumously awarded the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1977. Network is a film that is perpetually relevant. Continue on for the final ten, beginning with the film that kept a generation out of the ocean for years... :) 11. Jaws Huffington Post 'You're gonna need a bigger boat'. You can't talk about the film in the 1970s without talking about Jaws. Spielberg's 1975 monster movie birthed the blockbuster and changed the face of American motion pictures forever. The idea is, as all good ones are, a simple one: man versus shark. In the hands of a lesser director, this would be an excuse for a cinematic bloodbath, but Spielberg chose to go another direction and the results are spectacular. The shark (which Spielberg admitted to being fake-looking) is rarely glimpsed throughout the film's runtime. This just builds up audience suspense and, when the shark finally surfaces, the popcorn flies. There are some truly ingenious scares in Jaws and audiences flocked in droves to see them. Made for $9m, the film grossed $470m at the box-office (and millions more in merchandise). Suddenly, films were released on thousands of screens simultaneously with huge advertising campaigns. The film industry never looked back. A watershed moment (pardon the pun). Let's check back in on the wonderful cast of Jaws: 12. The Exorcist The Red List 'Something beyond comprehension is happening to a little girl on this street, in this house. A man has been called for as a last resort to try and save her. That man is The Exorcist.' Jaws may have been the first blockbuster, but The Exorcist certainly set the ball in motion two years earlier in 1973. The Exorcist, like Jaws, was also base on a best-selling novel and made on a modest budget ($12m). It grossed over $400m at the box-office, launching director William Friedkin onto the A-list and creating a pop culture phenomenon. Let's face it, everything has parodied The Exorcist at some point. The film had a troubled shoot, with the tyrannical Friedkin doing his best to scare or piss off everyone that he could (he fired a gun next to Jason Miller's head and slapped a priest to get the right reactions for a scene). There have also in the years since been claims that the production was cursed, as an unusually high amount of people associated with the film died and other spooky things went one. The film was a hit with critics and audiences, amassing ten Academy Award nominations and becoming the first horror film to be directed for Best Picture (it lost to The Sting). The Exorcist, an expertly made film, is one of the scariest of all time and still has the power to frighten when watched today. 13. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest The Film Sufi 'If he's crazy, what does that make you?' Milos Forman's 1975 drama film about a seemingly sane man's stay in a mental institution was only the second film in history to win all five of the major Academy Awards after 1934's It Happened One Night. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's nest is good value for it too as the film has many moments of brilliance. Jack Nicholson steals the show (naturally), but the supporting players are given a chance to shine as well. Watch out for a young Danny DeVito and a debuting Brad Dourif. The onscreen battle between Nicholson's Randle Murphy and Louise Fletcher's wicked nurse has been read as a personification of the 1970s culture wars. Keeping it authentic (as was often the case on 1970s productions), most of the actor's chose to stay in character when not filming and many of the extras were actual patients at the hospital. 14. The Conversation Pinterest 'Harry Caul is an invader of privacy. The best in the business. He can record any conversation between two people anywhere. So far, three people are dead because of him.' Gene Hackman was just one of many actors who had their best years in the 1970s. Hackman's output throughout the decade was impressive, if not erratic, and he had great turns in films as varied as Superman, Prime Cut, The French Connection, Night Moves and the underrated Scarecrow. Hackman was one of the decade's best actors and in The Conversation, it could be argued that he gives his best performance as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who has a crisis of conscience when he starts to think that the couple he is spying on is going to be murdered. Taking cues from Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, the film goes into extreme detail exploring themes such as perception versus reality and duty versus occupation. The film was released just a few months before Watergate, causing some to believe that the film is a commentary on the scandal. The Conversation was nominated for Best Picture, but lost to The Godfather: Part II, another Francis Ford Coppola film. The director really did have the Midas touch for a time in the seventies. A tension-filled piece of 1970's paranoia that you need to see if you haven't already. 15. Harold And Maude Daily Bruin 'This is Harold. Fully equipped to deal with life. This is Maude. Harold's girlfriend'. Harold And Maude, Hal Ashby's jet-black romantic comedy, was strange even by the standards of the seventies. When Ashby and Colin Higgins took the screenplay to Hollywood executives, they were told they were nuts. Nobody, they argued, wanted to see a romance between a 20-year-old man and a 79-year-old-woman. They also objected to the scenes of Harold faking his death and some other aspects of the story. And wouldn't you know it when the film came out many critics had issues with the black humour and the age difference between the two title characters. In recent years the film's reputation has been rehabilitated and it is now regarded as a cult classic and a midnight movie favourite. There's no denying the film's heart or its great Cat Stevens soundtrack. 16. Aguirre, The Wrath Of God purpleclover.com 'On this river, God never finished his creation' Aguirre is as famous for its off-screen troubles as it is for its breathtaking cinematography and performances on. It was the first of five collaborations between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski and it was, to say the least, an inauspicious start for the team. The film may have been about a soldier who goes mad in the Amazonian jungle, but it was Kinski himself who seemed to be losing his mind during the shoot. Actor and director clashed frequently about how Kinski should play and eponymous Aguirre, usually resulting in a Kinski throwing a massive tantrum and berating Herzog, his crew and the local natives. Kinski got so wound-up by the sound of the cast and crew playing cards in a nearby hut that he fired three gunshots at it. Kinski decided to leave the set, but Herzog, ever the diplomat, told him in no uncertain terms that if he left that he would have to shoot him first. The Kinski/Herzog relationship is documented in detail in Herzog's documentary My Best Fiend. Aguirre, as a film, is a masterpiece. All of the trouble was worth it in the end. 17. Badlands The Guardian 'In 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people' Terence Malick has reappeared after a long period of inactivity with critically acclaimed films like The Tree Of Life and To The Wonder, but this, his debut feature, remains his best. Badlands is a love-on-the-run film in the mold of Bonnie And Clyde. Malick has said that he wanted the film to be like a nostalgic fairy tale as deeply-flawed characters believe that they are living in one. It must be a Grimm fairytale then since Kit (a young Martin Sheen) goes on a killing spree in an effort to keep his and Holly's (and even younger Sissy Spacek) location a secret. The film is beautiful, Malick's soft cinematography and the charming score juxtaposing the violence on screen. It is a very American film that could have only been made in the 1970s. Badlands' influence can be seen in recent films like Mud and Moonrise Kingdom. 18. All The President's Men vox.com 'At times it looked like it might cost them their jobs, their reputations, and maybe even their lives.' The paranoid political thriller was a staple of 1970s cinema. Hey, why not? With Vietnam, political assassinations and Watergate happening around them Americans had a right to be paranoid. All The President's Men is the true story of two journalists investigating the Watergate scandal and the cover-ups they encounter and missing pieces they try to solve. It was directed by Alan J. Pakula, forming part of his informal 'paranoia' trilogy of seventies films along with Klute and The Parallax View (both of which are also worth your time). Much care was taken to remain as authentic as possible to the real-life story and the production reproduced everything to replicate a real newsroom at great expense. Nothing was allowed in the script unless it had been verified by someone in-the-know. All The President's Men features one of many great 1970's Dustin Hoffman performances. Robert Redford isn't half bad, either. 19. The Godfather/The Godfather: Part II theguardian 'An offer you can't refuse' It sounds clichéd to talk about how The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II are two of the greatest films of all time, but there's no getting around it. They just are and it's as simple as that. Francis Ford Coppola was on a hell of a roll in the 1970s, directing classics like The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, but the first two Godfather films stand as his greatest achievement. The story of Michael Corleone's rise to power in the Corleone crime family is an epic tale of betrayal, power and murder that could have only been made this well in the 1970s. Based on Mario Puzzo's best-selling novel of the same name, the film was a smash hit at the box-office, making $285m well above its $7m budget. But Coppola had to fight to get his vision up on screen, with executives determined to remove Al Pacino (whom they referred to as "that midget") from the film. Coppola stuck to his guns and Pacino stayed in the film. The result was one of the best performances in film history (although Pacino would have to wait twenty years to receive an Academy Award). The Godfather has many exceptional performances, not least of which is Marlon Brando's cotton-mouthed Don Corleone. Part II defies convention as being one of the only sequels in film history that people claim is better than the first. The Godfather Parts I and II are films to be studied and savoured. They are masterclasses in filmmaking and storytelling. Shame about the third one, eh? 20. Taxi Driver YouTube 'On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody' Oh, come on you didn't really think that there wouldn't be at least one Martin Scorsese film on a list of great seventies films, did you? Marty made some amazing films in that decade and Mean Streets and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore just narrowly missed the cut. Taxi Driver, however, simply has to be included, as it is one of the quintessential seventies films. The Palme d'Or winning movie is a terrifying insight into the mind of an alienated man who wants to 'clean up' the New York City streets. Not with a dustpan and brush mind you, but by rescuing a 12-year-old prostitute and killing her pimp. Taxi Drive is a rich, complex film that sees Scorsese on top of his game. Robert De Niro gives one of the all-time great performances as Travis Bickle. De Niro, ever the method actor, got his own cab license and did twelve-hour shifts while researching the role. No film so expertly captures the seedy underbelly of seventies New York, with all of its porn theatres and debauchery. The film was controversial when it was released, coming into conflict with the MPAA over the bloody nature of the film's climax and the young age of Jodie Foster's character. Like a fine wine, Taxi Driver only gets better with age. If ever you needed proof that the 1970s were the decade for cinema, this is it. Is the '70s really the best decade? What other classic 1970's movies were missed? Get the discussion going down in the comments. (Credits) Specifically, let's look at the incredible car chases these films brought to life... RELATED: Watch The New Trailer For ‘Fantasy Island’: A Campy 1970s TV Series Turned Horror Film