15 Movies from the 1970s, Kids Today Will Never Understand

[00:00:00]Somebody's been dumping thousands of tons of water from the city's reservoirs and we're supposed to be in the middle of a drought.

[00:00:06]>> The 1970s produced a run of American films that were soaked in the specific anxieties, attitudes, and textures of that exact moment. And if you weren't there, some of them are almost impossible to fully feel.

[00:00:21]Here are 15 movies from the 1970s kids today will never understand. Number 15, MASH, 1970.

[00:00:32]Robert Altman's MASH was set in a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War. But nobody watching it in 1970 thought about Korea for a single second.

[00:00:43]The film was about Vietnam, about the absurdity of military hierarchy, about young men being sent somewhere to get killed for reasons that made less and less sense the longer the war dragged on.

[00:00:55]And about the only rational response to that situation being a kind of savage, exhausting comedy.

[00:01:03]Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, and Tom Skerritt played surgeons who spent their off hours staging pranks, drinking, and >> There doesn't appear to be any reason I've seen you somewhere before.

[00:01:15]I don't know your name, stranger, but your face is familiar.

[00:01:19]>> dismantling every piece of institutional dignity they could reach.

[00:01:24]Robert Duvall played a straight-laced officer they systematically humiliated.

[00:01:29]Sally Kellerman played a nurse whose nickname the film turned into a running joke. The humor was cold and the warmth was buried under layers of cynicism that were entirely specific to a generation that had watched the 1960s dismantle every optimistic idea it had started with.

[00:01:49]The film won the Palm d'Or at Cannes in 1970 and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning for Ring Lardner Jr.'s screenplay.

[00:01:59]A child watching it today would see a comedy set in a war.

[00:02:03]An adult who lived through 1970 watched something that said out loud what their generation had stopped being able to say politely. Number 14, Five Easy Pieces, 1970.

[00:02:17]>> Okay, I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like an omelette, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on >> Bob Rafelson directed Five Easy Pieces in 1970 with Jack Nicholson in a performance that announced him as one of the major actors of his generation.

[00:02:34]Nicholson played Bobby Dupea, a man from a wealthy musical family [music] who has walked away from everything his background promised him and is working on an oil rig in California passing as working class, choosing a smaller life by deliberate and unexplained decision.

[00:02:52]The film didn't explain Bobby's choices and didn't apologize for them. It sat with his dissatisfaction without resolving it. Which was a thing American films almost never did.

[00:03:05]The famous diner scene, in which Bobby attempts to order a side of toast, >> Sure is nice talking to you girls.

[00:03:11][laughter] I wish that I had some more time.

[00:03:14]>> That's a wig you wear, isn't it?

[00:03:16]>> See?

[00:03:16]>> Yeah.

[00:03:17]>> And is told by a waitress that the menu doesn't allow substitutions, leading to a confrontation that becomes one of the most quoted exchanges in 1970s cinema, captured something precise about the frustration of a generation that had been handed a set of rules it no longer believed in and had no replacement framework for.

[00:03:41]Five Easy Pieces was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Nicholson.

[00:03:49]A young person watching it today would find a well-made character study.

[00:03:53]Someone who was young in 1970 would recognize Bobby Dupea from the inside.

[00:04:00]That specific post-60s feeling of having rejected the available scripts without having written a new one. Number 13, Harold and Maude, 1971.

[00:04:11]>> What were you fighting for?

[00:04:12]>> Oh, big issues. Liberty, rights, justice. Kings died, kingdoms fell.

[00:04:19]>> Hal Ashby directed Harold and Maude in 1971 and it was a commercial failure by any conventional measure.

[00:04:27]The story of a 20-year-old man named Harold, played by Bud Cort, who stages elaborate fake suicides to disturb his oblivious mother and finds genuine emotional connection with a 79-year-old woman named Maude, played by Ruth Gordon, was not something that fit neatly into any existing category.

[00:04:49]Cat Stevens composed and performed the entire soundtrack. And the combination of his acoustic folk songs with the film's dark comedy gave it a tone that was entirely of its moment. Gentle and melancholy and irreverent simultaneously in the way that the early 1970s sometimes managed to be.

[00:05:11]>> Well, you're not going anywhere.

[00:05:14]Are you?

[00:05:15]>> Yes, dear.

[00:05:16]I took the tablets an hour ago.

[00:05:20]I'll be gone by midnight.

[00:05:21]>> Harold's fake suicides were played as comedy while his isolation was played as real.

[00:05:27]Maude's age was not treated as a punchline.

[00:05:31]The relationship between them was presented as the most honest thing either of them had.

[00:05:37]The film was essentially ignored on its initial release, but became one of the defining cult films of the decade through college theater circuits where it ran continuously through the 1970s and into the 1980s.

[00:05:52]For a generation that had watched the counterculture form and then dissolve, Mod's philosophy that life required active and deliberate choice landed with the force of something that needed to be said. Number 12, Serpico, 1973.

[00:06:10]>> That right there is a tale of corruption and intrigue, the likes of which you're going to rock this city.

[00:06:17]>> Sidney Lumet directed Serpico in 1973 with Al Pacino in the title role, playing Frank Serpico, a real New York City police officer who spent years attempting to report systematic corruption within the NYPD to anyone who would listen and found that the institution was so thoroughly corrupted that reporting the corruption was effectively impossible through official channels.

[00:06:43]Serpico eventually testified before the Knapp Commission in 1971, which led to significant reforms.

[00:06:50]Before he testified in February 1971, he was shot in the face during a drug bust in Brooklyn.

[00:06:58]The accounts of the incident suggested that his fellow officers had been slow to call for help. He survived and left the country for Europe shortly after.

[00:07:08]>> Now, you could be brought UP ON CHARGES FOR THIS.

[00:07:10]>> I always thought so, but the reality is that WE DO NOT WASH OUR OWN LAUNDRY. IT JUST GETS DIRTY.

[00:07:14]>> YOU ARE IN TROUBLE.

[00:07:15]>> I DON'T CARE IF I'M IN TROUBLE. I DON'T >> THE New York City that Serpico depicts, institutionally corrupt from the patrol officer level up through the chain of command, resistant to change, dangerous to anyone who tried to hold it accountable, was not fictional.

[00:07:32]It was a documented reality the Knapp Commission confirmed in detail.

[00:07:36]A young person watching the film today would see a story about a whistleblower, someone who lived in New York in the early 1970s watched a film about the city they actually lived in. Number 11, Soylent Green, 1973.

[00:07:53]Richard Fleischer directed Soylent Green in 1973 with Charlton Heston playing a detective in a wildly overcrowded New York City of the year 2022.

[00:08:04]The city has 40 million people. The environment has collapsed.

[00:08:09]>> Left to die.

[00:08:12]No.

[00:08:15]I love you, Sol.

[00:08:16]>> A food product called Soylent Green, produced by a corporation and distributed by the government, is the primary food source for most of the population.

[00:08:26]The film's famous ending delivered a revelation that most people already know by cultural osmosis, even if they've never seen the film.

[00:08:35]What the film carried that a young viewer today cannot fully access was the specific 1970s dread of overpopulation and resource exhaustion as imminent crises.

[00:08:48]Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book, The Population Bomb, had argued that mass famine was essentially inevitable within decades.

[00:08:57]The environmental movement was young and the problems it was describing felt accelerating and uncontrollable.

[00:09:04]Soylent Green was where that dread went when it wanted a story.

[00:09:09]Edward G. Robinson played Sol, Heston's elderly partner.

[00:09:14]>> Listen to me, Hatcher. YOU'VE GOT TO TELL THEM. SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!

[00:09:20]>> ROBINSON WAS DYING OF cancer during the production and knew it. He died on January 26th, 1973, 10 days after filming wrapped. The scene in which Sol chooses to end his life in a government euthanasia facility surrounded by images of the natural world he remembers from before the collapse, was the last scene Robinson ever filmed.

[00:09:44]Heston later said he had difficulty separating the performance from the reality of what was happening to his friend. Number 10, The Conversation, 1974.

[00:09:57]Francis Ford Coppola made The Conversation in 1974, between the two Godfather films, and it won the Palm d'Or at Cannes.

[00:10:08]>> I love you.

[00:10:09]>> Don't get involved in this, Mr. Caul.

[00:10:12]These tapes are dangerous.

[00:10:14]>> The same year, The Godfather Part II won the Academy Award for Best Picture, making 1974 the peak of Coppola's career by any measure.

[00:10:24]Gene Hackman played Harry Caul, a surveillance expert in San Francisco, who has spent his professional life recording other people's private conversations without moral involvement in what he captures.

[00:10:37]A job involving a young couple begins to disturb that professional detachment.

[00:10:42]The film was in production during the Watergate hearings, and the parallel between Harry Caul's work and the surveillance apparatus that had been revealed as part of the Nixon White House was not accidental.

[00:10:55]The specific anxiety the film tapped into, that the technology of surveillance was now sophisticated enough to be used on anyone by anyone with access, and that the people who operated it had built ethical walls around themselves that were not holding, >> I love you.

[00:11:15]>> Spending too much time together here.

[00:11:17]>> No, let's stay just a little longer.

[00:11:19]>> was very much the anxiety of 1974.

[00:11:24]A young person today lives inside a surveillance infrastructure that dwarfs anything technically possible in 1974, and the anxiety has become ambient.

[00:11:35]The conversation captured the moment just before that settled in.

[00:11:40]When it was still possible to be specifically alarmed by the idea that someone might be listening. Number nine, Chinatown, 1974.

[00:11:50]Roman Polanski directed Chinatown in 1974 from Robert Towne's screenplay and the film was set in 1930s Los Angeles during a water rights dispute loosely inspired by the real Owens Valley water controversy in which the city of Los Angeles diverted water from Owens Valley farmers through a combination of political manipulation and outright fraud.

[00:12:15]>> You're a very nosy fellow, aren't you, Gittes, huh?

[00:12:18]You know what happens to nosy fellows?

[00:12:20]Huh? No? Want to guess?

[00:12:22]>> Jack Nicholson played J.J. Gittes, a private detective, and Faye Dunaway played Evelyn Mulwray, the woman whose family is at the center of the corruption.

[00:12:34]The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won one.

[00:12:39]Towne's screenplay.

[00:12:41]It's ending in which evil not only wins, but wins completely and without consequence, was unlike anything Hollywood had produced in the previous several decades. The villain walks away.

[00:12:53]The good man fails. The innocent person dies.

[00:12:58]And the last line, spoken by Nicholson's character as he is led away from the catastrophe, was the film's verdict on the futility of trying to do the right thing.

[00:13:09]>> Somebody's been dumping thousands of tons of water from the city's reservoirs and we're supposed to be in the middle of a drought.

[00:13:15]>> In a system that was designed to prevent it.

[00:13:18]A young viewer today would recognize a well-crafted noir thriller. What they would not carry in their bones is the specific post-Watergate understanding that institutions designed to serve justice had been captured by the people they were supposed to restrain. And that this was not a temporary condition.

[00:13:38]Number eight, The Parallax View, 1974.

[00:13:43]Alan Pakula's The Parallax View was the second film in what critics called his paranoia trilogy between Klute in 1971 and All the President's Men in 1976.

[00:13:56]Warren Beatty played a journalist who witnesses an assassination at the top of the Seattle Space Needle and spends the film uncovering what appears to be a corporation that recruits and trains assassins for political purposes.

[00:14:12]The deeper he investigates, the more the investigation begins to consume him.

[00:14:18]The film's most formally striking sequence was a recruitment test administered by the Parallax Corporation.

[00:14:25]>> I want to predate a will. I want to name you as executor. Something informal. I'd like you to go out to my motel, pick up my things, and give them to the Salvation Army or whatever, but >> A montage of images overlaid with American iconography designed to identify a specific psychological type.

[00:14:41]It was unnerving in a way that was purely cinematic and it lodged itself in the memory of everyone who saw it.

[00:14:48]The film's conclusion offered no resolution and no comfort following the pattern that the best conspiracy thrillers of the decade established. The system wins, the individual is erased, and the official account of events is a lie.

[00:15:06]Three major political assassinations in five years. John Kennedy in 1963, Robert Kennedy in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

[00:15:19]>> Somebody's trying to kill me.

[00:15:22]>> Somebody besides yourself?

[00:15:23]>> How can you say that? I've never tried to kill myself.

[00:15:26]>> had generated a culture of suspicion about official explanations that was entirely rational given the available evidence. The Parallax View was made for an audience living inside that suspicion with no resolution in sight. Number seven, Dog Day Afternoon, 1975.

[00:15:47]Sidney Lumet directed Dog Day Afternoon in 1975 drawing on a real event.

[00:15:53]On August 22nd, 1972, a man named John Wojtowicz and an accomplice attempted to rob a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn, New York. The robbery failed almost immediately >> And then all around me, the 7,000 cops all around me.

[00:16:09]>> Who's on the phone now?

[00:16:10]>> Don't lay it on me.

[00:16:11]>> I'm not laying it on you.

[00:16:12]>> and became a hostage situation that lasted 14 hours and attracted a crowd of onlookers who cheered the robbers through the afternoon.

[00:16:22]Al Pacino played Sonny, the Wojtowicz character, with John Cazale as his partner Sal.

[00:16:28]The reason for the robbery, Sonny was trying to raise money to fund his partner Leon's gender reassignment surgery, was presented in the film with a matter-of-factness that was more progressive than most of what mainstream American cinema was doing at the time.

[00:16:43]The crowd outside the bank chanting Sonny's name was not invented for dramatic effect. It happened. The specific thing that young viewers today cannot fully access is the texture of that moment in New York City.

[00:16:57]The heat, the desperation, the sense that institutions had failed so comprehensively that a man robbing a bank in broad daylight could become a folk hero to the neighborhood watching from the sidewalk.

[00:17:12]New York in the early 1970s was a city in genuine crisis and Dog Day Afternoon was made inside that crisis by filmmakers who could feel it in the air.

[00:17:23]Number six, Nashville, 1975.

[00:17:26]Robert Altman's Nashville followed 24 characters across five days in the country music capital, weaving their stories through a political rally being organized by a third-party presidential candidate who is never seen on screen.

[00:17:41]Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Henry Gibson, Geraldine Chaplin, Shelley Duvall, and Barbara Harris were among the cast, performing original songs and navigating overlapping storylines that Altman allowed to develop with unusual freedom.

[00:17:59]Keith Carradine's song, "I'm Easy", won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

[00:18:05]The film was nominated for five Academy Awards.

[00:18:09]>> Some things that I can't hide.

[00:18:11]It still hurts when I recall the times I've tried.

[00:18:16]>> It ended with an assassination at the political rally. A performer shot on an outdoor stage, the crowd stunned, and then another performer stepping to the microphone and leading everyone in a song as the only available response to what had just happened.

[00:18:34]For an audience in 1975 that had lived through three assassinations in seven years, the ending of Nashville arrived with a weight that was physical.

[00:18:45]The country music setting, the political machinery, and the violence that closed the film were a portrait of America in the mid-1970s, too specific to translate cleanly to another era. Number five, Three Days of the Condor, 1975.

[00:19:02]Sydney directed Three Days of the Condor in 1975 with Robert Redford playing Joe Turner, a CIA researcher who works in a New York City office that reads books and reports looking for intelligence patterns. He returns from lunch one day to find everyone in his office has been killed.

[00:19:23]>> We'll bring along a familiar face, somebody you know.

[00:19:26]>> Who's left?

[00:19:27]>> I had a friend in statistics named Sam.

[00:19:30]>> He contacts the CIA and finds that the agency itself may be responsible and spends the film trying to survive while figuring out who within the institution wants him dead.

[00:19:42]The specific premise that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States might operate internal units that killed American citizens on American soil for operational reasons was not presented as outlandish. It was presented as a rational inference from what was already publicly known.

[00:20:03]The Church Committee hearings were underway in 1975 documenting CIA assassination plots, domestic surveillance programs, and operations that had been conducted without congressional oversight for decades.

[00:20:19]>> You'd be familiar with a very tall gentleman about 6'4", blond hair, strong like a farmer, not American.

[00:20:25]>> The audience watching Three Days of the Condor in a theater was not being asked to imagine something implausible.

[00:20:33]Max von Sydow played the professional assassin sent to eliminate Turner, calm, competent, and entirely without personal malice.

[00:20:42]It was a portrait of institutional violence as a profession and it landed in a year when the Church Committee hearings were documenting real CIA assassination plots and domestic surveillance programs that had been conducted without congressional oversight for decades. Number four, Network, 1976.

[00:21:05]Sidney Lumet directed Network in 1976 from Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay.

[00:21:11]>> ALL YOU AGREE ROBERT THINK ABOUT IS THAT HE'S I HIT.

[00:21:14]>> YOU KNOW MAX, it's just possible that he isn't insane.

[00:21:18]>> And the film imagined a television news anchor named Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, who announces on live television that he intends to kill himself on air the following week.

[00:21:30]Rather than taking him off the air, the network's programming division, led by a ratings-obsessed executive played by Faye Dunaway, builds a show around his instability and watches the ratings climb.

[00:21:43]The film was received as savage satire.

[00:21:47]Television news as entertainment, ratings as the only measure of value, the willingness of media institutions to exploit human breakdown for audience share.

[00:21:58]All of this was understood in 1976 as an exaggerated extrapolation of trends that were visible but not yet dominant.

[00:22:08]Chayefsky was warning about a direction.

[00:22:11]>> I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, >> Peter Finch died of a heart attack on January 14, 1977 before the Academy Awards ceremony and won the Oscar for Best Actor posthumously.

[00:22:30]Faye Dunaway won Best Actress. What a young person watching Network today cannot fully access is the experience of watching it as satire.

[00:22:41]Because the distance between the film's exaggerations and actual cable news programming in the decades that followed collapsed so completely that the warning became a description. Number three, Smokey and the Bandit, 1977.

[00:22:57]Hal Needham directed Smokey and the Bandit in 1977 with Burt Reynolds as the Bandit, a man hired to transport a truckload of Coors beer from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia.

[00:23:10]>> And back to here in 28 hours.

[00:23:12]>> It's only 900 miles there, 900 miles back.

[00:23:14]>> Well, for your information, >> a run that was technically illegal because Coors was not licensed for sale east of the Mississippi at the time.

[00:23:23]Sally Field played a runaway bride he picks up along the way. Jackie Gleason played Sheriff Buford T. Justice, who pursues them across state lines in steadily increasing fury.

[00:23:35]The film was the second highest-grossing release of 1977, behind only Star Wars.

[00:23:43]It made approximately $300 worldwide against a budget of approximately $4 million.

[00:23:52]Burt Reynolds was one of the biggest movie stars in the world at that moment.

[00:23:56]An easy, physical, self-aware charisma that worked specifically because Reynolds never seemed to be trying very hard and found the whole thing funny.

[00:24:07]The cultural specific that kids today cannot access is the CB radio. The Citizens Band radio craze of the mid-1970s was a genuine mass phenomenon.

[00:24:21]>> Oh, I love your suits. It must be a getting a size 68 extra fat.

[00:24:26]>> Millions of Americans installed radios in their vehicles and developed a subculture of handle names and trucker slang that felt, briefly, like an alternative community.

[00:24:38]Smokey and the Bandit was built on that craze.

[00:24:42]Ordinary people communicating outside official channels, warning each other about speed traps, and having an enormous amount of fun doing it. Number two, The China Syndrome, 1978.

[00:24:56]James Bridges directed The China Syndrome in 1978 with Jane Fonda as a television news reporter, Jack Lemmon as a nuclear plant supervisor, and Michael Douglas as her cameraman.

[00:25:09]>> I want to apologize for Richard this morning.

[00:25:12]He's difficult sometimes. I know that, but he's good. He's the best cameraman I've ever worked with.

[00:25:17]>> Film depicted a near meltdown at a nuclear power plant that is covered up by the plant's corporate owners with Lemmon's character attempting to expose the truth and Fonda's attempting to broadcast it.

[00:25:30]The nuclear power industry in the United States was deeply unhappy with the film before it opened and issued statements describing its scenario as technically impossible and irresponsible fiction.

[00:25:43]The China Syndrome was released on March the 16th, 1979.

[00:25:48]On March 28th, 1979, 12 days later, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania experienced a partial meltdown.

[00:26:00]The accident required a partial evacuation of the surrounding area and exposed the nuclear power industry's public communications >> You're going to knock it off [snorts] right now. I'm going to open a relief valve and flood the containment area.

[00:26:12]God help you and your company. Is that understood?

[00:26:16]>> to exactly the kind of scrutiny the film had depicted.

[00:26:20]The statements calling the film's scenario impossible were 12 days old.

[00:26:25]Jack Lemmon won the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance.

[00:26:31]The film's box office increased significantly after the accident. No work of fiction in the decade landed on reality with more precise and uncomfortable timing. Number one, Convoy, 1978.

[00:26:45]Sam Peckinpah directed Convoy in 1978, adapted from C.W. McCall's 1975 CB radio novelty song of the same name.

[00:26:56]Kris Kristofferson played a truck driver called Rubber Duck, who gets into a confrontation with a corrupt sheriff, played by Ernest Borgnine, and finds himself at the head of a convoy of trucks stretching for miles.

[00:27:09]>> He's gone crazy, man.

[00:27:11]He's trying to bust me on some vacancy charge.

[00:27:14]>> That becomes a spontaneous protest movement against authority.

[00:27:19]Ali MacGraw played a photographer documenting the convoy.

[00:27:23]Burt Young played another trucker along for the ride.

[00:27:26]Peckinpah was dealing with serious substance abuse problems during the production, and the film went over budget and over schedule, resulting in a final cut that Peckinpah did not consider finished.

[00:27:39]The studio released it anyway. It was a significant commercial success despite mixed reviews, grossing far more than its budget.

[00:27:49]What makes Convoy a specifically 1970s artifact that younger viewers encounter as historical artifact rather than lived experience is the trucker as cultural hero, the working-class man with a rig and a CB radio as the last free American.

[00:28:06]>> Well, hell, it was worth it.

[00:28:08]>> What was worth it?

[00:28:09]>> That gal in the XKE doesn't have any pants on, man. I took a look down and bingo, there it was.

[00:28:13]>> Outside the reach of speed limits and weigh stations and the IRS and everyone else who wanted to tell him what to do.

[00:28:22]That image had a brief, but intense life in American popular culture in the middle of the decade, generating songs, films, and television shows before disappearing almost completely.

[00:28:36]The CB radio culture that animated it faded as quickly as it had arrived.

[00:28:42]Convoy was its most extravagant monument, and it captured something about the 1970s working-class spirit of defiance that belonged entirely to its moment.

[00:28:53]15 films that were documentaries of their own decade as much as they were stories. And that's what makes them so hard to fully feel from the outside.

[00:29:05]If this one took you back, go ahead and hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. Plenty more is on the way.