Whatever its faults, American Cinema of the 1970s does not suffer from an excess of pretentiousness.  This matter-of-fact collection of essays takes the interesting approach of dealing with a different year of the 1970s, from 1970 to 1979.  Oddly, the book chooses to combine this linear approach with a thematic approach – the essay on 1970 is also about Movies and the Movement, for example.  This theme/chronology approach gives a somewhat arbitrary focus to each essay.

Lester Friedman’s solid introduction brings the major themes of the 1970s into focus, noting that that decade “did indeed witness an extensive ideological and social transformation in American culture and history, one mirrored in the industrial practises of making and distributing motion pictures” (2).  Tying social developments to movies in this way is not easy, however, and the book often shows signs of this. 

The primary quality associated with the 1970s Hollywood film is auteurism – the ability of a single director to shape a film according to his or her personal vision.  In the days of the studio system, directors had far less control: they were not given the power over the casting, editing, soundtrack and other film elements.  But with the collapse of this rigid production-line mentality in the 60s, individual directors gained the power to influence all aspects of film production.

The collection discusses dozens of minor landmarks of the decade, including the Vietnam withdrawal, and the (partial) achievement of women’s, black and gay rights.  Hollywood suddenly found itself in a more complex world, and the major studios clambered to respond.

The best of them, such as Mimi White’s Movies and the Movement, deal with under-represented areas of 70s Hollywood culture, such as the emergence of black filmmakers including Melvin van Peebles.  Mia Mask’s discussion of African-American sexuality in so-called ‘Blaxploitation’ movies is also interesting, as it attempts to explain the rise of the black heroes who were “ready to kick whitey’s ass” (57).  Mask’s essay is notable for its subtlety in dealing with the themes of massive hits directed by African-Americans, such as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (57).  She describes the confused reaction of white critics to these works, and offers some conclusions of her own about their importance in providing a voice to minority groups in Hollywood. 

While the auteur theory provides many of the essays with their narrow focus on single directors (Scorsese, Altman, Spielberg and Lucas feature the most prominently), the Watergate robbery is the defining event that hangs over most of the essays.  As a result of this single event, the introduction claims, “a pervasive sense of insecurity spread across the American landscape” (7).  This may not be the whole story, but the influence of Watergate can definitely be seen in the spate of paranoid thrillers in the 70s, featuring protagonists without clear motivations or admirable qualities. (However, this kind of historical approach does tend to overlook the influence of other factors, such as the French existential novel, on the paranoid 1970s American worldview). 

The events of the 1970s and their effects on culture are explained clearly and well, but the essays in this book eventually begin to resemble timelines of major events. After a while, the structure of the book begins to work against it.  There are only so many times that you can be reminded about how traumatic Watergate was before thinking, well, was it really that bad?  It may have been the first time the mendacity of an American President caught up with him as much as it deserved to, but the centre-of-the-universe position that it takes in this book seems myopic at times.   

The historical focus of the collection leads to the writers’ approach of including as many historical events as possible in their essays, a process that is just too scattershot to provide a sufficiently complex analysis of this rich period of Hollywood cinema.  While the contributors offer many excellent observations about the state of the industry in that period, as a whole the book never really moves beyond a series of disjointed – though often sharp – observations.  It suffers in comparison to other books about 1970s Hollywood, Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls in particular.  While Biskind offers a coherent thesis on the ideology of 70s Hollywood cinema, Friedman only gathers interesting comments on separate masterpieces, without a strong uniting theme.  The 70s were indeed interesting times for Hollywood, but this is not a new theory.  A study like this needs to look at films in much more detail in order to work.


American Cinema of the 1970s
(2007)

edited by Lester D. Friedman
Berg Publishers (distributed in Australia through Footprint Books)
ISBN: 9781845207458
285pp AU$56.95