1970s/2020s: Great for Movies, Bad for Humanity?
Do tumultuous times produce the most creative films? Do war, corruption, insecurity, abuse of power, conspiracy, tragedy catalyze creative output? The 1970s saw a boom in movies and TV shows while a horrific colonial war in southeast Asia estimated to have caused the death of four million people ground to failure for the US, and while an energy crisis produced stagflation, a three-headed monster of high inflation, high unemployment and stagnant demand
In 1970 four students involved in a Kent State University war protest were shot dead by National Guardsmen leading to a nationwide student strike that forced hundreds of colleges and universities to close. In 1972 members of the Nixon White House Plumbers broke into the DNC office at Watergate leading to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. In 1973 the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced a total oil embargo of the US for supporting Israel during the Fourth Arab Israeli War which produced long lines at gas stations in the US. That same year the Allende government in Chile suffered a (CIA-backed) military coup that led to a seventeen-year military dictatorship and the death of thousands of Chileans. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge took control in Cambodia, and in the wake of the 1979 revolution in Iran, 66 US citizens were taken hostage. I didn’t even mention the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979. Scary times indeed.
The same decade produced a lot of great movies. The Godfather in 1972, Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 are film legends. But whodunnits, neo-noirs, political thrillers and even detective parodies proliferated. Who could forget Peter Falk in his rumpled beige trench coat rummaging in pockets while questioning a suspect only to pull out a grocery list, ask for a pencil, then become distracted by something in the room and walk out to return a moment later saying, “Oh, just one more thing?” Columbo received numerous Emmy’s, Golden Globe’s and Edgars, and aired in 44 countries from 1971 to 1978 Why would people face up against economic insecurity and high-level corruption enjoy this show? The murderers, known to the audience from early in each episode, are often affluent and upper class. They recognize and fear the genius hidden beneath Columbo’s rumpled exterior creating a duel of wits tinged with class conflict. Since Columbo always names the murderer at the end, the audience can vicariously enjoy a lower-class person taking down a lawless member of the elite.
Could this be why Columbo enjoys renewed popularity in the 2020s, particularly among young people? The show generated a meme trend during the pandemic and beyond known as ‘columboposting.’ Memes often show Falk with the phrase ‘just one more thing’ followed by a phrase with contemporary import like ‘Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking minors to no one?’ Other memes refer to Columbo’s love of chili: ‘Share if you like chili, or if you like seeing rich people sent to prison.’ Some suggest Falk’s unthreatening version of masculinity is attractive in an era of gender bending. Others say a public exposed to repeated videos of police shooting people dead adores Falk’s dotty-uncle performance of cop work. In any case, Falk’s subversion of the genius detective trope, hiding smarts beneath a demeaned blue-collar exterior, is newly popular in the 2020s.
Foremost among detective pics of the 70s is Roman Polanski’s 1975 Chinatown, a legend nominated to every best films list in existence while Robert Towne’s screenplay gets compared to Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex and analyzed at every screenwriting course Hollywood can cough up. The movie hearkens back to 1930s LA, a nostalgic glance-over-the-shoulder from one depressed corrupt time to another. Like classic hardboiled crime stories, it asks whether a lone investigator can confront all that political and sexual corruption and concludes ‘he’ can’t. Chinatown is the pinnacle of neo-noir but the decade produced plenty more. There were several Raymond Chandler adaptations with contrasting takes on the hardboiled view of reality. Robert Mitchum played Philip Marlowe in Farewell My Lovely of 1975 and The Big Sleep of 1978. Farewell is the most faithful adaptation with some critics praising it for recreating the ambience of 40s LA while others criticized it as a campy Chandler tribute. Sleep updates the setting from 40s LA to swinging 70s London, a decision most critics described as whacky and confusing.
But Robert Altman’s take on The Long Goodbye in 1973 swung the farthest. Screenwriter Leigh Brackett believed the passage of twenty years after the 1953 publication of Chandler’s novel transformed the hardboiled private eye character into a laughable cliche. The film’s response? Give the story a sarcastic overtone. The movie opens with Marlowe, played by Elliot Gould, waking to his cat climbing all over him meowing for food. The cat refuses some cottage cheese mess Marlowe/Gould pulls out of a shabby refrigerator, so the detective heads off to the supermarket where he wanders around looking for cat food. Would Bogart be caught dead doing that? Director Altman reportedly said Chandler fans would hate his guts but he didn’t give a damn. Some did, some didn’t, and the argument continued until the film was accepted into the US National Film Registry in 2021.
The 70s produced blockbuster screen adaptations of Agatha Christie classics like Murder on the Orient Express released in 1974 and Death on the Nile in 1978. Murder was one of only two film adaptations Christie approved of, minus one detail: Albert Finney’s mustache as Poirot wasn’t lavish enough. And the decade produced detective story parodies. Peter Falk starred in two movies written by playwright Neil Simon, Murder by Death of 1976 and The Cheap Detective of 1978. Murder lampoons Golden Age mysteries with a cast of famous detective characters like Poirot, Marple and Sam Spade all locked in a country manor by a mysterious host who offers a prize of one million dollars to whomever can solve a murder scheduled for midnight. Cheap parodies Chandler’s The Maltese Falcon with a bizarre group of characters chasing an egg-shaped diamond.
Then there are all the 70s thrillers, usually with a murder or two and plenty of detecting. Klute employs the pretext of a call-girl stalked by a killer and aided by a private investigator. But Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Bree Daniels sets this one above the profusion of stories where sex workers are targeted. Three Days of the Condor depicts a bookish CIA analyst after he escapes a massacre at his Manhattan office and goes on the run to chase down the killer. The Day of the Jackal follows a hired hitman and an intricate plot to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. The French Connection explores a plot to traffic heroin through France into the US, featuring Gene Hackman as an NYPD detective on the trail of a wealthy drug smuggler.
So plenty of great movies from the turbulent 1970s to catch up on or enjoy again. We’re in the midst of another decade with more than its share of unfolding disasters, so it’s safe to predict another mystery and thriller movie boom. Which makes me ponder whether our human creativity will respond, in part, to another decade of war, energy and environmental crises, economic recessions, human rights catastrophes and more with a flurry of murder mystery stories that explore who is killing whom, who is trying to figure it out, who gets blamed and ultimately who wins, if anybody does. Maybe a dearth of justice in the real world leads us to seek it through fiction?
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