The differences between 1970s cinema and the cinema of today

Cafe Society
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I’ve been thinking lately that there is just something fundamentally different about 70s movies and TV shows versus the ones we have today. There are a bunch of different factors that seem to combine together to create the overall effect, but that overall effect is dramatic. It gives movies made in the 70s a feel that is drastically different from what we’ve got now, and I think that in 20 years or so, it will be seen as truly alien and antiquated.

I’m trying to think of just what it is that makes those 70s movies seem so…70’s…and it’s hard to exactly figure it out. But I have a few possible ideas:

Everything seems to have a “washed out” look to it. I don’t know if this is because the film they used back then did not produce as vivid color as the film they use now, or what, but in the movie “Dirty Harry,” just to give one example, the whole world of the movie has a tan-gray-brown look to it.

This might also have something to do with the clothes. Everyone back in the 70s, if movies are to believed, wore really drab clothes in various shades of brown and gray. Of course, there are the exceptions - the funkadelic bright colors of the rockers and pimps and psychedelic people and disco maniacs - so let me rephrase that - everyone in 70s movies over the age of 35 seems to only dress in drab shades of gray or brown. They also wore those big aviator-style eyeglasses a lot, and smoked cigarettes all the time. And all men wore suits, constantly.

This is a big part of it, I think, the fact that in movies now, you rarely see people dressed in suits unless they’re at a high-powered white-collar professional job. In 70s movies, all men are always wearing suits and ties, all the time, it seems.

Furthermore - the pacing of 70s movies is way, way slower than what we’re used to now. I used to watch Starsky and Hutch with my dad, and he’d tell me about how it was considered to be very violent for its time. This made me laugh because, while it was pretty violent compared to the cop shows that preceded it, it wasn’t even close to the level of constant gunfire and bloodshed that shows have now. And it’s damn slow. Modern TV audiences would not have the patience to make it through an episode of Starsky and Hutch or Kojak. Some episodes of Starsky and Hutch consist of roughly 10 percent action, and 90 percent guys sitting around in drab tweed suits in wood-paneled rooms, smoking cigarettes and wearing giant eyeglasses. The editing was much more sparse - we’re used to cut cut cut cut cut nowadays on cop shows, but S&H would have long shots that would go on for minutes with only one or two changes in the camera angle.

Am I imagining all this, or are these differences really that pronounced? Are there other things that you can think of that make 70s movies or TV shows unique?

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The actors were hairier.

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Memorable and hummable theme songs and intros seem harder to find these days

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To me, Colors is a bizarrely out-of-time movie. It was made in 1988 and it was set in that year but it has such a seventies feel to it that I checked the production date twice.

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In my mind, 70s movies were very stark and depressing…yet they seemed mostly filmed in bright sunlight. Dark movies of today rarely feature natural sunlight.

They seemed to take themselves VERY seriously, even if the writing/acting/directing was sub-par.

They had a lot more monologuing than today’s movies. Main characters seemed to philosophize a lot more, but about mundane topics masquerading as important topics.

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The biggest thing about 70’s movies that I notice, even more so than earlier movies, is, as you said, the pacing. Jesus H. Christ, they’re slow. And I don’t need every movie I watch to be a music video, trust me. They’re just really, really slow.

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What I remember about movies in the 1970’s was the “anti-hero” theme. Think of the Billy Jack movies (mentioned in another thread), Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (blonde Robert Redford played an American Indian on the run), The Exorcist,Last Tango in Paris, etc.

Happy endings back then were considered old fashioned, I guess.

I do remember two movies I liked, Jeremiah Johnson…slow to the point of turgid, but great scenery…Robert Redford in buckskins (drool). And, of course, Blazing Saddles.

Love, Phil

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So this discussion will include porno?

Don’t forget the 30-minute drama of the late 1960’s, where shows in the same genre would eat up a full hour today. There was Dragnet (where the actors read from cue cards to move the pacing ahead), both of Chuck Connors’ western series, and N.Y.P.D.

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IIRC, movie directors of the 1960s through early 1980s used a film stock that has not held up well over the years. That accounts for much of the washed-out look. I recently saw a copy of Ordinary People that was quite fuzzy and nostalgically remembered that what I was seeing was once “natural” and that I paid $1 to rent VHS tapes of even worse quality when I was in college back in the late-80s.

Movies of the 1970s were more literary and personal, infused as they were with the auteur theory of filmmaking (where the director is the person responsible in full for a movies artistic success or failure). Today’s films are more visual, the dialogue much simpler, with the directors of many of todays biggest films are near unknown hired hands who know how to stage big scenes and little else (how many people y’all know will know the name of the person who directed the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (Gore Verbinski) offhand?)

As for actual differences: the film stock is better. The sound of films is almost unimaginably better. F/X is a completely different world. Editing is much faster - a film with static shots regularly exceeding 90 seconds is rarely made today. Films have vastly larger budgets, the studios are oriented more and more towards the international market, and there is a massive home market for films where one didn’t exist before, making almost any major release to be available for the price of a Netflix subscription.

And a lot of this change (not all of it!) can be dated from May 25th, 1977. The turning-point between movies of “the 1970’s” and movies now is, of course, Star Wars. Once studios saw that hundreds of millions of dollars could be earned off opening wide original material that featured simplistic black and white villians and good guys arranged in plots so metronomic that you could keep time with them, it was all over for movies like Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, films which lived in a sea of moral ambiguity, no easy answers, and little comfort that the good guys would triumph in the end (how can the good guys triumph if there are no true “good guys” in a movie?)

IMHO, Star Wars changed the movie business more than any film since the advent of talking pictures. Before SW films opened small, limited to one or two screens per major market, with a slow rollout exceeding a year or two to the smaller towns. After SW films would open wider on 500 screens, 1,000 screens, more, all in an attempt to capture the revenues quicker. After SW, the measure of a films success became weekend box-office measurements, pre-SW the measure of a film was whether it was talked about in the written press and stayed over a year in the first-run.

Heaven’s Gate didn’t help either. :wink:

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Okay, I’m dating myself here but it seemed to me that starting around 1970 the majority of the films were shot on some incredibly crappy stock that decayed before it finished its first run. Can anyone comment on if things did look better when they were first projected in theaters and wound up tinted yellow by the time it got transferred to video tape? I don’t think directors intended all the films to look tan which makes me think that the film stock degraded quickly but I’m too young to remember how films looked during their initial runs in the 70’s.

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•They seemed to be at a historical midpoint between “casting roles with serious actors, in stories heavy controlled by society and the studio” and “casting actors who look pretty while naked, and often are.” The result being, of course, sex scenes with mostly uglier people.

•The era also enclosed the fossil layer of sci-fi films between the “uses stock footage of V-2 tests” and “Rip off Star Wars” layers. This is known as the “2001 rip off” or the “two-bit surrealism and anti-establishment undertones” period.

•Everyone’s clothing seemed to be ill-fitting, and looked too hot (And, by extension, somewhat sweaty and greasy).

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I bought “The Changeling” on DVD because I like scary movies. Although the release date says 1980, it felt very 70s to me. What I liked and was a little surprised by, was by the slow pace of the movie. However, the gradual increase of tension was more effective to ratchet up the chills, and I felt really immersed in the story. I wish there was more of that around; a little patience to let the story be told is not a bad thing.

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I remember noting the “washed out” look for things produced in the '70s when I was a kid in the early '80s watching things like “Benji” on TV. I also remember it was easy to tell a five year old “Afternoon Special” from a new one just by the look of the video more than the outfits the kids were wearing.

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Another cause of the washed-out look: “Cinema verite” (it’s French, so put accent marks over all of the "e"s)

A lot of directors were trying for a “realistic” look. The idea was, to make your film look like a documentary. What it actually did, was to make your film look like a bad home movie.

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1970s cinema had a higher “wakatchu” quotient.

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Aside from the Bond and Superman movies, movie heroes were not impervious to bullet wounds in the 1970s. Starting with the Rambo movies, all wounds sustained by the hero became minor flesh wounds, even machine gun wounds through the heart barely slowed down the movie protagonist.

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Also a higher “bow-chikka-bow-bow” quotient.

And “solarization”!

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That was the 80s.

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Oh, yeah. Depressing, ponderous and looong are the three adjectives that come to mind when I think of '70s movies. Star Wars and Harold and Maude are the only '70s movies I can think of that I actually like. Other movies like Chinatown and McCabe and Mrs. Miller…I know that they’re good movies, but, damn, I just can’t like them.

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So if the film stock was of poor quality in the 70’s, how do we account for the sharp color of movies from the late 30’s, 40’s, 50’s? Do they look good because they were re-mastered and the 70’s movies haven’t been re-mastered yet?